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[LordBucket]

The main problem with what Lord Bucket said is that he's treating it like, as he said, a female audience is a hypothetical audience. When, as has been stated, it's not? 47-50% of gamers are female, so the audience is split, but the actual games are not.

1) It is completely silly to expect people who've been successfully making billions of dollars for decades using a very specific formula by targeting a specific audience to suddenly change their strategy to accommodate your own personal agenda for gender representation. Clearly what they're doing is working. What profit incentive is there to change? If there are 20 years of industry sales figures supporting the premise that male-centric games sell better, it's ridiculous to expect them to say "oh, look...male gamers are still a majority, but they're not as much a majority as they've been for the entire history of gaming. So let's totally change our strategy that has worked perfectly well for decades and that is still working perfectly well despite the increase in female gamers...and use a different strategy in order to make some feminists and moral guardians happy."

2) The 47% figure is overall. Various submarkets have different figures. For example, only 25% of console gamers are female. It's silly to expect console companies to go out of their way to appeal to female gamers that aren't in their market.

[LordBucket]

I had to look up Phantasy Star to be sure.  Apparently only the first game had a female heroine, followed by four sequels with male main characters (Online lets you play as a girl, though).

Are you saying you're not happy with that, and you want the majority of games to have female leads? Are you saying you want an exact 50% gender ratio? What's your goal here? What's the problem?

There's still a problem now, but it was worse back then.

...what is the problem? Exactly what? The point of my post you responded to was to demonstrate that there are, and pretty much always have been games with female protagonists. That entire train of thought started when Vector implied that there weren't many games with female leads, which is clearly demonstrably incorrect.

There are lots of games with female leads. Yes, there are lots games with male leads too. A majority, even. But if you want to play as a girl, there's no problem at all finding a game that will accommodate you.

Does everyone agree on this?

Because if so...then again, what exactly is the problem? Are people seriously complaining about the fact that games with male leads exist? Is the problem that people just arbitrarily don't like the ratio? Why? Why does that need to be a problem? If you want to play a girl, you can. If you want to play a boy, you can. If you want to play strong woman who's the master of her own fate, you can. If you want to play a strong man who rescues helpless girls and gets smooches for it, you can.

Everyone is being catered to.

If you really have a problem with the fact that even though you're being catered to...other people are also being catered to...I think the problem is not with the gaming industry.

[Solifuge]

It's not just a matter of whether women are portrayed in games at all. There are and have been female characters for a long time. However, the problem is in HOW these female characters are represented. We want this to be done in a way that lets gamers project themselves onto the stories of female characters in a heroic or positive capacity, like the majority of existing protagonists in games (which are almost always male).

As for gaming being a "Primarily Male Industry" that's not true:

• Forty-seven percent of all players are women, and women over 18 years of age are one of the industry's fastest growing demographics.
  
• Today, adult women represent a greater portion of the game-playing population (30 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent).

Women want to, and do, play games. I think part of the problem is that games have been marketed primarily for boys since the beginning, which means that they'll be bought primarily for and by boys, which skews the marketing data, which in turn skews the content that developers put into new games. However, as seen above, there are plenty of women who want to play games, despite the industry brushing them aside. And in return, when the industry decides to make female-oriented games, what they get is a slew of titles like Puppy Paradise Island, Best Friendz 4Ever: Shop-A-Thon, and Housewife 4: The Cooking Adventure. Pretty much consistently, and for decades.

Lets look at some old game ads for a moment, shall we? Feel free to skip around; some of these are long:
Exhibit A - Nintendo Entertainment System
Exhibit B - Sega Megadrive/Genesis
Exhibit C - Atari 2600
Exhibit BLURGHHD - Playstation 1

Synopsis: Nintendo markets to boys exclusively. Sega Genesis does the same. Atari did a few commercials where they show the system as appropriate for both genders; it's still skewed, but not 100%. Playstation 1 is just as Male-skewed as the other two.

If you'd like to do more reading, here's a great Wikipedia link: The portrayal of women in video games

EDIT - a funny thing I learned:
Exhibit 1: Search youtube for "Top 10 Video Games for Girls" and get mostly a mountain of boobs.
Exhibit 2: Search youtube for "Top 10 Video Games for Boys" and get mostly top-10 video game lists.

[Max White]

90s ads, I love you so... Don't ever change!

Oh wait, damn. 

[fqllve]

1) It is completely silly to expect people who've been successfully making billions of dollars for decades using a very specific formula by targeting a specific audience to suddenly change their strategy to accommodate your own personal agenda for gender representation. Clearly what they're doing is working. What profit incentive is there to change? If there are 20 years of industry sales figures supporting the premise that male-centric games sell better, it's ridiculous to expect them to say "oh, look...male gamers are still a majority, but they're not as much a majority as they've been for the entire history of gaming. So let's totally change our strategy that has worked perfectly well for decades and that is still working perfectly well despite the increase in female gamers...and use a different strategy in order to make some feminists and moral guardians happy."

