Extra Credits talks about gender sterotypes in game mechanics.

[SKBPinkie]

Portal isn't an FPS.

You wouldn't say Crash Bandicoot and Gears of War are the same thing just because they're played from a third-person perspective. Same goes for Portal and something like Halo. The Shooter part of First Person Shooter is kinda critical to the genre's name.

It's like the morons who go "point-and-click adventures are just like shooters, you simply point, and click, HURRDURR". No, just - no.

 

[CFriis87]

Wait, so the solution to gender stereotyping in mechanics is more gender stereotyping?

Huh.

I...am completely lost. I can't watch the video again right now, what are you talking about?

How they say that gender stereotyping is an issue (which it is), then go on to imply that to make a game's mechanics appeal to the opposite gender they must either make it more non-violent (Portal, Kingdom Hearts) or more violent (Puzzle Quest, James' Zombie idea).

I think that the thing that they were talking about was that we shouldn't be limited. That we shouldn't say "First Person shooters are only for guys and they all need to be violent" and "puzzles are only for women and need to be nice." Kingdom Hearts and Portal managed to appeal to both genders because it mixed and matched ideas and didn't stick to the stereotypes of one genre. I think the point of the episode was that we shouldn't stick to one extreme or the other and try and explore the in-between areas.

Also there's a lot of fighting in Kingdom Hearts.

EDIT: Well there's first person shooting in Portal. There really isn't platforming in Dear Esther

So... Gender stereotyping of themes in games is okay and should be used to eliminate gender stereotyping of genres in games because that's bad?
Just another half-baked, somewhat self-contradictory idea from the Identity Politics Taskforce.

 

[CFriis87]

This channel is so annoying, but I can't put my finger on why.

Identity Politics...
You're welcome.

 

[webkilla]

-Huge Wall 'o' text-

Spot on.
People are making a fuss for nothing. Video Gaming started as a male hobby and it shows in the genres that became popular. In the past few years more women started to play and it is going through the same developments. If people would just let it run its course then we'll probably see a good "female" line-up of games next to the "Male" and all stuff in between.

agreed - both with Therumancer and and Exos.

"Extra Credits is right in a general sense, but only in that the big budget gaming industry tends to stick almost exclusively with what it knows works, causing stagnation, something which has been being complained about for years. Trying to tie gender issues to it seems pretty much ridiculous... as well as the whole basic point of this video with all the complaints about how there were no games being developed FOR women, now that it's obvious that there have been, and for a very long time, having these girl games is suddenly wrong?"

This is so spot on. Its NOT a question of not wanting to make games for women, its a question of money.

Big publishers only want to fund safe bets, so games that are sure to sell get funded.


I have been saying - ever since Sarkeesian's kickstarter - that what these feminist gaming advocates need is NOT to change the rest of the industry, but what they need is their own minecraft.

They need to make a game that sells like hot shit to women, to prove to the bigger developers that women is a viable audience to sell to.

What are revolution60's sales figures again? Gone Home's sales figures? Depression Quest? (oh wait, that was given away for free)


The idea that FPS mechanics are somehow inherently only for male gamers... its the good old causation vs correlation fallacy.

Sure, a lot of first person view games might be made and sold primarily to a male demographic - but EC themselves say that Portal 1 and 2 were popular with women, and they're with a first person view. Gone Home uses a first person view.

And with that, the argument that first person games are inherently masculine falls to pieces.

Come on EC, I know you can do better. Stop with the identity/gender-politic bullshit. Their whole video is riddled with assumptions that have no citations or proof, beyond them simply being the opinion of the EC crew. If they have their heads so far up their own asses that they believe this stuff, then I fear for their ability to function in the game industry as a whole.

 

[Allum_Bokhari]

Their broad points are hard to argue with. Take the mechanics of FPS and stick female-friendly themes like puzzles on top of it, or take the mechanics of puzzle games and add male-friendly themes like adventure and violence onto it. Yay, more thinking outside the box. Yay, more creative new titles.

Where they (somewhat predictably) fall down is explaining how the themes themselves came to appeal to different genders. They acknowledge that FPS mechanics appeal to more women when you replace violence with puzzles (Portal 2), but give a pretty lackluster explanation of why this might be the case. All they have to offer is around a minute of tired old pre-Pinkerian assumptions about the effects of society, culture, etc, with no consideration granted to the newer research.

