I’ve been meaning to blog about a nice feature in Polygon, No girls allowed. The essay starts by talking about gendered toys (and toy store aisles) and then moves on to why there isn’t the same gendering in games, but worse:
As for the boys section — there isn’t one. Everything else is for boys.
If the selection at the average retailer is anything to go by, girls don’t play video games. If cultural stereotypes are anything to go by, video games are for males. They’re the makers, the buyers and the players.
It has been fashionable to point to statistics that suggest “forty-five percent of all game players are women.” (Entertainment Software Association Industry Facts) Such facts, however, apply to all games, but not necessarily to retail games which are marketed more to males. The essay therefore looks at marketing and the vicious cycle of designing for a market (young men) that then reinforces beliefs about the market (it is best to target young men.)
According to Roeser, it makes sense from a marketing perspective for the video game industry to have pursued a male audience, which is exactly what it did starting in the early ’90s.
Tracey Lien then looks back at the history of game marketing and notes how it is only recently that there has been such market segmentation. Lien writes about early women developers like Carol Shaw who worked for Atari and how they weren’t designing for a particular gender.
Things changed in the mid 1980s after the Atari crash. Nintendo saved the industry by reintroducing games as toys which were then marketed as toys. Nintendo started gathering demographic information and discovered that more boys were playing which then fed into segmentation.
In the 1990s, the messaging of video game advertisements takes a different turn. Television commercials for the Game Boy feature only young boys and teenagers. The ad for the Game Boy Color has a boy zapping what appears to be a knight with a finger laser. Atari filmed a bizarre series of infomercials that shows a man how much his life will improve if he upgrades to the Jaguar console. With each “improvement,” he has more and more attractive women fawning over him. There is nothing in any of the ads that indicate that the consoles and games are for anyone other than young men.
The marketing segmentation became a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that ignored all the games popular with women like Myst and the Sims. The marketing and media present the male oriented games as the important or real games and the others as exceptions. Perhaps Grand Theft Auto is the exception and Farmville is the norm. Perhaps retail console games are just a fraction of game culture.
This essay strikes me as a great entry into talking about gender and games for a course. I also like the web design with the images that alternate from one side to the other.
On a related note, see the Let Toys Be Toys (for Girls and Boys) advocacy web site.