8 ms·

Finding Van Tran, who brought female representation to games

71 points by bpierre 4y ago

smegsicle 4y ago
so if the 'gender barrier' of female representation in games was broken forty years ago, what is the goal of those who imply that it's some sort of systemic issue? are they that ignorant, or do they benefit by the discord somehow?
- joemi 4y ago
  Female representation in video games sure feels to me like an ongoing problem. Is it better now than it used to be? Yes. Is it no longer an issue? No. I don't think anyone's arguing that there's zero female representation. The argument is that there isn't enough and/or what representation there is is poor representation.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    Is "problem" the right word there? Is it really a bad thing for society that women don't have as many gamedev jobs as they otherwise could?
    - smegsicle 4y ago
      best i can gather, this seems to be a kind of strange wishful belief that some people have- for women to be exactly the same as men- and any counterexample is taken as a threat to their worldview somehow
    - jrajav 4y ago
      You misunderstood the statement. Female representation in video games means female characters _in_ the games. Independent, impactful, and nuanced characters like the protagonist or antagonist. Whether you think representation in video games is important or not tends to be a function of whether your personal identity is already well represented. If you don't think it's important, I'd encourage you to seek the perspectives of someone who is not well represented, ideally just a real-life friend. You might learn things you hadn't simply hadn't thought to consider, through no fault of your own. As for game dev jobs, more women in them would probably mean more female representation in games too, simply because there would be more perspectives at key decision points. And it's hard to argue that there isn't negative pressure against women entering and thriving in the industry, when one of the biggest game developers on the planet is recovering from a deeply embedded epidemic of misogynism.
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        > If you don't think it's important, I'd encourage you to seek the perspectives of someone who is not well represented, ideally just a real-life friend. You might learn things you hadn't simply hadn't thought to consider, through no fault of your own. Agreed. If you don't have experience with something, the obvious thing to do is to talk to someone who does. I've read so many stories from people whose fondest memory of games/TV/career/etc is finally seeing someone who looked like them, and how life-changing it was.
    - dahart 4y ago
      > Is it really a bad thing for society that women don’t have as many gamedev jobs as they otherwise could? Yes, it is. Not because we need more game devs, but because there are women who actually want those jobs and are qualified and have a harder time getting them. And because when they do get them they deal with issues that the men in the same positions don’t have to deal with. And because they get paid less for the same work on average. These things are indeed bad for society, they make our environment worse than it could be otherwise. We also don’t have enough games that represent the growing category of female gamer, we have too many Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto and Madden, and not enough games like, I dunno, Sayonara Wild Hearts or Celeste. We could generally speaking make more money by having more games that not just cater to female gamers but are made by women.
      - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
        >We also don’t have enough games that represent the growing category of female gamer, we have too many Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto and Madden, and not enough games like, I dunno, Sayonara Wild Hearts or Celeste You're going to have to be way more specific why there are too many of the former, too little of the latter, why the latter attracts women more, etc. You can name hundreds of games like the latter two depending on your selection criteria. >We could generally speaking make more money by having more games that not just cater to female gamers but are made by women. This too I would like to see more support for, unless your only criteria is "women will buy games made by women".
      - sacrosancty 4y ago
        Do women really have a harder time getting game dev jobs overall just because they're women? Is there actual evidence for that? How would the industry look if there was no such discrimination? How would we know that the problem was solved?
        dahart 4y ago
        Yes, women really do have a harder time, at multiple levels. And there’s literally mountains of actual evidence. One way to know when the problem is solved is when the rates of gender disparity, whatever they are, settle for a long time and are the same in all countries, and that women as a whole agree that things are fair. We’re barely ~100 years (1 human lifespan) from women having the right to vote in the US. Before that extreme cultural bias was baked into law. In some countries it still is. We’re maybe a bit over ~50 years from the start of computer science as a widespread field of academic study, the start of which involved very few women. The number of women in CS in the US went from zero to 37% in the 80s, and then went down (why?) and is now hovering around 20%. In Indian, the number of women in CS has in the recent past exceeded 50%. The fact that the numbers are changing rapidly, and that they’re different in India vs the US is proof of cultural biases.
    - joemi 4y ago
