*************************** Update - Jan. 28 *****************************
Thank you for your comments so far! Some reflections from Brenda:
Wow, great comments on the blog. Love the revenge of the nerd argument, and agree that my "guys can't make games for women" was a very broad stroke. Of course, someone who wants to understand how women think and what they enjoy playing can do that work and get the info he needs to deliver. I do want to respond to the last entry, however. I don't agree that the "women in games thing" will "sort itself out". I have a 12 year old who is a math star. She is the best in her class in math, and her mom runs a game studio. You'd think she'd include tech as a possible career path. Nope. She wants to be a fashion model. A Fashion model! I swear, this kid was brought up in a house full of lego, with only a barbie or two, both of which her brothers had severed the head off of in one of their experiments with the rowing machine. All of this to say, please don't underestimate the pressures on girls (and boys, for that matter) to conform to stupid societal conventions - they are loud and strong, and we've got to be vigilant if we want to offer alternatives to our bright kids who deserve a chance at the world outside of those binding stereotypes.
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A blog on women and games is bound to raise a few eyebrows. Hasn’t this topic been done to death? We can all point to some great female game characters, so what more is needed? Have you played Mirror’s edge?
The thing is, we’re still very early on in tackling this issue, and there are so many layers to what needs to be addressed. Last year’s finding in Game Developer Magazine showed that 93% of engineers in the industry are male, around 70% of artists, and importantly, only 10% of studio heads are women. So, no, IMHO, this issue has not been done to death. In fact, this issue is still wet behind the ears, and needs to be on the agenda all the time, throughout the industry. More, not less, attention to this topic is needed.
Most gals working in the industry are in Sales and Marketing, HR, or Art. These are important roles, and I’m not belittling that, but it is also important that women make up part of the other disciplines of the industry as well. Why? Is this a feminist argument for equality? Is 50 / 50 just a rule to be applied, regardless of all else. Well, there might be something to that, but the real reason, to my mind is simple. Until we have great women making games for women, we won’t have great women’s games.
Thank you for your comments so far! Some reflections from Brenda:
Wow, great comments on the blog. Love the revenge of the nerd argument, and agree that my "guys can't make games for women" was a very broad stroke. Of course, someone who wants to understand how women think and what they enjoy playing can do that work and get the info he needs to deliver. I do want to respond to the last entry, however. I don't agree that the "women in games thing" will "sort itself out". I have a 12 year old who is a math star. She is the best in her class in math, and her mom runs a game studio. You'd think she'd include tech as a possible career path. Nope. She wants to be a fashion model. A Fashion model! I swear, this kid was brought up in a house full of lego, with only a barbie or two, both of which her brothers had severed the head off of in one of their experiments with the rowing machine. All of this to say, please don't underestimate the pressures on girls (and boys, for that matter) to conform to stupid societal conventions - they are loud and strong, and we've got to be vigilant if we want to offer alternatives to our bright kids who deserve a chance at the world outside of those binding stereotypes.
********************************************************************************
A blog on women and games is bound to raise a few eyebrows. Hasn’t this topic been done to death? We can all point to some great female game characters, so what more is needed? Have you played Mirror’s edge?
The thing is, we’re still very early on in tackling this issue, and there are so many layers to what needs to be addressed. Last year’s finding in Game Developer Magazine showed that 93% of engineers in the industry are male, around 70% of artists, and importantly, only 10% of studio heads are women. So, no, IMHO, this issue has not been done to death. In fact, this issue is still wet behind the ears, and needs to be on the agenda all the time, throughout the industry. More, not less, attention to this topic is needed.
Most gals working in the industry are in Sales and Marketing, HR, or Art. These are important roles, and I’m not belittling that, but it is also important that women make up part of the other disciplines of the industry as well. Why? Is this a feminist argument for equality? Is 50 / 50 just a rule to be applied, regardless of all else. Well, there might be something to that, but the real reason, to my mind is simple. Until we have great women making games for women, we won’t have great women’s games.
Yah, I just said men can’t make great games for women. This is the point in the argument where someone throws Will Wright at me. True, the Sims is probably the most successful franchise, ever, and a big chuck of their market is double X chormosoners. We all know the story of how guys bought the game, turned their female buddies on to gaming, and the rest is history. I’m grateful for that, don’t get me wrong. And, of course, when Mr. Iwata announced at E3 06 That Nintendo’s “Revolution” was going “disrupt” the market and change the demographic of who games, it wasn’t just your typical PR propaganda. Girls and women are a huge driver for the incredible dominance that continues to be the Nintendo story. I’m grateful for that too.
