Jimquisition: Diversity? LIEversity!

[Abnaxis]

No, you thought you'd addressed it but the point you made was invalid, I already explained why in my response to CloudAtlas (I think). Summed up, it is because anybody can find reasons why they don't identify with the protagonist, and your assertion that it wouldn't bother men but would bother women is unfounded because you have no evidence for it, you are simply taking your own wishful thinking as fact.
This logic would hold to my example of being British if it was valid, although you did try to dismiss it because reasons.
So no valid reason against it being a zero-sum game then, which means that you can only assert that the race/gender is irrelevant. This makes your argument invalid for the reasons previously stated.

Pretty sure none of the protagonists in those shooters are British, so no need to go any further with that one.
Citation needed on how it affects the number of people in the community too, you're making statements that you have no evidence to back up.

This argument has failed, your attempt to address the point I made was basically "nuh-uh because reasons".

My point to adress this issue, is that not all differences are created equal. Being British does not hold the same meaning that being homosexual does, does not hold the same meaning that being female does, does not hold the same meaning the being non-white does.

So you're British. Do you have to carefully consider whther or not you want to voice chat in a multiplayer game, for fear that others will treat you differently because you accent reveals you to be British? I've known women who never voice chat because even if other players are accepting of them, they always start acting differently when the woman's voice reveals her gender, and that's no fun. British people are a go-to villain, but has anyone ever looked at you with suspicion and fear without even talking to you, solely because you are British? Because every Muslim I have known (at least the ones of Middle Eastern decent) has shared that experience with me. Don't you think games and media that have Middle Eastern terrorists as antagonists might be sending a different signal to Muslims, than a comparable work with a British antagonist communicates to you?

Being left out holds a different significance to different people, because of the way society at large and the gaming society treats them. A white male protagonist doesn't carry the same meaning or value to white males, as a black female protagonist carries with black females. Conversely, a black female protagonist is not going to have the same detrimental effect on a white male, ad a white male protagonist does on a black female. That doesn't mean that the difference doesn't exist, or that it is only a matter of personal opinion. You'll note that, in every augment I have made, I am talking about how SOCIETY treats individuals, not how the individuals comport themselves. This isn't about making game creators beholden to every individual gamers particular tastes, its about lowering the barriers gaming culture at large has erected against various categories of people.

If you give $100 (sorry, I tried to use pounds but I'm American so it only came out clumsy) to a homeless man on the street, that means something different to him than if you give $100 to the Red Cross, which is different than what it means if you go to the store and by $100 worth of video games. It's the same $100 in every case--it hold the same purchasing power, it holds the same absolute value as legal tender no matter where you spend it. However, to the homeless man that's months worth of food (or whiskey, depending on how cynical you are); to the Red Cross it's certainly appreciated and recognized as one of many necessary small donations that keep the company afloat, even though it's less than a rounding error in their accounting department; and to the store it's only $20, because the other $80 went to the publishers.

It's the same thing here. Having a sympathetic protagonist does not mean the same thing everyone, because everyone doesn't have equal access to sympathetic protagonists, and sympathetic protagonists don't carry the same contextual meaning to everyone. It is not a zero sum game.

 

[Abnaxis]

Pretty sure none of the protagonists in those shooters are British, so no need to go any further with that one.
Citation needed on how it affects the number of people in the community too, you're making statements that you have no evidence to back up.

And once again, with emphasis:

This citation does not, can not, and will never exist because nobody is prescient enough to tell the future. Nobody knows if any action will result in more people playing games, with anything remotely approaching certainty. Every time you ask for "proof" you are making an invalid argument, that current status quo is somehow "proven" and that more conclusive proof is required to deviate from it, when there is zero--ZERO--valid proof either way.

 

[Abnaxis]

So because you have no proof to offer, you are going to declare the need for proof "invalid"?
That is the most ridiculous claim I've ever seen made, I'm not sure further discussion is worth the trouble here, as it's a fool's errand to discuss something with somebody so ideologically driven to declare the simple need to prove the accuracy of their own statements to be "invalid".

You are making an unprovable assertion--that the way publishers currently conduct business is the proven, superior way to garner as many fans as possible, and the demanding that everyone else show you proof to the contrary. There is no proof to the contrary, because there is no way to know, with certain, what effect an any decision will have before it is made, or what would have happened if a different decision was made in the past. This applies to your underlying assumption you are using to demand proof, that current practice is the "right" way, and "proof" is needed to change it.

Your underlying assumption is faulty, the demands you are making are impossible, and you are applying a double standard to everyone else that you, yourself are not obeying. Thus, your request for "proof" is entirely without merit. There is no point in asking for "proof," when you yourself have none.

