Games vs. Gamers: E3 Edition

Hello, world. My name is Kate Cox, and I'm a gamer.  My 2011 obsessions are the Fallout and Mass Effect franchises, I was dedicated to MMORPG gaming for 6 years, I named my cat Guybrush, I can quote Cave Johnson speeches with the best of them, I play casual games on my PC and Android, and I'm planning to start catching up on the Deus Ex games next week so that I'm ready when Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes out this summer.

I'm also a woman.  I don't hide that one here on my own blog, but I'm stating it for the record.  I'm married to a gamer guy, but I had the games 20 years before I had him.  Gaming brought us together; he didn't "convince his girlfriend" to try it.

Why the recap of my life story?  Because apparently Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, and others still don't believe that I actually exist, and I'm not sure how else to convince them that I do.

I hadn't been planning to write about E3 at all; the shiny new things marketing circuit isn't really my beat.  But for some reason I ended up watching the streams of all of Monday's big press conferences, and then was home sick on Tuesday and so left the TV on G4 to catch that round as well.

(Okay, I'll admit it, we all know this was the "some reason.")

Where in the last 6 months in particular I have felt very comfortable writing about games and interacting (via Twitter and this blog, among other places) with other writers and with game designers, sometimes I get one of those heavy-handed reminders that I am still neither the target demographic of these products, nor a demographic these marketers particularly care about one way or the other.  I might, they concede, occasionally use the game machine that my husband, boyfriend, father, or brother insists on keeping in the living room, but the "core" games are best kept far away from me.

And how do the big companies tell me this?  Passively and actively.  Let's look at both.

Every person on stage for the Microsoft presentation was male... up until they got to the "soft" presentations of Kinect-ready non-core and non-gaming fluff.  For Mass Effect 3 Shepard and his player are both men, but for talking to the console and asking for it to find Lego, Star Wars, and Harry Potter titles for you, you have a woman.

In addition to the actual on-stage presence, there were issues of body language.  The men were nearly all standing, and assertively (although some were focused on playing their demos).  The first woman to appear on stage was seated, and spoke on cue.  The other girls and women to appear in the Microsoft event were mainly all in the "embarrassingly awkward and pointless" half of the line-up, with the exception of the female half of the two-player Dance Central team.  (Although dance games aren't my thing, I didn't find that team's presentation awkward or unbearable, and the dancers both worked equally hard.)  The one woman to be featured alone and not speaking on others' cues was there to show how her personal style can be scanned into an XBox Live avatar.

And then of course there was the Tomb Raider preview... featuring a screaming, moaning, bound and struggling woman.  This is the best they can do for Lara Croft?  This is the woman who, for 15 years, has been the go-to example for the "chest diameter does not equal protagonist incompetence" crowd.  She was the female answer to Indiana Jones, and the inspiration for the Uncharted franchise.  And now she's reduced to half-orgasmic torture porn screaming?

Granted, I don't know that a trailer or even a gameplay demo ever speaks accurately of the entire content of a game, but my opinion of the game is certainly less than stellar so far.  With a chance to reboot the franchise and take it beyond the "boobies hurr hurr hurr" demographic and into "intelligent action-adventure gaming," they've kept at least the marketing firmly planted in "male gaze" territory.

EA was no better, as far as gender representation.  Their games look excellent (not gonna lie, pretty much drooled on myself watching the Mass Effect 3 material, even in the complete absence of FemShep) but they certainly didn't seem inclined to acknowledge that women exist.  I also don't recall much in the way of any female presence at Sony's event, though it is possible I have forgotten.  The fourth major media circus of the day can be hard to remember.

All of that said, the lack of acknowledgement that I exist isn't the worst a company can do.  It's thoughtless, and shows the male privilege that a lot of the marketers, designers, and other relevant players have, but it's not malicious.  In fact, I'm going to say it's probably still better than what Ubisoft did.

Oh, Ubisoft.  I mean, really?  I've linked a nearly-full 76-minute video there, but everything wrong with it can be summed up in two words: Mr. Caffeine.

