I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
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For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side.
Yet here we've arrived at a state of affairs where most western children regularly spend inordinate amounts of time on walled-up instant-gratification video game platforms designed to vacuum money out of their parent's wallets, entirely detached from inspiring them to hack at things and go into technology. Somehow this state of affairs is perfectly normal and okay.
Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about it.
YOu are right, though, that the computer games of the nineties offered a lot more hackability than iPhone apps. ZZT was an introduction to OOP for many kids, Red Alert had rules.ini that defined the stats for each unit, and Duke3D had configuration files in C. Mods and "Total Conversions" were a things. That ecosystem isn't just unavailable in mobile games, but would probably be hated by many companies who want full control over their product.
So two things we should do: write more moddable games, include defaults that don't assume we're all male (or white, for that matter.
In contrast to the many menus and dialogs we had before that encouraged users to explore and customise, it seems that apps now are far more opaque to the point that many users don't even realise some things are options that can be changed.
That ecosystem isn't just unavailable in mobile games, but would probably be hated by many companies who want full control over their product
Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch, but I think the whole "war on general-purpose computing" has played some part in this too.
One could make a solid argument that knowing what a file/program "really is" is entirely redundant: it's all von neuman architecture after all: why make the distinction?
That said, I absolutely agree on your sentiment about the ios platform being way too locked down. Most annoyingly, it's entirely arbitrary: it could very well ship with something along the lines of hypercard/applescript or something better out of the box.
That said, I feel that most (not all) apps with in-game purchases are pretty sleazy.
- there were both genders more often (in, fact, i can name very few of the games I played that were male only... yeah DukeNukem for ex. I know a couple female only games, tho)
- when different genders were proposed it was OF COURSE for free. Now u gotta pay because u like a red hat better or what not.
In retrospect, I see I was lucky enough to come into computing at exactly the right time. When I was young I was capable of understanding (practically) my entire computer system, because those systems were so simple. As the complexity increased, so did the depth of my understanding. Today, I understand most of what my computer does (the most important parts, at least).
What a tough road it must be for a newcomer to cope with all this complexity, the very complexity I have literally spent my whole life learning.
I'm not a natural hacker. If I was a kid now, I'd just play games on an iPad and effectively learn nothing because there's no friction. This isn't a slam on the ipad or misplaced nostalgia, just a recognition that sometimes you are forced to learn things out of necessity, and if you're born into plenty, you never are forced to grow. On the other hand, for anybody who's a born tinkerer, the fact that iPads are locked down and super easy to use is irrelevant because you have a thousand other cheap hackable devices like Raspberry Pis or Arduino. For someone who's not a born tinkerer though, they may never pick up a hackable device, and will miss some opportunities for growth.
Enlighten me, youngster how is that accomplished without breaking the warranty of the device?
When I look at my childhood, the vast majority of my peers had consoles and didn't 'hack' them at all. It was mostly the few 'pc gamers' that got into this. I don't think it's so different nowadays.
Kids today are going to be more likely to get into tech, and it's going to be far far easier for them to do it. We don't need to get nostalgic for how much more "authentic" it was back in the day when the tools sucked a lot more.
(the GameShark comparison may be valid - but in my experience, a GameShark was just a thing you bought to cheat in a game. None of my friends who got them got into learning about programming because of it)
http://www.androidgamehacks.net/forums/
And just like hacking with Game Genie was unusual back then, jailbreaking devices, hacking .apk files and hand-editing save games isn't for everybody either. But all of that definitely still exists, and is far more accessible than ever.
