Do you mean in number? Or do you feel one is portrayed as being inherently better than the other?easternflame said:
Are mainstream devs deliberately discouraging women from gaming?
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I mean in the fact that it took bioware 2 games to have gay relationships but lesbian was an option.BloatedGuppy said:
That would be pandering again, but this time to straight males, as opposed to pandering to lesbians. It would really only be "sexist" if they put a lesbian in the game and she was a straight up super hero, and the equivalent gay male was a retard.easternflame said:
Hold the phone, I've read every yarn Robert Howard ever typed. How is Conan a racist?xXxJessicaxXx said:
Wait just remembered "Vale of the Lost Women."
Yeah I guess. Pandering in general is pretty juvenile and annoying, and shows a certain level of disrespect for the intelligence of your audience. As they're one of the ONLY developers even bothering to put homosexuals in their games at all, though, I have trouble taking them too much to task for it.easternflame said:
To be honest? A Native American can generally blend into a group of men a lot more easily than a woman can. Most of them (especially if they have mixed European blood) can pass for white pretty handily. For an existing example, take a look at the protagonist of 'Prey' [http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/prey_tommy.jpg]. Hardly looks like the Redskins mascot.xXxJessicaxXx said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that because of a deliberate character flaw?xXxJessicaxXx said:
I think that was clumsy design more than anything else. Amalur felt like a rather hastily built game to me, for whatever reason.xXxJessicaxXx said:
Erm...I think 'plenty' exaggerates the numbers a fair bit. Look through lists of female pirates, and it's pretty sparse to begin with, and that's before you count up how many of them did so while disguised as men.xXxJessicaxXx said:
I see where you're coming from, but consider that most of the stuff you listed had pretty valid reasons for its choice of protagonists. Games have to balance acceptable breaks from realism with a believable setting, and frankly, era plays a big part of it. Call of Duty 2 didn't have women mixed in with the D-Day landings, because it was shooting for immersion. From a purely objective standpoint, there are a lot of situations where you don't expect to find women.xXxJessicaxXx said:
But don't forget: there's plenty of reasonably-recent examples that might slip under the radar, but are pretty damn good efforts by the dev team. The Saints Row series after the first had multiple female voices to pick from, all of whom got just as much attention as the male variants. For a much more subtle example, the Halo games let players pick the gender of their Spartan. It changes the voice, and there's no physical difference, but that's the great thing: it actually treats women in the military as soldiers. They don't get specially-molded breasplates or inexplicably tight jumpsuits while the guys get a tank's worth of armor. It's astonishingly simple, but still nice when you think about it.
This is really what I was thinking as I read this thread.onegirlgaming said:
I'm not sure if many people on this forum play D&D, or watch it as entertainment (it sounds weird I know, but for me it's just as good as a comedic/serious television program), but if you ever do and come across a guy trying to role play a woman (and being serious about it) you'll probably notice that it is hilariously bad.
I really can't blame him. If I want to pretend to be, or write up, a male character I have all sorts of experience and heroes to draw from. I've been a guy my whole life, that's quite a bit of info right there on how to write one.
Women, however, are strange and mysterious beasts to a lot of guys. I've never been a woman before, so I have no idea how to act like one. I've lived and worked with plenty of them, but for the most part the only outward difference I can see between them and males are odd desires and preferences that I don't understand in any meaningful way, or the display of emotions that guys typically are expected not to show.
So already you can see the probably see a problem here. With that knowledge at best I'm going to write an incredibly bland character that's essentially a guy that likes shoes, and at worst I'm going to write a character that acts like Barbie.
I think these issues are only going to decrease when people capable of thoroughly understanding women, i.e other women or particularly gifted men, enter the industry and start taking over from the people who have honestly just been guessing up until now.
its all in the interpretationBloatedGuppy said:
shes obviously very smart...and DOES NOT GIVE UP (in the prequel comic its an important defining trait)
for some reasom I imagine her being a little more serious than gordon freeman
so to me shes a charachter...because I automatically contruct some kind of personality for her
Small point, something that bugs me and both sides of the argument are guilty of:
Sweeping generalizations are bad, and do not earn cookies.