He (real name Aaron Priceman) is apparently a personality designed to market products to us.  Not a game designer, as so many of the awkward executive speakers at E3 are, but very obviously a salesman.  This is the person Ubisoft chose to emcee and to be the voice of their 2011 and 2012 blockbuster announcements.  And what did this corporate mouthpiece say?

You see, the world of technology has changed a lot since 1986, and so has gaming.  Today, 97% of young people play video games!  40% of them?  Are women!  And 89% of them?  Are smokin' hot.  I know this, I've investigated.

Now this has made a whole new group of pick-up lines available, I'm sure you guys know, like: "Hey! Wanna come over and play my Wii?"  "We should Kinect!"  "Hey, thanks for the Sony Move!  Here, hold my joy wand."  Yes, I'm not afraid of a few dick jokes, thank you.

In the video linked above, this segment runs from roughly 12:30 - 12:40.  However, notice the edit at 12:35, where it cuts to a wide shot?  All of the references to women (and their hotness) have been edited out.

To see the original, cue up to 12:33 in this version:

I really don't know what to make of the choice to edit the remark out of the first video.  On the one hand, someone clever realized just how boneheaded and offensive it was.  On the other hand, that script made it through rehearsal, onto the teleprompter, and out of Priceman's mouth before anyone clever managed to realize just how boneheaded and offensive it was.  I am just glad that I was able to find a copy of the original.

Mr. Caffeine there was right about one thing, though, and that was just how many of us laydeez are out there.  In fact, the 2011 ESA Survey does indicate that I'm in good company, and less alone than ever.  82% of gamers are over 18.  42% are girls or women.  And 37% of us are both.

Let's recap that: nearly 40% of all video game consumers are adult women.  Boys 17 and younger represent 13% of gamers.

This leaves us with the perennial conundrum, the question at the very heart of this entire blog: Why does gaming marketing remain so heavily focused on the juvenile few, and so exclusionary toward the adult many?  Faced with a true statistic -- that we form over 40% of a potential consumer base, just as we form roughly 50% of the actual population -- Ubisoft goes the stupid route.  They could embrace us, or at least tolerate us, or try in some way to convince us to buy their games.  Instead, they brainlessly alienate us, and keep setting us aside as the other.  (And the "pickup lines" weren't even funny; his entire presentation was a crime against comedy.)

Here's a protip, Ubisoft: it's not all Peggle out our way in female territory.  Some of us like games where you shoot stuff.  Some of us really like games where you're sneaky and stab stuff.  Oh, wait!  You make one of those!

So in the future, can we maybe skip the casual sexism and go right to the gaming?  (Because that really is a fantastic trailer, I like it more every time I watch it.)  You do that, and I won't object to giving you my money.  And hey, who knows: maybe giving you more of my hard-earned US dollars will convince you I exist.  In 25 years of your illustrious history it hasn't yet, but for a gamer hope springs eternal.

On why the XBox 360 sucks.

Microsoft's XBox 360 is a great gaming machine.  I'm not big into platform wars -- anything that works is fine by me.  Over 50 million happy gamers use their XBox 360s and XBox Live, and I actually think Microsoft has done a great job with its console overall.  Aside from the notorious red ring of death, those little machines work and work well, and bring gaming countless games to countless gamers yearly.  When it launched, everyone was primed and ready for the next generation and Microsoft brought it to us.

The problem is, it launched pre-holiday 2005.  I remember well -- I was working for GameStop at the time.  (And what a mess that launch was.)  That sucker is nearly six years old.  And it is not anywhere near as technically capable as a PS3 or a gaming PC.  It's slower, smaller, and aging.

But platform-exclusive games are rare, these days.  I completely understand why: a modern AAA game can easily run between $15 million and $75 million for the studio behind it -- even up to $100 million.  You're not going to recoup that investment on just one platform -- there simply aren't going to be enough gamers on it.  (A 2009 study placed the average cost for a current-gen console game at $10 million.)

In short, almost every game we buy for our PCs or our PS3 is a cross-platform release (there are some exceptions).  And I'm sorry, 360 gamers, but your antique is holding the rest of us back.

