you guys are all missing a very important piece of the puzzle that everyone seems to miss when talking about this sort of thing
- corporations exist to make money -
prior to the very recent surge of independent game development – facilitated by easier-to-use development tools like Unity, Game Maker (with the stuff added since the YoYoGames acquisition, namely the cross-platform stuff), and UE4 – video games cost a lot of money to make, and their cost only went up as time went on. games kept setting the bar higher and higher for graphical fidelity, realisticness of characters, breadth of content (just look at any open-world game), and so on. think back to the early Xbox/PS2 era and look at where non-indie games are now. notice how teams went from 1-5 programmers in the 8- and 16-bit era to smallish teams in the N64/PS1 era, and now you have pretty much every major AAA game being made by hundreds of people, usually from different companies, over the course of several years
look at the death of the mid-tier non-indie game: Midway went out of business in 2009. for better or for worse, we no longer have video game tie-ins for every animated film ever. if you see a new video game based on your favorite Saturday morning cartoon, it's now a Gravity Falls mobile (iOS/Android) game, and not a $20-40 Xbox One/PS4 game. "weird" (niche) mid-tier Japanese games never kept up with the AAA games, because of their niche appeal
so what happens when cost of development skyrockets due to consumer expectations? you have to play things super safe. you can't afford to risk tens of millions of dollars (or more!) on anything that's not going to be a surefire hit. I've been recently going back and studying the changes the video game industry has gone through in the past decade or so, and it's been absolutely fascinating. remember in 2008/2009 when Capcom was trying to make more Western-style games? they had Grin, a Swedish developer, make Bionic Commando: Rearmed (an "HD remake" of the original 8-bit-era Bionic Commando), as well as a new, AA- or AAA-budgeted Bionic Commando for PC/Xbox 360/PS3. the new Bionic Commando was a completely different game, a third-person shooter with grappling and swinging mechanics
this kind of game would never come out today, holy shit, right? like, how many gamers playing games today even know what Bionic Commando is, and even if they did, who would put down $50-$60 for a new game in that "franchise"? some people, to be sure, but definitely not so many to justify the cost of that game. Grin went out of business later in 2009, after that game was released.
so for a long while there, the bottom dropped out from the middle tier of video games, and people were struggling to figure out what to do. thank God almighty that Sony and Microsoft finally pulled their heads out of their asses and focused on indie game development for their new consoles, because otherwise the industry would be pretty much dead. it's still not in a great place, but we're getting better; people can afford to take risks on their weird indie games, because they're being made by small teams (and, sometimes, individuals), and they're selling for $1-20, not $20-40. the development tools are in place to facilitate this, too; instead of having to make a fresh engine every time you make a game, you can just use Unity for your cross-platform weird indie games
how does all of this have to do with sexism and minorities and shit?
once again:
- corporations exist to make money -
think back to BioShock Infinite. relatively recent game, coming from a well-respected developer, led by a well-respected game designer (one of the few "household names" in games [note: this isn't me gushing over BioShock Infinite; I don't really like it that much, personally]). remember the big fuss over the game's box art being generic as hell, just a dude with a gun on his shoulder or whatever, instead of something more artistic?
yeah, why did that happen?
- corporations exist to make money -
focus testing. full stop
when you have as much riding on the success of BioShock Infinite as Irrational, 2K, and Take-Two did, you can be damn sure that some marketing guys are gonna focus-test the shit out of your game. I know nothing about focus-testing except that the people who do it probably know what the fuck they're doing because they get paid so much to do it. you, reader, and I can sit around all day saying "why aren't there more games with female protagonists?", but any marketing guy at a AAA studio could probably tell you, quite simply: "if you have two games side-by-side in Walmart, with identical premise and gameplay, but one game has a black trans lesbian on the cover, looking badass, and one has a presumably-straight, presumably-cis white American male holding a gun on the cover, one of these is going to sell more than the other"
does this suck? absolutely. people complained for years about "brown shooters", but enough of them sold to the point where they kept making them, right?
some people try to argue against it, or say that it's wrong, but the fact remains that most people who buy game consoles in America are, or at least have been mostly 18-24-year-old straight white cis males. game marketing departments are only doing their jobs by making games marketed directly at them, instead of reaching out to more demographics
if you're making a game and you know that the majority of your market is [demographic], why would you market it to anything but [demographic]? niche Japanese games that still exist do very little to make themselves more appealing to Western audiences, while AAA Japanese games do the exact opposite, and try to cater toward Western audiences specifically because, as I said above,
- corporations exist to make money -
, and they have to in order to meet the worldwide sales numbers that their games' budgets demand
so you might say that AAA video games "have been sexist/racist/otherwise prejudiced" in the past, and even going forward, because they have marketing people behind them, doing their job to make sure that the games are as appealing as possible to as much of a market as possible that will buy the games. sure, at any point, Brown Shooter 34's protagonist could have been even a gay white American male, but come on, that would obviously be an unnecessary risk, from a business perspective, right? as a marketing guy, I can point to this stack of research showing that 18-24 straight cis white American game-playing males will undoubtedly buy the game if there's a white dude with a gun on the cover, but if we make that white dude gay… who knows what that would do to our sales numbers? would they go down because the demographic we traditionally target has a high chance of being homophobic? probably! would we sell more copies to gay people, because they now have a protagonist that they can somewhat identify with on a superficial level? maybe! that's one hell of a multimillion-dollar gamble, though! why take the risk? why not play it safe?
