Gaming's silent heterogeneity
August 20, 2015 8:27 AM   Subscribe

 
Your last article almost reinforces the core gamer orthodoxy. It basically says that the market for the indie games on Steam is small, mostly male, and 20 something. Enforced by a previous article of his. As we said about it, it boils down to "make your game for redditors".
posted by zabuni at 9:00 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Woe to any gaming studio or publisher that would refer to their player base as customers.
It'd be as if they didn't care about who gives them money!
posted by Smart Dalek at 9:01 AM on August 20, 2015


That first link REALLY needs is a graph for "I play single player games (exclusively/often/sometimes/never) to force the trendline they don't exactly draw through zero.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 9:06 AM on August 20, 2015


As we said about it, it boils down to "make your game for redditors".

Not sure what you mean by that. The article itself concludes with "Gamers are different. Don't overgeneralize", not "make games for Redditors". In fact, saying that "many of the gamers supporting the smaller games market are white males" is the same as "many of the gamers supporting the smaller games market are redditors" is as reductive as the market segmenting he's trying to warn against in the article itself.
posted by selfnoise at 9:23 AM on August 20, 2015


Not sure what you mean by that.

It was more the last bullet point:
The core audience of PC games market that supports developers with smaller titles is rather tiny.

And the previous article tries to show that it is tiny, mostly male, and 20 something.
posted by zabuni at 9:29 AM on August 20, 2015


I will never forget getting into adventure games on my tablet, and discovering how women-centric they are. Almost all of the protagonists are women (one of the two I've played where it was a guy, there was an annoying "love triangle" thing built in) and frequently you're saving both men and women, but it's all puzzles and games and finding secret items. It made me really happy for the first time in a while - games where the narrative was about someone kind of like me saving the day without having to hurt too many people.

But no one ever advertises them. I found them because I looked.
posted by Deoridhe at 9:53 AM on August 20, 2015 [6 favorites]


The core audience of PC games market that supports developers with smaller titles is rather tiny.

And the previous article tries to show that it is tiny, mostly male, and 20 something.


Well the Steam article has actual numbers and the other article is entirely about marketing and popular perception. The numbers show that the group of gamers who buy lots of games (the Torchlight 2 owners) are not the same people who play DOTA 2.

Maybe they're both subsets of the under 20 male group, we don't know that. For all we know, 75% of those Torchlight 2 owners who buy lots of games are women over 40. Steam doesn't publish any verifiable demographic information about users and, anecdotally, a lot of gamers who are women don't mention that fact in their profiles.
posted by straight at 9:59 AM on August 20, 2015


(Actually, that's not what the data shows. The Dota 2 group is huge and could contain most of the Torchlight 2 owners in the big end of its tail. I wish they had mentioned how many of the Torchlight 2 owners own Dota 2.)
posted by straight at 10:05 AM on August 20, 2015


I will never forget getting into adventure games on my tablet,

Are adventure games back now? I was a huge fan of the genre back in the glory days of King's Quest, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, and Maniac Mansion.

I don't really play tablet games, but I'm very happy if that's the case. I don't know why that genre seemed to have faded away.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:13 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


A while back I thought I might like to play some PC games and went looking for something I might like. There were some multi-player type games that I thought I might enjoy, but I never tried them because I've heard that gaming communities are awful towards women, and while I'm sure there are many that aren't, I just didn't want the emotional hassle of having to deal with that kind of bullshit. I was looking for leisure and relaxation, not work and a constant requirement to be on guard.

So, I wouldn't assume that if girls are playing different kinds of games it's because girls are just so different that girls and boys could never like the same games.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:19 AM on August 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


Adventure games are definitely doing a bit better these days. There are smaller developers doing more traditional point-and-click games, like Wadjet Eye, and you can find a LOT of those on Steam. Then you have companies like Telltale and Dontnod who are making streamlined adventure game/interactive movie experiences which are really cool but don't tend to contain the tricky puzzles that you may remember. Double Fine had Broken Age, which is a very traditional adventure game, and then Ron Gilbert, who made the original Monkey Island, is currently working on a game designed to look almost exactly like an old SCUMM game from the DOS era. So yes!

A lot of the tablet or mobile adventure games are "hidden object" games which is sort of taking the pixel-hunting part of an adventure and focusing on that idea (just finding objects in a background). There are other sub-genres on mobile, like room escape.

If only I had a penguin...: the first two articles sort of focus on that feeling and I really wish I hadn't included the last derail-inducing article, but oh well.
posted by selfnoise at 10:22 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Lately I've been playing Dragon Quest 8 with my boyfriend (yeah, I'm behind the times... largely for the reasons outlined in the second article). It's a great, solid RPG - fun, engaging, great character design, fantastic music - which makes it all the more annoying that Jessica, the lone playable female character, has her tits constantly hanging out. I actually changed her to the "dancer's outfit" armor because it was LESS revealing, and will probably keep her in the stupid thing for the rest of the game and just take the hit to defense. Her special power is "Sex Appeal," which allows her to paralyze enemies. (Said enemies are cartoon blobs and trees and mummies and things.) It just serves to make it very, very clear what my place in the world of gaming is meant to be.