Why is it necessarily a personal agenda for gender representation? Isn't it possible that it is just consumers complaining about a situation they find undesirable and making requests to accommodate what they would like to see produced by the industry so that they can later go on to purchase the products that fulfill their requests? I would personally like to play more games with female protagonists. I would like to play more games where female characters are treated as more than a goal or a romantic lead. I would also like to play more games where the characters are treated with more respect in general. Having those desires and expressing them is not unreasonable. I just don't see why this situation is any more objectionable than any other situation where a consumer base complains about a situation.

If you think there are sufficient amounts of those games, well that's fine. But that doesn't make it wrong for people to request more of them. The whole point of the entertainment industry is to cater your product to the requests of your consumers, and especially in situations like this, where as you point out there is significant inertia against the proposition, these requests need to be made vocal. This is exactly how the industry does and should work.

[Reelya]

@Solifuge: Ummm, those puppy simulators and shit, actually sell really well. Nintendogs is in the top 10 selling videogames bought by females. This is a business these people run, they're not evil charities spending their own cash to try and indoctrinate people into locked gender roles or something. Your automatic assumption that these "girly" games are somehow inferior to "what boys like" is a sexist assumption in itself. And there's also the uncomfortable conclusion that girls don't know their own minds, and are indoctrinated to like the shitty games, and if they could just escape their "programming" they'd like the type of games that us smart people, boys, purchase.

[Putnam]

Nintendogs is not Littlest Pet Shop.

[Reelya]

But the existence of "Littlest Pet Shop" doesn't mean anyone is FORCED to play that. Choice exists. It's not like there some sort of video game gulag here. Someone had to consciously put money down on that, rather than Nintendogs. There's also the elitism still prevalent in that statement that "girly" games are inherently inferior.

There's also this weird assumption that the entire "pets" concept, is a female thing, just because girls like games about pets.

[Solifuge]

I like how you:
1) Ignored every point I posted, but the one line where I talked about the really terrible "girl games" that are on the market.
2) Read what I wrote as me saying "Businesses are all evil and are forcing gender roles on us!" which I don't recall either writing or implying.
3) Started saying I was being sexist for... calling all girls stupid, and all boys smart? Somehow?

I probably shouldn't feed the trolls, but B'whuuuuuuh?

[Reelya]

First up you cherry picked only terrible games which are marketed to girls, and ignored, e.g. "The Sims" which is a very popular game with women.

You also listed non-existent titles as your examples: "Puppy Paradise Island". I pointed out that Nintendogs is one of the best selling games for girls. Basically you're sneering at the entire concept of the games girls actually like to play. People make more pet-related games not because they want to force women into some mold, but because someone else made a pet game and it sold 50 million copies. I can't see how a "cute pet" game is sexist AT ALL, just because girls enjoy them.

[fqllve]

The majority of "girly" games I've seen or played just aren't very well made. Say what you will about Nintendogs (I don't personally like the games) those games are at least well-crafted. By contrast, most other games that would be labeled girly are little more than shovelware marketed towards preteen and younger girls. In general they're games based on an existing IP and I don't think it's sexist to point out that they're typically of lower quality. There are some exceptions, but as a rule there aren't many games marketed towards adult women.

[Reelya]

Solifuge didn't make that argument in his original post though, he criticized the conceptual basis of those games without dscriminating on production quality: games about pets, friendship, cooking are naturally inferior to sensible games about killing things. Kids games in general have sucky production quality. I've played plenty of sub-par shooters, rpg, rts games over the years as well. Name some really well-produced games for little boys for example?

Even shooters which have a strong non-sexualized female protagonist aren't amongst the best-selling titles for women. So, when they start supporting such titles, more titles like that will be produced.

[Putnam]

Solifuge didn't make that argument in his original post though, he criticized the conceptual basis of those games without dscriminating on production quality: games about pets, friendship, cooking are naturally inferior to sensible games about killing things. Even shooters which have a strong non-sexualized female protagonist aren't amongst the best-selling titles for women.

No, Solifuge did not say that the conceptual basis is inferior. He said that the games themselves were inferior and happened to be those kinds of games.

At the very least, what I just said has just as much grounding in reality as what you did.

[Reelya]

Go back a page and read his post:

And in return, when the industry decides to make female-oriented games, what they get is a slew of titles like Puppy Paradise Island, Best Friendz 4Ever: Shop-A-Thon, and Housewife 4: The Cooking Adventure.

The point here is that he didn't complain about the budgets or production quality, but the concept behind the games. There's an unstated assumption that boy's games are about "real" things and what women and girls like isn't real games. Not just for low-budget ones, but stuff like The Sims gets the same treatment: girls like it so it isn't a "real" game.

[fqllve]

Name some really well-produced games for little boys for example?

That's the point though. Most of the games targeting the female demographic are marketed towards children, and games for children tend to suck.