"Women like x" "Men like x" "X is always blah" "X gonna give it to you" etc.
No sweep general, it makes kitteh cry.
Sweeping generalizations are bad, and do not earn cookies.
"Women like x" "Men like x" "X is always blah" "X gonna give it to you" etc.
No sweep general, it makes kitteh cry.
ok, right away I'm going to admit I didn't read all of this, just a couple of pages, but my internet time is severely limited so I had to make do. Bearing that in mind, feel free to ignore me or inform me if what I say here has already been covered.
Now, speaking as a male gamer, who likes RPGs with complex and well-developed characters, well-told and well-structured stories, and at least as much if not more, SINGLE PLAYER gaming, I feel like if you took all of the 'female' points out of this it basically describes exactly how I feel I'm treated by modern devs. I don't want story to be sold up the river purely for the sake of gimmicks, or a solid single-player story to be thrown out the window because it's far more important to get multiplayer, online and offline, or have games which work perfectly well on their own have a poorly-justified, poorly-done multiplayer feature tacked onto the side, though more recently it's been beginning to look the other way around. I don't buy in to the so-called masculine 'power fantasy' mentioned in the first pages, I don't want to be a 'cool awesome soldier running from location to location shooting bastard terrorist rag-heads and saving the free world', nor do I want to be some hulking leviathan with no emotion besides rage facing hordes of enemies who exist for no other reason than for me to tear their squishy bits off.
The reason I find this to be relevant, is because if what you're saying is true and they ARE excluding female gamers on purpose (or at all), then they're also excluding people who want stories, people who want characters, and most of all, people who want to play on their damn own once in a while, which, as nice as it may be to think making us all the 'oppressed masses' is probably just not the case.
What IS the case, I would say, is that, with gaming still being viewed as an immature medium, indulged in only by children or poorly-developed man-children who want to kill things with no depth or complexity, that's an audience it attracts, and consequently the audience that the medium caters for. It's already well-accepted here that there'd be a huge market for games with more depth and complexity, but that's not the largest buying audience, and so that's not who they sell too. If you feel victimised by a medium that you're quite devoted to and have spent quite a lot of time and money on, rest assured you aren't the only one, but don't feel like it's female exclusive, and also don't think it's really intentional (though it may sure as hell feel that way). It's less a case of "we don't want to cater to this market, so let's make lots of games that we know won't appeal to them" and more "this other market is the biggest money-maker, so let's tick all the boxes that fill the absolute minimum qualifications to appeal to that audience and spread it among as many different games as possible."
Anyway, that's my little rant on the subject over
Now, speaking as a male gamer, who likes RPGs with complex and well-developed characters, well-told and well-structured stories, and at least as much if not more, SINGLE PLAYER gaming, I feel like if you took all of the 'female' points out of this it basically describes exactly how I feel I'm treated by modern devs. I don't want story to be sold up the river purely for the sake of gimmicks, or a solid single-player story to be thrown out the window because it's far more important to get multiplayer, online and offline, or have games which work perfectly well on their own have a poorly-justified, poorly-done multiplayer feature tacked onto the side, though more recently it's been beginning to look the other way around. I don't buy in to the so-called masculine 'power fantasy' mentioned in the first pages, I don't want to be a 'cool awesome soldier running from location to location shooting bastard terrorist rag-heads and saving the free world', nor do I want to be some hulking leviathan with no emotion besides rage facing hordes of enemies who exist for no other reason than for me to tear their squishy bits off.
The reason I find this to be relevant, is because if what you're saying is true and they ARE excluding female gamers on purpose (or at all), then they're also excluding people who want stories, people who want characters, and most of all, people who want to play on their damn own once in a while, which, as nice as it may be to think making us all the 'oppressed masses' is probably just not the case.
