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[smeeprocket]

That doesn't sound right, at least as a mass trend because women make up 18% of computer science degrees, and 22% of the games development workforce. If they were being unfairly stopped at the gates, you'd expect the percentage of women employed to be lower than the graduate rate.

At the same time female graduate levels slumped and stayed around 18% since 2007, women employed in the games industry doubled in the last 5 years. There's no great evidence that masses of women developers are being excluded deliberately.

how many of those women are working for AAA games? Because I'm not feeling represented.

[alexandertnt]

It's not going to 100% be the case, but I think female developers can better make a game women, and honestly both genders, can find enjoyment in. Well, tbf, I find enjoyment in games marketed towards males, I just feel very excluded.

Actually, I think the focus should be on the people who actually control how a game turns out. The people that finance the game, the people who work on the consoles at Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo (who usually have guidelines and rules for the sort of games they expect on their console, as well as have the final say on whether a game can be released at all), and last and unfortunetely least, the game designers and writers (whose main jobs is to design a game within the often tight constrants given by the last 2 groups).

Not that getting more women into areas like programming is a bad idea, of course. It's just unlikely in itself to change much about games.

And I can not express enough that there is a very creepy, aggressive, rape-y element in gaming culture. Like I said, I don't use voice chat for TF2 because every guy on the chat will become absolutely enthralled by you, either making overtly sexual advances, or just acting like you are a mystical unicorn that they have to compliment or show off to constantly.

Ugh, I have actually experienced some of this myself in other games, as my voice is fairly high-pitched and can be mistaken as feminine over a poor quality audio chat (despite the fact that my ingame name is clearly spelt with the male spelling of Alexander ).

[Gentlefish]

That doesn't sound right, at least as a mass trend because women make up 18% of computer science degrees, and 22% of the games development workforce. If they were being unfairly stopped at the gates, you'd expect the percentage of women employed to be lower than the graduate rate.

At the same time female graduate levels slumped and stayed around 18% since 2007, women employed in the games industry doubled in the last 5 years. There's no great evidence that masses of women developers are being excluded deliberately.

Doubled doesn't mean anything with such small numbers. 1 doubled is, after all, just 2. 22% of the entire game industry is still a significantly small number. How many of those 22% are able to call the shots?

[Reelya]

That doesn't sound right, at least as a mass trend because women make up 18% of computer science degrees, and 22% of the games development workforce. If they were being unfairly stopped at the gates, you'd expect the percentage of women employed to be lower than the graduate rate.

At the same time female graduate levels slumped and stayed around 18% since 2007, women employed in the games industry doubled in the last 5 years. There's no great evidence that masses of women developers are being excluded deliberately.

Doubled doesn't mean anything with such small numbers. 1 doubled is, after all, just 2. 22% of the entire game industry is still a significantly small number. How many of those 22% are able to call the shots?

I didn't say they're calling the shots. It was in response to a specific claim that there are tons of qualified women developers out there, trying to get into the games industry only to find the door slammed in their faces. All I had to do, and was attempting to do, was address that one claim, so you can't read any more into it than that.

If they doubled the numbers of female game developers employed in the industry in the last 5 years and there's been no increase in female graduates during the same period, to the point that the percentage of women in the industry now exceeds the percentage graduating with computer-related degrees, that sort of casts doubt on the idea that they're actively blocking qualified women from getting involved in the industry. If anything, this shows that the games industry is measurably more pro-female than other computer-science related fields.

[Rolan7]

Wow, interesting 7 pages.  I learned about the income gap a bit... Disheartening.

I've been thinking about Far Cry 4.  There are several things I didn't like about it, mainly game mechanics, but it sure has an interesting portrayal of gender issues.  Does a really good job at it, in my opinion.  Some highlights:
* There are lots of women in the resistance, maybe even half (perhaps due to my choices in-game...)
* Two of the three enemy generals are women, with interesting characterization (One more so than the other, imho)
* Without spoiling anything, the binary "morality" choices for this game basically pit progressiveness, prosperity and women's rights against idealism, stability, and cultural traditions.  Was not expecting that... at all.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I seriously considered helping Sabal with each mission, but at first his idealism just seemed unrealistic.  Then towards the end he started getting downright misogynistic, calling Amita a "bitch" and mocking her struggle as an ambitious woman in a traditional society.  I know he was angry about his cultural traditions getting despoiled, but the way he reacted just made me feel like those traditions needed upheaving.
Also he tried "Your dad would have supported me!", which would have worked better if I hadn't found so many of my father's journals...  Yeah, not very progressive.

All the enemy soldiers are male, but when contrasted with the egalitarian rebel army that just makes the bad guys more eeeevil.