The GameGenie/GameShark/ActionReplay scene was much more accessible than hacking .apk files and jailbreaking mobile devices. I was messing with those devices even before I decided on a CS major. And it was as simple as just having one stray thought "What happens if I change this number?" In contrast, you don't just decide "What happens if I open this apk file up and change such and such?" How many people even know that the apk files are just zip files to start with? Then you get into decompile the files or hex-editor or whatever... but none of that is accessible as just randomly entering a different number in the GameGenie interface that's presented to you immediately.
tetris teaches geometry, word games teach vocabulary, strategy games teach strategy - I don't even understand how you got upvoted. you kind of just sound like the guy who hates his favorite band because they got popular.
kids can get so much more attention from figuring out a hack today than ever before. when I figured out a hack as a kid, the best-case scenario would be that my nerdy friends were the only ones who noticed. but a decade ago, having the best CSS hack on MySpace was something everybody in school would know about. today, being able to hack your phone is one of the coolest things a kid could ever brag about.
software is eating the world, so competence with computers is becoming indistinguishable from competence, period. the fact that iOS does not provide you with a shell account can't change that fundamental fact.
this popular iOS game was co-developed by a five-year-old girl and her father:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissy%27s_Magical_Ponycorn_Adve...
I think you need to let the kids walk on your lawn a little, dude.
sorry, I'd probably get a lot more upvotes if that weren't the case.
Unrelated, I notice the Tetris effect [1] strongly when I play RTS games too long. I still see the game when I go to bed, and I get weird urges to perform the actions of the game when I'm not playing.
Why? You won.
Maybe it'll be battling Minecraft plugins and building one on their own (after all, this is still the #1 game among children from what I understand). It might be developing an instinct for great UX and media execution (games like Candy Crush for instance).
Only hindsight will tell, but I don't think it'll be entirely for naught.
Like you, playing video games from a young age was the entry point for me into computing, but (partly also due to every adult saying they were a waste of time) I didn't realise until much later (17-18) that I could take that interest and make it in to a fulfilling career.
Despite the walled gardens, tools are still out there for people who want to make new or hack existing games, and people who want to do that will find a way.
They will have a curiosity about how things work that won't be quelled until they figure it out, and the process of figuring it out will be half the fun plus a large chunk of the learning.
It is interesting that often we don't see others' points of view until they're put in front of us. My entire life, I've played games with male defaults and never noticed the lack of females. Only when my 8 year-old girl said, "Why can't I play a girl?" did I realize it was an issue. Yikes!
I'm playing OlliOlli (edited the name in since a user asked), a really awesome and successful game right now from a small (ish?) company (they're even making a sequel) where you only get one character to play as, and he is definitely male -- you couldn't even spin him as possibly being female. I'm male too and I'm afraid to point this out to the company, because of the backlash that usually happens, and I think the company is pretty much all male staff. It's not a huge deal but if the sequel is just as limited I'll express my disappointment, as it's a great game otherwise.
Happy to point it out on your behalf if you'd like to mention the game!
Just don't assume maliciousness and others won't either. There are plenty of things in the world I don't know about and I learn from everyone else; I just try pull my weight by sharing the things I've learned.
What is unfortunate is that there is a growing group of activists who will start the discussion with a public accusation or attack.
Good luck being happy in life. Victims deserve your empathy, not the angry. Anger rarely leads good things, whether it be at a personal level, or at a macro level.
Even in Myst, they asked/pretend the main character is a girl (though the intro makes it rather clear that's not the case).
It's really surprising to me, since as a boy I often chose female characters and didn't really think about it. But game devs could easily be losing money by alienating so much of the market. (Though girl characters for purchase, so long clearly identified in demos or marketing materials, is probably a cynical way to fix the situation. Spending $5 to make my daughters enjoy a game is an automatic buy.)
And it extends further, too. When buying a ThinkPad for my 6-yr-old, she really wanted a colored one. Even when explaining it's a superior platform, how it'll hook into her audio hardware, etc., she was only OK with the platform after I said we could get one of those vinyl skins printed up for her ThinkPad, so it wouldn't be all black.
Maybe this is all well-known, but it's just amazing to see how strong the "feminine drive" is, essentially naturally, at such s young age. (We severely restrict the amount of shitty girls kid's TV shows, no Barbie, no Disney products, biggest toys are LEGO, etc.)
If they go to public school peer relations and student body culture will override prior teaching. When presented with the girls sitting next to them talking about the shows and toys you never exposed them to, they are met with the decision to have faith in their parents or seek to fit in with the status quo.
It is why it is so hard to break childhood stereotypes, because unless you can get a majority of parents to pressure the disjunction, the culture of their classroom will limit what you can do.
