5 ms·

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

by 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.

by joemi 4y ago

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.