What IS the case, I would say, is that, with gaming still being viewed as an immature medium, indulged in only by children or poorly-developed man-children who want to kill things with no depth or complexity, that's an audience it attracts, and consequently the audience that the medium caters for. It's already well-accepted here that there'd be a huge market for games with more depth and complexity, but that's not the largest buying audience, and so that's not who they sell too. If you feel victimised by a medium that you're quite devoted to and have spent quite a lot of time and money on, rest assured you aren't the only one, but don't feel like it's female exclusive, and also don't think it's really intentional (though it may sure as hell feel that way). It's less a case of "we don't want to cater to this market, so let's make lots of games that we know won't appeal to them" and more "this other market is the biggest money-maker, so let's tick all the boxes that fill the absolute minimum qualifications to appeal to that audience and spread it among as many different games as possible."
Anyway, that's my little rant on the subject over
Yeah, I don't buy it either. Apparently some people have described Bayonetta as "empowering." I would not be surprised if those same people also describe Cosmopolitan Magazine as "empowering."Vault101 said:
Yeah, people can argue that all they want, but I don't get the impression in the slightest that that game was "made for me" or with a female audience as so much as an afterthought. I haven't played it myself, but it's more of the clownish character art that turns me off from it.Kahunaburger said:
Probably a bit late of a reply - captcha problems.Phasmal said:
But you are a minority, I assure you.
Having a GF that's into "guy video games" is like having a GF that is into car maintenance (a gear head) or is a horror movie buff. Most guys will not have GFs like that.
MMO I suppose are one of those that both genders plays, but that said to some extend I have a feeling they both play for different reasons. Guys play to "win", to you know enjoy the gameplay, a lot of girls on the other hand IMHO play mainly for the social interaction.
Edit:
LOL. Captcha is still broken. /sigh
I would reply here but it would look weird.
Edited-in-reply (Back to the Future, te te te ...):
I never said you are a "unicorn". It just that your numbers are not huge enough to be ... you know ... this is going to sound offensive ... ... "significant". You are an outliner. You and your kind are a small group.Phasmal said:
This is where your "sampling" has gone wrong.
It's like taking a survey about equal rights for African Americans at a KKK meeting.
The point is, if you want to pull in the mainstream lady crowd, you are going to need to do radically different games - things like CoD are not going to go down well with them. Now based off what we see in other mediums like film and books, chances are, games designed for the mainstream lady crowd are going to bored the crap out of the guys.***
*** Now it's possible to make stuff that appeal to both genders, but it's quite a bit harder as you have juggle the wants of two demographies.
I have
For every girl like you, there are 10 that play for the "social interaction". You know, the kind that know just enough about the game to function in a group - not exactly a "game mechanic wizard". These are the ones that play to hang out in guild chat and run instances/raids for the "social experience". Winning, losing, isn't a big deal to them. We just loss WG, OK. We just wiped 5 times in a row in a raid, OK. Gear isn't a big deal to them, gear for them is a means to an end - to enable them joining the guild in raids - rather than the goal.
I totally had captcha problems a few weeks back, it was all `Enter the following:` and then just a white box. It did not think I was hilarious for entering `White Box`.deadish said:
I may be a minority, I'll agree. But I'm not a unicorn. A load of ladies on here have listed the games they like too and its not different to `guy games` much at all. Guys repeatedly telling us we aren't there or are really rare doesn't reaaaally help.
I think you may be stuck in the generalisation hole. I play WoW for the exact same reason as my boyfriend; to kick some ass. I've no idea what just playing WoW for socialisation would be like, but it sounds like it would suck. In fact, I avoid socialisation sometimes in WoW cause I don't wanna deal with `You're a girl?`.. `Yep`. `A real one?` `Yeeeah?` and all that silliness.
EDIT: You can reply above if you want. Its cool.