The thread I see is companies with wild cultures dominating the early years of games development. Nolan, for instance, once went on the record describing one of

The thread I see is companies with wild cultures dominating the early years of games development. Nolan, for instance, once went on the record describing one of his employees as 'stacked'. By the time the 90s rolled around, there's a glut of advertising that targets nearly exclusively young men, using sex to sell games (often when the themes are totally unrelated.) There are countless reference pieces for this, even Nintendo who today has a family friendly vibe put out a gameboy ad that featured a bound woman in lingerie. In the 90s, we saw an explosion of gaming, mostly picked up by young men. It became perceived as a boy's hobby, something girls didn't/shouldn't want to do. Jump ahead 10 years and games are taking off professionally. We've segmented our markets into 'core' and 'casual' gamers, and we're starting to see esports become a thing. Demographically, the professional gamers are still overwhelmingly men. Around this time, marketing became more broad and moved away from 'sex sells' and more towards 'good games sell'. Ubisoft attempts to inspire change by sponsoring the 'Frag Dolls', a cyberathlete team of women. Sure, there's still plenty of sex splashing across ads in the industry, but many of the big players are trying to reach a wider audience. Jump ahead to today and you'll see women on Twitch participating in basically every game out there. From Starcraft to Rainbow Six, Planet Coaster to Stellaris. The competitive scene is starting to see women rise in the ranks, with top8 positions on stages like EVO and IEM. When I look at art, I look at who made it and who it is for. What stories and backgrounds led to the construction of the piece. What informed it's creation. Look at "This War of Mine" or "Papers Please" or "VA-11 HALL-A" or "Dream Daddy" or "Life is Strange". For games like that to be made, you need creators who come from different backgrounds. My belief is that we're only recently starting to see works like this emerge because many of the people who made them may have felt like outsiders a decade or two ago, and are only now starting to be welcomed in.