I don't think anyone's arguing that there's zero female representation. The argument is that there isn't enough and/or what representation there is is poor representation.
Is it really a bad thing for society that women don't have as many gamedev jobs as they otherwise could?
Whether you think representation in video games is important or not tends to be a function of whether your personal identity is already well represented. If you don't think it's important, I'd encourage you to seek the perspectives of someone who is not well represented, ideally just a real-life friend. You might learn things you hadn't simply hadn't thought to consider, through no fault of your own.
As for game dev jobs, more women in them would probably mean more female representation in games too, simply because there would be more perspectives at key decision points. And it's hard to argue that there isn't negative pressure against women entering and thriving in the industry, when one of the biggest game developers on the planet is recovering from a deeply embedded epidemic of misogynism.
Agreed. If you don't have experience with something, the obvious thing to do is to talk to someone who does.
I've read so many stories from people whose fondest memory of games/TV/career/etc is finally seeing someone who looked like them, and how life-changing it was.
Yes, it is. Not because we need more game devs, but because there are women who actually want those jobs and are qualified and have a harder time getting them. And because when they do get them they deal with issues that the men in the same positions don’t have to deal with. And because they get paid less for the same work on average. These things are indeed bad for society, they make our environment worse than it could be otherwise.
We also don’t have enough games that represent the growing category of female gamer, we have too many Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto and Madden, and not enough games like, I dunno, Sayonara Wild Hearts or Celeste. We could generally speaking make more money by having more games that not just cater to female gamers but are made by women.
You're going to have to be way more specific why there are too many of the former, too little of the latter, why the latter attracts women more, etc. You can name hundreds of games like the latter two depending on your selection criteria.
>We could generally speaking make more money by having more games that not just cater to female gamers but are made by women.
This too I would like to see more support for, unless your only criteria is "women will buy games made by women".
One way to know when the problem is solved is when the rates of gender disparity, whatever they are, settle for a long time and are the same in all countries, and that women as a whole agree that things are fair. We’re barely ~100 years (1 human lifespan) from women having the right to vote in the US. Before that extreme cultural bias was baked into law. In some countries it still is. We’re maybe a bit over ~50 years from the start of computer science as a widespread field of academic study, the start of which involved very few women. The number of women in CS in the US went from zero to 37% in the 80s, and then went down (why?) and is now hovering around 20%. In Indian, the number of women in CS has in the recent past exceeded 50%. The fact that the numbers are changing rapidly, and that they’re different in India vs the US is proof of cultural biases.
You've explained that you think it would be solved if it looked like what you described, but it might never look like that even if it was solved, so we'd never know. Perhaps a more useful question would have been how do we know the problem still exists? What's the evidence that women are treated worse in the game dev industry because they're women?
Given this fact, at some level you should be asking yourself the question where is the proof that there isn’t a problem? If there’s any question whether we have a social problem, and it reflects on us poorly, then don’t we have a responsibility to investigate, as opposed to denying it?
Women are reporting their experiences, and stories of game dev toxicity have hit the national media multiple times, with studios subsequently admitting they have problem.
There is still a well documented pay gap.
There is under-representation of women in industry compared to numbers of women that aim for the field studying art & computer science.
I was also partly referring to the widespread documentation of bias problems today in all industries and in all countries, not necessarily specific to the US or to game dev. We just haven’t yet solved all sexism & racism, the evidence for this abounds, and it’s not that surprising since not enough time has passed.
If you’re really curious please actually do some active research of your own and don’t wait for someone on the internet to defend it. Read the history of Suffrage. Read about the glass ceiling over the 20th century. Take a look at the stats of women in various field over time. Read a little of some of the feminist thinkers. Talk to multiple women, game devs even, and get their perspective, they don’t all have the same experience nor see it the same way.
Perhaps it applies more to managerial roles in AAA game studios as that will be matters of corporate environment exploitation & survival than about pursuing life in creative content making, but that would be a wider issue than storylines included in products marketed to a target group, I think.
Also, the economy is less efficient, with inferior talent making games, and the talented woman doing something else that they're not as well suited for.
It's funny you mention Celeste, as I've not met a single woman who got into it. And honestly, it makes sense if you think about it for a second. Adding a female protagonist to a technical platformer won't automatically give it strong appeal in the female demographic.
Nor does the fact that The Sims, Stardew Valley and Bejeweled were created by men take away from the fact that they're extremely appealing to women.
I guess just part of me is always skeptical of activists ham-fistedly making design decisions, as it tends to lead to products that consumers either actively hate or don't care about.
I've been playing games for 30-something years, and I think women aren't portrayed as well as they should be. It's come a ways over the years, but I don't think it's fixed. I'd call it a problem. If you think it's perfect as-is, then I guess it's not a problem for you.
Having more female game devs is like having more Australian game devs who know when it's summer there. A big difference though is that unlike Australia which has less than 0.5% of the world's population concentrated in one area, women are over 50% of the world's population and are evenly distributed. You can have a lot of games without Australia but almost every game with people in it needs to have women or you'll be telling a strange story. Imagine a situation where most games have scenes in Australia but most game devs don't know it's summer in January there. That's a problem.