Damn. So it's different because feelings.
Who are you to tell me how bothered I am by the non-inclusion of British protagonists? Who are you to tell me that I'm not more bothered by that than women are by male protagonists, or Muslims are by non-Muslim ones?
Perhaps I am incensed by it, which would mean that your claim that being female or whatever is somehow a special minority status because feelings falls apart immediately.

It seems to me that you've decided that women and non-white people are automatically victims in society, and that white males are automatically victorious, so the concerns of white males can be brushed aside and excluding them is perfectly fine.
That makes no allowances for different human experiences and is pouring scorn on white males who are not automatically victorious.

This is very very close to the Social Justice Warrior mindset, and I don't think this conversation will be productive going forward, as there's a distinct possibility this will devolve into wailing of "check your privilege" and the like.

No, I have not decided that anyone is a victim. My central conceit is that publishers, by and large, have formatted their marketing, development, and distribution models with the overwhelming target of garnering the 20-30, white male gamer, and any customer who doesn't fit that narrow target is a happy coincidence. Do you think this is not the case?

Given this fact, I am framing the argument in a "white male vs. other" sort of way. If publishers decided their laser-focused target demographic was blue sea urchins, you would probably put words in my mouth characterizing me as a SJW fighting against all the evil blue invertebrates of the ocean.

And, once again, it's not different because "feelings," it's different because history, society, and human nature. Are you saying you've been assumed to be a incompetent because you are British? That your education regarding World War II was shaped by the same political forces mine were, in the US? Have you been given access to services (like, say, health care), solely because you're British? Have you been denied?

I don't give the first flying fuck how you, as a single individual, feel. What I care about, and what I'm interested in shaping, is the way the gaming community reacts when you tell them you are British. Do we embrace you? Do we welcome you? Do we shun you? If I gather 10,000 Englishmen into a convention center full of gamers, how many of you will leave in disgust? How many will stick around and have fun?

I want as many people, from as many social circles that are different than mine, to be gamers. I want the gaming community to be a demographic reflection of the greater community it exists in. This benefits me, and in fact it benefits everyone, in a myriad of ways. That's not going to happen if the culture discourages entire groups from even considering joining in the first place.

 

[goliath6711]

I bet you Jennifer Hale got paid less than Mark Meer for voicing Commander Shepard.

Where in the holy hell did THIS come from?!?!?!

I'm serious. Where is even the slightest sliver of evidence that would remotely show the tiniest hint of a suggestion that this could somehow have the remote possibility of maybe having some modicum of truth toward it?

 

[chibby]

Ubisoft will never get a dime of my money.Again, thanks for fighting the good fight, Jim. The fact that gender equality is still being contested at this late date is evidence that the status quo is content to ignore my existence. I didn't just become a gamer. I've been playing video games since 1983ish. The game industry's unwillingness to cater to my dollar can't be taken as anything but deliberate. They know us girls are playing too, they just don't want to challenge their own ideals of what girls can and do enjoy.

 

[hermes]

This is getting ridiculous. Don't make the same mistake Jim made: Read the interview and try to be critical about it instead of jumping at the jugular at the first chance like you are hungry for hits.

You are complaining about a game with extensive script and voice assets because they made only ONE protagonist. Truth, the wording was a little poor, but to allow the entire campaign to be played by a female character would be like asking for two entirely different games. There is only one protagonist (Arno Dorian) in the story, and the coop is simply having copies of Arno running around, all with the same face, voice and personality. This is Just Cause 2 multiplayer, not Elder Scrolls Online. Gimmicky? Yes. Hooky? Definitely. And also the reason why you can't change elements like the gender and race of the character. The campaign is not your story, its Arno's story. Like him or not, Arno is not "just anyone", he is a defined character with defined characteristics.

It is fair enough to complain about the general lack of female protagonists, but this is hardly the example to rally against, because these games were never about customizing your character and background to your liking. Come Mass Effect 4 or Fallout 4 and they remove the gender option, it would be more appropriate to feel like a cop out. To complain that Arno is not a woman is like making SE accountable for not making Lara Croft a 300 pounds Asian. Its like asking (nay, demanding) that Lord of the Rings to be adapted to movies twice, one of them where the party is all female, and then disrespect the producers because "its too much work".