      Note that, at least in the case of this article, the topic of "female representation in games" isn't just about women having jobs in the industry, but also about making games featuring women. Both of these aspects are what I'm referring to as well. I've been playing games for 30-something years, and I think women aren't portrayed as well as they should be. It's come a ways over the years, but I don't think it's fixed. I'd call it a problem. If you think it's perfect as-is, then I guess it's not a problem for you.
    - kX4A8o4mVmX8aW 4y ago
      I see from your name and profile that you're from Australia. Suppose you play a game set in Australia and there's a scene where you have snow in January. The first game you play like that you might just laugh, but if every game you play has snow in January in Australia you would probably get annoyed. Having more female game devs is like having more Australian game devs who know when it's summer there. A big difference though is that unlike Australia which has less than 0.5% of the world's population concentrated in one area, women are over 50% of the world's population and are evenly distributed. You can have a lot of games without Australia but almost every game with people in it needs to have women or you'll be telling a strange story. Imagine a situation where most games have scenes in Australia but most game devs don't know it's summer in January there. That's a problem. Where it can get mixed up is that a lot of "knowing the seasons" as a woman is knowing stuff that makes men uncomfortable. A female game dev making a realistic female character can introduce everyday factual experiences about things like sexual harassment, birth control, or feminine hygiene, and some male players might say she's trying to make an activist game and she can reply, no, this is just my life. It would be like getting mad at an Australian game dev for always going on about summer in January as if it's their fault the sun spends a lot of time in the sky around that time. (This is leaving aside the economic argument that developer jobs tend to be good and therefore desirable, and it should be suspicious when any particular demographic is dramatically underrepresented in a field with mostly good jobs.)
      - AussieWog93 4y ago
        >I see from your name and profile that you're from Australia. Suppose you play a game set in Australia and there's a scene where you have snow in January. The first game you play like that you might just laugh, but if every game you play has snow in January in Australia you would probably get annoyed. If you want a concrete example of that, A lot of media that features Australian characters are played by Americans doing bad Paul Hogan impressions. It's dumb, but didn't make me want to play Borderlands or COD instead of Overwatch or BioShock (with that damn 0126 code too - who does this!?) >(This is leaving aside the economic argument that developer jobs tend to be good and therefore desirable, and it should be suspicious when any particular demographic is dramatically underrepresented in a field with mostly good jobs.) Gamedev jobs are mostly terrible, with low pay, immense amounts of unpaid overtime and chronic, stressful "crunch time". I don't know why men stay in the industry, let alone women.
- dahart 4y ago
  It’s unfortunate but true that one person breaking stereotypes at one small company doesn’t suddenly stop stereotypes from existing everywhere. But as an ex video game developer for a decade, long after Van made Wabbit, I’m sorry to say that female representation in games is low and barriers still exist to this day, even if things are improving. Assuming that one person’s success implies that people shouldn’t call attention to ongoing issues is the problem. It’s neither a hidden goal nor people who are trying to sow discord, there are still real imbalances. Games these days are a bigger production effort than what it took to make Atari cartridges, and in big studios often require a CS degree. Women in CS went up for several decades until the mid 80s, and then started going down again. So gender imbalances in education play a large part in the state of things today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_disparity_in_computing#Statistics_in_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_disparity_in_computing#...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- washadjeffmad 4y ago
  Largely, women are an underutilized demographic in the markets of a nearly $200B industry and represent a huge unrealized opportunity. Most of these pieces are not about "women are smart enough", ie- there is no intellectual barrier to the work and engagement, but signaling that women creating products for female consumers means that video games are in truth "by women and for women". As women increasingly hold higher degrees, raise their incomes, and need to work fewer hours to afford their lifestyles, they should have excess time and wealth that could be captured by gaming. Manufacturing female brand identities has been successful in other markets, and promoting female involvement or female exclusivity has been an effective continued motivator for engagement.
dijit 4y ago
The most notable thing to me here is that nobody tried to stop it, they do not talk about barriers, only a vague mention that she might not have been nerdy enough but that notion was removed when she spoke. In fact they were enthusiastic about the task and she was given free reign- and this was a Texan company; Texas as far as I understand is the bastion of right wing politics in the US (I’m not American. Forgive me if I’m wrong), and here’s a foreign woman being given free reign. So, what happened? 40 years later and I’m being told nearly constantly that games are discriminating towards women. I work in games, have for close to a decade, and HR beats us over the head for not hiring enough women. (Then later on our executives seem to sleaze on those women, which we also get blamed for. But. Hey Ho.)
