PAX Panel: Girls and Games

http://kotaku.com/5043749/pax-panel-girls-and-games

Featuring ANets very own Linsey Murdock
designer in charge of the recent GW1 updates.

Oh, well, I guess that topic was going to come up sooner or later. I'm a girl, and I still don't get why people have to start bandying it around so much. A good game's a good game.

"Linsey Murdock"....

Girls play games? Preposterous! :/

Interesting panel, too bad I have a headache otherwise I'd read the whole thing.

In my opinion people in general need to drop the stereotypes surrounding various pasttimes. My boyfriend was recently told to 'get a life' when Miles the Ultramarines guy pointed out to a pontential customer that he (my boyfriend) has roughly 20k Chaos and has been collecting for ten years. I was standing not but two feet away, reading through the 5th Edition rule book recently realsed. I was also pointed out. I am female and spend much time in Games Workshop drooling over pretty marines models and wondering how not to smudge paint when painting my Daemonettes' nipples.

I honestly think that girls, specifically teenage girls, need to stop putting so much import on how they look to their friends and pontential sexual partners and more on their own fun. I was often called 'weird' for hanging out in GW and wanting to play RPGs. I had fun and then consumed several muffins when I was called 'practically aneorix'. I like muffins.

Also, the game creators need to stop thinking 'pink' (Imagine Babyz? WTF?) and start thinking 'fun' and 'pactical'. Yes many women seem to show a love of shoes, this however does not mean they'll dungeon run in Malahno Blahnik stilletoes. Sometimes I just want to grab a mace and smash something, in steel toe boots!

Hmm, a bit of a rant and ramble there. Oh well.

I'm seriously surprised it's not Regina taking part.

Personally I'm sick of people giving a crap if girls play games or not. It's really getting to be an old subject. I'm tired of hearing about it.

To be fair, most GW stores have employees and a customer base that mostly consists of mouthbreathing neckbeards. Many of them are misogynistic losers who can't conceive of anything outside of their routine bubble of existence.

Hey honestly I think GW and games in general nowadays are much less misogynistic than earlier...I mean even in friggen pokemon at least you can make a girl char now hahahah

My guild is controlled by girls and i have no complaints.

No, I'd use them to stab the first monster in the eye. Much more satisfying.

And I still don't get it. Why is there a particular need to suddenly rush over and cater games for girls? Oh, right, marketing.

You misunderstand, this 'customer' was a man who thinks having fun involves sitting on the couch every Saturday drinking beer and watching the footie. While stricken with a severe case of apathy, my local store is very nice and friendly

What the hell is a neckbeard and get off Warseer, it's bad for you.

Edit: GlacialPhoenix, it is indeed marketing. Why do you think they aim at kids as well? I saw a six your old girl at my till the other day with a pink DS covered in Nintendogz stickers blowing into the microphone, I was deeply disturbed.

I like what Linsey said about Princess Peach. ^^

I don't know if this is true for all of Guild Wars, or if I'm just a moron magnet, but I find an impressive amount of misogynistic idiots in Guild Wars. People who say that "girls can't play warriors because they're weak," people who say "there's no girls on the internet" and of course the people who think "girls can't play video games." No one really agrees with me when I say otherwise, and I get a lot of crap from other people/my alliance because I'm a girl gamer who dares to stand up for herself.

Personally, I think that when the immature males who fail to see that girls are capable of playing and succeeding at video games get over their mental block, there will be less of an uproar at girl gamers.

Talk about getting two 'niche' groups at once.

Well, marketing thinks of us girls as a really big untapped source of cash, which is fair enough, I guess. That's their job, after all. Making pink things - to use an example - however, is a remarkably one-sided way to do it. Yeah, some girls like pink. There are some girls who also hate it and will be rather offended if you try to market it to them that way. And then there are those who'll get offended at the 'games for girls' that companies design.

I was once idly looking around for a good game to buy - this was quite a while back. I thought I'd go and ask for a recommendation, and the guy at the counter stared at me, started looking at the stuff they had for sale, and finally handed me one.

"What's good about this?" I asked.

"...I kind of thought you'd like it because one of the leads is a girl."

He wasn't misogynistic, and he did try, but I was still sort of stunned. I mean, what does 'the lead being a girl' have to do with it being a good game?

EDIT:

I've seen a few of those people. I've also seen the responses. My favourite - and I wish I'd thought to screenshot it - was one guy replying, "I play GW with my wife, and I can assure you a thousand times over that she has boobs." (This was in response to some troll shouting "GIRLS DONT PLAY GW EVERYONE NOES TT!!!")