In the future I hope to be able to afford private schools with a focus on getting students interested in things. That'll hopefully bring out like minded families. Basically, I just want to increase their saving throws vs crap.
That isn't to say distance them from their own age group. They need tons of exposure to those their own age. But if you do that you can have them going to all the activities and clubs they are interested in in the evening while dodging the cult of personality and familiarity that is the public classroom. And if you can save your children from the brain drain, they will find myriad interests in a vibrant world for them to pursue.
I don't think it's quite that hard. If you expect to counteract the influence simply by removing offending messages, then yes, it will not be successful in the face of peers. But if you explain and teach your family's value system that explains WHY you avoid Barbie and the like, that can be much more sticky.
Not sure if you're saying Minecraft does or does not have female characters but Minecraft has actually supported skins pretty much since the beginning (over 4+ years now) so you can be male, female or whatever you want to be really.
Also recently they added a default female character skin so players without a custom skin are randomly given a male or female skin.
Also, Notch has written[2] about the gender situation in Minecraft. He was attempting to make everything "genderless" (or "both"), which he now suggests might not have been the best decision.
[1] http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/min...
[2] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/28188312756/gender-in-minecraft
The Hunger Games app? As in, an app based on a book with a female protagonist? That's kind of like saying "Oh, hey, the Pride and Prejudice game lets you play as a girl!" It's a telling detail that could slip past if you're unfamiliar with the story.
The author was advocating for games in general offering characters of both sexes more often; I doubt she'd assert that every single game must have female options. Hunger Games an existing plot, and just as girls have been dealing with male-character-only games for decades, boys can deal with games that stick to the plot -- and I think 12-year-old boys can understand the motivation to stick to it.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-hunger-games-panem-risin...
I chuckled. App makers (especially the ones in the "top 50 essential apps") are well oiled capitalist money-making machines. Ethics rarely come into play when the A/B tests they run suggest that the product direction go one way (towards money) and not the other ("but what about the children!").
I personally don't feel this way, but you can imagine how businesses at that level would.
http://img.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp-content/uplo...
A male making a female character is an altogether dicey proposition. Not only do they have to go through extra effort to imagine said character, but they also run the significant risk of being castigated if said female character doesn't perfectly align to various norms.
I'm interested in this apparent phenomenon, can you an example?
http://kotaku.com/game-developers-really-need-to-stop-lettin...
From what I can tell, the character already aligns perfectly with the norm of "woman as object", and if people get "castigated" (actually harmed or affected in some way, rather than criticized online by a few commentators) for creating characters like that, I've yet to hear about it.
Anita Sarkeesian's graduate thesis and the subject of more than one of her videos is an extensive criticism of how "strong female characters" in fiction reinforce binary gender stereotypes by requiring that their definition of strength conform to masculine ideals of it rather than feminine alternative models (strong female characters have to be "badass".) I don't think she's wrong, but the argument has been leveraged often enough that it's made even me wonder what would be good enough to satisfy some people. Please note that you can trip this criticism simply by adding additional female characters, which is exactly what some people here are complaining about. You add a female sprite, the female "acts like a male". It's not as simple as just adding female characters.
Women's portrayal in video games is an ideological battleground, to an extent that men's portrayal is not. This is why it's potentially a risk. You can't even win by not playing, because lack of women is a problem too. But you can lose the least by not playing or not caring. I think that is why the two default states for female representation in games are "nonexistent" and "terrible".
I think we can agree that the "strong female character" trope is complicated in terms of why it exists and how it works, and every single person isn't going to "leverage" criticism of it perfectly. I accept this as a fact of life and don't think it's relevant to OP's statements.
Choosing to "lose the least" strikes me as silly at best, when contacting a few women in your life (hopefully you have as many in your company) and consulting them about the character you're creating is not hard. If you are still criticized after consulting them, you listen to the criticism, maybe write about how you listened to it, and try again in your next game, which is still not hard -- it doubtlessly happens all the time with criticism of all other sorts.
"YOU MISOGYNIST! The female characters are all X".
"We've taken feedback and made some Y & Z characters as well".
"YOU MISOGYNIST! There is more to women than X, Y & Z."
"So we've made a game with male characters..."
