Gamer girls get the shaft...

The fact that the majority of gamers are male is hardly a controversial statement. It’s almost tautological. Guys like games, girls don’t. Yet, fundamentally, I don’t see why one’s fondness of gaming should be so dominated by a person’s sex. Games are, at their most basic level, just interactive media. When you think about games a bit more you can see why they’re so male dominated; you can see why I spent a lot of my childhood playing on my Sega Megadrive and my sisters didn’t. Maybe it’s some ingrained gender pigeon-holing but little boys seem to prefer playing with toy soldiers, whilst little girls end up playing with dolls. When you look at the majority of games out there they generally seem to involve shooting and killing stuff and I guess that’s more appealing to a 7 year old boy than a 7 year old girl.

Even when you move to games marketed for more adult audiences, the gaming industry has hardly helped things. The origins of Lara Croft, perhaps the first mainstream female gaming protagonist are a rather dubious tale. Maybe it’s just an urban myth, but apparently Lara’s most prominent features is the result of one of the developers playing around with the character model, giggling at the results and deciding to make that the final design of the character. Female characters in gaming were rife with perhaps derogatory stereotypes that probably put many girls off gaming. In the world of RPGs the male characters had the big swords (Freudian maybe??) whilst the female characters were weak and squishy casting spells safe in the knowledge that the big, burly (if androgynous) men would protect them.

I’d like to think that over the last decade or so things have moved on somewhat and yeah, to some extent, they have. There is a decent repertoire of games out there that have realistic female characters that aren’t defined by huge breasts, little clothing or their tendency to die easily. I’m talking about Jade from Beyond Good and Evil, or Alyx from Half-Life 2. There’s also the development of games that aren’t just about killing crap or driving fast cars – things that stereotypically, guys seem to enjoy more than girls. My girlfriend – who before meeting me had absolutely no interest in ever playing games – has recently fallen in love with Catherine, a puzzle game about adultery and the consequences of it. The Wii has led to the development of games that appeal to people who normally disregard them, opening it up to a wider audience. It all boils down to the fundamental question I stated before: why should the idea of sitting in front of a TV and controlling the actions of the characters on screen only appeal to men? I don’t get why it should.

Yet this still doesn’t deal with a very different issue. Are girls welcomed as gamers? There are countless stories of women getting a hard time on online services like Xbox Live. A game of Call of Duty with a bunch of drunken guys, when suddenly a girl appears on the voice chat. Oh my god an actual girl!! Then she has to suffer the entire game getting hit on and abused by a bunch of idiots whilst all she wants to do is shoot a few people like everyone else there. Recently I went to the Eurogamer Expo like Ross, the Games Editor, who wrote about it a few weeks ago. It’s my third expo and it seemed to me that this year had more female attendees than I’d seen previously. Women dressed up as video-game characters, groups of friends, both male and female, and middle aged couples all there to check out some games. Maybe some of the girls were dragged along by their partner or friendship group, but still perhaps it’s a sign that attitudes to gaming are changing. And then something happened. Booth Babes. If you’ve never heard of that term, it is infamously attached to gaming expos, describing a woman paid to stand next a gaming booth wearing very little. Her entire purpose is to lure men to come over to the booth and play the game she is advertising. Eurogamer has since apologised for the significant presence of booth babes this year, saying they didn’t know any of the companies attending had hired any and will not let any companies do such next year.

Now I have nothing against women doing this for their profession. It’s more about how it labels the entire idea of computer games. “Video games are for men. Men like scantily clad women. Hire women to advertise games.” Most of all it’s a lazy and terrible advertising ploy. Moreover though it just tells every woman attending these expos that they are not welcome – “Girls, we don’t give a shit if you like games; we don’t care if you came here to try out the Wii U or maybe play the new Halo, this event is not for you. Go home and watch Sex and the City. This place is for guys. Not just guys. Straight guys. Guys who like boobs and girls with QR codes on their hot pants” (yes they really did have QR codes on their hot pants).

To be fair to the majority of the gaming industry, the main offenders were not really development companies. I’m not going to name any names, but only one game booth had booth babes. Mostly it was supplementary companies. Companies that sell products involved in gaming, but not necessarily only for gaming. I think most developers understand that girls can and do like games, and if they don’t make female characters that are absurd and sexist, girls might play them.

Maybe I am just wrong. Maybe there is something I’m missing about why gaming is so male dominated; if so, let me know. However, regardless of that, the outward image needs to change. Purely from a marketing point of view surely making over 50% of the population feel unwelcome in your industry is a damn stupid tactic.