 

[Abnaxis]

I'm not sure why you don't understand this, but it's very simple, if you are claiming that more diverse protagonists are required to increase the number of a game's customers, you are required to provide proof to back up this assertion.
If you cannot provide proof then you cannot use it as an argument in favour of your position. You have admitted that you have no proof, and admitted that this is actually impossible to prove, so how about you now admit that this argument is an invalid one and then we can move on? You've already admitted that there's no proof, you've already admitted that the argument is invalid by doing so, so stop using the invalid argument.

What argument are you ascribing to me? You are the one who came in and said "you must prove that this change will make companies money, or I won't listen," not me. My response is, you can't prove not doing it actually made more money, let alone what effect making a change will have, so what the hell is the point of your question? Nobody can know whether Tomb Raider would have made more money if it was about Larry Croft. Nobody can know if TF2 would have been more popular if it had more female characters. Yet you come into the discussion, and demand to be shown proof (HA!) of exactly that, otherwise in your eyes no argument is valid.

So still, it's different because feelings. Males are not affected by the gender of the protagonist, women are affected by it, white people are not affected by the race of the protagonist, but non-white people are, and you know this because feelings. Fuck the idea that women and minority groups are comprised of individuals with their own agency, thoughts and feelings, eh?

This is just the racism/sexism of lowered expectations, you're claiming that women and other minorities within gaming are not partaking in the pasttime at the rate that they want to, that they are bullied away from it by all the white men, you're claiming that they are so sensitive and such easily offended perpetual victims that the mere idea of a character not resembling them is enough to keep them away from a hobby they would otherwise enjoy.
How is this different from conventional bigotry? Is the core of a racist belief not that other races are inferior to your own? That they are not as capable, and weaker? Is the core of male-on-female sexism not that women are weaker individuals, unable to make their own decision because they cannot be trusted to make the right ones for themselves?

I fail to see how you think that infantilizing these groups is going to bring them flocking into gaming, if I were a woman my first thought upon reading your writing would be "oh great, not only do I have to deal with honest sexists, I also have to deal with dishonest sexists dressing up their infantilization of me as concern".

Who's infantilizing what now? You are seriously, seriously starting to annoy me by putting words in my mouth.

Here is the thing: if I treat people like crap, if I tell them that I could care less whether they like me or not, do you think I will be the most popular person in the world? Do you think I will attract a massive following of friends? Do you think the people who, quite reasonably, want nothing to do with me are "victims"?

I am not claiming that anyone is being bullied by anyone, but rather that non-whites, non-males are getting a collective "fuck you" from publishers, and they are quite rightly, and reasonably finding some other way to dick around with their spare time instead of spending money on games made with zero interest in their social context.

Or, if you prefer a more grounded, scientific proposition, the demographic makeup of the gaming community is massively skewed, such that white male 20-somethings make up a much larger proportion of the active gaming community when compared with the proportion of white male 20-somethings in the overall population of potential gamers. This means that there is something inherent in the gaming community that disproportionately encourages white male 20-somethings to join, that disproportionately discourage everyone else from joining, or (most likely) both.

The root cause could be anything. Maybe white male 20-somethings are just the only people interested in playing games. Maybe there's no way to reverse the trend. However, we would all be better off if gaming were more diverse. I am therefore hypothesizing that maybe, just maybe, getting large publishers who wield the most power in the community to at least try to appeal beyond the all-hallowed male white 20-something demographic might just be a obvious low hanging fruit when it comes to widening the audience beyond white male 20-somethings.

Your counter is that it doesn't matter who the publishers try to target, because you personally have no problem playing games that don't target you as a British person. That the only driving force of the discrepancy is personal preference, and that anyone who thinks different is beholden to some emotional drive for justice. You have no proof of any of this, but then you demand proof from everyone else, because obviously your position is the correct one you'll need concrete evidence to change your mind. You try to couch your counter arguments with false equivalence, by saying that if your initial assertion is wrong and the reason people aren't participating is lack of support, then redirecting support from white male gamers will automatically mean publishers you lose as many or more white males as you gain from everyone else. And then when I tell you, no, in fact different groups actually have different cultures, men and women are actually somewhat different in how they view the world as collective sub-groups--which really should be obvious--you make ridiculous accusations that I'm appealing to emotion and infantilizing under-represented groups.

Are those last three paragraphs to your standards? Or are there still too many "feelings" there? I mean, I know I said "appeal," so obviously my entire argument is just "wah wah feelings"...

 

[furai47]

My point to adress this issue, is that not all differences are created equal. Being British does not hold the same meaning that being homosexual does, does not hold the same meaning that being female does, does not hold the same meaning the being non-white does.