- enqk 4y ago
  Back then there was no notion of what a game was and who is it for. Nowadays people making games grew up with them. Ultra-specialized, fans of the medium they work on. Diversity is more expected early on
  - joemi 4y ago
    Plus, building on this, the article mentions Van Tran having a 3 person team to make a game. On a team that size, the one women on the team has a much bigger influence than the one women on a larger (and sometimes MUCH larger) team that's more common today at big game companies.
- joemi 4y ago
  > The most notable thing to me here is that nobody tried to stop it, they do not talk about barriers, only a vague mention that she might not have been nerdy enough but that notion was removed when she spoke. Well, in a way this is kind of like confirmation bias (or maybe a different bias term? or a tautology maybe?), I think. This is a story about a woman that we know got a job at that company, so she therefore met less obstructions in getting the job than everyone who didn't get a job (there or elsewhere). The fact that she got the job and was successful enough to be someone who had an article written herself is why the article was written. Texas being a bastion of right wing politics doesn't really matter at all in regards to systematic issue when we're looking at just a single data point. For instance, NYC could similarly be argued to be a bastion of left wing politics, but that doesn't mean there aren't occasional instances of racism, xenophobia, sexism, etc in NYC in individuals or organizations. It may be rare, but if you're looking for just a single example, it can be found, but it does not mean that it's common. > So, what happened? 40 years later and I’m being told nearly constantly that games are discriminating towards women. What do you mean what happened? Are you implying that with Van Mai's hire, gender discrimination was suddenly solved and no longer existed?
jdthedisciple 4y ago
Can someone explain to me why exactly female representation in gaming is important / the lack thereof is a problem? Is there any particular merit in being associated with and represented in the field of gaming? Would the world be a better place if males and females were both to be exactly equally well represented in the field of gaming, whatever that means?
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Back in the late 2000s a lot of people were saying that casual gaming was, as an expansion outside of the male 20-something DOOM fan demographic, caused by women entering the game industry and working on things that male 20-something software engineers wouldn't think was enjoyable. There's a lot of gender essentialism in that way of telling the story, but there's also a lot of gender essentialism in the standard marketing playbook on target demographics more generally, and it seems to be making money for them. There is some argument to be made that it is good to have someone that is at least remotely contained within the target demographic involved when creative decisions are being made, at the very least to avoid having to send every little thing out to a focus group. That is for example why metal bands are usually made up of people who like metal, and why session musicians who are jobbing it don't end up doing a lot of songwriting.
- dybber 4y ago
  The lack of representation might mean that fewer games are developed targeting women/girls, which means that there’s potentialet a lot of unexplored territory.
- jrajav 4y ago
  This article isn't even arguing anything about female representation, it's just a historical piece. The way you bring up it being a problem and questioning its merits seems vaguely incendiary in this context and makes me wonder if you're actually interested in the answer. I'm not gonna assume what your thoughts are on the matter, but I will suggest that if you're actually interested in an answer to your questions and not just starting a discussion that might or might not be fruitful for anyone, your answers will be best found doing earnest research and especially talking to real people who are affected by a lack of representation.
dybber 4y ago
More stories about early female game developers: http://www.atariwomen.org/stories/ http://www.atariwomen.org/stories/
numpad0 4y ago
I don't quite understand the push for pronounced minority caricatuarization as a display of nobility, nor the dominance of bald macho man covered in blood as a protagonist in some subgenres of games. A lot of anime, JRPGs and mobile gacha games are built around the concept of a fictional, prominent group of teenagers of audiences' sexual orientation saving the world, and that passes Bechdel tests, and seems to almost perfectly fit into "the" criteria. Teenage girl quantum physicist scantily clothed talking democracy and sacrificing their life, for a reason miles away from a dick but for a true greater good? I think those are just clicks away if that is what you want or what you need more to correct the world we are in. But it's not what everyone wants, if not a polar opposite, so I don't understand why it's talked this often.
eappleby 4y ago
tangentially related: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1098298392/a-12-year-old-girl-takes-on-the-video-game-industry-update https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1098298392/a-12-year-old-girl... Planet Money (Podcast): A 12-year-old girl takes on the video game industry
homarp 4y ago
original Polygon article discussion: previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236200