thus: Western video games have been traditionally marketed directly at teen-to-young-adult straight white cis males. I don't think this is a controversial statement, but it seems like a ton of people would like to refute it
I am NOT saying that ZERO women, minorities, etc. also played these games. this is obviously not the case. but the fact remains: I haven't even played Call of Duty: Black Ops III, but I have little doubt in my mind that the protagonist is a straight white male, and this decision was made in order to sell games, NOT because of bigotry or whatever
ALL OF THAT SAID:
this is why the new indie game market is absolutely fantastic for everybody
now we can have, once again, this great "middle tier" of video games, but this time they're even better than they ever were before. they're cheaper than before ($1-20 instead of $20-40). they're lower-risk than before (smaller teams + easier-to-use dev tools). and, because of these reasons: they're more diverse than they ever have been, allowing the games industry to finally branch out and reach people who never would have thought of video games as a thing they would even try before. boom, now video games have the power to be actually mainstream, instead of this weird stigmatized semi-niche thing they've always been before. finally we can move past the public perception of video games as this thing that only children, virgin neckbeards in their parents' basements, and college frat bros play. I didn't even talk about the mobile games market, but that's obviously a huge plus, too; everyone has a damn smartphone, and now everyone can play games. I can begin work on a game right now, today, using Unity, and target literally everyone with an iPhone, iPad, and Android device. you don't have to go out and buy a console to play my game, nor have a prohibitively-expensive PC; you just use the thing that you're maybe even reading this on right now
basically: I'm stoked for the future of video games, and incredibly optimistic about how it's going in general
WHICH IS WHY
people like Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn piss me off so much
like I've said in previous posts, they're probably the two most well-known female names of real people in video games, and they haven't contributed a damn thing to this industry. Quinn made a single shitty Twine game, received an undeserved amount of flak for it, and is now making a career out of combating "harassment". Sarkeesian made a couple of shitty videos that raise a couple of good points here and there, but are largely complete garbage, and she's making money hand-over-fist for it
these two women have done nothing but complain about the video game industry, instead of actually striving to prove that, no, women can totally make games just like men
I actually really liked Quinn a lot before the whole GamerGate thing. one time I saw a video with her in it, and she was talking about how she was playing around with VR in ways that nobody else really was: using webcams as well. she said she made a simple thing where she attached webcams to the front of Oculus Rift prototypes, and then made a "game" out of it where two people wore these headsets and shot each other with Nerf guns, while only being able to see the feed from the other player's camera. this is obviously nowhere near a full game or anything, but I was incredibly inspired by her creativity and out-of-the-box thinking with regards to virtual reality and the cool shit we can make with it in the future
but now look at her: she's caught up in her own bullshit drama. she literally has a book and film in the works about her "terrible tragedy of harassment". she hasn't made a single game, even another simple Twine story, since Depression Quest
dear God I hope nobody thinks of her as a fucking role model
same goes for Sarkeesian
is a non-trivial amount of vocal hate sent her way the result of gamers being overly-defensive about their favored medium? absolutely, no question
are she and McIntosh feeding into this vocal hatred? absolutely, no question
because of FemFreq, you now have young people that think that an acceptable contribution to the video game industry consists of breaking down the racial distribution of fictional video game characters in video games that take place in European fantasy settings… instead of, like, making their own games that contain the characters and settings that they want
in my opinion, both of these women are demonstrating to girls and young women that even learning the minimum amount of computer science skills in order to make a simple Unity or Game Maker game is a waste of time, compared to just being vocal about How Things Should Be and being an eternal victim
again, I'm going to bring up Kalman and Sentris, because it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "women in video games" that aren't Sarkeesian or Quinn
look at the trailer for Sentris: http://store.steampowered.com/app/303530/
from the reviews, reactions to the game seem to be mixed, but like, just look at that video. look at all the work that went into making the blocks animate when they move. look at that crazy waveform visualization thing in the center background. look at the entire visual style of the game. whether the game is good or not, a lot of effort was spent making it look and feel exactly like how the creator intended. I can't help but fucking respect that. I'll bet that I have more programming skill than Samantha Kalman (who, again, taught herself Unity [I'm not sure whether it was JavaScript or C#, but that doesn't matter] in order to make this game), but she fuckin worked her ass off, polished up this game she made by herself, and released it on Steam. I might be technically more skilled at programming than Kalman, but I have infinite respect for her for having a vision, executing on it, polishing it up, and releasing it. that's something that I haven't done outside of GAM, for crying out loud
but, nobody knows who she is, because the industry is too busy bowing down to Sarkeesian and Quinn, instead of looking for actually inspirational minority developers like Kalman
remember: Kalman is also trans. she doesn't really say this anywhere, but she has talked about it publicly. she doesn't wear it as a badge of honor. she doesn't cry about negative Sentris reviews, because obviously someone who would rate her game negatively is anti-woman, anti-trans, or both. she made a fucking game, put her name on it, and released it
I can only hope that girls and young women looking to get into video games can see the larger picture of the "GamerGate" fiasco, understand why it happened, and see Quinn and Sarkeesian for being the self-absorbed eternal victims that they are. I hope that they see people like Kalman and look up to them as inspirations for what one woman can do in 2015 with just an idea, a copy of Unity, and some determination
like I said in the first half of this rant: indie games are the awesome savior of artistic expression and diversity in video games that we've badly needed basically since the birth of the medium. some of the stuff that you see come out on Steam, itch.io, and elsewhere on the Internet is so fuckin cool, so interesting, so original
we need more of this shit!
making a career out of publicly crying about the mean things that the anonymous Internet said to you is not how you reach the goal of increased diversity in video games
I only have this greater perspective on the situation because I've spent the last couple of years obsessively researching the video game industry and how it's changed over time
I don't expect a third-grade girl, interested in getting into making video games, in 2015 to do the same. I would expect her to see Quinn and Sarkeesian as role models
and people wonder why there aren't more women in the video games industry
it's probably just all the toxic masculinity