Please provide in response a list of groups of people sorted by the amount of privilege held; starting with whichever combination of white cis heterosexual western etc. finds itself at the top this week. Or is the list updated daily now, I haven't checked in a while.

Thank you.

 

[Abnaxis]

Please provide in response a list of groups of people sorted by the amount of privilege held; starting with whichever combination of white cis heterosexual western etc. finds itself at the top this week. Or is the list updated daily now, I haven't checked in a while.

Thank you.

For the love of Jim, is it really that contentious to make the statement that people from different cultures might, you know, actually be different from one another in attitude? As an American, I couldn't give less of of a damn about the 5th of November, while I'm sure BitingGaming doesn't care a whip about the Fourth of July. I can walk three blocks down the street and buy a Glock legally, and he can't. If I shoot myself in the foot with that Glock, I will get prompt medical care that I will be paying off for the next few decades, while he will get less-prompt care for free. Do you not see that we come from different histories and different social contexts, and that will shape the way he buys stuff differently than the way I buy stuff? That he can't say "Well I'm British, and I have no problem with lack of British protagonists so STFU" because it's and apples to oranges comparison? And that the same thing goes for "well, if it bothers women then it will bother men too"? It's over-generalizing from the specific, to a gross degree.

Also, since I'm not here to toot some justice horn (Justice? It's bloody video games, for fucks sake. No woman is going to waste away in despair because she never got to play Halo) I would say, order the list by how many resources their groups has access to that I don't, and by what degree they are left out. Because the benefit I see is proportional to these things.

And what if the politician is savvy enough to say that games shouldn't feature blood (like in Germany) or he only calls for certain games to be banned (such as calling for Manhunt to be banned in the UK after one child killed another child with a hammer). By simply narrowing down the scapegoat to specific games the politicians can blame games without alienating the majority of their supporters.

And yet...that's still an improvement. Putting games on the shelves as long as they don't show blood, is still better than banning them outright.

Once again, this is not about coming up with some magical solution that will make everyone agree and we'll never have to defend gamers against outsiders again. This is about acknowledging the fact that we will always be in conflict with others, and trying to maximize our ammunition. I'm saying, if we steal a tank from the enemy, that gives us more firepower and them less, which makes us better off. You're..argument, I guess?..is that they'll still going to fight us, so there's no point.

My response is "sure, they'll always be against us, but the more power we wield and the less they wield, the better off we will be coming out of the fight." This is about the war, not the individual battles.

The Nintendo came out in 1985 in the USA. If we assume that the youngest people who got a NES were 5 then anyone under the age of 34 would have grown up with video games. Also 67% of households in the USA have a games console. So a good proportion of adults know what games are.

Sure they do. They know that games are the glorified toy that their child plays with, that they can hold in the same regard as Chinese linking logs. If the politician says games make kids do bad things, they can just go in the trash with the Chinese dolls that contain lead, because they are no more important.

I'm saying that certain demographics are more likely to prefer a game with one type of mechanics than another type of mechanics. This is why about 90% of people who play shooters are male while almost all people who play Farmville are female despite both gender being free to play either game.

Also mechanics are very important when selling a game. People who enjoy shooter tend to enjoy games similar to shooters (fast paced), rather than games that are slower paced (involve a lot of grinding or solving puzzles).

Actually you could easily test this by making a genetic shooter, and having men and women rate it by how enjoyable it was. I predict that the majority of men will say that they like this shooter, while most women won't.

You could also test this by asking men and women about the games they enjoy, examining male and female brains to see what they enjoy, or even see what people enjoy in a non-game environment (such as how many hunter are male).

And this is where you are absolutely, unequivocally wrong.

The question you are tyring to answer is, fundamentally, "why do gamers play the games they play? Why do some people enjoy shooters?" Science never, under any circumstance, answers the question of "why?" You can do !!SCIENCE!!, and it will show you correlations between gamer demographics and gamer behavior--you can even go the biology route, and run scans of brain patterns while people play games, and see how activity in a certain region predicts how much someone enjoys a shooter.

When you're done, you will be no closer to answering your question. Correlation does not mean causation. Just because more men like shooters, doesn't mean that being a man directly causes your enjoyment while playing a shooter. Maybe what actually helps you enjoy it is some other factor, that is also highly correlated with being male--like, from a purely numerical, scientific perspective it would be almost valid for me to say a regular regimen of peeing while standing up increases enjoyment while playing shooters. Maybe peeing standing up from an early age exercises the pre-frontal cortex in a way that makes it more susceptible the the stimulation provided by shooters, and that why all the pee-standers enjoy shooters while the squatters don't?