What’s the grateful thing about? Why does it matter if girls or women game? Sociologically, it’s a question of access to technology and the issue of gender. Futurists have written frightening scenarios that the feminist in me shivers to thing about. Business wise, we want the female entertainment budget to be spent in our segment of the market – on games. Downloadable, in a box at retail, on the cell phone or PC, we want women to spend their buck on our game, rather than on that movie or the latest novel on Oprah’s book list.
The fear is, if guys were first to the keyboard, and drove the tech advancements of the past x decades, and made tech that spoke to their sensibilities and desires, isn’t it a self fullfilling prophesy that they build what they want to use? Women, who, due to social stigma or biological makeup (insert nature vs. nurture arguments here) are late to the party, will continue to be locked out because the tech being created is designed from a male perspective? I think this is pretty likely, and may in fact be the case in gaming.
Seems to me that this is proven out in comparing and contrasting the casual game market to the console market. While the console space is still largely male dominated in terms of developers and consumers, this is not the case in casual games. There seem to be more women creating in that space, and the primary consumer of casual games is female. My observations have been that many of the most innovative and engaging games for gals have been in the casual game space. Interestingly, this is also the gaming segment that employs a higher percentage of women. Wouldn’t it be great to have this be the case throughout the industry? It would not only expand the range of product, I think it would drive further market expansion, which is important if the industry is going to continue the double digit growth we’ve become accustomed to.
I’ve got to run. I’m reading Brenda Laurels “the Utopian Entrepreneur” and it’s hard to put it down for long. Check it out if you are interested in hearing from an industry veteran who is truly plugged in and has amazing stories to tell on the issue of trying to make successful games for the female market. Anyone remember Purple Moon?
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4 comments:
i'll never forget one of my first meetings when i joined the web Interactive team at a large Canadian media conglomerate. One of the poor women you describe was there. She was hamepered by the glass ceiling, trapped in her lacklustre position as the head of marketing with a huge department of people and a six-figure salary. (My heart nearly broke).
i was brand new, and though i had no real experience to bring to bear on the conversation, i was trying to speak her language - trying be involved by referencing my hands-on understanding of the company's kid/tween demographic. i started talking about my experiences as an instructor at a board of education-run technology camp for kids and tweens, where i had taught game design.
The woman interrupted me, and mockingly said "tch - you went to COMPUTER camp?" And then, ten years after i thought the ordeal of high school had ended, the pretty and popular yes-men working in her marketing entourage all laughed at me. The board room may as well have been a schoolyard.
Nerds have historically gravitated to technology. An by "nerds", i mean male social misfits, who were often teased and mocked at school - boys who didn't interface well with people, and who found it easier to push code or pixels around a computer terminal. And now that their chosen pasttime has become popular and profitable, everyone wants a piece. Forget the fact that popular girls and athletic boys used their love of technology to further ridicule nerds - now that we're all adults and everyone wants to make a buck, the kids who were too cool for video games in the 80's want in.
i know i'm painting broad strokes here. It's almost comically stereotypical. But these stereotypes are accurate! i lived them.
i don't buy your access argument. The kids i knew in high school - girls and boys alike - all had equal access to the same technology. They just chose to be interested in other things, whether for personal or social reasons. We may be raising a new generation where it's more acceptable for girls to study technology (i'm raising my two girls to be very tech-savvy), but please don't begrudge male nerds growing up in the 70's and 80's, who were long considered losers at life, their victory.
Professional sports are extremely popular and profitable, but i don't hear anyone saying "we need more nerds in football."
I think it would be great to see more women in the games industry. And I do believe the earlier females get into games and technology, the more likely they'll want to pursue a career in it.
Before becoming a female game designer, I went to school for Computer Science and later on went to Vancouver Film School for game design. Both were very male dominated, and I was the only female in the Game design course (as I am the only female game designer at the company I work for).
If I hadn't been exposed to games and showed such an interest in computers at such an early age, I wouldn't have pursued my career in the games industry. Up until I started to research schools out West, I didn't even know of the positions available to work for in the games industry asides from being a programmer.
