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Thread: Inclusion Isn't Enough

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    Inclusion Isn't Enough

    Warning: This thread revolves around the politics of video games. If you can't handle that, leave.


    So traditionally we think of opposition to expanded and improved representation for women (or, for that matter, LGBTQ people, people of color, people with disabilities, etc.) in games as coming from a conservative place and mentality. After all, there was that whole alt-right Gamergate thing not very long ago, for example, which enjoyed the open and active support and participation of the likes of Breitbart News and The Daily Stormer, to say nothing of the larger online male supremacist movement (Return of Kings, etc.) and, sadly, turned out to be a microcosm for where our larger political culture was headed. But it's worth adding that the extremity of Gamergate drove away most of the online gaming community and provoked a backlash in video game development that has seen the game industry begin to expand its recruitment of female workers and, perhaps accordingly, has also seen the female representation in video games themselves expand noticeably. It is not disputable that, before 2015, the majority of major video games being released had male leads, for example, but here's the trend in player options for major games beginning with those given press conferences at E3 2015:

    E3 2015:

    Gender choice: 46%
    Male lead: 32%
    Androgynous/no lead: 13%
    Female lead: 9%

    E3 2016:

    Gender choice: 49%
    Male lead: 41%
    Androgynous/no lead: 7%
    Female lead: 3%

    E3 2017:

    Gender choice: 52%
    Male lead: 28%
    Androgynous/no lead: 15%
    Female lead: 7%

    (It's worth highlighting that 7% of video games had female leads in 1997 as well, which shows you that that category has seen zero net growth in the last two decades.)

    You'll notice a trend in that one of these categories -- gender choice -- increases every year and is now a feature of fully the majority of major video games that we can see on the horizon. There is a trend toward a liberal, i.e. inclusive, ethic that we can see emerging now, in other words. In general, this ethic expands its cultural reach at the expense of male-centered games since that's always such a huge category to reduce, but as we can see in comparing E3 2015 to E3 2016, for example, it sometimes also come at the expense of the consistently marginal, female-centered games category, and that's what I want to highlight and focus on here today.

    When I speak of conservative, alt-right opposition to female representation in games and the games industry, I speak of movements that emerge to demand things like the systematic firing of women from game development or publishing companies, the removal of announced female game characters prior to a title's release, negative review scores for small games created by women, etc., typically with a conspiracy theory attached. That has traditionally been the main impediment to expanded and improved representation for women (and others) in gaming. But I propose to you that the trend toward liberalism, as manifested in-game in the form of gender choice, might eventually become the bigger problem if current trends continue. Let me explain more clearly with a couple specific examples that highlight what I'm getting at:

    As you may or may not know, one of my favorite games of all time is the 2003 intimate adventure Beyond Good & Evil, which stars a poor, female photojournalist by the name of Jade who uncovers a government plot to keep a war going indefinitely by conspiring with the enemy in order to justify permanent military rule. It was a commercial flop in its own time, thanks largely to lack of marketing, but, being a quality title, subsequently developed a cult following large enough to justify a sequel in the publisher's eyes. Thus in 2009, Ubisoft released this preview trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2:



    You'll notice that Jade remained the protagonist. We then heard silence from Ubisoft on the project until this year, when Beyond Good & Evil 2 resurfaced at this year's E3 trade show as a completely different game! The updated Beyond Good & Evil, it has been explained, will be a massive-scale MMO with a vast library of selectable characters, including the option to create your own; a fact that frankly promises to undermine the intimacy that made the first game appealing to me and which I believe constitutes selling out. After all, there is a profit motive involved in giving everyone a little something. The problem with giving everyone a little something though is that the story, the scenarios, etc. have to become interchangeable, indistinct, generic. The original Beyond Good & Evil was the story of a young woman and her loved ones as much as it was about the larger society around them. The sequel is shaping up to be the story of no one in particular. The humanity of the original is lost to marketing strategy. And while that might be one thing if you belong to a social group whose stories have always been told aplenty and continue to be, if you instead belong to one whose stories are scarcely being told as things are, well...I think that that's a problem.