The question itself is one that can never be answered. Or rather, it has a limitless number of potential answers, and the laws of logic and physics do not provide the tools to narrow those theories down to the One True Cause.

No they don't. Having a diverse protagonist isn't going to make the cover of the box any better. If women aren't going to buy a game because it has a scowling, muscular male on it; they're unlikely to buy a similar game with a scowling, muscular female on it. Before you recommend a more feminine box cover I'd like to point out that if the cover art doesn't match the tone of the game people are highly likely to return it.

Basically if people don't enjoy the mechanics of Call of Duty it doesn't matter what you put on the cover because it won't make the game any more appealing to people who don't like shooters.

As much as I'm sure people want to think marketers are just useless nobodies who get paid millions to get stupid people to buy their stuff, there are countless examples I can bring up, where fuck ups in marketing have alienated customers from products they would have otherwise bought. That's why Firefly got cancelled. Fox wanted to market it as action schlock, when that wasn't what the show was--and even though there is a market for it, it failed spectacularly to bring in viewers. Planescape: Torment is another good example--the game is at the top of many, many "best ever" lists, but it didn't sell worth shit when it actually came out. I didn't buy it, because all the ad material ever featured was some badass dude in dreadlocks and over-the-top theatrical screenshots which didn't represent the game.

That's two things that I like, a lot, that I had nothing to do with when they were created because marketing fucked up. Bad marketing can and will alienate paying customers from a product they will enjoy, no matter the quality of the product or how much they might enjoy it. Thus, you can't justify the statement of "well, if they didn't buy it because they didn't like the marketing, they wouldn't have liked the game anyway."

Just because triple A games have the biggest budgets doesn't mean they attract all newcomers to gaming. I know people who got into gaming through casual gaming (such as Candy Crush). They will never play a triple A game because they don't like complex games.

How do you know they don't like complex games? That's not an answered question.

Again, I am not saying that AAA publishers are the only voice in gaming, nor that if they change their tune everything will be better. I am saying they are the biggest voice in gaming, the biggest (again, BIGGEST, not ONLY) point of contact with outsiders, and thus, if the goal is to get the MOST PEOPLE interested in gaming as an art (again, not "everyone," just more people), starting with AAA developers is a good place to start.

I got some more words for BitingGaming, but I have some RL stuff to do first..

 

[Abnaxis]

Your examples of marketing affecting sales are both examples of the advertising not matching the product, and thus can only really be used as proof that advertising can work by proving the inverse.

My examples of marketing are specific cases where the product was marketed. Not only in its advertizing, but it's production and presentation as well. In the specific case of Firefly, Fox forced Joss Whedon to add Inara because they thought a whore would make the show more racy, and they showed the episodes out of order to sell it as action schlock. The publishers did everything they could to target one specific market, from creation to advertizing, and the actual audience--the ones that love the show for what it was originally and are still, a decade later, clamoring for more of it--got left by the wayside. Fox could have made big dollars on Firefly, but their fixation on one particular demographic put a wall between the quality product they owned, and the audience that was highly willing to pay for it.

I don't want to leave potential gamers, that could contribute to my hobby if the publisher didn't have a fixation on a narrowly defined target audience, left by the wayside.

Citation needed.

Regarding your last three paragraphs, your argument had already failed before you wrote "The root cause could be anything", but that is a suitable explanation as to why it failed. The. Root. Cause. Could. Be. Anything.
Your proposal involves developers and investors risking vast amounts of money in order to address a problem that may not actually be a problem, the root cause of which (by your own admission) could be anything, and could easily be totally unrelated to the "solution" you have proposed.
The only argument you can make in favour of this proposal amounts to "but I feel that it might work", so yes, your entire argument is indeed "wah wah feelings".

You're within your rights to ask developers to try it, just like I'm free to insist that somebody remakes TIE Fighter because I reckon it'd made a decent profit.
What neither you nor I are within our rights to do, is demand that the developers take that gamble with other people's money.
The difference here is that I'm not demanding anything, and you are trying to bolster your woeful argument with shaming tactics by claiming that "non-whites, non-males are getting a collective "fuck you" from publishers"

That's why I went beyond the collective "fuck you," but you conveniently ignored the rest of that post.

You want citation? Fine.

There is a universal law in statistics, that quite literally is what all science and discovery ever accomplished by mankind is built on. That laws states, that if you use a collection method which is unbiased, you can collect a sample of people/widgets/subatomic particles from a larger population and your smaller sample will reflect the same behavior as the overall population (within a small random error that is proportional to your sample size). The contrapositive of this law (which must be true as long as the original statement is true) is that if you look at and sub sample of a larger population, and that sub-sample does not reflect the overall population it was sampled from (again, within a small amount of error proportional to your sample size), then whatever method you used to gather that sample was biased.