There are the visual differences.  When you're in the middle of something like Uncharted 2, you see the full potential of the PS3's raw computing power and the capacity and definition of a blu-ray disc.  The thing looks gorgeous.  Crisp, sharp, detailed, and thoroughly amazing.  The merest hint at what the future of HD gaming can keep looking like.

But graphics aren't everything! you cry.  And you're right.  They're not.  If there were, I'd never use any other machine than my gaming PC (still state-of-the-art, even though it's a year old -- that curve has slowed way, WAY down in the last 3-4 years) and I'd have it hooked up to the best pair of HD monitors money could buy.  But many of my favorite games aren't about the graphics, they're about the writing.  Portal 2 is not state-of-the-art in visuals and Tales of Monkey Island certainly doesn't roll that way.

But right now there's a full keyboard attached to my desktop, of which the only keys I get to use are W, A, S, D, space, left-CTRL, tab, and sometimes Q and E if it's a game where strafing is a separate motion.  Controls, menus, and maps are all better, more detailed, and easier in most MMOs I've tried than in any other game of the last few years, and I think it's because they're PC native.  You can assume the player will use her mouse to manipulate a map in EQ2 or LOTRO.  But for Mass Effect the default assumption is that the player has only a controller, and that he can just sit closer to the TV (which will be 35" or larger) in order to read the map.

Admittedly, some despair over the future of PC gaming isn't the 360's fault.  It's Apple's.  As non-workplace "computing" tasks get relegated to the iPad and the smartphone, a capable desktop or laptop computer is fast fading from presence in the modern home.  There are 3 million people logged in at any given time to Steam, but there are over 6 million active iPhones in the US alone and over 300,000 daily new Android activations (across carriers and manufacturers).

All of this adds up to one clear fact: aside from a handful of niche titles, the era of the PC exclusive is well and truly over.  And I could take that (if grumpily), if we were not stuck right where we were at the beginning of this post: the XBox 360 is holding back content and performance for my PC games.

So Microsoft -- Nintendo's announcing their new console this summer and the PS3 is a full year newer than your device and had higher specs to start.  You are falling behind and taking me with you.  Step it up sometime soon for us with your 8th gen release, would you?

Beyond the Girl Gamer 1.2: The Chainmail Bikini

 Beyond the Girl Gamer: Intro | 1.1

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The long and the short of this piece is really pretty brief, because it's something we all know, and have known for years.  This post in the series exists because it has to, because I can't overlook something so egregious that we all know it internally:

Our female characters are nearly all overly sexualized.  And even when they might not be so bad in the context of a game itself, they're beyond awful in the marketing materials.

Rather than re-hashing several years' and decades' worth of discussion and argument here myself, I'm going to spare myself the pain of wheel-reinvention and link you all to someone who does have the data: Go Make Me a Sandwich.

The post that first brought me to that blog was an excellent breakdown of sexualized depicion in WoW galleries, by gender.  Hint: it's all T&A for the laydeez.  She also addresses the kinds of poses that seem to be de rigeur for the men in the room.

So really we know this happens.  This leaves us with two real questions:

1.) Why?  Why why why?

2.) Aren't there other good ways to sell and market a game?

Over and over, we hear "sex sells."  We hear that a bronze chestplate -- plate armor -- that covers the whole torso on a male avatar but only the breasts on a female avatar (or plate greaves, that cover the entirety of the legs on a male avatar but wears like a thong on a female avatar) does so because the men and boys who play the game just want to look at the bare girl skin.

Really?  I mean, really?  Do we think so little of gamers that not only do we assume that they're all straight men, but also that they all have the proclivities of an uncontrollable 13-year-old?

Everyone -- I mean, everyone -- in gaming has been discussing this for years.  We're smarter than this.  Valve has just recently knocked it out of the park on marketing a game with a female protagonist and a female antagonist.

So I'll leave you with just a sample of what some others have written on the topic:

• TVTropes entry on the Chainmail Bikini (examples galore)
• The Border House on the Platemail Bikini, especially in WoW
• Wikipedia's "Portrayals of Women in Video Games" entry
• A UVA Undergrad on feminist media theory & video game characters
• Aleah Tierny's "What Women Want," via PBS
• University of Arizona: "The Effects of the Sexualization of Female Video Game Characters..."