That's the argument as I can see it. Is it fair or real? Who knows, but that's what it is!
Another classic example of girls that are capable of escaping bears being unrepresented in tech. I kid, by seriously the cause of this isn't game devs being sexest against girls, it's (IMO) society being sexist in general. Boys (not men) will not play games that look like they may be made for girls because of what society might think of them. The fear of being bullied for enjoying anything pink or featuring women is very real for most boys growing up, especially (but not only) if the boy is already feeling confused and ashamed of what his sexuality might be. Since the mobile game market is dominated by children, having the main character be female can potentially scare away a large percentage of the market. Unless the game is already clearly "girly", then the risk just isn't worth it.
TL;DR: Boys playing girls = gay, girls playing boys = normal.
Also, the solution is simply to offer the option of playing a girl character. Then anyone can play whomever they want. :)
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive; in fact they're quite tightly related. Though that does raise the interesting point that the feedback loop has to be broken somewhere, and starting by adding female characters is as good as any.
I understand that every article goes through a revision process. But it started by saying "I am a 12 year old girl" and I wonder how many filters the text and the thesis went through before being published. I just find something strange about adults using the identity of a child to inject their own words, if this is indeed the case.
Anyone good at drawing sprites who wants to lend a hand?
Edit: Looks like someone beat me to it!
http://kennastuff.blogspot.com/2013/03/zelda-starring-zelda-...
I think of the Pewdiepie episode of South Park where Ike and his friends each have their own device and each consumes their own media separately when I think of kids having sleepovers now.
I always thought it was the boys who wanted to play as a "kickass chick". e.g. Tomb Raider
I'm male. Back when I experimented with game development, all the games I wanted to make involved the main character being male. It's not something I ever consciously thought about, it's just how it happened to be. Does that make me sexist? Of course not. I can make whatever the hell game I want. You can't tell an artist how his art has to look.
Look outside of games. If I told you to write a novel, would you write it from the perspective of the opposite gender? Personally my gut instinct is to write from the perspective of a male, because that's what I relate to most.
I don't think your story makes you sexist, though.
I think that's the point. Perhaps it's something that you might want to think about. Institutional bias is insidious because it's so pervasive as to be normal, banal. No one gives it a second thought.
It's one hell of an omission, and actually, there's got to have been a lot of opportunity missed.
And the icing on that cake? On mobile, female gamers are actually way more loyal players (42% higher 7-day retention on average versus males), they also spend about 35% more time in gaming appss, oh and they're also spending around 31% more on In-App-Purchases than their male counterparts too.
http://www.joystiq.com/2014/10/27/report-men-play-more-mmos-...
http://www.joystiq.com/2014/10/27/report-men-play-more-mmos-...
The lack of girl characters implies that girls are not equal to boys and they don’t deserve characters that look like them.
Now a 12 year old have reached the same conclusion and if that's her real name on the article... alas I must say that was a dangerous thing to do.
If the makers of the game added a female character that would be extra cost from a platform, front end, and art perspective. Thereby pushing the cost of the game up for everyone when it's probably still mostly males who play the game.
So the cost of adding a female player is recouped by the people that want to play a female character.
If the makers added in a female character to begin with the game might cost a little more, but in app economics there seems to be a big difference in $1.
I wonder how many males that buy games only buy games that offer both genders as playable characters.
There's a popular view on hacker news of corporations which are nothing but money grubbing entities bent on doing anything for profit. This doesn't jive well with the view of these game corporations as mysoginistic entities out to repress girls intentionally or unintentionally.
Games for Girls? - http://thehussingtonpost.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/games-for-gi...
Little girls deserve better than to be told to make themselves sexy - http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2014/jan...
Girls, Boys, Feminism, Toys: Deborah Siegel and Rebecca Hains Discuss - http://thesocietypages.org/girlwpen/2014/01/14/girls-boys-fe...
Hers; The Smurfette Principle - http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/07/magazine/hers-the-smurfett...
What it’s like being a teen girl - http://web.archive.org/web/20140820073431/http://sodisarming...
teenage girls: "...they haven’t been living, they’ve been performing." - http://www.metafilter.com/121190/teenage-girls-they-havent-b...