Of course they could have quite easily made the case for innovative, Portal-style usage of game mechanics without bringing gender into it. But seeing as they did, it would have been nice to see them demonstrate knowledge about where the current debate on group gender preferences actually stands, as opposed to where it stood in, say, 1976.

 

[Silvanus]

Portal isn't an FPS.

You wouldn't say Crash Bandicoot and Gears of War are the same thing just because they're played from a third-person perspective. Same goes for Portal and something like Halo.

Saying something shares a mechanic or genre with something else isn't saying they're "the same thing"; it just means they share that one characteristic.

So, Crash Bandicoot is a third-person, 2D platformer, while Gears of War is a third-person shooter. Portal is a puzzle-solving FPS, while Half Life is an FPS centring on combat (though the latter kind is so much more common, we usually don't need to specify that an FPS centres on combat. It would only be relevant when comparing it with one that doesn't).

 

[l0lwut]

I can never bring myself to watch an entire episode of EC in one sitting. They're either going on and stating extremely obvious things like they've just invented the most brilliant thing ever, or they're banging on pretentiously about their own pet theories that don't hold any water whatsoever. That James guy in particular seems like a pretentious and self-important bag of douche. From the first part of this episode this seems like another one of his idiological rant about gender politics in gaming. Heard enough BS about that for the coming months.

Also, what's up with the helium-like voice? It is extremely annoying and makes me want to hurl my speakers out of the window.

 

[Lightknight]

I have the most horrible feeling that things are gonna explode because the word "gender" is in this thread title. Please everyone, prove me wrong.

So, extra credits talked about how there's stereotypes in mechanics in gaming. Like "Only boys play first person shooters" or "Only girls play puzzle games" and while they does talk about how ultra violent war games will most likely sell better to a male audience, there's a stereotype that all first person shooters have to BE ultra violent war shooters, and how that's hurting the genre and preventing us from experimenting with other types of FPSs to get games like Portal, and how the idea that hidden object games are only for women prevents the implementing of ideas like the pretty kickass zombie apocalypse survival idea they have at the end of the video.


The main strength of the video is that it talks about stereotypes of both genders and while there's nothing wrong with being comfortable inside a stereotype, there's harm in letting those stereotypes dominate our viewpoint. Overall, I think it's a very thoughtful episode, and completely worth a watch.

While it is great to see other types of games, in order for their argument to be relevant they'd have to show the FPS market as doing poorly or waning. It doesn't really seem to be the case. Those games are selling more than nearly all game of the year titles for example. They would also have to show a large enough latent demand for those sort of games which doesn't really seem to be present.

The problem with the whole thing is the assumption that all stereotypes are false. In all honesty, a good stereotype is one that actually applies to a group in aggregate and is only false (and frequently ethically bad) if you assume it of individuals.

Men are indeed naturally more aggressive than women. Men also show a higher level of enjoyment for the fast paced violent games whereas women prefer RPGs and more social titles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Differences_between_the_genders

Paper after paper backs this up. Here's a decent article full of appropriate citations: http://radford.edu/~mzorrilla2/thesis/differencesinplay.html

If you're developing an FPS then your audience is mostly male. This is true in movies too. A violent movie is going to be watched far more by men. Genders express a difference in preference of Genre in nearly every industry and pretending like there isn't a difference is just being ignorant or blinded to the truth. It's sad to see people keep trying to cram us all into the same mundane box when we would be far better suited to recognize and even celebrate our differences since those differences are what have made us fit for survival.

You've got to think of it this way. Even back in 2010 when the ESA put females and males at 40/60% gamers. Nintendo released a study that showed that 80% of female console gamers owned a Wii as their primary console. That took 80% of females out of the console market for the vast majority of AAA titles that were only released on other games. I've done the full math on that several times here but that meant that less than 20% of women (console gaming women specifically) were even eligible to play those AAA titles when compared to men who had a much more even spread over consoles. Women on average even show less enjoyment of three dimensional games than men that require high levels of spatial reasoning (like, FPS games). Thankfully gaming improves spatial reasoning but I don't know how much (do they eventually match males in spatial reasoning? I don't know. The numbers just show that males have the advantage by a fair margin on average). But there's

Now that the ESA has added iOS titles to the mix the ratio could be even lower thanks to the Wii being discontinued and the WiiU being a failure (commercially).

