Women in Games?

I recently had the pleasure of attending a talk by David Smith, founder of Women in Games Jobs, a not-for-profit company which describes itself as working to "recruit, retain and support the progression of women in the games industry by positively and actively promoting female role models and giving encouragement and information to those women seeking to work in games".

Ignoring the incongruity of a man establishing an organisation for the promotion of women, David made some interesting points.

According to David, of the 9,000 highly skilled workers supported by the Games Industry in the UK, only 1 in 15 is female; a staggering ratio, even for an industry that has traditionally been associated with young males.

 

But is this association valid? According to a report by the Entertainment Software Association in 2008, the ratio between male and female ‘gamers’ is around 40:60, with almost half of players between the ages of 18 and 49, and the average age of gamers 35 years old. Although this was a survey conducted in the US, it is logical to expect similar results in the UK. While this ratio is not consistent across all game genres (web and phone based games feature the highest proportion of female players) overall it is impossible to ignore the fact that women are a sizeable majority of gamers.

So how do we account for this discrepancy? According to David Smith, the history of video games has been that of ‘boys making games for boys’. If we look at who ‘blockbuster’ games are aimed at, this certainly seems true. The almost universally poor portrayal of female characters in games shows exactly who developers assume their biggest market is: sexually frustrated male teenagers. 

Game director Hideki Kamiya claimed that the core theme of the game Bayonetta was intended to be ‘sexiness’.

However, the statistics show this is quite clearly not the case: games are not just the pursuit of young men. In catering only for an elusive, stereotypical market developers will ultimately fail to find their audience; they risk alienating the very people whose business they need to continue. In such a hit-driven industry, where companies fail regularly, developers cannot afford such a mistake. Commercially it makes little sense, so why is such unchecked sexism especially prevalent in the medium of video games?

The character Samara from Mass Effect 2 must get cold while walking about in space.

The most obvious answer is that with so few women involved in creating games, the patriarchal attitudes and male sexual fetishes we see are left unchecked. Without the voice of women (or even non-straight males), is it really surprising that female characters are primarily used as window dressing? Something pretty to drape around the DVD case. 
 

It is also worth highlighting that minority groups have a worryingly small presence in the games industry. As David Smith noted, around 3% of those working in the industry in the UK are members of an ethnic minority. So perhaps a more accurate analysis of the history of games is that of ‘white boys making games for other white boys’.

Certainly the ingrained sexism seen in the artistic direction of video games must be challenged, from all sides, but primarily from within the industry itself. I believe video games have the potential to become the medium of our generation, but for this to happen we must see a radical shift in the people who make them. We must see more women and members of minority groups making the creative decisions in games companies, in order for the medium to adapt and ultimately to survive.