Jimquisition: Vertigo

[deathjavu]

Also, the argument about catering to current demographics is dumb on many levels. I made a flippant joke earlier, but let me break it down further:

a) Catering just to the current demographics is a dipshit way of doing business on many levels.

-All businesses should be looking to expand their demographics to increase both profits and long term survivability.

-Creating games for the same demographic (at present, teenage and college age boys) leads to the creation of the same games over and over again, which results in repetitive, boring, and uninteresting games such as the millions of COD clones stanking up the market.

-Everyone competing for the same market leads to market oversaturation, resulting in humiliating multimillion dollar flops such as whatever Medal of Honor game EA has shit out most recently (I don't know and don't care).

You clearly have no idea how a business works.

1) It's not always possible to expand your demographics. For example if the only game you've got the equipment for is shooters you can't make RPGs.

Another problem is that many businesses have gone bankrupt because they tried to expand their demographics (requires a huge capital investment), failed, and the cost of this failure bankrupted them. Being a niche company is often much safer.

2) If your demographic wants one type of game you keep making this game as long as it makes money. The fact that you don't like this business model doesn't make it a bad model.

3) Most flops are due to companies overestimating how large the market is then spending too much on making a game, rather than making bad games. That's why you can get flops even with games that sell over 4 million copies and was praised by critics.

b) What comes first, the appeal to other demographics or the interest from said demographic?

-I bet you think that's a chicken-egg question, which would admittedly be cute, but actually similar histories in movies and books prove it's not. The appeal almost always comes first, and then lo and behold, the statistically likely audiences show up in droves. Look at Twilight! It succeeded solely because it aimed itself at an underserved book audience. Or XCOM/Civ5 for the strategy demographic, if you want to talk about something not shit. Business has proven time and time again that if you're aiming at an underserved market, all you have to do is exist, regardless of quality. From a business perspective, aiming where no one else has is almost always a winner.

Twilight targeted the teenage girl romance market, which is one of the most over-saturated book markets. Next you'll be telling me that the fantasy market was underserved because Harry Potter did so well.

Your belief that if you just make something for an "underserved" audience you'll be a success is nothing but wishful thinking. There are countless examples of games, TV shows, and movies that tried to appeal to the "underserved" but failed because the "underserved" didn't like it.

Teenage girl romance is not the same as middle aged woman romance, which is indeed a saturated market. Teenage girls, especially teenage girl nerds, was an underserved market that allowed the success of Twilight and Hunger Games. Name another book series specifically for teenage girls and teenage girl nerds. I'll wait.

Blacksploitation films. Another great example- no one made films to appeal to black people because they assumed they wouldn't sell. Huge financial successes when someone finally noticed the waiting market.

It's very simple- businesses will stick to the same models until they sink by them because they're so terrified of any risk, particularly when they have such overinflated budges (as you noted). But as Jim has discussed in many videos, there's no good reason to put out that much fucking money when making a game! Then you could aim for new markets without the ludicrous upfront costs, minimizing the risk while still allowing for expansions to market share. If overbudgeted games are the cause of flops, why not make some cheaper ones to expand your audience?

This principle applies to the "well the change is inevitable stop whining about it" crowd. No, the change isn't inevitable. Objects do not move without the application of outside forces, and that applies to businesses too. Businesses HATE change and will always be dragged to it kicking and screaming (witness every safety regulation ever). Quite frankly discussions like this are the only outside force that could change because of the lack of current female consumers. The only way a company could even know there are missed consumer bases is conversations like this.

Anyways, I have offered a handful of examples of where aiming for underserved markets hit the jackpot. You have provided none of this same tactic causing a company's implosion.

----

Oh, and that other argument, the "I'm so sick of hearing about this (gender issues in games)".

If you're sick of these discussions, why are you still in them? No one put a gun to your head and forced you to post! And it's the same people saying this time and time again. Are you just masochists or what?

 

[Velocir_X]

Objects do not move without the application of outside forces.

You closet Aristotelian, you! (patiently waits for someone to get the joke)

 

[daxterx2005]

If Sexy female characters are the worlds biggest issue, I think we can sleep soundly tonight.

 

[gargantual]

ight. fair point. But I still think hetero guy devs'll be hetero guy devs', and the market for male servicing games won't evaporate. I know. I admit I'm a customer

. A real game changer would be not just women who aren't held by early 20th century female perceptions but one that a 'dude' gamer values beyond sex appeal. Technically in movement, and because of shared human aspirations. If you look at how valuable Major Kusanagi is as a brilliant leader, respectable and cool head in Ghost in the Shell. If you want someone in your corner you don't get better than her. In a jam she's always right on time.