‘I’m not a pilot, I’m a pilot’s wife,’ says 3 yr old girl - http://reelgirl.com/2013/11/im-not-a-pilot-im-a-pilots-wife-...
Sexism 'is daily reality' for girls - http://www.bbc.com/news/education-25138455
Womanhood, girlhood and shared exclusion - http://glosswatch.com/2013/12/16/womanhood-girlhood-and-shar...
“Is my son smart?” “Is my daughter skinny?” Google Searches Reveal Parents’ Gender Biases http://rebeccahains.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/is-my-son-smart...
What Do Little Girls Really Learn from “Career” Barbies? - http://peggyorenstein.com/blog/what-do-little-girls-really-l...
Report: Many girls view sexual assault as normal behavior - http://www.salon.com/2014/04/14/report_many_girls_view_sexua...
Cosmetic surgery and teenagers – a disaster waiting to happen - http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2014/apr...
I've never understood why so many people feel compelled to play with a character with the same gender/race/etc as themselves.
What amazes me even more, is that people are willing to pay for this.
I, for one, relish a game that doesn't make me play as Johnny Brownhair-Whiteguy, but I have the benefit of being a white male with brown hair. I have the benefit of being catered to by most video games. If I could less often play as someone that looked like me, I think I'd start to feel excluded.
An extreme diet and a lot of gym time and a set of stilts might get me somewhere near Agent 47, or binge eating and a wig might move me towards something E Honda-esque. IDGAF.
One of the MMORPGs I play as a female character coz I preferred the character model. She has green hair. In real life, I don't have enough hair left to warrant the pack of bleach and color.
It's not real. It's a video game. I'd be as happy playing as Katniss as I would Peeta, if those are the Hunger Game options.
Video games aren't the story of us. They're the story of someone else. That's the point.
I'm not a humanoid fox with a star fighter, I'm not an elf tasked with saving the world. I'm not a hired assassin or a warrior with long red hair fighting a tyrant.
I look forward to seeing the results of your research at a level at least as detailed as that performed by the 12 year old author of the article, to see how well the subjective recollection of your recent experience matches with objective data.
Or because girls are willing to play as boys, and then pay to play as a girl?
But boys are unwilling to even play as a girl?
I prefer to look for rational (for example economic) reasons for things, and not assume everything is because of bias.
I know first hand this sucks. I have a daughter who just a couple days ago had me to download the Oz Temple Run game. She was very disappointed that the main character was a boy, that only 1 of 4 available characters was a girl, and that the girl was the hardest to unlock. We aren't spending running on virtual currency, so odds she'll never get to play the game as a girl.
So... consciousness raised and subsequently tamped back down, I suppose.
You can't change the world by yourself but we all play a necessary role: Politely and respectfully speak up where people are not aware. IMHO no individual, no matter what their social capital, can substitute for people seeing and hearing these things from their peers. Also, we tend to be follow the herd; even in an angry stampede, one voice can make several others in the herd slow down and think.
Yes.
When something is virtually identical the whole world over, I think I can comfortably say biology and not culture.
Statements like this, which partition people using one trait, and then confidently assert that the subsets differ dramatically in some other trait, are nearly always wrong. There will invariably be more differences within groups than between them; that is a property of human beings.
I'd note that she complains about games where the protagonist has no identifiable gender, or is an animal. That's often done quite intentionally to dodge try to dodge this problem.
I'd note that she doesn't complain about this.
She simply mentions the data because it is relevant to the overall research she is doing.
You had Chun Li to choose from if you wanted to play as a girl, or Ryu, E. Honda, Blanka, Guile, Ken, Zangief, Dhalsim, Balrog, Vega, Sagat or M.Bison if you wanted to play as a guy.
Nowhere does it imply men are chauvinist pigs out to further a male-dominated agenda. The fact that you have extrapolated as such is probably more indicative of your own personality and prejudices than anything else.
No one is saying men should be sorry for being men. My takeaway is that the world would run a bit better if we all had a bit more empathy and more awareness of how our actions might perpetuate institutionalized biases.
This article is just a 12 year old girl wishing she could play as a girl more often.