Knowledge is key here-- and if we want younger generations of females to want to work within the games industry, we must share what positions they can aspire for, and what they can study in order to get that position.
I don't think technology is the only factor as to why women don't get into the console game market-- I think generally the lack of knowledge of positions in the industry is also a factor. Women can be producers, testers, project managers, designers, artists (among other positions)-- many positions which won't deal with having a very heavy technical background.
It could be true that there are more women in the casual games market because the technology barrier is less than that of the console market. Also, perhaps simply that's the market they want to make games for. Personally, I want to design and work on great games-- which ever platform that may be.
And I hope that's what younger women who want to get into the industry realize-- that if they work hard enough they too can create great games alongside the many males within the games industry.
"Yah, I just said men can’t make great games for women."
If this is true, then why, as a man do I care? This statement says to me,"Don't bother even trying to make games for women. Don't bother making games that appeal to both either because game mechanics are, apparently, not universal." So does that make "rock, paper, scissors" a boy game or a girl game? If this is true then I must assume that women can't make great games for men either. So are you arguing for segregation in the games industry?
I've read some very useful articles discussing the preferences that women have in games. They leave you with tangible information you can use. A statement like "men can’t make great games for women", beside implying a very simplistic concept of game design, doesn't leave me with anything useful. It tells me that the only people who can sort through this are women and that as a man, I'm neither responsible nor accountable for the lack of games that appeal to women.
In a previous life, I was a junior executive at an upstart, er, start-up game publisher. Wait... lemme add that I'm of the female persuasion. We enjoyed wild success with an early multimedia title thanks to tons of pre-release promotion and the phenomenal relationships I worked very hard to build with magazine publishers and editors...all of which was nearly completely undone when our CEO dressed down the editor of a major magazine in front of god and everybody at Comdex (when comdex still meant something to the gaming industry). It's a long story, but in a nutshell, our CEO was wrong about something he thought was supposed to happen, and rather than asking ME about it, shot off his mouth on the show floor. At dinner that night (In Caesar's rotunda) I lit into him. His excuse was that he thought he was protecting me. I believe my, uhm, rampage ended with "I'm not your daughter, I'm not your wife. I'm the person you hired to make people know about and like our company, and now I have to start MY job from scratch."
I don't know that the paternal affectation really permeated the games industry at the time(he was actually pretty old compared to other CEOs, so it might have just been a generational thing), and I know it doesn't now, but after he successfully lost the company due to a squabble with our developers, I moved to a different industry. It probably wasn't a conscious effort, but I didn't try very hard to stay in games, either.
However, I still have pretty strong ties to the industry via a number of avenues, and have observed an executive trend that's kind'a sad, really. Unfortunately, the worst example of that observation happens to be a woman, one of the few female game company executives, and that makes me feel the need to respond here.
Ridiculous financial success led to the "hollywood-ization" of what used to be an incredibly fun, humble, and passionate industry, drawing ambitious folks out of the woodwork. ...Folks who craved the "easy" route to a jet-set lifestyle of expense accounts and hot tub meetings.
It's so incredibly easy to claim to be a die-hard gamer - especially when you want to suckle at the teat of a swollen cash cow. What’s a little more challenging is keeping in mind gaming’s roots – the garage companies, college roommates creating future blockbusters between mid-terms – and how gravely important respect for those roots and the grandfathers of the gaming industry is. This is an industry with a real and palpable soul. Boards of Directors, NASDAQ, and executives from other industries (who think they can teach a thing or two to the gamers) have been trying to suck that soul away.
What’s beautiful is that the “NEXT BIG THING” keeps coming not from the giants (both of the industry and wanna-be giants sleazing into the industry) but from humble folks with a little idea. The giants that the wanna-be’s seek so desperately to emulate can only rehash, repackage, reword and ultimately destroy the jewels ‘real’ gamers mine.
My hope for the future of the industry is this: the economic downturn will separate the wheat from the chaff; Those with a passion for games will endure, while those with a passion for glitter will find someone else to annoy. The “girls in gaming” thing? Bah, that’ll sort itself out too, without the aid of gold-bracelet-clad fist pounding. Our education systems have been working hard to tell girls that math is fun, and it’s okay to say that out loud.
Out.
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