What I dislike is the proclivity of total arsehole protagonists, or plastic white dudes and the underlying fearfulness regarding display of sexual characters because that feeds the cynicism.

I enjoy playing as unrepentant villians and total ???marks but I'd also like more progressive dude heros Peter Parkers and Karate Kid's who kick ass, but really when necessary. Who even if they are still initally motivated by love and attraction but realize their power is their global responsibility, and grow into their 'hero' status. They think about their desires, pursuits and how what they do affects others, and earn their keep with people instead of just 'f-you I got mine'

 

[deathjavu]

Care to explain why so many women want to be a princess and so few want to be Rambo. Could it be because the vast majority of women do have similar tastes? That would explain why chick-flicks appeal mainly to women, while action movies don't.

I'll say it again:

CITATION.

NEEDED.

You need a citation to tell you that little girls prefer to be princesses and women prefer chick flicks? Have you never met a woman before?

What about everything covered with the Disney Princesses? The dress up dolls aren't aimed at boys.
http://princess.disney.com/shop

Here's a definition of chick-flick:
"a motion picture intended to appeal especially to women".

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chick%20flick

Finally here's a study of movie preferences based on race, age, and gender. They found that women prefer romance; while men prefer action and sci-fi.
http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/media3.html

You're aware that it's a) literally impossible to separate societal factors from biological factors in purchasing decisions like this, meaning these decisions could just as easily be down to societal influence and b) there exist(ed) societies in history that have completely different gender roles than what is now considered traditional?

(sauces, pick your spice: we've got official research paper, wikipedia and blog post)

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174235

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_roles_among_the_indigenous_peoples_of_North_America

http://culturalfascinations.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/women-who-hunted-an-examination-of-gender-roles/

----

Also, oodles of people who mentioned Wynne from DA:O - you clearly haven't been around the escapist long enough

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/stolen-pixels/6848-Stolen-Pixels-148-Dragon-Aged

 

[springheeljack]

I was just thinking today about the fact that rockstar has not made a game with a female lead yet
I wish they would it would be interesting playing as one

Grand Theft Auto is a game where you play a criminal. The criminal gender ratio in real life is 10:1 male. It is not unrealistic for a game about criminals to have most of the characters be men.

Well keep in mind he's not talking about GTA in general.

They have made...a few new IP's in the past. The only thing that comes up right now is Bully.
So it's entirely possible for them to make a new IP.

I mean, they made 1 billion dollars afterall.

Well honestly I was thinking about gta at first but then I realized that none of the other rockstar games had any female player controlled characters either (Well except in Max Payne 2 where you get to play as Mona Sax briefly)
Anyway if any game company has the potential to create a unconventional female character its rockstar

 

[Velocir_X]

Teenage girl romance is not the same as middle aged woman romance, which is indeed a saturated market. Teenage girls, especially teenage girl nerds, was an underserved market that allowed the success of Twilight and Hunger Games. Name another book series specifically for teenage girls and teenage girl nerds. I'll wait.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanormalRomance
look under literature

Also Nancy Drew, and that one thing about the girl that was recently on kickstarter for a reboot/continuation

Oh, and that other argument, the "I'm so sick of hearing about this (gender issues in games)".

If you're sick of these discussions, why are you still in them? No one put a gun to your head and forced you to post! And it's the same people saying this time and time again. Are you just masochists or what?

I personally find discussions of any sort fun, but to explain the rest of my brethren:
a)These discussions bleed out and affect everyone, especially when their express purpose is to shame those in disagreement into submission
b)This is not a case of if you ignore it, it will go away. Such a thing as opportunity costs exists (and is rarely, if ever, mentioned.)Recently Anita Sarkeesian was hired on by DICE to "monitor the representation of women in Mirror's Edge 2". Is it wrong for someone who doesn't care about these issues or finds them trivial to complain about money being spent on them instead of on improving the game's gameplay or environments?

 

[MaximumTheHormone]

Sick of this 'gender issues' bullshit Jim.
Women aren't represented as variously as men because there's not as many women as playable characters. Developers have only produced pure power fantasy without any of the artistic deviance that comes with an en masse market were products are required to differentiate themselves.
Why?
Because games with female protagonists have traditionally sold poorly compared to those with male ones.
It isn't misogynistic, its a simple case of capitalistic push and pull factors.
Its similar to, say, someone complaining that its racist that not enough anime gets shipped over to their local video outlet, even though they're the only one interested in that sort of thing.

