Editorial: Omitting Women From Games Because "It's Too Hard" is Unacceptable

[beastro]

They should have had balls and said they simply didn't want to do it.

I find it amazing the amount of demand from people wanting to tell others how to make their games. It really seems to be something unique to games as an art form and would be amusing to see aimed towards painters or songwriters.

 

[Voulan]

This is different. It's less "it's just the way things are, shut up and deal with it" and more "it's business, getting up in arms over it won't do anything if sales aren't affected."

I'm basing that accusation more on someone literally saying that phrase within the first couple of posts. I feel like that's only encouraging the idea that we should never criticise or debate changes.

Still, I'm not a fan of the "it's just business" argument either. I don't want to go down the road of believing there's some sort of conspiracy agenda behind the decision, but certainly I would like to condemn the idea that the gaming industry should never do anything outside the ordinary simply to save money. After all, most of the budget blowout goes towards useless and widely condemned CGI trailers and bigger-than-necessary marketing campaigns. Especially when the change being asked for is as profoundly absurd as asking to include the other 50% of the population.

Anyway, that's just my point of view. I'm hoping that joining in on these discussions might change the opinion that things stay the way they are because not enough people demand it. I really hope things change, since we're starting to stagnate the games being churned out yearly.

 

[trollnystan]

SNIPPED
If your fave indie game only has a male or female character, perhaps you now understand a little better why this is the case. I suspect my friends over at Rockstar North are breathing a sigh of relief that no one ever fired this complaint across the bows of their GTA titles... imagine how much fun it would be to have a female sociopathic bad-ass and the dialogue that could go with it... The buggers can afford to do it, too!

Missed opportunities everywhere.

Your post had a lot of other good points, I'd just like to point out that at least me and my friends were a bit miffed that GTA V had THREE protagonists and all of them male. They had an opportunity to slot a female protagonist in with two male ones all sly like and they didn't take it.

Miffed I tell you. VERY miffed.

OT: as far as Ubi goes... I'm disappoint son. I get that it probably costs money and time, but they managed to put female characters in the multiplayer in previous games did they not? What was different this time?

But what do I know about making games?

 

[IndieForever]

They should have had balls and said they simply didn't want to do it.

I find it amazing the amount of demand from people wanting to tell others how to make their games. It really seems to be something unique to games as an art form and would be amusing to see aimed towards painters or songwriters.

I agree with your first sentence. Having been involved with decision-making at the start of a project I can pretty much confirm that this is simply how it is, and not an Illuminati conspiracy to beat women into the submission they deserve through the cunning manipulation of video game media.

Your second paragraph is something that is probably worth its own thread as there is a huge amount of discussion to be had on it. Although all 'art' is essentially interactive, gaming is unique in that it can change on the fly. An oil painting cannot reconfigure the characters' genders based on the preferences of someone viewing it. I suppose a band or songwriter could release two versions of a song about love lost, one containing the word 'boy' and the other 'girl'; I know that's a bit flippant, but you get the point. Once you're committed in what I would term as traditional art - painting, sculpture, song, poetry etc, etc., that's it, it's done, no going back.

We have the unique ability in gaming to alter the viewpoint based on the preferences of the person playing the game. Let's take advantage of that.

 

[bdcjacko]

Bayonetta and Tomb Raider prove it is nearly impossible to make games with women in them.

 

[Something Amyss]

They should have had balls and said they simply didn't want to do it.

I find it amazing the amount of demand from people wanting to tell others how to make their games. It really seems to be something unique to games as an art form and would be amusing to see aimed towards painters or songwriters.

Unless you count movies, TV, comics, books, and so on. Hell, using your painting comparison, painters who make commercial paintings are still beholden to the base. Not to mention even the greats had patrons they had to please. Songwriters and musicians get it on all levels.

In fact, it's this defense of artistry that seems unique to the genre.

I think it's naive to think this came from anything other than design by committee. Hell, what's with the annual release schedule? Do you think this comes from a place of artistry?

 

[Something Amyss]

Bayonetta and Tomb Raider prove it is nearly impossible to make games with women in them.

Well, Bayonetta 2 ONLY got made because of an exclusivity deal....

 

[infinity_turtles]

People are still bitching about this? This seriously seems like people misunderstood something, latched onto it, and then when explained what the real deal was, they stubbornly refused to let go because they're more concerned with their issue then whether there's an actual problem in this instance.