    To highlight a more prominent example that I think many people here on PF will understand and/or relate to on some level, the liberalization trend also recently hit Nintendo's famous, long-running Metroid franchise.

    In 1987 (or '86 if you're Japanese), the original Metroid became the first console game to bring 2D open-world game play into the popular view, thus launching a mini-trend that produced material like Castlevania II, Blaster Master, and so forth. It also included a surprise at the end that stunned the gaming community: At the end of the game, the player character, Samus Aran, removes her full-body armored suit to reveal that...the muscular, bad-ass bounty hunter you'd been playing as the whole time is actually a woman! You'll scoff now at the pettiness, but that was actually a revolutionary moment in gaming in 1987 that made Samus a household name as, for a time, gaming's seminal feminist icon, enjoying a kind of Wonder Woman-like stature. Even today, Samus still polls as the second most-recognized female lead in video games, behind only Lara Croft of the later Tomb Raider franchise.

    Over the last decade, Nintendo has been criticized for demeaning Samus to increasing degrees. First they did away with her muscles in their character designs. Then, with Metroid: Other M, they reduced her from a bad-ass bounty hunter to a servile shrieking mimsy who cannot even defend herself from attack without the express permission of a (male) commander of the regular military. These were the stages of character reduction that preceded the announcement of Metroid: Federation Force in 2015, which introduced Nintendo's broader cutesy ethic to the Metroid franchise (with giant-headed characters and so forth), abolished the franchise's traditional single-player game play...and replaced Samus altogether with a generic player character of subjective gender and a title (Marine) instead of a name and a real identity. Due to this backdrop, and also the fact that the game was supposed to commemorate the franchise's 30-year anniversary, the announcement trailer for Metroid: Federation Force yielded a legendary backlash: It generated a 90% dislike ratio on YouTube within 24 hours, soon thereafter a (then) record number of total dislikes for any YouTube video of any kind, and a Change.org petition calling for the game to be cancelled, followed by franchise record low sales upon its release. And lo and behold that two years later, we have a new, mostly-traditional type Metroid game just released with the unsubtle title Metroid: Samus Returns!

    Metroid remains Nintendo's only female-led franchise. And that's what it took to retain even that one in today's climate of "inclusiveness". Do you see what I'm getting at? If current trends continue, yes overrepresentation of male-specific narratives will continue to decrease...BUT the underrepresentation of female-specific narratives will never be addressed, and may even get worse! I think on some level it matters whether girls and women see stories ABOUT US being told in this medium. The fact that there are so few of them tells the girls and women of today that we don't really matter as much as our male counterparts. We need our own stories too, not just generic, blah stories about generic, blah characters with no gender-specific experiences. To highlight what I mean another way, here's how games that use gender choice are typically marketed:


    CoD BO 3.jpg

    Assassin's Creed Synicate.jpg

    FIFA 17.jpg


    You see what I mean? You'd never even know that you could play as a woman or women (as applicable) to judge by the box covers, or by the commercials for that matter! My point is that the industry is so male-dominated that almost WHENEVER there's a male character option, that option is considered the default and the female option(s) is/are marginalized and sidelined, often including in the games themselves, not just the marketing. Only games that actually revolve around females tend to do anything else.

    What do you think? Is the current trend toward gender choice a long-term threat to meaningful female representation in video games? Do women (and other marginalized groups as well) need our own stories to be told in this medium or should every game include the option of choosing one's gender and possibly race and other demographic attributes, either directly or in the mind? In other words, should token representation become universal or should we expect more from time to time?


    (As always, all are welcome to contribute (note though that I said "contribute", not "waste my time with BS"), but I am especially interested in the opinions of those who, to some degree or other, follow and are invested in geek culture. @AeonPax, @Green Arrow, @Hal Jordan, and @CreepyOldDude readily come to mind.)
    Last edited by IMPress Polly; 09-17-2017 at 10:38 AM.