Still with me so far? Okay, so we can apply this rule to any sub-group you care to name. Gamers, engineers, skydivers, foot fetishists whatever, and if the population of the subgroup doesn't match the overall population by a certain margin, we can say, with an exact amount of certainty that SOMEHOW, the way people are organizing themselves/being organized into the subgroup is biased.

Now, the commonly accepted number is that 40% of gamers are women, though I've seen more current figures [http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2014.pdf] as high as 48%. The latest census data says that 50.8% of the people in United sates population is comprised of women. That means that, as long as the sample in the worst case study was bigger than 100 people (pretty sure it was) we can say with 99% certainty that some bias exists somewhere, that makes it less favorable for women to be gamers, based on the data. In fact, we can even say the same thing about the 48% number, as long as the sample size used in that study was bigger than 1000 people questioned (again, it probably was).

Conclusion A: The gaming community is not as diverse as it could be.

As I've mentioned before, nowhere does it say why this is the case. Science never answers the question of "why". That's why, incidentally, I don't give two steaming shits about why the gaming industry is biased against women--the only thing that matters to my argument is that it is biased, which I have shown.

Who's to blame for bias does not matter, the only thing that matters is what that bias means for me, for my community as a gaming enthusiast, and to developers that make games I care about. To that end, we have known for a very long time, and from a very wide berth of studies (like this one [http://asq.sagepub.com/content/44/4/741.short], plus any number of a dozens of other articles if you want to Google "diversity and worker production") that corporations, ESPECIALLY corporations that rely heavily on human capital, innovation, and creative input from employees, see a positive association between their employee diversity and employee satisfaction, product quality, and the ability to control costs. Since the video game industry recruits from gamers as their employment pool, that is strong evidence supporting the fact that a more diverse gaming population can in fact bring about more, higher quality games, and more money to publishers.

Not only that, but there is also a lot of evidence that the gaming community directly benefits--i.e. that it benefits in ways that don't involve increasing the profits of publishers--if we are more diverse. this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network] article presents data that shows that consumer advocacy groups have a positive association between member diversity and social capital.

Conclusion B: I, as a member of the gaming community, will benefit if that community becomes more diverse.

Put these two conclusions together, and it leads to a compelling case for increasing diversity. No "feelings" involved.

Now that I've shown diversity is a good thing, that I want to work for, it's time to start constructing theory as to why the bias exists and what action might reduce the bias. Since--once again--there is never a conclusive, unquestionable answer to why or what will happen, I need to rely on logic and hypothesis to propose actions that might bring about the change I desire. To this end, one hypothesis is that a driving factor behind the bias, could be that publishers are communicating, in numerous subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that non-white, non-males are only of secondary concern to them as customers, and that this creates bias in the community as the shunned groups rightfully give the AAA gaming community the finger and go do something else.

That hypothesis relies on empathy and "feelings" to reach a hypothetical course of action, but I challenge you--show me one, single justification for any action a publisher might take with the aim of attracting more customers--one--that does not have to do with "feelings." By definition, this entire discussion is about "feelings," because both of us--you and me both--we want more total people to "feel" like buying and playing games. What you are saying is not a valid criticism, you are just trying to trivialize my points by framing them as appeals to emotion, when they quite clearly aren't.

Your proposal involves developers and investors risking vast amounts of money in order to address a problem that may not actually be a problem, the root cause of which (by your own admission) could be anything, and could easily be totally unrelated to the "solution" you have proposed.

Nowhere does that support your basic assertion that more people will buy games if the protagonists are more diverse, and in a trivial sense it could be pointed out that because game developers and publishers exist to turn a profit, if your assertion were true then we'd expect that those organisations would be entirely willing to do it if it would increase their profits.
They obviously don't think it will and they have access to the actual data, so your challenge is to prove that they are wrong in forming this conclusion.
It goes without saying, that you have failed to do so.

This is where I get to be smug and smarmy, and say "Citation please."

Seriously, give me compelling evidence that there is any marginal cost or marginal risk (i.e., more cost or more risk than the publisher is tolerating when they decide to make a game in the first place) to make a game with a different-gendered protagonist. And note that I'm NOT advocating "adding the option;" I have already said--in this very thread--that it is expensive to add a second, fully fleshed protagonist to Assassin's Creed, and that it's more than a little unreasonable to trivialize that cost. I want you to prove to me, conclusively, that the $3.4 million spent on Tomb Raider would have been recovered in six months of sales instead of nine if Lara Croft had been a dude (a change that costs $0 of additional investment). Show me the proof that if Uncharted had starred Natalie Drake instead of Nathan Drake (again, cost increase of $0), that it would have only sold 3 million copies, instead of 4 million.