So you are a developer about to invest tens of millions into an FPS title. Who is your audience? I'll give you a pretty big hint:

http://www.flurry.com/sites/default/files/blog-images/GameType_byAge_andGender-resized-600_0.png

This is even just generic genre. COD isn't like Team Fortress 2. So if sub-genres were broken down even further we could even see different numbers there to further illustrate who your audience is if you're making X type of game.

If anything, they are correct in encouraging us to challenge the stereotypes and make sure that they are actually representative of the aggregate. We do know that violent games are truly far more for males than females. We've tested and verified that.

But notice, none of the categories are 0% female. They're just mostly female. However, that's what studios and publishers are saying when they say that Shooters are for men. The ratio is so heavily stilted towards males that from their perspective that's what matters. They're not wrong. I would hardly consider a game like Portal to be a FPS though.

 

[scotth266]

When the episode itself acknowledges that there are a ton of games that break these supposed "gendered mechanics" stereotypes, why exactly did we need an episode talking about them? Isn't the mere existence of so many examples enough to point out that most developers don't buy into the idea of "gendered mechanics"?

And that whole Portal example is just... yeesh. "Women loved Portal because it was an FPS without violent conflict" is probably one of the cringiest stereotypes I've ever run across, and it runs really close to that "violence is masculine, peaceful resolution is feminine" thought-line that only makes sense if you're the sort of person that loves talking about patriarchy theory.

EDIT: Also Portal hardly lacks violent conflict, considering that you spend the game trying really fucking hard not to get murdered only to "kill" your adversary towards the end of the game.

 

[Jake Martinez]

Wait, so the solution to gender stereotyping in mechanics is more gender stereotyping?

Huh.

I...am completely lost. I can't watch the video again right now, what are you talking about?

How they say that gender stereotyping is an issue (which it is), then go on to imply that to make a game's mechanics appeal to the opposite gender they must either make it more non-violent (Portal, Kingdom Hearts) or more violent (Puzzle Quest, James' Zombie idea).

EDIT: Oh, and calling Portal a first person shooter in the vain of CoD is like calling Dear Esther a platformer.

Your cognitive dissonance is 100% spot on. They are using reductionist logic to try and construct their argument. They are pulling the equivalent of, "In order to get more women to visit action movies, we should make them more like romantic comedies."

Which of course, is ludicrous because you don't go to an action movie to see a romantic comedy.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that these people are genre aware. After all, they've been doing this for how long now? They even correctly identify the different genres that are in play. All you need to do in order to invalidate their argument is to look around at how other established media and consumers treat genres to see they are sort of full of it.

I'll be as polite as I can about this, but I think these guys are hacks.

IF you want to look at someone who has put actual scholarship into this idea, examine the work of someone like Raph Koster. He's actually done the hard yards of looking at how games are designed and if we introduce gender biases into them that way. This is actually an interesting topic because of two very important reasons - It admits a fundamental truth (men and women do not engage in all problem solving or game playing activities in the same way) and tries to address that issue by looking at innovative ways to design games that can appeal to both genders.

I think on some level this is what these EC guys are trying to say. The problem is, they don't actually know enough about the subject in order to do anything other than make crude analogies. Trying to genre swap or genre mix games isn't going to necessarily be successful (unless of course, you manage to hit on creating a new genre - in which case, fucking kudos to you). Instead what you want to look at is out of all the potential players for a specific genre, like say, FPS's, have we designed the game in a way that isn't inherently exclusive in experience to one gender or another.

This doesn't even have to relate to the narrative of the game, at this point we're talking about strict ludology, or game play mechanics.

I find that particular topic endlessly fascinating and I actually respect the work that Raph and other people have done on this. The only caveat I have about this is that if you look at the ludology of the game as part of the narrative, then if they hit upon magic ludology conventions that they can statistically prove appeal to both genders in a financial sense, we're going to see what we always see in that case, which is companies consolidating their offerings to adhere to a strict formula.

So yes, while it's a fascinating subject, and yes people do stand to make money from it, it doesn't actually guarantee that we'll have good games, or at least any more variety than we normally would have. In fact, it might actually disincentiveize the desire of companies to innovate past a certain sales/market share threshold.

