Gaming?s Awkward Adolescence.
Since its birth in the early 1970?s, gaming has aged slowly. It may be nearly 36 years since Pong first appeared in arcades, but gaming is still fresh-faced and starry eyed, downy peach fuzz dappling its chin as it takes its first faltering step towards maturity. In short, gaming has finally hit puberty.
Don?t believe me? Well, let?s look at some of the evidence.
First and foremost, gaming has had a growth spurt; sales in the US alone have tripled between 1996 and 2007 and are now worth nearly $10 billion. (Source: www.theesa.com). Clearly gaming is a serious business now and much of this growth can be attributed to Sony?s entry into the race.
Back in the Golden Age of 16-Bit Gaming, Nintendo and Sega battled each other for dominance of the console market. The Super Nintendo and the Mega Drive/Genesis were arguably both companies? most successful systems, but a quick look through YouTube shows that most of their marketing was aimed at kids, and in one case, monkeys. It dawned on Sony that, as enthusiastic as children might be, they didn?t really have a huge amount of disposable income so instead Sony aimed their sights squarely on the 18-30 demographic. Their advertising moved away from the tropes of pearly-white American teens enthusing about how it was just like the arcade and instead presented us with surreal monochromatic vignettes, which crucially, had a much more adult tone.
It was a move that paid dividends as, due to technical and financial considerations on rival systems, the PlayStation had plenty to market. Top tier games like the zombie-tastic Resident Evil and the dystopian Final Fantasy VII appearing on the exclusively on PlayStation and it?s relatively low price compared to its rivals as well as an ad campaign that appealed to grown-ups not only secured Sony?s place as King of the Castle, but also popularised gaming to a much wider market. To date, the PlayStation has sold over 102 million units and its successor, the PlayStation 2, has sold 118 million units. Compare this to the Super Nintendo, the best selling console of its generation, which sold a measly 49 million units and it?s easy to see the impact that Sony had on the market. (Source: www.vgchartz.com)
And it?s not just that gaming is huge now. Like many young men, gaming is starting to realise that girls don?t actually have cooties after all and are, in fact, quite interesting. Unfortunately, like many young boys, their attention is focused on the wrong area. That?s right, gaming is obsessed with tits.
You don?t have to look very hard for examples of over-sexualised women in games; Eidos? Lara Croft instantly comes to mind. Lara Croft actually appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the 'Most Successful Human Videogame Heroine' and was so famous at her height that she graced the covers of style magazines, hawked us products and appeared on stage with U2. But why is she popular you might ask, is it her intelligence, her integrity, perhaps her athleticism? Well, it might be, but it?s more likely to be the fact that her boobs are bigger than her head.
To list every top-heavy bikini-clad bimbo that appears in a video game would be asinine; suffice to say gaming seems to buy them in bulk and every single one exposes more flesh than is necessary and in most cases sensible. Even in a game like World of Warcraft, female characters seem to get beachwear instead of armour, with little holes to expose midriffs and enhance cleavages, basically negating the any advantage of wearing the armour at all. It?s easy to say that gaming isn?t the only medium guilty of this, as the poor representation of women is a problem wherever you look, but at times it seems that developers are going out of their way to make it worse rather than better. Take Soul Calibur 4 for instance; apparently Ivy decided that the thigh boots, basque and bolero jacket she?d been wearing was too restrictive and traded them in for this:
It?ll be tit tape and a thong next, I swear to god. Oh wait, it already is.
It?s not just Soul Calibur either; just look at the ogling simulator Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, a game in which, rather tellingly, none of the male DOA characters appear, or the Eastern-European shagging-and-sorcery epic The Witcher, where the ability to sleep with practically any female in the game is used to increase replayability! Some titles, such as Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude or Singles: Flirt Up Your Life, eschew the concept of game almost entirely in favour of polygonal breasts, only occasionally forcing you to wash your hands and pick up the controller to play some perfunctory mini-game. The icing on the cake is the appearance of the ?Girls of Gaming? articles that have appeared in Playboy, where a variety of game characters appear in various states of undress. Nice one guys, thanks a lot!
This situation would be unacceptable even if gaming was an exclusively male pastime, but research done by the ELSPA in 2004 showed that in the USA, Japan, and UK, the three largest gaming markets in the world, women made up 39%, 36.8% and 27.2% of the total active gamers respectively. (Source: www.elspa.com) It seems strange that in a market that generates so much revenue that publishers aren?t doing more to attract women.