 

[Velocir_X]

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174235

Thank you, I will have to go to the schools library and read this closer. Very compelling work from the synopsis, but as always the devil lies in the details. Its quite possible this can be described in terms of the difference between Empathizing and Systematizing (Simon's work). Maybe its even evidence (of some sort) of the predicted extreme empathizing type.

Because fundamentally whose in charge or who does what duties, does not necessarily have to affect who likes what.
Good stuff though, very though provoking, more like this!.

 

[Reyold]

How about Laverne from Day of the Tentacle? She's a main protagonist, has to fend for herself in the future, and not conventionally attractive. She's not evil, but she's not quite right in the head either.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

From dictionary.com:
Cocksure: overconfident, arrogant, conceited

arrogant and conceited are clearly insults, and of a similar connotation to dense.

Yeah, dictionary.com - quality reference material right there. I was using it in the more traditional sense - which is simply over-confident, not necessarily arrogant.

Notice how there are multiple meanings of words attached to definitions? I'm pretty sure you weren't using "dense" in terms of weight-to-volume ratios, because that wouldn't make sense in the context..

 

[deathjavu]

Teenage girl romance is not the same as middle aged woman romance, which is indeed a saturated market. Teenage girls, especially teenage girl nerds, was an underserved market that allowed the success of Twilight and Hunger Games. Name another book series specifically for teenage girls and teenage girl nerds. I'll wait.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanormalRomance
look under literature

Also Nancy Drew, and that one thing about the girl that was recently on kickstarter for a reboot/continuation

Oh, and that other argument, the "I'm so sick of hearing about this (gender issues in games)".

If you're sick of these discussions, why are you still in them? No one put a gun to your head and forced you to post! And it's the same people saying this time and time again. Are you just masochists or what?

I personally find discussions of any sort fun, but to explain the rest of my brethren:
a)These discussions bleed out and affect everyone, especially when their express purpose is to shame those in disagreement into submission
b)This is not a case of if you ignore it, it will go away. Such a thing as opportunity costs exists (and is rarely, if ever, mentioned.)Recently Anita Sarkeesian was hired on by DICE to "monitor the representation of women in Mirror's Edge 2". Is it wrong for someone who doesn't care about these issues or finds them trivial to complain about money being spent on them instead of on improving the game's gameplay or environments?

Considering how extensive TVTropes lists usually are, delving into the most obscure of obscure series, that's actually a pretty short list (especially in non-lit categories, which I realize isn't what we were talking about but is still kinda relevant). Several of those series aren't centered around female characters so I'm not entirely sure if they fit the bill (?) (I didn't want to go through them all, I haven't been trapped on TVT in years and I intend to keep it that way). Admittedly, there are a lot more than I would have expected. But I'm still sticking to the "Twilight aimed at a market that wasn't terribly well served" explanation because it's generally the most reasonable explanation for its success.

They hired who for what? Couldn't they have gotten an actual female game developer or something? Someone who understands how making games works? I know a couple of them have quit due to harassment but there have to be some female developers still around...

Ok, point you on that one. But talking about opportunity cost is participating in the conversation, wheras "I wish this conversation would go away" is really not.

I don't buy the first point though. The only way someone could be "shamed" is if they entered into some part of the conversation, i.e. by clicking on a link that was almost certainly explicitly about this subject. I've avoided these conversations for days and weeks at a time while still following gaming news to a fairly reasonable degree, it wasn't even hard.

I have no idea why I jumped in twofooted this time. Just having a shit day, I guess.

 

[Velocir_X]

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

"Zatkin said. It?s also hard to draw many broad conclusions from this data. There are so few games with exclusively female heroes, and those few games are given such a small marketing budget, do we even know how well a large-budget, marketed game with a female hero would perform?"

The study is inconclusive. My best counterargument goes as follows: From the set of games that have had little to no marketing we have seen at least a handful of smash hits (minecraft most readily comes to mind). If the games with female only protagonists belong to that set, and in terms of that set are statistically significant (looking in terms of all games that have had similar marketing budgets to, say, mirror's edge, fat princess or Remember Me, 24 games ain't bad), wouldn't it be logical to expect at least one smash hit with a female only protagonist? This is all tentative hypothesizing of course.