71 points by bpierre 4y ago

so if the 'gender barrier' of female representation in games was broken forty years ago, what is the goal of those who imply that it's some sort of systemic issue? are they that ignorant, or do they benefit by the discord somehow?

joemi 4y ago
Female representation in video games sure feels to me like an ongoing problem. Is it better now than it used to be? Yes. Is it no longer an issue? No. I don't think anyone's arguing that there's zero female representation. The argument is that there isn't enough and/or what representation there is is poor representation.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  Is "problem" the right word there? Is it really a bad thing for society that women don't have as many gamedev jobs as they otherwise could?
  - smegsicle 4y ago
    best i can gather, this seems to be a kind of strange wishful belief that some people have- for women to be exactly the same as men- and any counterexample is taken as a threat to their worldview somehow
  - jrajav 4y ago
    You misunderstood the statement. Female representation in video games means female characters _in_ the games. Independent, impactful, and nuanced characters like the protagonist or antagonist. Whether you think representation in video games is important or not tends to be a function of whether your personal identity is already well represented. If you don't think it's important, I'd encourage you to seek the perspectives of someone who is not well represented, ideally just a real-life friend. You might learn things you hadn't simply hadn't thought to consider, through no fault of your own. As for game dev jobs, more women in them would probably mean more female representation in games too, simply because there would be more perspectives at key decision points. And it's hard to argue that there isn't negative pressure against women entering and thriving in the industry, when one of the biggest game developers on the planet is recovering from a deeply embedded epidemic of misogynism.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      > If you don't think it's important, I'd encourage you to seek the perspectives of someone who is not well represented, ideally just a real-life friend. You might learn things you hadn't simply hadn't thought to consider, through no fault of your own. Agreed. If you don't have experience with something, the obvious thing to do is to talk to someone who does. I've read so many stories from people whose fondest memory of games/TV/career/etc is finally seeing someone who looked like them, and how life-changing it was.
  - dahart 4y ago
    > Is it really a bad thing for society that women don’t have as many gamedev jobs as they otherwise could? Yes, it is. Not because we need more game devs, but because there are women who actually want those jobs and are qualified and have a harder time getting them. And because when they do get them they deal with issues that the men in the same positions don’t have to deal with. And because they get paid less for the same work on average. These things are indeed bad for society, they make our environment worse than it could be otherwise. We also don’t have enough games that represent the growing category of female gamer, we have too many Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto and Madden, and not enough games like, I dunno, Sayonara Wild Hearts or Celeste. We could generally speaking make more money by having more games that not just cater to female gamers but are made by women.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      >We also don’t have enough games that represent the growing category of female gamer, we have too many Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto and Madden, and not enough games like, I dunno, Sayonara Wild Hearts or Celeste You're going to have to be way more specific why there are too many of the former, too little of the latter, why the latter attracts women more, etc. You can name hundreds of games like the latter two depending on your selection criteria. >We could generally speaking make more money by having more games that not just cater to female gamers but are made by women. This too I would like to see more support for, unless your only criteria is "women will buy games made by women".
    - sacrosancty 4y ago
      Do women really have a harder time getting game dev jobs overall just because they're women? Is there actual evidence for that? How would the industry look if there was no such discrimination? How would we know that the problem was solved?
      - dahart 4y ago
        Yes, women really do have a harder time, at multiple levels. And there’s literally mountains of actual evidence. One way to know when the problem is solved is when the rates of gender disparity, whatever they are, settle for a long time and are the same in all countries, and that women as a whole agree that things are fair. We’re barely ~100 years (1 human lifespan) from women having the right to vote in the US. Before that extreme cultural bias was baked into law. In some countries it still is. We’re maybe a bit over ~50 years from the start of computer science as a widespread field of academic study, the start of which involved very few women. The number of women in CS in the US went from zero to 37% in the 80s, and then went down (why?) and is now hovering around 20%. In Indian, the number of women in CS has in the recent past exceeded 50%. The fact that the numbers are changing rapidly, and that they’re different in India vs the US is proof of cultural biases.