Far Cry 2 did a fairly good job, with several of the mercenary buddies being women.  Too bad the PC could only be one of several male mercenaries, probably so dialogue could refer to the PC as "dude" "man" and "him".  The PC options you didn't choose appear in-game as buddies, the PC themself has no spoken dialogue and little character beyond being somewhat sociopathic.  Still, could have been a lot worse.  I still remember the first time I tried to heal a buddy, Flora, and it... just didn't work.  The game is arbitrarily cruel like that, particularly what you (have to?) do rather than let them bleed out.

Far Cry 3 was a bit weird.  The two girls in Brody's group of friends basically nag him constantly.  The exotic islander high priestess seduces him.  The older village women sit around doing villager things (one runs a shop) while the young ones stand around, party, or prostitute themselves depending on the area.  They definitely don't join the all-male rebel army, despite their divine ruler being a woman.  Well, maybe that's why they leave the hopeless battle to the men.  It's all pretty much justified though, particularly considering FC2 and 4.  None of Brodie's friends are supposed to be very sympathetic, they're all clueless and privileged, representing a life he's leaving behind.  The co-op has a Left4Dead style selection of 3 guys and 1 woman, and she's basically the only one who isn't a criminal thug.

I wish more games were like Planetside 2.  Everyone's wearing practical sci-fi armor, and in typical conditions it's really hard to tell whether an enemy is male or female.  They're either too far away or a split second away from murdering you.  I think chest plates are slightly deformed, but not *boob shaped*.  The main sign of female soldiers is the voices of teammates (and enemies) calling out enemies and demanding healing.  It's perfectly fair and equal, which feels so natural I almost didn't notice it.

None of that WoW nonsense where most armor sets lose important vital-covering pieces if worn by women.  What kind of message is that??  I reiterate that players should be able to choose between sexy and complete armor regardless of their character's gender.  Nothing wrong with wanting to look sexy at the expense of practicality, but tying that directly to gender is a disturbing (yet oh so common) message.

[wobbly]

I'm not underestimating the pay gap, I'm citing the actual figures economist have looked at.

A feminist group even found that pay rates are equal in most graduate fields. The only unequal areas were K-12 education and sales/corporate roles.

What proportion of the job market fits in to the "other occupation" & "other white-collor occupation" on your graph? There's a fairly large discreprency there, though it's also hard to tell whether they're comparing people with the same occupation or different. Also the gap in the "management" bar. Seems to me an area where your pay is more likely to be heavily negotiated then technical roles. It's tricky to tell because engineering jobs tend to ride the line between technical & management, & I have no idea how they divided the data. Sales is also weird, does that count commissions in the figures? How much of the issue is gender biases in buying patterns, how much the employer?

[10ebbor10]

None of that WoW nonsense where most armor sets lose important vital-covering pieces if worn by women.  What kind of message is that??  I reiterate that players should be able to choose between sexy and complete armor regardless of their character's gender.  Nothing wrong with wanting to look sexy at the expense of practicality, but tying that directly to gender is a disturbing (yet oh so common) message.

IIRC, there was a discussion near the beginning of the thread which showed that most armor DOES NOT lose important pieces.

[Xantalos]

Several.

[Glowcat]

So, like, just poking in to correct some roughshod statistical analysis. The feminist group Reelya is talking about is AAUW and they have a few things to say about the gender pay gap.

http://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/
http://www.aauw.org/2013/04/05/three-reasons-the-wage-gap-hurts-women-in-stem/

Also the study being cited specifically notes that those categories lump together certain sciences in occupations which ends up presenting a very muddied view of the facts. While women do much better in these categories when looked upon as a whole, there's still a massive inequality between, say, men and women who majored in Computer Science (see figure 5). Ironically enough, in that category the pay gap is exactly 77% for the first year out of college.

http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap-the-earnings-of-women-and-men-one-year-after-college-graduation.pdf

I suggest looking through it more if you want to see how they conceptualize the problems surrounding the pay gap and address it in their analysis. They also tackle the factors that might reduce the "raw wage" gap to ~7% among other things.

[Rolan7]

None of that WoW nonsense where most armor sets lose important vital-covering pieces if worn by women.  What kind of message is that??  I reiterate that players should be able to choose between sexy and complete armor regardless of their character's gender.  Nothing wrong with wanting to look sexy at the expense of practicality, but tying that directly to gender is a disturbing (yet oh so common) message.

IIRC, there was a discussion near the beginning of the thread which showed that most armor DOES NOT lose important pieces.