 

[DynastyStar]

Extra Credits rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence, They never source their statistics, and in ALOT of cases, the things that they say is flatout wrong.

 

[Areloch]

When EC talks purely about design stuff, it's a pretty good show.

When they start veering into socio-political stuff surrounding games, I feel that the quality takes a nosedive. Due to the formatting of the show, and keeping the episodes short in length, they can't provide any actual sourcing for things they say with data to back it up.

So it rapidly descends into them basically saying "Do it like this to fix society's ails!" while anyone that actually looks at the subject realizes rather quickly it's far from being as simple as that. Their Gaming As Education mini series wasn't too bad about it because they could spend a lot longer covering the topic and ideas across multiple episodes.

But self-contained episodes like this don't have time for any intricacies or nuance and the entire point they may have had suffers for it.

 

[l0lwut]

Extra Credits rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence, They never source their statistics, and in ALOT of cases, the things that they say is flatout wrong.

It's all they have because they are just an idiological soap box spouting propaganda unsupported by any actual evidence. I'm glad they are not on the Escapist anymore.

 

[hentropy]

Trying to compare match-3 mobile puzzle games with FPS is like trying to talk about Lawrence of Arabia and CSI: Miami in the same article, trying to say anything meaningful about it is difficult because just how different they are, they exist on two different mediums and these days tend to be enjoyed by different people altogether. I don't mean to turn this into "casual v. core" but they are different segments, no matter what their personal attributes. There are men and women who played Mario, Sonic, Pokemon, etc. in the 90s and when they grew up a lot of them still choose to play games.

It's no doubt that over the last 15 or so years games have gone from being colorful, not culturally specific, and largely unconcerned with masculinity or femininity to much more gendered themes. In my experience women tend to gravitate to games not too unlike those they played in their youth, colorful Japanese games of a variety of genres, due to how many brown/grey/gritty games there ended up being. This doesn't mean women didn't like these game's mechanics, but rather the themes. This led to a general resentment of the AAA industry and a boom in indies, which in turn caused some of the... problems we face today.

In my personal experience (again, not really a scientific study, but experiences seem to be all anyone has on this issue), women don't really favor certain game genres over others, certain game genres are just more likely to have a certain theme.

 

[marioandsonic]

I have been saying - ever since Sarkeesian's kickstarter - that what these feminist gaming advocates need is NOT to change the rest of the industry, but what they need is their own minecraft.

They need to make a game that sells like hot shit to women, to prove to the bigger developers that women is a viable audience to sell to.

This even happened back in the early arcade days.

Back in the late 70s, most of the games were about shooting things (Asteroids, Space Invaders, etc.), and a young Namco employee named Tōru Iwatani noticed that very few women were playing these games. He wanted to create a game that would be more appealing to women, as well as all other demographics.

Some time later, he and his team created Pac-Man, and the rest is history.

So it can be done.

 

[BarryMcCociner]

I'll admit I laughed pretty hard when Daniel called Portal a First Person Shooter.

You know, just because it's in first person and you have a gun doesn't make it a first person shooter. Portal is a puzzle game, ask literally anyone. The game isn't about shooting, it's about figuring out a puzzle. And even then, there are still games in first person with guns and with shooting that aren't first person shooters. For instance, I wouldn't call Dishonoured an FPS, that's a stealth game through and through, I wouldn't call the recent Fallout games FPS's either, they're RPG's through and through. The focus is on questing and exploration, plus the gunplay is pretty sub-par. Much more fun to go full "Mr. Brofist McStrongpunch".

Just because you employ certain mechanics from another genre, doesn't mean you're a part of that genre. For instance unlocking abilities is a staple of pretty much every RPG, yet that's also a staple of spectacle fighters, this does not make spectacle fighters RPG's and visa versa.

I'd like to wonder whether Daniel's putting the cart before the horse, do people like these themes because of 'societal ideas' or does culture adapt to the way both genders like their theming. I mean, when you look at something as simple as say what profession choose, you notice a disparity between say nursing and engineering. You find men going into engineering and women going into nursing.