  - joemi 4y ago
    Note that, at least in the case of this article, the topic of "female representation in games" isn't just about women having jobs in the industry, but also about making games featuring women. Both of these aspects are what I'm referring to as well. I've been playing games for 30-something years, and I think women aren't portrayed as well as they should be. It's come a ways over the years, but I don't think it's fixed. I'd call it a problem. If you think it's perfect as-is, then I guess it's not a problem for you.
  - kX4A8o4mVmX8aW 4y ago
    I see from your name and profile that you're from Australia. Suppose you play a game set in Australia and there's a scene where you have snow in January. The first game you play like that you might just laugh, but if every game you play has snow in January in Australia you would probably get annoyed. Having more female game devs is like having more Australian game devs who know when it's summer there. A big difference though is that unlike Australia which has less than 0.5% of the world's population concentrated in one area, women are over 50% of the world's population and are evenly distributed. You can have a lot of games without Australia but almost every game with people in it needs to have women or you'll be telling a strange story. Imagine a situation where most games have scenes in Australia but most game devs don't know it's summer in January there. That's a problem. Where it can get mixed up is that a lot of "knowing the seasons" as a woman is knowing stuff that makes men uncomfortable. A female game dev making a realistic female character can introduce everyday factual experiences about things like sexual harassment, birth control, or feminine hygiene, and some male players might say she's trying to make an activist game and she can reply, no, this is just my life. It would be like getting mad at an Australian game dev for always going on about summer in January as if it's their fault the sun spends a lot of time in the sky around that time. (This is leaving aside the economic argument that developer jobs tend to be good and therefore desirable, and it should be suspicious when any particular demographic is dramatically underrepresented in a field with mostly good jobs.)
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      >I see from your name and profile that you're from Australia. Suppose you play a game set in Australia and there's a scene where you have snow in January. The first game you play like that you might just laugh, but if every game you play has snow in January in Australia you would probably get annoyed. If you want a concrete example of that, A lot of media that features Australian characters are played by Americans doing bad Paul Hogan impressions. It's dumb, but didn't make me want to play Borderlands or COD instead of Overwatch or BioShock (with that damn 0126 code too - who does this!?) >(This is leaving aside the economic argument that developer jobs tend to be good and therefore desirable, and it should be suspicious when any particular demographic is dramatically underrepresented in a field with mostly good jobs.) Gamedev jobs are mostly terrible, with low pay, immense amounts of unpaid overtime and chronic, stressful "crunch time". I don't know why men stay in the industry, let alone women.
dahart 4y ago
It’s unfortunate but true that one person breaking stereotypes at one small company doesn’t suddenly stop stereotypes from existing everywhere. But as an ex video game developer for a decade, long after Van made Wabbit, I’m sorry to say that female representation in games is low and barriers still exist to this day, even if things are improving. Assuming that one person’s success implies that people shouldn’t call attention to ongoing issues is the problem. It’s neither a hidden goal nor people who are trying to sow discord, there are still real imbalances. Games these days are a bigger production effort than what it took to make Atari cartridges, and in big studios often require a CS degree. Women in CS went up for several decades until the mid 80s, and then started going down again. So gender imbalances in education play a large part in the state of things today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_disparity_in_computing#Statistics_in_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_disparity_in_computing#...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
washadjeffmad 4y ago
Largely, women are an underutilized demographic in the markets of a nearly $200B industry and represent a huge unrealized opportunity. Most of these pieces are not about "women are smart enough", ie- there is no intellectual barrier to the work and engagement, but signaling that women creating products for female consumers means that video games are in truth "by women and for women". As women increasingly hold higher degrees, raise their incomes, and need to work fewer hours to afford their lifestyles, they should have excess time and wealth that could be captured by gaming. Manufacturing female brand identities has been successful in other markets, and promoting female involvement or female exclusivity has been an effective continued motivator for engagement.

