What a Girl Wants

This is a follow up of sorts to my previous post, Feminist Issues.  I was reading a chapter about video games in my Communications text book, Media Now, yesterday.  I was so perturbed by this excerpt:

"One of the enduring challenges to video game designers has been to develop games that appeal to females.  In the early days, games attracted a largely male audience.  An exception was 'Centipede', an arcade game from the early 1980s that was the first one to be popular among female players.  Some attributed that to the female-friendly pastel colors, but the fact that it was designed by Dona Bailey, the only female programmer at Atari at the time, may have had something to do with it."  -- Media Now Seventh Edition, Straubhaar, Larose, Davenport page 396

The above passage spurred me to write this follow up.  Analyzing this passage bit by bit, the first assumption made is that video game designers are 'challenged' to develop games for females.  So, this means that females don't like the video games that are available now?  Where do they get this information?  I have seen this assumption written many times before, that the majority of video game players are males.  Since I am a female and I have loved many genres of video games for many years, I can't identify with this statement at all.  I also tend to spend a lot of time looking up information online for videos and reading forums.  It is not always obvious what an online user's gender is.  I also have read many women hide their gender online for fear of harassment.  NY Times article about the disturbing trend of online harassment:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/us/sexual-harassment-in-online-gaming-stirs-anger.html

 I will say that among personal friends I have known, there are just as many female game players as male, although of the ones I know, females do tend to stay more quiet about their video game play.  We have plenty of reason to not advertise our interests, it does seem to be a man's world as portrayed and fed to us by the media.  This website was started by a group of female gamers, targeted by online bullying who now publish their attackers words and have bonded together.  I may have mentioned once that I read in a Game Informer magazine editorial that 'girl gamers are rare as unicorns'..a sentiment shared by this author, but are we really that rare or just in hiding?  http://kotaku.com/5782957/im-an-anonymous-woman-gamer

According to the Entertainment Software Association's 2012 survey on the Computer and Video Game Industry, 47% of females are gamers. http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp  The survey was conducted from '2000 nationally representative households'.  My Statistics class taught me to question every survey ever conducted and published and since the population of the US is 3M, I question the 'representativeness' of 2000 households.  Regardless of the true number of female gamers, we do exist, in probably much larger numbers than we have been told all our lives.  Is this cultivation theory?  Media tells us games are for boys, we see boys playing games and games marketed to boys, and we as girls assume this is the 'world' view?

Moving on to the next part of the passage, and this one really burns me up: 'female-friendly pastel colors'..what the..?!  Seriously, who decided that pastels are female-friendly?  Now, I love color, all kinds of color, including pastels.  I don't really remember Centipede being pastel, nor that fun of a game.  It was okay.  The first Mario Brothers was much more fun to me.  It was mostly primary colors if I remember correctly.  I think assuming a girl is attracted to a game, or any product for that matter based on 'pastel colors' is absurd. I wear clothes in every color and do select products to buy based on color..but never pink.  I have nothing against pink, it just isn't my first choice.  I find the idea that we are born with a color predisposition hilarious. Most people don't realize that baby girl and boy color preferences were dictated by..who else..the media and retailers..in the 1940s.  At one point in time, pink was actually associated with boys!  Read the story here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html?c=y&page=1  I will buy clothing and housewares, color coordinated for its purpose, as will my husband.  Regarding my video game purchases however, I turn to Game Informer or IGN for reviews, as well as researching within my own favored genres.  I also would not choose a game specifically just because it was designed by a female game designer.  I play games for entertainment and don't particularly care who created it.

So..what do I not like about video games?  Well, I am not too fond of overly violent games, war games and first person shooter type games.  I played Duke Nukem and Doom back in the day.  They got really boring and repetitious after awhile.  I found Civilization somewhat stimulating but did not like Command and Conquer.  To this day, I don't really like the strategy genre.  I have no interest in Call of Duty or Halo.  I bought the Metal Gear Solid series for my boyfriend in high school when it first came out and while I enjoyed watching the movies and him play the game, I did not like playing myself.  I was more into the really involved story games, RPGs, to be exact.  They allowed me to escape into this fantasy world, almost like watching a movie, but interacting with it.  Indeed, my favorite game of all time, Final Fantasy VII was made into a movie.  There were really good books I read as a child, that I was sad to reach the end of and a good video game was like that for me.  With the RPG however, there are typically so many sub plots and side stories, you can spend many hours playing such a game.

I can't speak for all women out there, but I am tired of the media/video game industry spitting out assumptions about who women are and what we want in terms of video games (fyi, for me I never played Barbie Designer nor never would!).  If you want to market games to us..why don't you ask us?  Why don't you employ more of us as game designers?  Why don't you stop perpetuating violence and stereotypes of females in your games that continue to degrade us?

A final thought -- as a busy full time Mom and currently, full time Computer Science student, I don't have nearly the spare free time I once did.  I can't become involved in RPGs too much because I don't have an hour or two to sit down and play.  Casual games are very appealing to me for this reason, I can take a ten minute break, and de-stress on my Ipad with a myriad of countless choices.  This trend is growing dramatically with women as found by the aforementioned ESA survey above.  Next post I will talk about Casual and Serious Games.  I leave you with some of my favorite games:

1. Final Fantasy VII
2. Final Fantasy X
3. Final Fantasy IV (DS)
4. Super Mario Brothers All Stars, especially 3..ok just about anything with 'Super Mario' in it
5. Lunar Silver Star Story
6. Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2
7. Might and Magic Mandate of Heaven? (PC)
8. Sonic the Hedgehog
9. Parasite Eve
10. Legend of Zelda..I like just about all of them I played..starting with the original NES gold case