Anyway, when it?s not spending some quality time with the Victoria?s Secret catalogue, gaming has another love, something close to the hearts of many pubescent young gentlemen, both literally and metaphorically.
GORE! (Insert some manner of drunken whooping noise.)
Games seem obsessed with viscera and blood these days. This isn?t idle conjecture either; look, a graph!
This graph shows the number of games that have received 15 or 18 ratings from the BBFC in the last ten years. (Source: www.bbfc.com) Apparently 2005 was the year that game developers finally snapped and in recent times games have given us the chance to chainsaw aliens in half, slice people up with an otaku lightsabre and my personal favourite, stab people in the eye with a piece of broken glass. You can almost see where the Daily Mail is coming from. The games industry seems to have made the same mistake that a lot of teenage boys make in assuming that ?violent? is synonymous with ?mature?, when more often than not the exact opposite is true.
Finally, gaming has started to notice strange things happening to its voice. Gaming learnt to speak back in the early nineties, when CD ROM was becoming more commonplace. Developers, unsure what to do with all that extra space, stuffed their games will full motion video, which was often of a dubious quality. Back in those days, we were more amazed that games could talk at all and weren?t really concerned with the how good it was. It also wasn?t uncommon for games that were less space intensive to have a ?talkie? version released on CD-ROM; LucasArts was notable for doing this with many of their adventure games. It wasn?t until the PlayStation and Saturn that speech was made really feasible to the console market, but it soon caught on. As technical specifications improved and storage capacity increased, a fully voiced game became the norm rather than the exception and today a game can be made or broken by the quality of its voice acting.
Oblivion, a game that has almost universally garnered high scores (94/100 on metacritic.com), was lambasted by critics and fans alike for its voice acting, decrying it as being dull and stilted with too much repetition of voices, while Bioshock another game that has almost universally garnered high scores (96/100 on metacritic.com) has been lauded for its voice acting, and in fact, the obligatory plot twist rather bravely hangs on a voice actor sounded very natural when saying something very deliberate, to paraphrase the PC Gamer UK review. We?ve only got Nintendo to convince now, as they resolutely stick to the same text based format they?ve used since the NES.
So what do all these facts, figures and folderol actually mean? It means that it?s a very interesting time to be a gamer. Just like a real teenager, video games now have pretty much everything they need to become anything they want. Only time will tell how the medium matures after its awkward adolescence.
Since its birth in the early 1970?s, gaming has aged slowly. It may be nearly 36 years since Pong first appeared in arcades, but gaming is still fresh-faced and starry eyed, downy peach fuzz dappling its chin as it takes its first faltering step towards maturity. In short, gaming has finally hit puberty.
Don?t believe me? Well, let?s look at some of the evidence.
First and foremost, gaming has had a growth spurt; sales in the US alone have tripled between 1996 and 2007 and are now worth nearly $10 billion. (Source: www.theesa.com). Clearly gaming is a serious business now and much of this growth can be attributed to Sony?s entry into the race.
Back in the Golden Age of 16-Bit Gaming, Nintendo and Sega battled each other for dominance of the console market. The Super Nintendo and the Mega Drive/Genesis were arguably both companies? most successful systems, but a quick look through YouTube shows that most of their marketing was aimed at kids, and in one case, monkeys. It dawned on Sony that, as enthusiastic as children might be, they didn?t really have a huge amount of disposable income so instead Sony aimed their sights squarely on the 18-30 demographic. Their advertising moved away from the tropes of pearly-white American teens enthusing about how it was just like the arcade and instead presented us with surreal monochromatic vignettes, which crucially, had a much more adult tone.
It was a move that paid dividends as, due to technical and financial considerations on rival systems, the PlayStation had plenty to market. Top tier games like the zombie-tastic Resident Evil and the dystopian Final Fantasy VII appearing on the exclusively on PlayStation and it?s relatively low price compared to its rivals as well as an ad campaign that appealed to grown-ups not only secured Sony?s place as King of the Castle, but also popularised gaming to a much wider market. To date, the PlayStation has sold over 102 million units and its successor, the PlayStation 2, has sold 118 million units. Compare this to the Super Nintendo, the best selling console of its generation, which sold a measly 49 million units and it?s easy to see the impact that Sony had on the market. (Source: www.vgchartz.com)
And it?s not just that gaming is huge now. Like many young men, gaming is starting to realise that girls don?t actually have cooties after all and are, in fact, quite interesting. Unfortunately, like many young boys, their attention is focused on the wrong area. That?s right, gaming is obsessed with tits.