No evidence that that's true of most armor...  Just that there exist modest armors.  The image provided on page 2 actually conveniently has a male counterpart, let's compare them:

So you really, or do you have this idea stuck in your head that all rpg armor is boobplate, and you ignore all evidence to the contrary? For example, last time this came up, somebody was complaining about world of warcraft armor, so somebody linked actual female armor from WoW, which as you can see, is so completely not boobplate that it would probably pass hijab requirements in most middle eastern countries.

And yet people still complain about how revealing it is.

Is there really a problem here, are we we simply so accustomed to there being a problem that we're never happy?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ironically, this particular armor set still has boob-armor.   The Paladin and Warrior variants are crafted uselessly "around" the breasts just to show them off.

But I did some cursory poking around on Wowhead, and it's true that a lot of armors don't lose parts if a woman wears them.  Maybe most?  It's impossible to tell, most of these armors don't have screenshots for male and female.  But there are obviously a lot of armors which do lose pieces just for sexiness, and that's just an unnecessary thing to do to someone's hard-won reward.

I shouldn't have said that *most* armor loses pieces, though.  That may not be true.

[Neonivek]

That doesn't sound right, at least as a mass trend because women make up 18% of computer science degrees, and 22% of the games development workforce. If they were being unfairly stopped at the gates, you'd expect the percentage of women employed to be lower than the graduate rate.

At the same time female graduate levels slumped and stayed around 18% since 2007, women employed in the games industry doubled in the last 5 years. There's no great evidence that masses of women developers are being excluded deliberately.

how many of those women are working for AAA games? Because I'm not feeling represented.

How many Triple A games are women interested in?

Triple As are usually very polarizing when it comes to who is interested in either one.

The major point you have Smeeprocket is that your favorite games are ones that are very male oriented, that men buy and women avoid.

I am reminded a lot of Ninja turtles except their every attempt to include a woman on the team has always been to their detriment. Karai being probably the only female character I can think of who could have joined the Ninja turtles (the 2000 turtles that is) and it wouldn't have been lame... but she never did.

Or heck any "male character" in a "all female show" who has always felt like he belonged exactly 0% of the time or been a total slave of the female cast usually used to be "wrong!".

Triple A games that you reference are usually male oriented because they are targeted towards males because they are specifically tailored to men because men will buy them.

Your being excluded because you are not shelling out tons of cash.

It would be like me complaining that the biggest romantic comedy of a year wasn't male oriented enough... Of course it wasn't... Men don't typically watch romantic comedies, at least not enough to justify the huge budget (ignoring that they usually have small budgets because romantic comedies are easy to write and fund... with Taylor Perry finding a way to basically do them on the smallest funding possible). The only male character in MLP in the main cast is there to be cute and that is pretty much it, there isn't going to be a well made male cast member (in fact the only male characters who stepped up as characters did so to be love interests towards female characters)

YET I can forgive MLP because the Rainbow Bright reboot (which is terrible) did include a male lead, to the extent that he had more of a role then rainbow bright herself... and it was terrible for doing so... Basically being the third wheel in a show that REALLY didn't need him (and holy goodness is he clearly meant to attract guys).

But better yet... Triple A games make up a small percentage of games. and the last Triple A released? Was Destiny a RPG with male and female character selection.

So take that as you will.

Heck Diablo 3? Male and female selection and the main character and second main character of the game, outside the playable one, are both female.

Bioshock infinite? main character is female... She just isn't the playable one (but because you are a non-entity in the game).

Ohh my Triple As are so exclusionary.. I mean Grand Theft Auto 5 which only 15% of their fanbase are women... which had no selectable female character and was a game about organized crime. How many Mafia bosses are currently female?

The issue is not contained into Triple A games... or at least if you are going to make that claim then back it up with sales.

---

Though one thing that is something to talk about is what should the games with a 15% female fanbase, that won't increase, do?

While no one wants to have the poorly placed terrible female sidekick who is meant to be the channel for the female audience... Certainly there must be a middle ground.

Personally I think those games could use some enriching as far as female text is concerned.

[Quartz_Mace]

What exactly does "AAA game" mean? I think I get the concept if it being mainstream and made by large corporations, but is their an exact definition?

[Neonivek]

What exactly does "AAA game" mean? I think I get the concept if it being mainstream and made by large corporations, but is their an exact definition?

It specifically means that a heck of a lot of money is spent on it...

That is basically it.

[Quartz_Mace]

What exactly does "AAA game" mean? I think I get the concept if it being mainstream and made by large corporations, but is their an exact definition?

It specifically means that a heck of a lot of money is spent on it...

That is basically it.

Okay, thanks.

[10ebbor10]

Well, originally, it was a sort of grading system. One A for gameplay innovation, one for positive reviews, and another for financial success.

These days it's just a big budget title.