You can't, because that data can't exist. Note: not doesn't, can't. Publishers do not have access to some magical viewing pool the tells them how the world will react to any action they might potentially take. Your presumption that "well, the publishers have all the data about how the market operates, so if they aren't doing X, that's proof positive that X must not be profitable or they would do it," is unfounded to the point of being borderline farcical. Nobody--not you, not me, not publishers, nor audiences, nor reviewers--has the clairvoyance to say what precise set of variables results in maximum profit, with anything approaching certainty.

You have no proof to found your own ideas on, and yet you demand it from me? On what grounds are you basing your own claims?

 

[Abnaxis]

I mean, you did chuck a strawman in there too, so that's a nice change of tone:

Your presumption that "well, the publishers have all the data about how the market operates, so if they aren't doing X, that's proof positive that X must not be profitable or they would do it," is unfounded to the point of being borderline farcical.

I would agree that it'd be "borderline farcical", which is why I didn't say it. I said that if they had evidence to suggest it then they'd already be doing it, and that if you're going to try to convince them by saying that doing it will guarantee profit then you'd better be able to prove it to them.
As before, if you're making demands then you'd better be able to back them up, but you can't, and you're just trying to use shaming tactics to advance your personal idea of the way things should be.

Again, with the "demands" crap. When have I "demanded" anything?

On a second reading, I can see that I misread your earlier statement. That doesn't make it a strawman argument, so much as a misunderstanding, but I'll concede that you weren't saying that publishers know everything about the market. However, the point still stand that the "evidence" can never exist, and that justifying publisher behavior because "there's no evidence for them to act otherwise" is not valid under this restraint.

Give me one hypothetical situation where a valid set of this "evidence" could possibly exist, which would meet your demands. Just make something up, I don't care. I'm confident that you can't, because any such evidence would have to involve comparing two mutually exclusive events--a game being released with a male protagonist and the exact same game being released into the exact same market with a female protagonist--and since they are mutually exclusive, it is literally not possible to have empirical data from both alternatives for purposes of comparison.

Oh dear, your attempt at an objective appraisal stalled at the point where you explained that gaming does not represent the demographics of the overall population, and then failed to prove that lack of diverse protagonists is the reason for it, and then failed to prove that more diverse protagonists would address it even if it happened by pure chance to be the reason.

Let's get one thing straight, there is less than a miniscule chance that the proportion of women shown in the survey differs from the wider population, purely by chance. Looking around some more, it looks like the sample size for the ESA survey was 15,000 respondents. I have looked--really looked--for a piece of software that will keep enough decimal points, so I could give you an exact estimate of the probability that the statistic is the result of 100% random chance. Every last one of them rounds it to zero, which--considering the best one I have will still track probabilities less than 10^-8--puts the "this could happen by chance" justification into "yeah, that's not what happened" territory.

We might not know what the reason actually is, but "not random chance" is a foregone conclusion.

You're still hung up on the idea that you "feel" that it is the reason and it would work.

So we're still at "it's different because feelings."

So as expected I'm saying "nope, still feelings.

No, that's not how it works. You are trying to claim that more diverse protagonists will increase sales, you have no evidence for this whatsoever, and as a result this assertion can be safely dismissed because it was asserted without evidence.
You don't get to turn it around and claim that the onus is on me to prove your baseless assertion wrong. You've advanced it without evidence, I'm dismissing it for lack of evidence.
I'm now going to advance the hypothesis that having too high a proportion of female protagonists will cause the planet to crack in two by an unknowable mechanism.
You are now required to disprove this hypothesis before you can proceed.

See, what I did there? That's what you tried to do, and it doesn't fly.

....They teach the scientific method in Britain, right?

Your example is not at all what I was doing, because your example hypothesis does not use any sort of theory as a basis. Hypotheses have to be supported by theory, otherwise you cannot argue with them, and there is no point in creating a hypothesis that can't be debunked.

I have given you the theory underlying my hypothesis, which you have yet to address directly. These are:

1) That groups of people will preferentially not associate with groups or organizations that do not express concerns for the individual's needs. If you think my hypothesis cannot be justified on the grounds of this statement, why do you disagree?