You don?t have to look very hard for examples of over-sexualised women in games; Eidos? Lara Croft instantly comes to mind. Lara Croft actually appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the 'Most Successful Human Videogame Heroine' and was so famous at her height that she graced the covers of style magazines, hawked us products and appeared on stage with U2. But why is she popular you might ask, is it her intelligence, her integrity, perhaps her athleticism? Well, it might be, but it?s more likely to be the fact that her boobs are bigger than her head.
To list every top-heavy bikini-clad bimbo that appears in a video game would be asinine; suffice to say gaming seems to buy them in bulk and every single one exposes more flesh than is necessary and in most cases sensible. Even in a game like World of Warcraft, female characters seem to get beachwear instead of armour, with little holes to expose midriffs and enhance cleavages, basically negating the any advantage of wearing the armour at all. It?s easy to say that gaming isn?t the only medium guilty of this, as the poor representation of women is a problem wherever you look, but at times it seems that developers are going out of their way to make it worse rather than better. Take Soul Calibur 4 for instance; apparently Ivy decided that the thigh boots, basque and bolero jacket she?d been wearing was too restrictive and traded them in for this:
It?ll be tit tape and a thong next, I swear to god. Oh wait, it already is.
It?s not just Soul Calibur either; just look at the ogling simulator Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, a game in which, rather tellingly, none of the male DOA characters appear, or the Eastern-European shagging-and-sorcery epic The Witcher, where the ability to sleep with practically any female in the game is used to increase replayability! Some titles, such as Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude or Singles: Flirt Up Your Life, eschew the concept of game almost entirely in favour of polygonal breasts, only occasionally forcing you to wash your hands and pick up the controller to play some perfunctory mini-game. The icing on the cake is the appearance of the ?Girls of Gaming? articles that have appeared in Playboy, where a variety of game characters appear in various states of undress. Nice one guys, thanks a lot!
This situation would be unacceptable even if gaming was an exclusively male pastime, but research done by the ELSPA in 2004 showed that in the USA, Japan, and UK, the three largest gaming markets in the world, women made up 39%, 36.8% and 27.2% of the total active gamers respectively. (Source: www.elspa.com) It seems strange that in a market that generates so much revenue that publishers aren?t doing more to attract women.
Anyway, when it?s not spending some quality time with the Victoria?s Secret catalogue, gaming has another love, something close to the hearts of many pubescent young gentlemen, both literally and metaphorically.
GORE! (Insert some manner of drunken whooping noise.)
Games seem obsessed with viscera and blood these days. This isn?t idle conjecture either; look, a graph!
This graph shows the number of games that have received 15 or 18 ratings from the BBFC in the last ten years. (Source: www.bbfc.com) Apparently 2005 was the year that game developers finally snapped and in recent times games have given us the chance to chainsaw aliens in half, slice people up with an otaku lightsabre and my personal favourite, stab people in the eye with a piece of broken glass. You can almost see where the Daily Mail is coming from. The games industry seems to have made the same mistake that a lot of teenage boys make in assuming that ?violent? is synonymous with ?mature?, when more often than not the exact opposite is true.
Finally, gaming has started to notice strange things happening to its voice. Gaming learnt to speak back in the early nineties, when CD ROM was becoming more commonplace. Developers, unsure what to do with all that extra space, stuffed their games will full motion video, which was often of a dubious quality. Back in those days, we were more amazed that games could talk at all and weren?t really concerned with the how good it was. It also wasn?t uncommon for games that were less space intensive to have a ?talkie? version released on CD-ROM; LucasArts was notable for doing this with many of their adventure games. It wasn?t until the PlayStation and Saturn that speech was made really feasible to the console market, but it soon caught on. As technical specifications improved and storage capacity increased, a fully voiced game became the norm rather than the exception and today a game can be made or broken by the quality of its voice acting.
Oblivion, a game that has almost universally garnered high scores (94/100 on metacritic.com), was lambasted by critics and fans alike for its voice acting, decrying it as being dull and stilted with too much repetition of voices, while Bioshock another game that has almost universally garnered high scores (96/100 on metacritic.com) has been lauded for its voice acting, and in fact, the obligatory plot twist rather bravely hangs on a voice actor sounded very natural when saying something very deliberate, to paraphrase the PC Gamer UK review. We?ve only got Nintendo to convince now, as they resolutely stick to the same text based format they?ve used since the NES.
So what do all these facts, figures and folderol actually mean? It means that it?s a very interesting time to be a gamer. Just like a real teenager, video games now have pretty much everything they need to become anything they want. Only time will tell how the medium matures after its awkward adolescence.