 

[deathjavu]

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

"Zatkin said. It?s also hard to draw many broad conclusions from this data. There are so few games with exclusively female heroes, and those few games are given such a small marketing budget, do we even know how well a large-budget, marketed game with a female hero would perform?"

The study is inconclusive. My best counterargument goes as follows: From the set of games that have had little to no marketing we have seen at least a handful of smash hits (minecraft most readily comes to mind). If the games with female only protagonists belong to that set, and in terms of that set are statistically significant (looking in terms of all games that have had similar marketing budgets to, say, mirror's edge, fat princess or Remember Me, 24 games ain't bad), wouldn't it be logical to expect at least one smash hit with a female only protagonist? This is all tentative hypothesizing of course.

However, they talk about another article in which marketing is identified as one of the strongest predictors of success

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-power-of-review-scores-why-critics-have-more-control-than-we-think1

"Awareness goes a long way. Marketing spend is actually a higher factor on sales than game quality."

Outlier success stories such as Minecraft does not a solid conclusion make, as we both well know. Also, I will guess without reservation that "games with little marketing" is a much, much, MUCH bigger data pool than "games with female protagonists". There are tons of games that come out every year that we never hear about- most without female protagonists.

Because fundamentally whose in charge or who does what duties, does not necessarily have to affect who likes what.

Damn, I need to go to bed. Look around for more scholarly articles about historical tribes with different gender roles (most of them were highly culturally impacted by contact with "western" civilization, which is why we have to go anthropological). I know I've read about others. It's also true that this doesn't really talk about what people "liked"...but then again, historically we were way more concerned with survival and we don't have nearly as much data about leisure time. Because, y'know, they didn't have much. The point I was trying to make is that it is one of the few pieces of data we can get about the line between societal and biological influences in gender roles because we're influenced by the society around us from age 0. Societies with non "traditional" gender roles kinda point towards societal factors, but admittedly data can be a bit scarce.

Plus there's the whole argument that other historical records have been skewed by males dominating the field (anthropology) in the 17-1800s when it was starting up in the modern sense, eras in which male domination would have been assumed... but that's a whole other kettle of fish I don't know a whole lot about and my god I have to get up at 7 it's 1:00 gnight.

 

[Velocir_X]

Considering how extensive TVTropes lists usually are, delving into the most obscure of obscure series, that's actually a pretty short list (especially in non-lit categories, which I realize isn't what we were talking about but is still kinda relevant). Several of those series aren't centered around female characters so I'm not entirely sure if they fit the bill (?) (I didn't want to go through them all, I haven't been trapped on TVT in years and I intend to keep it that way). Admittedly, there are a lot more than I would have expected. But I'm still sticking to the "Twilight aimed at a market that wasn't terribly well served" explanation because it's generally the most reasonable explanation for its success.

They hired who for what? Couldn't they have gotten an actual female game developer or something? Someone who understands how making games works? I know a couple of them have quit due to harassment but there have to be some female developers still around...

Ok, point you on that one. But talking about opportunity cost is participating in the conversation, wheras "I wish this conversation would go away" is really not.

I don't buy the first point though. The only way someone could be "shamed" is if they entered into some part of the conversation, i.e. by clicking on a link that was almost certainly explicitly about this subject. I've avoided these conversations for days and weeks at a time while still following gaming news to a fairly reasonable degree, it wasn't even hard.

I have no idea why I jumped in twofooted this time. Just having a shit day, I guess.

I would describe Twilight not as serving an undeserved market but rather as the predictor of a fad. You wouldn't say Justin Bieber or the Jonas Brothers' popularity was the result of serving an undeserved market, would you?

By shaming I meant the general inflammatory tone of the initial claims of these discussions, and how attention grabbing they are. That probably has no more or different effect than the rampant microagressions of sexism (which in my opinion means not at all) but you can see these people coming from the same place.

As for opportunity costs, what I meant was that people are using imprecise language (all too common). What they mean by "I don't want to have to deal with this discussion" is "I don't want to have to deal with the effects of this discussion" that is the opportunity costs of dealing with sexism, or paying to fix the presentation of Faith (which was quite all right thank you very much) instead of paying to fix ME's shhit combat.

Also man, I feel for you, having a shit day sucks, but damn that's some negative selection. I generally prefer to enter discussions when I have an interesting thought hit me (like the one in my first post in this thread which sadly no one has responded to /shameless bump) /offtopic

 

[Velocir_X]

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

"Zatkin said. It?s also hard to draw many broad conclusions from this data. There are so few games with exclusively female heroes, and those few games are given such a small marketing budget, do we even know how well a large-budget, marketed game with a female hero would perform?"

