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.

2d Walk cycle

Informed by the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge (below) I have made my very own homemade 2D walk cycle.

First of we have the steps planned out. I've chosen to use four 'frames' over the course of 1 second.

If I animate this walking past it looks pretty legit. Obviously there's only one foot, but it does look like it's walking.

For the purposes of video game animation, I will be animating the walk cycles on the spot - Moom will not move around forwards in Maya. So first let's show this in my 2D animation:

Yep, definitely looks like a single leg on a treadmill. If I add in a second leg behind the first (greyed out to distinguish it) I have the whole set.

Just to check this still looks right when moving, I've moved the legs forward each time:

Well this looks pretty good to me. now I know where the feet will be at every quarter of a second I can transpose that into Maya and hopefully let the computer fill in the majority of the movement for me.

A Different Kind of Animation

I thought I'd throw this into the blog, since it counts as 'animtion'. I fancied having a go at redesigning the ident I made for Jack Brindelli's Youtube channel.

Original:

I made this one about over a year ago using Flash. Although I was happy with it at the time, I felt I could do a better version now.

New (WIP): 

 

Using After Effects instead of Flash means I can go crazy with the blur. Gotta love some of that blur. In seriousness though, it does make fade transitions more convincing.

I'm going to go back over this later on and probably change the timing so it syncs up with the audio better.

Walk cycle - First Attempt.

Using the 'Moom' character rig (http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/moom-v4-0-3-by-ramtin). This cycle is 40 (39) frames long.

To be frank, this is pretty rubbish, but that's to be expected considering it's my first attempt animating a 3D character. I think I have the basics of how to actually move the rig about sorted in my head now, the trouble I've been having has been knowing which parts to move, and how.

For instance, in this cycle the legs raise far higher than they should do while moving forwards. I tried to emulate the secondary motion (movement of the head/hips/etc) but this has come out rather exaggerated. In my future attempts I need to be more subtle.

I'm going to reduce the cycle down in  4 frames, and draw them out in 2 dimensions first, then take that into Maya.

Bouncing Ball II: Bounce Harder

So the next step is to make this cheeky little ball bounce forwards as well as up and down (this is the part where it gets complicated).

I improved on the earlier ball animation in a number of ways: the ball actually rotates as it falls, and the point from which the squash and stretch occurs rotates with the ball. There is also I more subtle amount of squash and stretch. Maya can loop the animation with values offset, meaning the up/down motion is repeated while the ball moves forwards continually. I couldn't find a way of reducing the height of each bounce each time without changing the keyframes manually, so in this animation the balls heighest point remains consistent. Also (although barely noticeable) the rotation is not offset with each repetition, meaning the ball rotates back to its original value directly after each bounce. But I only noticed that after I exported this lovely .avi.

Bouncing Ball - Part 1

So the first thing you're going to be doing in any process of animation is making a ball bounce (I certainly did it in 2D years ago). I present: my first attempt at making things move about in Maya.

At the time I recorded this I had no idea how to export video in Maya, hence the cameraphone video.

There's probably a bit too much squashing going on here (although that depends on what type of ball this is I suppose!).

Life Drawing - 16/01/13