dijit 4y ago

The most notable thing to me here is that nobody tried to stop it, they do not talk about barriers, only a vague mention that she might not have been nerdy enough but that notion was removed when she spoke. In fact they were enthusiastic about the task and she was given free reign- and this was a Texan company; Texas as far as I understand is the bastion of right wing politics in the US (I’m not American. Forgive me if I’m wrong), and here’s a foreign woman being given free reign. So, what happened? 40 years later and I’m being told nearly constantly that games are discriminating towards women. I work in games, have for close to a decade, and HR beats us over the head for not hiring enough women. (Then later on our executives seem to sleaze on those women, which we also get blamed for. But. Hey Ho.)

enqk 4y ago
Back then there was no notion of what a game was and who is it for. Nowadays people making games grew up with them. Ultra-specialized, fans of the medium they work on. Diversity is more expected early on
- joemi 4y ago
  Plus, building on this, the article mentions Van Tran having a 3 person team to make a game. On a team that size, the one women on the team has a much bigger influence than the one women on a larger (and sometimes MUCH larger) team that's more common today at big game companies.
joemi 4y ago
> The most notable thing to me here is that nobody tried to stop it, they do not talk about barriers, only a vague mention that she might not have been nerdy enough but that notion was removed when she spoke. Well, in a way this is kind of like confirmation bias (or maybe a different bias term? or a tautology maybe?), I think. This is a story about a woman that we know got a job at that company, so she therefore met less obstructions in getting the job than everyone who didn't get a job (there or elsewhere). The fact that she got the job and was successful enough to be someone who had an article written herself is why the article was written. Texas being a bastion of right wing politics doesn't really matter at all in regards to systematic issue when we're looking at just a single data point. For instance, NYC could similarly be argued to be a bastion of left wing politics, but that doesn't mean there aren't occasional instances of racism, xenophobia, sexism, etc in NYC in individuals or organizations. It may be rare, but if you're looking for just a single example, it can be found, but it does not mean that it's common. > So, what happened? 40 years later and I’m being told nearly constantly that games are discriminating towards women. What do you mean what happened? Are you implying that with Van Mai's hire, gender discrimination was suddenly solved and no longer existed?

jdthedisciple 4y ago

Can someone explain to me why exactly female representation in gaming is important / the lack thereof is a problem? Is there any particular merit in being associated with and represented in the field of gaming? Would the world be a better place if males and females were both to be exactly equally well represented in the field of gaming, whatever that means?

whatshisface 4y ago
Back in the late 2000s a lot of people were saying that casual gaming was, as an expansion outside of the male 20-something DOOM fan demographic, caused by women entering the game industry and working on things that male 20-something software engineers wouldn't think was enjoyable. There's a lot of gender essentialism in that way of telling the story, but there's also a lot of gender essentialism in the standard marketing playbook on target demographics more generally, and it seems to be making money for them. There is some argument to be made that it is good to have someone that is at least remotely contained within the target demographic involved when creative decisions are being made, at the very least to avoid having to send every little thing out to a focus group. That is for example why metal bands are usually made up of people who like metal, and why session musicians who are jobbing it don't end up doing a lot of songwriting.
dybber 4y ago
The lack of representation might mean that fewer games are developed targeting women/girls, which means that there’s potentialet a lot of unexplored territory.
jrajav 4y ago
This article isn't even arguing anything about female representation, it's just a historical piece. The way you bring up it being a problem and questioning its merits seems vaguely incendiary in this context and makes me wonder if you're actually interested in the answer. I'm not gonna assume what your thoughts are on the matter, but I will suggest that if you're actually interested in an answer to your questions and not just starting a discussion that might or might not be fruitful for anyone, your answers will be best found doing earnest research and especially talking to real people who are affected by a lack of representation.

dybber 4y ago

More stories about early female game developers: http://www.atariwomen.org/stories/ http://www.atariwomen.org/stories/

numpad0 4y ago

I don't quite understand the push for pronounced minority caricatuarization as a display of nobility, nor the dominance of bald macho man covered in blood as a protagonist in some subgenres of games. A lot of anime, JRPGs and mobile gacha games are built around the concept of a fictional, prominent group of teenagers of audiences' sexual orientation saving the world, and that passes Bechdel tests, and seems to almost perfectly fit into "the" criteria. Teenage girl quantum physicist scantily clothed talking democracy and sacrificing their life, for a reason miles away from a dick but for a true greater good? I think those are just clicks away if that is what you want or what you need more to correct the world we are in. But it's not what everyone wants, if not a polar opposite, so I don't understand why it's talked this often.

eappleby 4y ago

tangentially related: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1098298392/a-12-year-old-girl-takes-on-the-video-game-industry-update https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1098298392/a-12-year-old-girl... Planet Money (Podcast): A 12-year-old girl takes on the video game industry

homarp 4y ago

original Polygon article discussion: previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236200