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    I'm all for female leads if their characters are interesting and it doesn't come across as forced, no different than a male lead. I'm not surprised to see females being options now in mmo games and things of the like, where you create your character from scratch, that probably would have been smart to have been an option from the start. I know the Pokemon franchise eventually put the option to play a female lead at a point.

    I still think it all boils down to developers programming for a market that they think will sell. That may or may not be true, but I still think that's the feeling.

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    *sigh* I suppose Medal of honor was somehow supremacist?

    Not a big gamer, but that is the only game I ever beat! Shoot them pesky Nazis!
    There is no God but Resister and Refugee is his messenger’.

    Book of Democrat Things, Chapter 1:1






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    Quote Originally Posted by resister View Post
    *sigh* I suppose Medal of honor was somehow supremacist?

    Not a big gamer, but that is the only game I ever beat! Shoot them pesky Nazis!
    ]

    I think you're reading too much into this.
    "For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'." John Greenleaf Whittier

    "Our minds control our bodies. Our bodies control our enemies. Our enemies control jack shit by the time we're done with them." Stick

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    Polly, I think you bring up some great points here.

    MMOs need the inclusion of having both genders available. Other games, it's not so necessary, and tends to be detrimental. The logical sol.ution would be to create multiple stories for the character choices provided. For games that allow character creation, have the story change based on the options chosen. This greatly adds to replayability along with the other benefits.

    As a writer, ultimately, the most important thing is the story. That may be part of the reason FPS have little interest to me.

    As an aside, what was done with Metroid disturbs me greatly.

    As for the covers you have shown, other than the soccer game, I think there should be equal representation for the options available. With sports games, I think genders matter little, if at all.

    In general, the story is what matters to me. Gender can easily play a part in that. I think women are still marginalized in regards to quality video game stories. I'm all for fixing that.
    "For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'." John Greenleaf Whittier

    "Our minds control our bodies. Our bodies control our enemies. Our enemies control jack shit by the time we're done with them." Stick

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    The greatest mmorph of all time not only has just as many female leads but female heros and female characters.

    Every character in World of Warcraft can be male or female, the storyline has women and males combined as heros and heroines and villains. Females are very much written into the Lore moreso it seems on the horde side than the alliance side.
    LETS GO BRANDON
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    Hal Jordan wrote:
    Polly, I think you bring up some great points here.

    MMOs need the inclusion of having both genders available. Other games, it's not so necessary, and tends to be detrimental. The logical sol.ution would be to create multiple stories for the character choices provided. For games that allow character creation, have the story change based on the options chosen. This greatly adds to replayability along with the other benefits.

    As a writer, ultimately, the most important thing is the story. That may be part of the reason FPS have little interest to me.

    As an aside, what was done with Metroid disturbs me greatly.

    As for the covers you have shown, other than the soccer game, I think there should be equal representation for the options available. With sports games, I think genders matter little, if at all.

    In general, the story is what matters to me. Gender can easily play a part in that. I think women are still marginalized in regards to quality video game stories. I'm all for fixing that.
    I appreciate your thoughtful response and obviously agree with the crux of it! I just have to quick points to make in reply:

    As for the covers you have shown, other than the soccer game, I think there should be equal representation for the options available. With sports games, I think genders matter little, if at all.
    I disagree with you on drawing the exception of sports titles! I think there's a reason why sports simulations are the least popular genre with female gamers. Only 2% of the genre's player base is female overall, as you can see at the link. I suspect it's substantially because sports simulations are the most one-sidedly male-centric video game genre in existence today. Even when there are professional women's leagues for a given sport in real life, they won't tend to exist in the logically corresponding video games. Electronic Arts though has been working to change that in recent years. Although their FIFA franchise has existed since 1993, they finally began including the women's league in the 2016 edition. And they actively marketed FIFA 16 to both male and female players, as well. Here, for example, was the American box cover:


    FIFA 16 US2.jpg


    You see? It CAN be done!! It's really not that difficult. But installments subsequent to the 2016 edition have, while retaining the women's league in the games, removed the female representation from the box covers and commercials, by contrast. Electronic Arts is likewise finally adding the WNBA to their similarly long-running NBA Live franchise this year, in NBA Live 18, but the preview box cover that we've seen only depicts two men and shows no other indication that the WNBA is included. But if the women's leagues had separate games, gender-based marketing bias wouldn't be an issue because there would be no choice of which league to show! (Assuming they bothered to market the women's versions at all. You sense my certain cynicism here?)