Also, my boyfriend was telling me about how he left a group by explaining to them that he was supposed to dungeon run with me, and got the response "...your girlfriend's a gamer?! LUCKY BASTARD." Somewhere out there, we're also special and appreciated. XD

That's slightly more to do with identifying with the game, people have a tendency to believe that gamers or readers get more involved if the main is someone of their own gender. The opposite is "said" to imply eye candy (Lara Croft sproings to mind). It's the reason why I rant about Elves in games but see less of a problem with Homo Sapiens (I'd still like to make a game without either, that would be FUN).

Gender stereotyping, it's done with babies as well. Pink is 'girly' and blue is 'manly', where else would the phrase 'Only real men wear pink' come from?

Also, Taurcius *hugs!* You're awesome cool :3

Colours need to be ditched with their gender overtones and gain new ones, like red having symbolism of love and violance, pink could be a symbol of outdated and arachaic practice. One can dream.

In regards to women being an untapped resource, it's true. With technology being an everyday thing now, using it has lost it's stigma and people (mainly companies) are waking up to it's potential as a medium for women. At least there isn't a house-keeping game yet.

I think they should worry about making good games. if it is good it will attract both boys and girls instead of going out of their way to find a reason that girls will like this game because of .... attitude.

Lollerchopter?

I admit i'm not always free of predjudices. When i first saw Bloodrayne (the game not the movie!) i tought women would be offended by such cheap use of female anatomy to get attention, but it turned out a VERY large portion of Rayne's fanbase is female. I even think they are the majority.



Anyway: I think female leads are becoming more interesting over time. Nariko (Heavenly sword), Faith (Mirrors edge) and Shenoa (Castelvania:Order of Ecclesia) all seem to be strong heroines who are more then mere eye candy.

There seem to be three general ways for males to respond to female gamers. Young boys tend to be either in denial, and/or think of girl gamers as unconditionally inferior; if proven otherwise, it's back to denial ("You're not really a girl!" and such). Older men, generally those who play with their wives and such, often don't give it a second thought unless it's pointed out to them. Young men around their 20s tend to display the reaction your boyfriend described. I can say from personal experience that I've been called a "lucky bastard" for having a girlfriend who enjoys Civ IV....even though that has twice resulted in being forced to stay up until 7 am for an extended play session. And no, there's not a bit of innuendo there.

Of course, this is how I see things, and there will always be exceptions, including the overly-mature 12 year old, and the horrendously backwards 45 year old. It's sad that there are still people out there that demean female gamers, but you can find bigots of pretty much any flavor online, if that's any consolation.

Agreed, we have been involved in the game industry as designers, players, consultants etc for a very, very long time, and I think it's high time the guys got off their high horses and realized it's not such a novelty.

Or alternative life style.



If it's the latter, make a yuri-hentai game about it.


(Just kidding... maybe)


Anyways I don't get gender pride from either sex when it comes to gaming; as long as they make games I find fun I can't do much to complain about it.

I wouldn't mind a yuri game, but no hentai.

The problem with most games catered towards girls is that the devs spend so much time in gearing it towards girls (or so they think) that they completely detract from making a good game. What happens is that the game is just incredibly beautiful, with good sounds and music and lots of ways to make your character pretty, but it has abysmal gameplay.

Only getting SLIGHTLY off topic there.


I think a lot of guys who do play GW are immature, and quite a few who are not immature as well are surprised when they meet girls in GW. It is not as if there are that many playing. 95-5% split? Even less? However once we get past the inital "woah" factor, most guys settle down and realize that nobody cares. They are just girls after all.

Oh yeah, and I lol'ed at the Peach comment.

The Bikini armors and the missing Tarzan armors say something different.

I know plenty of girls who play games. Me being one also. I don't get the big deal and the sterotypes, seriously. Chicks have been playing games forever...I don't get why it's so surprising o.O

I meet girls on Halo 3 all the time. Granted, their score is about 3-20x lower than every guy on the game, they're still there. And they're absolutely adorable when they're swearing when they die. I've met them on Guild Wars, even met one of them in real life. It was the first time meeting someone online. Very neat experience. Guild Wars makes you friends.

Hmm, I never saw it that way before, I just pegged different people as 'mature' and 'immature'.

Also, @ Taurucis about the abysmal gameplay: I agree.

Until one of them decides to get competitive with the guys, I suppose. XD Feeling competitive does a lot - regardless of your gender.