Where it can get mixed up is that a lot of "knowing the seasons" as a woman is knowing stuff that makes men uncomfortable. A female game dev making a realistic female character can introduce everyday factual experiences about things like sexual harassment, birth control, or feminine hygiene, and some male players might say she's trying to make an activist game and she can reply, no, this is just my life. It would be like getting mad at an Australian game dev for always going on about summer in January as if it's their fault the sun spends a lot of time in the sky around that time.
(This is leaving aside the economic argument that developer jobs tend to be good and therefore desirable, and it should be suspicious when any particular demographic is dramatically underrepresented in a field with mostly good jobs.)
If you want a concrete example of that, A lot of media that features Australian characters are played by Americans doing bad Paul Hogan impressions. It's dumb, but didn't make me want to play Borderlands or COD instead of Overwatch or BioShock (with that damn 0126 code too - who does this!?)
>(This is leaving aside the economic argument that developer jobs tend to be good and therefore desirable, and it should be suspicious when any particular demographic is dramatically underrepresented in a field with mostly good jobs.)
Gamedev jobs are mostly terrible, with low pay, immense amounts of unpaid overtime and chronic, stressful "crunch time". I don't know why men stay in the industry, let alone women.
Wrong weather and bad accents are pretty tame, I agree. Actual portrayals of women in games have been much worse. The "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" YouTube series by Feminist Frequency goes over a lot of these. Fortunately the industry has gotten better and games are now expected to include realistic female characters. That can be a tough ask for male game devs though. Most men couldn't accurately describe shopping for a pair of pants as a woman, let alone something more complex.
> Gamedev jobs are mostly terrible, with low pay, immense amounts of unpaid overtime and chronic, stressful "crunch time". I don't know why men stay in the industry, let alone women.
Nevertheless there are many women in much worse jobs who would take all of those terrible game dev jobs in a second if they could. The fact that they haven't suggests some systemic problem.
I can't help but wonder where this statement came from. Men have sisters, mothers, daughters, partners.
It's not some kind of a mysterious and opaque world, to which they don't have any access.
Of course a willing male game dev could research anything necessary to portraying women accurately. Or, alternately, you could hire female game devs or at least some consultants and get on with actually making the game.
To be clear: I'm not agreeing with you. I don't think "most men" would fail at the task you mentioned.
I also think that men can generally tell if a female character is realistic, it's just not what they're going for in a game and the market responds to that.
Same with those romantic pulp novels people read on vacation. Regardless whether they're written by men or women, the men there are always hilariously unrealistic. This is by design.
You make an interesting point about unrealistic depictions. In a way it's even harder for a man to write an unrealistic man that appeals to female readers than to just write accurately. I'm reminded of this comic: https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/false-equivalence. Of course male authors can learn to do it.
It's obvious to me that if you want to depict women accurately in art, or as you pointed out create art for women, then it would be helpful to have more women involved in the process. If anyone is seriously arguing that a typical man can write women and for women as well as a typical woman can so it's okay that most game devs are men then I'm not sure what to say. Agree to disagree.
Tell that to all the people complaining about yellowface/Apu. It's genuinely on an "Ahh, I am honourable Chinese man, my family is honour" level.
>The "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" YouTube series by Feminist Frequency goes over a lot of these.
Wow, using Anita Sarkeesian - widely derided for being out of touch and over-intellectual - as a source and expecting to change minds.
>Most men couldn't accurately describe shopping for a pair of pants as a woman, let alone something more complex.
Seriously? Men complaining about going clothes shopping with their wives is goes back to the days of bad 1950s stand-up.
>Nevertheless there are many women in much worse jobs who would take all of those terrible game dev jobs in a second if they could. The fact that they haven't suggests some systemic problem.
I'm being serious here - child care, admin or even retail are much, much better jobs from the point of view of living a balanced life and providing for your family than anything in games dev.
I was referring to your Paul Hogan impression comment which I thought you meant was not a big deal to you. I can understand that a racist "yellowface/Apu" accent would be much more offensive.
> Wow, using Anita Sarkeesian - widely derided for being out of touch and over-intellectual - as a source and expecting to change minds.
I was using the series as a reference for tropes much more offensive than a Paul Hogan impression. If you don't want to listen at Anita Sarkeesian for some reason, you can find a list of tropes at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebVideo/FeministFreq... with examples linked from there.
> Seriously? Men complaining about going clothes shopping with their wives is goes back to the days of bad 1950s stand-up.
I wasn't talking about complaining but instead describing the literal process. Where to go, shopping etiquette, dressing room etiquette, cost, fit, fashion. Plus the emotional context: some women find shopping very upsetting for reasons men might struggle to understand, let alone portray accurately in fiction.
> I'm being serious here - child care, admin or even retail are much, much better jobs from the point of view of living a balanced life and providing for your family than anything in games dev.
I was thinking of home health care workers. Over 3 million in the U.S., mostly women, average age in their 40s, median wage around 30k USD per year, taking care of sick or elderly people including physically moving them and cleaning up after them, sometimes living in the patient's home. I find it hard to agree that this job would better than being a game dev, but in any case you only need a high school diploma to do it so most game devs who want to change adult diapers in the middle of the night for much less pay and for their entire working life should be able to make the jump pretty easily.