The study is inconclusive. My best counterargument goes as follows: From the set of games that have had little to no marketing we have seen at least a handful of smash hits (minecraft most readily comes to mind). If the games with female only protagonists belong to that set, and in terms of that set are statistically significant (looking in terms of all games that have had similar marketing budgets to, say, mirror's edge, fat princess or Remember Me, 24 games ain't bad), wouldn't it be logical to expect at least one smash hit with a female only protagonist? This is all tentative hypothesizing of course.

However, they talk about another article in which marketing is identified as one of the strongest predictors of success

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-power-of-review-scores-why-critics-have-more-control-than-we-think1

"Awareness goes a long way. Marketing spend is actually a higher factor on sales than game quality."

Outlier success stories such as Minecraft does not a solid conclusion make, as we both well know. Also, I will guess without reservation that "games with little marketing" is a much, much, MUCH bigger data pool than "games with female protagonists". There are tons of games that come out every year that we never hear about- most without female protagonists.

Because fundamentally whose in charge or who does what duties, does not necessarily have to affect who likes what.

Damn, I need to go to bed. Look around for more scholarly articles about historical tribes with different gender roles (most of them were highly culturally impacted by contact with "western" civilization, which is why we have to go anthropological). I know I've read about others. It's also true that this doesn't really talk about what people "liked"...but then again, historically we were way more concerned with survival and we don't have nearly as much data about leisure time. Because, y'know, they didn't have much. The point I was trying to make is that it is one of the few pieces of data we can get about the line between societal and biological influences in gender roles because we're influenced by the society around us from age 0. Societies with non "traditional" gender roles kinda point towards societal factors, but admittedly data can be a bit scarce.

Plus there's the whole argument that other historical records have been skewed by males dominating the field (anthropology) in the 17-1800s when it was starting up in the modern sense, eras in which male domination would have been assumed... but that's a whole other kettle of fish I don't know a whole lot about and my god I have to get up at 7 it's 1:00 gnight.

Yeah I got to go too. Night.

If you look I'm not in anthropology. (actually in chemE and materialsE but) I happen to have a love evolutionary psychology ever since reading Dawkins' early work, so yeah. Those things you posted, though, are mighty interesting, and I'd love to see them examined from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, sadly I'm not the one for the job.

 

[varmintx]

I was racking my brain to come up with a character that fit your criteria. The closest was Chris from Suikoden III [http://suikoden.wikia.com/wiki/Chris_Lightfellow], and even then, she's certainly not unattractive (though thankfully she wears proper armor not that idiotic breasts built-in kind). She's good at heart, but is forced into morally questionable situations as documented in that wiki.

 

[MaximumTheHormone]

or..?

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

Looking at broad stroke data really isn't helpful as it paints in strokes of generalizations and, as the article says, there aren't that many female exclusive protagonist titles (24 out of like 669 games).
We could use specific example to see if games are given similar marketing measures that they will sell to the same extent.
Tomb Raider vs. Uncharted 1
- Both action/ adventure titles from fairly highly held developers
- Tomb Raider had more money to spend on marketing and multiple platforms to make up for Sony's endorsement
- Tomb Raider had a budget of 100 mil, compared to uncharted 1 20 mil
- similar meta critic, both positive though (Lara Croft 86, Uncharted 88)
- Uncharted was a Sony exclusive, Tomb Raider launched on all but Wii + handhelds, therefore it had a higher sale potential
From this information it would seem that these titles are comparable, if not that Tomb Raider has the slight advantage marketing wise. However the sales data for these games:
Uncharted: Drakes Fortune- 4.16
Tomb Raider (2013) - 2.84
-source: VG Charts
inb4 Uncharted has been out longer, if Lara Croft was out for longer it would sell more.
inb4 what about selling 3.4 million?
1) Squenix have already denoted Tomb Raider 2013 a disappointment and after the initial marketing push sales have slumped, whereas Naughty Dog relied on close to Sony (Something Squenix had, but decided to swap for a multiplatform model) to ensure a strong presence at sony marketplaces and in Ps3 related media (while still remaining with a marketing budget well below Tomb Raider's)
2) 3.4 mil units were shipped to retailers, however not all of these were sold thus 2.84 mil retail sales while Squenix can still boast they got a decent return.