The game has one protagonist. Multi-player has everyone being the same character. There is only one character to play as. One! It's a set protagonist. Are games not allowed to have a male set protagonist? They are? Then stop trying to run the game's reputation into the ground as an excuse to parrot an issue you care about. It makes your issue and the people who care about it look like a whiny cancer that will spread to anything it can find ANY excuse to latch onto.

If there were four, unrelated main characters like people thought there were at the beginning, the lack of diversity would definitely be odd and I could see why people would take issue. This though? This is people whining because one big budget game on a tight release schedule isn't exactly the game they want it to be.

 

[RA92]

Moving the goal post? Whaaaaaaaat? You'll have to explain your reasoning there. So since the study wouldn't perfect (what social study is?), I'm moving goalposts? And therefore we should just accept the way that you say it is? I'm not sure what you're saying.

Your initial position was that it's a 'fact' that gamers don't buy games with female protagonists (and thus claiming the original argument you quoted being supposedly undermined). When I brought up the relative lack of such female-led games, suddenly your factual numbers need multiple constraints to be viable that lowers its claims to being absolute fact.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

No, it is not a valid point, I might even go so far as to call it anti-intellectualism.

You might go so far as to call it anti-intellectualism, but you'd be wrong. Additionally, you've made like, three ad hominem arguments in two postings, so I don't think you are any authority on good argument. I might go so far as to call your position entitlement, but I'd also be wrong, so I won't.

But I see what you're saying. Nobody is saying that you don't have the right to express your opinion. However, you're sort of saying that I shouldn't express my opinion, which is that the onus is on the consumer to enjoy media for him or her self. If you only like games in which you can play a character who looks like you, then only buy those games. If there aren't enough, then you will either have to expand your horizons, create your own, or find a new hobby. That's just how it is.

Further, we go through this dance all the time because people keep bringing it up, and sites like the escapist keep giving it space because they know that it will have people like you and me talking and clicking on their pages.

That doesn't necessarily mean that there are significant numbers of people who base buying decisions on the gender of the main character. That is, except, if you believe the research, gamers tend to buy more when there are male protagonists. That's a fact that seems to completely undermine your position.

Three Ad Hominems? Please point them out for me. If you do I will apologize for them. Just for the record this is what I consider an Ad Hominem to be. Person A makes claim X. Person B makes an attack on person A. Therefore A's claim is false. They need to meet these conditions for me to consider them Ad Hominems.

The "it's my opinion" defense only protects you from so much. For example, if I can point out logical flaws in your "opinion" then I'm not going to buy that defense. And my argument was never about the right to express opinions, it was about how you were throwing massive blanket statements to dismiss arguments without actually addressing them. With logical fallacies at that.

Pardon me, but it was going on in the gaming forum long before it happened here, and people cared about it then too, so I don't buy your argument that it's all artificial clickbait. And even then, people still clearly care about it, a comment section addressing it and giving them a space to allow their voice to be heard does not change that.

One problem with that though. There is evidence that the reason that games with female main characters don't sell as well as ones with male main characters is because they don't get nearly as much funding or advertising.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/games-with-female-heroes-dont-sell-because-publishers-dont-support-them

Remember Me, do you recall seeing that much advertising for it? I certainly don't. It's a self fulling prophecy. Publishers believe games with female main characters won't sell, so they don't advertise them, therefore they don't sell. It's the same thing that happened to horror games. It doesn't help that games with female characters tend to have lousy design or be shaky experiments, see Assassin's Creed Liberation. Also, like I said, the money aspect should not be the deciding factor in the creative department of gaming. That's what causes things like COD's out of control sequels and the death of creativity.

If we're going to talk about the market for games with a female lead, we need a competently designed game with a female lead that the devs actually cared about and was not the victim of corporate pandering.

Spoiler

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/41/Transistor_art.jpg

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

There was an interesting post on Reddit about this that TotalBiscuit Tweeted about recently: http://www.reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/27ut97/distinct_lack_of_female_characters_due_to/ci5z8i7

[mega-text snipped]

Creating female playable characters is a lot of work, and when you're on a very tight schedule you have to consider what to prioritise. When only a small segment of your target audience is going to care about not being able to play as a female character, it makes more sense to focus on something else.

INB4 "muh 45%". That falls under the latter category of "lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Okay. That still doesn't answer the question of why they aren't generally part of the initial plan. I can understand that going back and adding-in female characters takes effort just as going back and adding ANY character will take effort. Part of the outrage is that the women aren't there in the first place. It's like when a company apologizes for some gross misstep they took, and the general response is "Yeah that's nice, but why did you think that was an okay thing to do in the first place?"

