Damsel in Distress - Tropes vs Women in Video Games

jill_valentine wrote: »

I studied computer science with an eye towards videogame design for a bit. I love videogames very much. One of our two alternating second year programming lecturers was notorious for his belief that girls can't code. His attitude was clearly evident in the fact that in the room full of students, the ten or so females got a disproportionate amount of hassle when it came to new coding concepts or problems. Even the lads noticed it, and revelled in it - if somebody was going to be asked a tough question and get a hard time when they got it wrong, it was going to be one of the girls. Eventually, it became routine that the girls would avoid the lectures they knew he was involved in and do their own study, placing them at an obvious disadvantage when it came to exam time. In other words, his belief that girls aren't natural programmers was ultimately self fulfilling - it created such a passive aggressively hostile environment that they didn't want to be involved. He "won."

And that's not an isolated anecdote. Women are, still, a minority in the gaming industry, and while an element of that is indeed likely because there is a perception that "games aren't for girls" - the industry itself is still doing its damnedest besides to squeeze that minority even further. Just as with TV and movies, fewer women behind the screen makes for fewer women on it - and fewer again being represented in any meaningful, useful context.

The presence and quality of female characters in lead roles, lead roles that aren't directly reliant on other male authority characters, serve as distinct characters rather than bouncy boobsy baubles is actually declining. Again, the trajectory of Jill Valentine is a sad example of that. The new, jiggly titted Lightning is another. Lara Croft is a rare reversal of the trend.

Women compose upwards of 40% of the online videogame market and that number's going up - but you'd never know it from the marketing, which either clearly prioritises males or even aims at them to an exclusionary extent. Yorkie style marketing.

We keep being told, too, by industry idiots that "women don't sell" in videogames, but... based on what? Even considering how few female-led videogames there are out there, that statement doesn't actually seem to be backed up by anything tangible. It's a convenient excuse that sounds nice and rational and objective, but drill down into it and there doesn't actually seem to be any discernable relationship between female leads and IP successes at all. Yes, most of the big sellers are male-led - but most videogames period are male led, so that means SFA unless you weight it against those qualifying factors. It's a mantra that seems to have taken such a deep root that nobody ever really questions it, nobody ever really thinks too hard about it.

What we do have numbers to support is in marketing - “Games with a female only protagonist, got half the spending of female optional, and only 40 percent of the marketing budget of male-led games. Less than that, actually,” Zatkin said.

"With under 30 games with exclusively female protagonists, and those games receiving much smaller marketing budgets than games with variable genders or male leads, it's hard to draw any conclusions about the impact of gender on sales or reviews. "

A quote from that Kotaku article sums the problem there neatly -



The videogame community, like many other arms of the entertainment industry, still has this weird psychological barrier where it views women as an optional, niche demographic. A nice bonus. Instead of what they are - 50% of their maximum potential paying public. 50%. It's absolute madness for somebody in a commercial arena to treat half the wallets waiting for them as an afterthought. Madness.

Male viewers and players often don't see the problem just because they aren't tuned to see that "absence". Just as I, as a white person, am not always aware of the surreal lack of anybody of colour on something like Friends. A closer example of that would be how male viewers and reviewers hardly ever notice or comment on the giant reality failure at the heart of Modern Family that seems absolutely bizarre to female viewers, for instance, or how shocked they tend to be about how few movies pass the Bechdel test.

It is absolutely bananas that a game series featuring over one hundred playable characters over ten years can feature only one female - nine years ago, btw - without that having long ago firing up the absurdity siren all over the landscape. To me, that just goes to show how conditioned we are to accept it, to the point that we don't even notice how crazy it is anymore. Meanwhile...

The commonly accepted wisdom about videogaming and women is frequently false and often self fulfilling, but it's so often repeated that people treat it as true. That's not necessarily "hating" women in itself, it's just an unwillingness to think about it. And hey, it's kind of a bummer to think about, I get it. And that's not a diss on men, but maybe instead of automatically adopting a defensive position and trying to find reasons why she's wrong, it might be worth thinking about where she might have a point.

Instead of saying "Well, videogames aren't the only market guilty of it, the effect probably isn't that bad!", and putting our energy into brushing it off as an issue, maybe we could just hold our hands up, agree that it's Bad Thing, and start thinking about where videogaming could start taking steps to sort its own gaff out rather than running.