I'm a guy, and I agree with what a couple of the people in the panel said about guys wanting more romance and relationship development in games. I was also rather surprised by some of the comments on the article by guys vehemently denouncing these comments, saying shit about how the panel members didn't understand "us" (men, I suppose). How the hell does what I have hanging (or not, as the case may be) between my legs affect whether I enjoy romance or not? I'm sure that there are people, both men and women, who don't enjoy romance, and that's fine. But I've personally known other guys who also enjoy the romance genre, and appreciate something besides "Me guy! You girl! We bang!" and far as development goes. I think that the panel member who said that guys secretly enjoy such things (romance and relationship development) is correct; many of the guys who I've known have felt a need to hide that from society, as they don't want to be denounced as "girly" or, even more common, being called "gay" (the damn bigots causing two problems at once right there). I think that more romance in games would sell, not because it would aim towards the female crowd per se, but because there are plenty of people, both guy and girl, who actually like such things.

Watch how you word things, because that can be taken directly as you not having anything hanging in between your legs.

Completely true. I'm a male and I have read romance novels, only watch shows that deal with sex, relationships, or other drama (whether it being comedic or suspenseful) and am not afraid to admit it. While I do enjoy sex, it isn't anything really to brag about. All the nerdy virgin boys here think that all there is to life is poking a girl and anime porn. Continue to yank it like a monkey in a mango tree. Unless you're in a serious relationship, I personally think one night stands are immoral. Even though...I've done them. Hypocrite.



Homosexuality is something that is put aside as shameful, as a society (mostly the religious society) but can be accepted by those who aren't prejudice. I think anyone who calls another girly or gay as an insult are simply immature and should be castrated with a nail gun. But these are my thoughts.

Girls weren't put on this Earth to pleasure men. They were put on this Earth to torture the crap out of us to get pleasure.

The biggest problem with this is that there really is this sort of segregation. Can you name a good female warrior player? Now, can you name a good female monk? How about 5 monks? Almost every girl playing above average level is playing a support class.

Add to the fact there are a lot less successful girls in GW, and that people pay more attention to them so the ones that are bad really stand out, and you get the impression that they're bad in general. The ratio of successful to unsuccessful probably isn't that different (there's an ocean of terrible male players, after all), but as I said, they stand out more.

Not to mention how much guild drama can result (we had a core monk refuse to play in the Celestial Tourney because she didn't think the new cape looked nice) - a stereotype perhaps, but a recognizable trend. There are top-tier guilds that don't allow girls because they don't want to risk having to deal with that kind of garbage.

I believe Rebel Rising [rawr], one of their core monks are female. Also, there is a female monk that HA'd with me frequently. They do exist, but typically as a healer or an elementalist, at least in my experience of meeting girls. Those are their main characters, one or the other. I have yet to meet a girl with a main character of anything else, especially that of an assassin or warrior.

One of my friends and guildies has an assassin as her main. I also know one who has a mesmer main and one with a necro main. I'm the most stereotypical, being the monk of the lot.

It's partly the reaction as well. Some people do treat girl gamers as 'bad until proven otherwise'. Some are bad, but then you have bad players in every game.

And, of course, you have the perpetual favourites. I know quite a few guys with ele mains, just as there are lots of girls with ele mains. (I'm so stereotypical - my main is a monk and my second's an ele, although my survivor's a derv and I plan to play her more)

Heh, you're not the only female in Guild Wars who has this problem, although my experience is not limited to this game - it came up a lot in AoC, too. I hate the type of responses, "zomg - a female just spoke! [in vent]" which is always followed by "there aren't girls on the interwebs!" or some variant of other stupid exclamations. Gawking eyes, exclamations, stating the obvious, etc. are all overdone. Boys just need to stop being stupid. They may think they're being funny when they act like a 12 year old, but that's all I ever really perceive them as - immature children.

It's getting real tiring - guys don't understand how annoying they are every time they make a big deal of someone being female. Admittedly, a lot of the problematic ones are the younger people who play - they are pretty much socially retarded. Not only have they not learned how to interact properly with people, they probably spent the last 7 of their 15 years on this planet consumed by video games. It's usually males under 20 that are the problem, and extends to PvPers under 25ish. The only people who have managed not to act stupid or be distusting and disturbing toward me are men that are about 35+.

Sometimes the problem isn't even them being stupid about females, but just the opposite. The major sausagefests just make them one giant ball of moronic pigs It's one of the main reasons I stopped PvPing... I noticed in PvE that the average physical and mental age was higher, and I wasn't disappointed everytime I was in the presence of males.