In short, this isn't about adding new characters that would take extra effort, it's about the base characters generally always being male in the first place that adding new characters to include females is suddenly "extra effort".

Or, in shorter-short: Women shouldn't be a "feature".

 

[RA92]

Moving the goal post? Whaaaaaaaat? You'll have to explain your reasoning there. So since the study wouldn't perfect (what social study is?), I'm moving goalposts? And therefore we should just accept the way that you say it is? I'm not sure what you're saying.

Your initial position was that it's a 'fact' that gamers don't buy games with female protagonists (and thus claiming the original argument you quoted being supposedly undermined). When I brought up the relative lack of such female-led games, suddenly your factual numbers need multiple constraints to be viable that lowers its claims to being absolute fact.

That was my quote. You're right. I guess I was a little loose with the word fact, but that is my understanding of the situation is that female protagonists supposedly decrease sales. It's from the talk about Remember Me, Tomb Raider, and the cover of Bioshock Infinite from last year.

Tomb Raider 2013 sold well (over 4 million copies), and its Definitive Edition actually outsold FIFA 14 in the UK. It's been profitable enough to warrant <url=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/trailers/9348-Rise-of-the-Tomb-Raider-E3-Trailer>a sequel. The only reason Square Enix was grouchy about the initial sales was that they were hemorrhaging money on the Eastern front (especially through FF XIV), and were banking on their Western titles (Tomb Raider 2013, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, etc) to drag them out, which was unreasonable.

Remember Me didn't sell well because it was a mediocre game with average scores.

If you go back to the discussion over the Bioshock cover, you'll see that plenty of people criticized its generic cover, which is why Ken LEvine tried to defend his decision in the first place. Another example is the cover issues with The Last of Us, which was pure corporate boneheadedness. They still put Ellie on the cover, and I haven't heard of it tanking TLoU's sales.

 

[IndieForever]

That was my quote. You're right. I guess I was a little loose with the word fact, but that is my understanding of the situation is that female protagonists supposedly decrease sales. It's from the talk about Remember Me, Tomb Raider, and the cover of Bioshock Infinite from last year.

Our market studies would agree with you on that. Generally, having a sole female playable character would appear to have a negative knock-on effect to sales. Conversely in the right-here-and-now, adding a female lead to a game is either a break-even scenario for smaller studios or even a slight loss. I am not for a minute suggesting that this is a desirable state of affairs, but that's how the accountants see it. For the larger studios this shouldn't even be a discussion - take the small hit and build up a loyal base of fans who appreciate your inclusivity. You won't see the results this year, or maybe even next year, but build it up.

That is my purely commercial argument for inclusiveness, and not based on any socio-political view. The social argument is perhaps the stronger one but that one does seem to get hijacked for the sake of a good sound-bite or quote in the media these days.

What saddens me is that there are some great games out there that would have benefited from giving the player the option to have a female lead. There are so many fascinating inter-personal things that happen which would translate well to gaming, but it comes at a cost.

For example, next time you're at a bar, pub or club, restaurant, whatever, watch the interactions. Men walk differently when they perceive they're being judged by other men, their body language changes when they talk to women, or male friends. Women do exactly the same thing which is why we always have the appropriate other actor on the mo-cap stage when we run a capture sequence. Unconsciously, behaviour and motion change. When you get it right in a game, it 'clicks' with the player as being correct. When it's wrong, it jars, and breaks the immersion. This is expensive to do. The dialogue could be so much more interesting if it wasn't the same old stereotypes talking to the same old stereotypes.

At the end of the day, though, we want you to enjoy your experience. If you do, you'll buy more of our stuff, so we can make more stuff you like. Pretty simple, huh?!

If you feel uncomfortable playing generic-white-30s-male-hero you won't, which is why we should give you as many options *as we realistically can*. We can't cover all of the bases out there. Sorry. But we can give you a lead character who is male or female, of any skin colour, with identical dialogue and of any sexual orientation you like to imagine. We might not be able to script the world around your own unique preferences, but we can get a good way there. Use your imagination to get the last 5%.

In our profession we make things that are not real. There may never have been a female Apollo astronaut, but that doesn't mean we couldn't give you the opportunity to play one if we made 'Call of Duty - Moon Landing'. And we should.

Just remember that, despite what you may think of Ubi, it does cost a lot of money and that is an issue.

Rock. Hard Place.

 

[rbstewart7263]

But? you DONT get to pick your character in assassins creed. your just arno thats it? the other guys there arno too. No one would get to play as this female character anyway?

Why is everyone willingly ignoring this fact?

 

[beastro]

They should have had balls and said they simply didn't want to do it.