    Of course, real life needs to help out as well. There are girl's football leagues in many schools and communities across America, yet no professional women's league exists. We have likewise seen clearly in recent years that females CAN throw overhanded just fine, yet there is still no professional baseball league for women or allowance of women into the MLB. It also wouldn't hurt for the "regular" NBA to add an M in front of their league name so that people (including game publishers like Electronic Arts and "What are women?" 2K Games ) might be less reflexively inclined to think of the sport of basketball as masculine by default and feminine by exception.

    But anyway, all that is why I don't see the sports genre as a valid exception to my point in the OP. The existing level of stigma on female participation in sports, and especially of professional aspirations, is bad enough without the video game industry's help, in my opinion.

    MMOs need the inclusion of having both genders available. Other games, it's not so necessary, and tends to be detrimental. The logical sol.ution would be to create multiple stories for the character choices provided. For games that allow character creation, have the story change based on the options chosen. This greatly adds to replayability along with the other benefits.
    This is an interesting perspective! However, it doesn't address the marketing bias issue that I've been raising here. There is simply no way to solve that problem at a structural level save for either making the player character androgynous (which eliminates the possibility of gender-specific narratives) or just allowing some (preferably more) games to have female leads. I think the latter approach makes the most sense, which is why I'm sticking up for it here.

    I'm not griping about MMOs or anything! I don't mean to make it seem that way! There's a reason why MMOs are among the most popular genres with female gamers, and it's got everything to do with their broadly inclusive ethos. (36% of the MMO player base overall is female, a you can see at the link, which equates to disproportionate female representation when you consider that only about 25-30% of gaming hobbyists (people who identify themselves as gamers when surveyed) are female.) I'm just saying that people don't want every game to be an MMO. As you saw with the epic response to Metroid Prime: Federation Force, people don't want Metroid to be an MMO franchise. They don't want it to be another Destiny. They want it to be Metroid: single-player, exploration-based action-adventures starring Samus Aran, and specifically as a super-cool, bounty hunting girl power icon.

    Common wrote:
    The greatest mmorph of all time not only has just as many female leads but female heros and female characters.

    Every character in World of Warcraft can be male or female, the storyline has women and males combined as heros and heroines and villains. Females are very much written into the Lore moreso it seems on the horde side than the alliance side.
    Of all the game franchises out there, I observe that the two franchises feminist game industry critics most often use as foils are Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft. The former is mostly criticized for...well we don't have time for that list today! The latter is most often criticized for heavily sexualizing its female avatars because most of them are used by male players, which, it is commonly contended, creates a community culture of sexually objectifying women analogous to the larger gaming community's "waifu" contests and such that in turn translates into widespread sexual harassment of the game's actual female players. I know from play experience that the common feminist critiques of GTA are accurate. I haven't played WoW before though to confirm the accuracy of the common critiques thereof. I suspect they are true though. I mean there's probably a reason why you see commonplace alt-right terminology finding its origins in the WoW community.

    I will say though that it would appear that that Blizzard is making an effort to create a less hostile game structure and play atmosphere in WoW and its community these days, or at least that's what I've heard. I think that, as you can see at the link in this post, WoW's player base is currently estimated to be 23% female, which is well behind the average for its genre overall (36% female), but it was just 15% female a few years ago, and less than 10% female more traditionally, so things do seem to be changing in the WoW community these days. Maybe what you're pointing out here is part of that change!

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