You call it a trend, and I call it stupid people letting other stupid people play for their team. I've known guys to leave a guild over the cape - stupid behaviour isn't gender-exclusive. Most of the females that I've met/know who made a breakthrough into higher-end PvP got that lucky shot to play with good mentors because they didn't have a dick. If guys didn't waste their time ooh'ing and ahh'ing over every vagina they met in game, more quality and level-headed females would've had a better shot. Not to mention, sadly, that some women have grown to be attention-RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOs because the males have shown them that they will give undivided attetion, just becaues of their gender.

The more honest reason to exclude women from teams is that the boys aren't willing to get over their big boys sausage club. I remember someone from dR [name omitted] was pug-leeching HFF from me, and he started talking to another male pvp-er in my party. He started discussing how all females suck at the game and shouldn't be PvPing for all sorts of reasons. It's funny how you think people/guilds earn respect from other players based on their rank/rating, but then once you get to know them, you're just entirely disappointed.

My favourite PvE characters are all casters or range attackers. Can't play them in PvP thou, in PvP i like bringing a hammer and pound people to pulp. I'm a girl :P

Regarding male/female role in the game industry... well, isn't it the same in all industries? Female have to fight for everything harder then male does. lol, I don't know, could it be because we can do everything better? Could it also be because women, like, for instant, a mother, she cooks, cleans et cetera, while the father play computer game with the child, hence there's less women playing game because they are preoccupied with other more important thing that needs taken care of that the men aren't lifting a fingers to do? Besides its not that big a gap at the current moment: "According to the Entertainment Software Association, more than 43 percent of gamers are female which explains why developers and publishers are switching gears and trying to focus on games for girls, or games for everyone."

ps: just a thought, wtf's wrong with Marlo saying girls need to be taught a certain way to think? no one needs to be taught a certain way to think. that just sound wrong. People just need to be themselves :P

If more than 43 percent of gamers are female, doesn't that mean they already have a sizable amount of female gamers? And does that not mean, if they have nearly as many female gamers as male, that either current marketing tactics were already doing just fine, or perhaps they need to be improving marketing on both fronts as a whole?

I think they just need to make good game, lol @ marketing, I play guild wars because some one give me a good review about the game. Not because they have good marketing.

It could be that most of them are casual gamers, and marketing wants to drag in more of those. I should think it'd be more profitable for them to attract casual gamers on both sides, though.

Also: I kind of want to know what they define as gamer, actually. I mean, you could be playing Maple Story and they might still count that as 'gamer'...

I agree with your point, but I think the statistic (as most are) is very misleading. To say that almost 50% of gamers are female is very deceptive. That number has very little to do with some games, like Guild Wars, where the majority of players seem to come from North America and Europe, and in these two continents, gaming amongst females is a lot less popular than females gaming in Asia. Due to the sheer size of the Asian population, and the cultural acceptance of the gaming industry, it's no wonder that 43% of the gaming population is female. But is that statistic even relevant to the panel's discussion at hand? Will they not be dealing with almost exclusively an American population? That stastisic is so misleading that it's not at all comforting.

If you want to play the 'works both ways' card, then use it evenly. Getting into top-tier PvP is luck and connections for males as well.

No doubt there's more pressure to perform for girls, and impressions are created when the vast majority of them are awful. Of course there are extremely successful females (WM Berry), but simply because of the stereotypes that they're bad, people often look for evidence to validate this, moreso than they would for a male player. The biggest complaints I've heard regarding females in higher-tier PvP isn't so much play quality (yeah, it's whined about, but so is the terrible play of all the males) but drama potential.

Drama is such a huge threat to the stability of any competitive guild, and I can fully understand any team that doesn't want to take the risk of female players - and it is a risk, even if it's debatable in size. You might disagree, but then I'd have to ask if you've played GW at a competitive level. While I certainly don't know every female player, every one that I've been in a guild with has sparked drama, without exception. I know some that have not, in other guilds, so I can't make any serious blanket statements, but that's my experience, and it's the experience that motivates players to stereotype.

I feel it means that in spite of marketing people are playing video games. My sister got dragged into WoW by her fiance (then boyfriend) and has stayed there because she enjoyed it. I tried to get her interested in Guild Wars (for her own sanity, heh). She found the graphics 'too realistic', though I think we can get her into Aion.

I know a couple of females who've joined games through friends, male or female, but have stayed based on merit. Marketing's one thing, but if your game isn't appealing all the sparkles in the world won't get you that killer player base. Hell, Pokemon's got a big fanbase and Platinum's getting released in September in Japan. Yes there are girls playing that and bashing people in WiFi battles. All you need is an exploding Metagross