At 28, I can easily pinpoint exactly why this pisses me off, and then mostly let it bounce off me. But this game came out in 2004, when I was 17, right around when I stopped being an avid gamer. My 17-year-old self deserves credit for being a smart badass feminist, too, but I think it would have hurt me a lot more back then, not least because it would be another six years or so before I stopped buying in to the myth of the "cool girl," and I would have felt a lot of pressure to be okay with Jessica.

I know these aren't new observations or anything, just wanted to chime in and agree with the second article. It's not that women don't like the games that men do, it's that we're being pushed out of games that would (save for things like this) be appealing to both genders.
posted by sunset in snow country at 10:25 AM on August 20, 2015 [9 favorites]


I recently gained access to an XBox One, so I began looking around for games I could play on it. Do you know how many 2D sprite-animated one-on-one fighting games there are for the XBox One? One, and it's by some Johnny-come-lately company I've never heard of. It's like Microsoft doesn't even care about the segment of the marketplace I represent.

No wonder gamers these days are so whiny and defensive. The games they're playing all suck.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:34 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


(Galyonkin says that 56% of Torchlight 2 owners also own DOTA 2. But they're a tiny subset, so it would be madness to think of DOTA players in general as the target for your Torchlight game, and of the actual market for Torchlight-type games, only about half overlap with DOTA players.)
posted by straight at 11:04 AM on August 20, 2015


straight: "Galyonkin says that 56% of Torchlight 2 owners also own DOTA 2"

Maybe there it would make sense to compare to Steam users in general, and see if that's above or below average.

Also, where did he say that?
posted by RobotHero at 11:16 AM on August 20, 2015


A great mobile adventure game is Sword & Sworcery

Bonus: woman protagonist, chunky pixel graphics!
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 11:38 AM on August 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


Steam doesn't publish any verifiable demographic information about users and, anecdotally, a lot of gamers who are women don't mention that fact in their profiles.

yeah, steam wouldn't count my gaming as being a woman - my husband and i have the same steam account so we're not spending the money twice and it's all set up with his info to make it less attractive to trolls. i have an account for the couple of online/multiplayer games i have, but i'm pretty sure it's also coded male. funnily enough, i'm pretty sure i got that account for torchlight 2 so my husband and i could play together.
posted by nadawi at 12:43 PM on August 20, 2015


Also, where did he say that?

In one of those little side comment footnotes readers can add to the article.
posted by straight at 1:02 PM on August 20, 2015


which makes it all the more annoying that Jessica, the lone playable female character, has her tits constantly hanging out. I actually changed her to the "dancer's outfit" armor because it was LESS revealing, and will probably keep her in the stupid thing for the rest of the game and just take the hit to defense. Her special power is "Sex Appeal," which allows her to paralyze enemies.

Not trying to defend this at all... I think this is just as much Japanese pop cultural standards as stereotypical gamer hegemony. There's a lot of anime that casually reinforces this stuff, and remember Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragonball (which has as a character the similarly problematic Bulma), does the character designs for the DQ games. I think it goes into DQ8's whole thing of looking like a classic anime, which is overall charming, but does mean you get the occasional regressive depiction of gender roles.
posted by JHarris at 1:14 PM on August 20, 2015


There's a lot of anime that casually reinforces this stuff

Yeah, but not anime that has girls and women as a target audience, which leaves us right back where we started. It's not a "depiction of gender roles" so much as a giant, flashing sign that says THIS GAME IS NOT FOR YOU.
posted by sunset in snow country at 1:28 PM on August 20, 2015 [8 favorites]


Are adventure games back now? I was a huge fan of the genre back in the glory days of King's Quest, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, and Maniac Mansion.

The format is different, but the idea is similar. I find them very Myst-like, since it's first person in usually barren landscapes. You can get them for 4-7$ on most Tablets. I like Artifex Mundi games the most - in particular the Grim Legends series, the Time Mysteries (except for the latest, which I was meh on the story of), the Enigmatis story, and the Nightmares from the Deep stories (the best quality across the board in all three). It's a combo of logic puzzles, hidden object games, exploration, and random combination of weird things to make useful items. They also usually have difficulty levels, and you can skip anything if you get caught up in a story or hate a certain type of puzzle. I find myself revisiting favorite stories for fun - I've done that most on the Grim Legends series, because I'm a sucker for fairy tales.


Japanese pop cultural standards as stereotypical gamer hegemony

It's a lot closer to seinen cultural standards than pop cultural standards, and seinen is explicitly for late-teens to middle aged men. You wouldn't find this sort of thing in media aimed at women, and that is actually part of the point. We don't have equivalent josei-influenced media in the US, and though some shojo has broken through, it tends to not make it into video games.
posted by Deoridhe at 2:30 PM on August 20, 2015 [8 favorites]


For my sister, and so many girls and women like her, the gaming marketplace begins and ends with these mainstream visions of gaming, and the mainstream stores like Game Stop that sell them. “It’s obviously for boys. The nudity of course, but even the colors. From what I see, they mostly hire boys.”