I find it amazing the amount of demand from people wanting to tell others how to make their games. It really seems to be something unique to games as an art form and would be amusing to see aimed towards painters or songwriters.

Unless you count movies, TV, comics, books, and so on. Hell, using your painting comparison, painters who make commercial paintings are still beholden to the base. Not to mention even the greats had patrons they had to please. Songwriters and musicians get it on all levels.

In fact, it's this defense of artistry that seems unique to the genre.

I think it's naive to think this came from anything other than design by committee. Hell, what's with the annual release schedule? Do you think this comes from a place of artistry?

Oh no not at all.

I just find it amusing that as a product people are whining about it and as a work of art they're doing the same.

It's even more amusing to think of modern consumers as on the level of patrons to artists.

I guess what ti comes down to me is people trying to tell product makers what to do instead of buying the products they want, not buying those they don't like and not looking for things to be outraged at.

 

[Erttheking]

But? you DONT get to pick your character in assassins creed. your just arno thats it? the other guys there arno too. No one would get to play as this female character anyway?

Why is everyone willingly ignoring this fact?

I've said it before and I'll say it again. This does not make me view Ubisoft in a better light. This makes me think even lower of them. They're so lazy they can't even develop four unique characters, they're just developing the one. Lazy. Lazy. Lazy.

Also their reasoning for why they couldn't make a female character was asinine and further solidified my opinion that they were lazy.

 

[Redd the Sock]

While at face value the statement is stupid, "it'll cost too much" is usually short hand for "it won't bring in what it'll take to produce" which is the larger issue.

I keep going back to Remember Me. The whole process: endless complaints about lack of female leads, game comes out with female lead and makes big point about that and how they have to fight to get it out, game doesn't' sell, people wanting female leads make excuses. No I don't want to hear them again, I just want to point out that this sends a message that can be read: that all the gender politics online is just the internet being the internet, and listening to the complaints won't generate new sales, and not listening won't cost us sales. No, they won't do it because it's the right thing to do. they'll do it when it'll either cost them money to not, or make them money to do so.

Look, I get it. Interchangeable male for female characters was done on NES games, and even an Atari 2600 one (ghost manor) so I get the excuse is lame. But as a fiance guy, I can' fault a company for focusing on the features they think will make or break their sales, and in 2 years of gender topics, I've yet to see much in the way of making a game with a female lead a surprise hit (Tomb Raider is an established franchise), nor a noted boycott of a game that produced a surprise failure. We did what Ubisoft expects we'll do again, ignore the game that does what we say we want (remember me) while buy the game we're mad didn't (GTA V)because reasons.

I mean, hell, if 60$ was too much for you t spend on a game that was less than perfect, why else should you expect a company to be any less tight with their own purse?

 

[Erttheking]

While at face value the statement is stupid, "it'll cost too much" is usually short hand for "it won't bring in what it'll take to produce" which is the larger issue.

I keep going back to Remember Me. The whole process: endless complaints about lack of female leads, game comes out with female lead and makes big point about that and how they have to fight to get it out, game doesn't' sell, people wanting female leads make excuses. No I don't want to hear them again, I just want to point out that this sends a message that can be read: that all the gender politics online is just the internet being the internet, and listening to the complaints won't generate new sales, and not listening won't cost us sales. No, they won't do it because it's the right thing to do. they'll do it when it'll either cost them money to not, or make them money to do so.

Look, I get it. Interchangeable male for female characters was done on NES games, and even an Atari 2600 one (ghost manor) so I get the excuse is lame. But as a fiance guy, I can' fault a company for focusing on the features they think will make or break their sales, and in 2 years of gender topics, I've yet to see much in the way of making a game with a female lead a surprise hit (Tomb Raider is an established franchise), nor a noted boycott of a game that produced a surprise failure. We did what Ubisoft expects we'll do again, ignore the game that does what we say we want (remember me) while buy the game we're mad didn't (GTA V)because reasons.

I mean, hell, if 60$ was too much for you t spend on a game that was less than perfect, why else should you expect a company to be any less tight with their own purse?

Most likely it was less of a case of people note spending full retail on a game that was less than perfect and more people not spending full retail on a game that they didn't know existed. The advertising on Remember Me was appealing, I'm not even sure if it existed. Publishers don't think games with female leads won't sell...so they don't give them funding...so they don't sell. In the end, publishers fuck up absolutely everything in gaming and I look forward to the day we can be rid of them.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/games-with-female-heroes-dont-sell-because-publishers-dont-support-them

Also Transistor.