Is this culture? Or is this hormones? Men and women both have certain levels of estrogen and testosterone, and when you look at men who do go into nursing, they have an above average estrogen level, when you look at women who go into engineering they do display a higher than average amount of testosterone. I'm not saying that this would be the ONLY factor, but it's definitely a contributing one.


Source on my claim since I don't expect you to take it on faith: https://vimeo.com/19707588
Don't worry, it's subtitled.

Aside from its title "Hjernevask" The Norwegian word for brainwash, which I feel is a bit too sensationalist it's a good documentary. It snubs a lot of the misconceptions a lot of people have about culture being the deciding factor in gendered behaviour.


Anyway, when you look at statistics you see that there are certain mechanics men and women do have a preference for in spite of theming, for instance women have a tendency to enjoy 'god games' - games where you build something (a house/a civilization/an economy) games that are a bit slower but more though-based - and men have a greater tendency to enjoy more action oriented games that require memories of button combos and high reaction times.


And just in case somebody tries to accuse me of this - No, I'm not trying to tell you what games you should and shouldn't like. Statistics mean very little to the individual, it's possible for a smoker to live to be 100, it's possible for a cross country sprinter to drop dead at 20. Stats only apply to a large group.

 

[BytByte]

See, that's the problem, there's no such thing as a shooter that doesn't revolve around combat of some kind, since that's part of what a shooter is. That's like calling a game a platformer when it doesn't focus on platforming or a puzzle game that doesn't have many puzzles. Just because the 'gun' in portal gun is just a name, just like a paint gun. The game could have replaced it with psychic mind powers and this argument wouldn't exist in the first place. The only thing a FPS needs is ranged combat of some sort set in the first person perspective, Portal only achieves the latter. Just look at Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. It's based on Half Life's engine and used the first person perspective but because the main focus is on melee combat and ranged combat only makes up a small portion of the game mechanics in the form of archers it's considered an action game rather than an FPS.

Can you at least see how strict genre classification is silly. I and the person you quoted both disagree with you on Portal being a FPS. I think you shoot the portals in first person, shooting something in first person is an FPS for me. This is your need to have organization and classification to make sense of things. But things like genres are more fluid and they can't be exact with a term, especially one as nebulous as FPS that focuses on a perspective rather than what you actually do in the game. You are not right that Portal is not an FPS, you are not wrong either, it is a matter of opinion on what game is a part of what genres. I have seen in other threads that you are very cut and dry with things, but I'm sorry to say that's not how many things work, and you'll just get frustrated trying to make things work like that.

 

[BarryMcCociner]

See, that's the problem, there's no such thing as a shooter that doesn't revolve around combat of some kind, since that's part of what a shooter is. That's like calling a game a platformer when it doesn't focus on platforming or a puzzle game that doesn't have many puzzles. Just because the 'gun' in portal gun is just a name, just like a paint gun. The game could have replaced it with psychic mind powers and this argument wouldn't exist in the first place. The only thing a FPS needs is ranged combat of some sort set in the first person perspective, Portal only achieves the latter. Just look at Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. It's based on Half Life's engine and used the first person perspective but because the main focus is on melee combat and ranged combat only makes up a small portion of the game mechanics in the form of archers it's considered an action game rather than an FPS.

Can you at least see how strict genre classification is silly. I and the person you quoted both disagree with you on Portal being a FPS. I think you shoot the portals in first person, shooting something in first person is an FPS for me. This is your need to have organization and classification to make sense of things. But things like genres are more fluid and they can't be exact with a term, especially one as nebulous as FPS that focuses on a perspective rather than what you actually do in the game. You are not right that Portal is not an FPS, you are not wrong either, it is a matter of opinion on what game is a part of what genres. I have seen in other threads that you are very cut and dry with things, but I'm sorry to say that's not how many things work, and you'll just get frustrated trying to make things work like that.

Just gonna weigh in to a conversation I care very little about here, but in my opinion having strict genre classification is good. Mainly because the more restrictions you place on an art form, the more likely it is that an artist will want to rebuff those restrictions.

For instance, I listen to an absolute metric fuck tonne of death metal. However, here comes this Swedish death metal band calling themselves Amon Amarth. They have a couple little gimmicks, first their lyrics are about vikings and their mythology, cool. The second gimmick? They play death metal in a melodic key. Pretty rare for death metal to do, but it's fucking awesome to listen to.