And ten minutes or less on Google will bring you to at least a hundred articles, rants, and blog posts on the theme.  Some are better than others.  (I skipped the ones that referred to our protaginists as "sluts," for example.)

So in short: this happens.  It shouldn't.  And I don't even have the energy to do the comparisons between, say, Lara Croft and Nathan Drake.  To developers' credit, 2011-era Lara Croft is meant to be different from 1999-era Lara Croft.  But when heroes in similar games are Boobarella and Charming Schlub, I think the point is made.

Next segment: first-person vs. third-person and voiced vs. unvoiced characterizations, and the difference these make to the player in terms of gender and identification.

If It's For Women, It Must Be Stupid. (Pt. 2 of many)

In reality, 40% of gamers are women.  And yet we keep fighting this constant uphill battle against the perception that gaming is a man's industry: dominated by men, designed for men and boys, with marketers and designers and male players all sitting around completely unaware that there's this big female audience they could tap into.  Gaming is something that boys and men who haven't outgrown being boys do, right?  There will continue to be "no" women in gaming for as long as gamers go around defining games as "those things which exclude women."

There's a lot behind this.  History plays a part, to be sure; girls and women are much more a part of the scene now than, say, 25 years ago.  But why hasn't perception been able to get closer to reality? 

Well, in part, it's because if women like it, it must be stupid.  This is a phenomenon that applies to most media -- books, movies, television -- but seems to apply doubly so in gaming.  The concept is so deeply ingrained in the gaming community that some of the worst perpetrators of it, in my experience, are other girls and women.  I have most assuredly been guilty of it myself.  So let's unpack this cycle a little.

The gamer community, like any community, defines itself both in terms of what it is and in terms of what it isn't.  And as the expansion of gaming technology has brought more tools (portables, PCs, Macs, consoles, phones) to the table, the community has buckled down.  No longer restricted to the guy who had the time, money, and lack of other social demands required in order to achieve a difficult goal, gaming's been blown wide open.  68% of American households contain video game consumers.  In the Americas, sales of the Wii -- in 2010, years after its release -- continue to blow away sales of other consoles:

But the Wii is a source of derision for "real" gamers.  It's too "casual."  It's not "hardcore" enough.  Right?  We've all heard it.  We've all seen it, in comments on game news sites.  We might have written it.  Or we, the "dedicated" gamers, might have let our Wiis collect dust since 2008 while we played reflex-action blood-spattered HD games on our other consoles.

But Nintendo, with its marketing strategy, reminded us of an unassailable set of facts: There have always been girls and women in gaming.  Gamers have always come in different races and ages and income brackets.  Someone who plays Tetris for an hour at a time three times a week is a video game consumer, just as someone who raids in WoW for eight hours a night is.  Nintendo hasn't so much blown open the demographics -- though they have -- as they've blown open the debate and the recognition.

No-one has said, in eighty years, "all watchers of movies fit the same demographic." Television has a dozen competing networks per demographic.  And yet we maintain this overwrought, antiquated cultural insistence that all gamers are one type, one thing only.  And it comes as much from inside of the gamer community as from outside of it.  Why?

Because if it's designed for, marketed to, or primarily consumed by women, it doesn't count.

A 24-year-old male who spends 5 hours every weeknight online in Modern Warfare 2, is a "hardcore gamer."  He is the definition and perpetuation of the industry.  A 24-year-old female who spends 5 hours every weeknight devoting herself to the ins and outs of the lives of her Sims is... nothing.  A 35-year-old female who spends 5 hours every weeknight fluttering around the low-cost options on Yahoo Games is less than nothing.

In fact, in the Kotaku post I cited before, with the terrible music video, one commenter says it out loud:

this song is fucking terrible. Stan Lee and Seth Green are cool though and those girls are hot. Probably never touched anything outside Halo/wii/WoW though.

Because if you're female, even the exact same games the boys play (Halo, WoW) don't count.