2a) Gaming publishers have expressed, both explicitly and implicitly, that the 20-30 year old white male is their primary target demographic, and that all others are secondary. This isn't so much "theory" as much as accepted fact, because the publishers come right out and say it's true [https://www.facebook.com/business/success/ubisoft] (note how Ubisoft measures success by how many 18-34 withe males they attract to their games), so um...you're going to have a hard time disagreeing with this one.

2b) As part of their stated goal to appeal to 20-30 white male gamers to the exclusion of other, publishers continuously release games with middle-aged, white male protagonists. This claim is a little fuzzy, since it relates to the motivations of publishers, but I don't think it's much of stretch, given 2a. Do you disagree?

3) In aggregate, consumers of all races, genders, and creeds are smart enough to see that demographic appeal is the underlying force driving the marketing of AAA games, all the way down to the artistic design of the protagonist. Again, probably debatable depending on how cynical you are. If I'm losing you here, why?

4) Contingent on the above statements being true, publishers don't care about under-represented group AND those same under-represented groups are fully aware of the publisher's attitudes, THEREFORE those same groups will be discouraged from interacting with publishers, which cuts them off from the segment of the market that controls the largest share, and for all intents and purposes all of the media presence held by games.

The conclusion to this, in my mind, is that we would be better off if publishers cared about more than middle-aged white dudes, because--as I have shown, with citation above, we get better games, a better community and they make more money if the audience is more diverse.

One component of that conclusion, which actually relates to the original video Jim put up, is the design of protagonists in video games. The design is very clearly targeted, and people are smart enough to pick up on that.

You keep waving me off by justification of "feelings" (which again, is ridiculous because ANY DISCUSSION ABOUT APPEALING TO CONSUMERS IS, BY DEFINITION, ABOUT "FEELINGS"), so let me try to redirect you into saying something halfway productive: which, if any, of my theoretical bases do you have issue with, and why?

Right, so it failed because it was marketed to a demographic other than the one that was actually interested in it?
Seen as gaming is being advertised to the demographic that is currently interested in it, I'd have thought this was obviously not a point in your favour. Oh well, now you know.

My point was made in response to the idea that "if non-white, non-male fans really liked the games, they would buy them regardless of marketing because they enjoy the gameplay." My point is that history shows us that, even if consumers love your product, they won't buy it if you fuck up the marketing. Yes, white dudes buy shooters, but there's no proof that non-white, non-dude wouldn't also buy shooters if they weren't left out, and plenty of proof that leaving them out is, in fact, enough to discourage their buying

I don't know how you've failed to notice this, but I'm not making any claims at all, I'm requiring evidence to support yours.

Remember: feels < reals.

Honestly, I think we're done here.
You've restated "this is a problem and this is the reason and this is the solution and I know because feelings" every time now, and I see no reason for this to continue, if you can come up with an argument that cannot be summed up with the word "feelings" then I'll give it an honest appraisal, but any feelings-based arguments will be ignored from this point forward.

Should you demote your demand for change into an opinion that more diversity would be nice to see and that you hope it becomes a sensible business decision, then I'll be happy to agree with you, as I think it would be nice to see, just like TIE Fighter HD would be nice to see.

While it remains a demand I will vehemently disagree with you, because you have no evidence whatsoever to back up that demand.

There are (for the sake of simplicity) two, mutually exclusive options available to developers who have committed to creating a game focusing on a single-character narrative. They can either A: have it star a male, or B: have it star a female. There is zero extra cost, and zero extra risk to choosing between A and B.

Your position is: "You must show proof that option B will result in more money otherwise the only reasonable choice is option A."

My response is: "Why do I need to PROVE option B is better? There's no cost difference and there's no proof either way that A is better. Why is option A the default fallback?"

You: "You have to prove it because you are asking me to do option B. If you are going to ask me to do option B without proof, otherwise I have no reason to do anything other than option A."

Me: "Ok, but why do you have to do option A? Since there's no cost difference, why are you defaulting to A?"

You: "It's not my job to prove why option B is worse. It's your job to prove why option B is better, because you are advocating option B. If you can't show that B is better, the clear best choice is option A."

Me: "There is literally not one iota of difference between them, from the developer's perspective, other than 99% of everything already on the shelf followed option A. I can't prove option B is better, because neither one is better."

You: "Then nobody should do option B, because you can't prove it will earn more money. Everyone should just stick with option A."

Do you see my conundrum here? When you come here, and say "nope, there's no reason you can list, other than proving that some hypothetical game will make more money with option B that I will listen to," you are also saying that, by default, option A is better at making money. Except there's no way to prove either one makes more money, and neither one costs more. So why is option A better?