GameStop is the worst. Though working for them as a grown-ass woman was hilarious and informative. (Hey, I needed a second job that provided health insurance. Turned out the insurance was a lie, but that's mostly beside the point.) So many assumptions about my interests and experience playing video games from women and men and girls and boys alike, and such an unpleasant work environment:
  • Multiple TVs playing multiple videos at all times, and if corporate catches you turning the volume down or turning the displays off, you're in trouble.
  • Pawn shop economics without pawn shop ethics or accountability (we're setting a low bar here.)
  • Every GameStop manager has to decide whether they're going to accept obviously stolen merchandise in "trade." If they manage to keep their numbers up over time, they've probably made the wrong decision.
  • Because of the whole stolen goods thing, the customer base tends to be scarier than most other mainstream retail.
  • Terrible store designs because GameStop has tended to lease the weirdest, cheapest spaces they can in any given strip mall (my store was impressively long and narrow. We could've bowled in there.)
  • And of course all the ridiculous membership program sales stuff that annoys everyone involved.
It's all sort of a horrible rolling disaster in ways that don't have much to do with gender roles, but the general crappiness of the enterprise had a lot to do with why it wasn't any better at selling games to girls and women. For one, the garish noise that we weren't permitted to do anything about doesn't make a pleasant browsing-and-asking-questions experience for anyone. So, if you enter the store not already knowing what you're interested in, it's not all that likely you'll get help. You've basically got to shout to be heard -- who bothers shouting when they're not already supremely confident that this product is for them?

For another, game publishers suck at keeping a backlist available. So there might be great games that you'd love to play if you heard about them, but even if you find out about it the store hasn't got it in stock and can't get order it. (This has improved greatly with digital distribution, but the stores don't get much of that income stream so are trying to de-emphasize it as much as they can get away with.) My first week at GameStop, I sold every copy of Beyond Good and Evil we had, in every format, and rounded up every one I could from other stores in my district and sold those, too. Mostly to women and girls, because I want them to have the same fun playing games that I do, and that game is awesome. And then I was out of copies forever and couldn't get any more.

Anyway. GameStop's specific unpleasantness doesn't really matter so much in terms of girls and women's ability to access games we want to play (the internet is solving that problem for us) but it does affect our sense of any kind of community among girls and women who play games. The unpleasant experience chases out anybody who's not already being told "you will enjoy this!" from every corner. So in the most obvious place in the post-arcade era to see other women who play games, I primarily saw women who were reluctantly accompanying their minor children (and often got the stink-eye when I suggested they might like some, too!)

The lack of that sense of community leaves a lot of girls and women who play games thinking they're somehow alone in the hobby, when that's just not the case. Combine that with the really nasty treatment that a lot of women and girls have received in the other obvious source of community-feeling, online gaming, and it's even worse. The main place I have gaming-related conversations these days is on the bus, because 3DS and Vita (and of those, it's mostly Vita talk because it's a lot rarer to see those in the wild.)

Wow, wall of text. Um. In conclusion: retailers have a lot to answer for, and could easily be less awful than they are.
posted by asperity at 4:03 PM on August 20, 2015 [6 favorites]


Those are good points above, that the anime stylings of DQ8 reflects a social divide in Japan between for-boys media and for-girls media.

On GameStop's general unpleasantness: yes, they are horrible. I've mentioned this before, but they once sold me a "new" DS game that came with a save file already on it. I am ready to assign them responsibility for all evil in the video gaming world. There are two in my little town of Brunswick, GA, and they're within a mile of each other.
posted by JHarris at 4:21 PM on August 20, 2015


For what it's worth, Gamestop's days are numbered. (If you own stock, sell it :) )
If this is anything other than Captain Obvious, I can try to remember details, but the general direction of the industry doesn't look good for Gamestop's business model. (And Asperity's horror stories sound like the kind of things companies end up doing when circling the drain)

Problem is, I'm not sure that will pave the way for something better. Thinking-out-loud*, video arcades died when in-home gaming got powerful (and many remaining arcades were shut down by hostile neighborhoods) but kind of got re-invented in a much more kids-and-family oriented format (moving somewhat towards old-style carnivals). Pen-and-paper gaming stores never went away but my vague impression is that they cater to a slightly broader crowd these days and their function as a hang-out space is a more important component than it used to be (an approach developed by Games Workshop stores?)
I like the idea of video game stores becoming more casual/social hang-outs where more people feel comfortable, even though I doubt I'd be a customer, but I suspect the near future is going to me more like pure video game retailers won't be able to survive at all and some new hybrid business model has to appear if we're going to get a nice welcoming environment for games people that isn't in the home.

*Idle thoughts, not to be confused with studied insight :)
posted by anonymisc at 5:47 PM on August 20, 2015


From the perspective of a visual designer, I wonder how much the design of Steam itself turns away an audience that would surely enjoy a large portion of its potential customers. The interface is all black and sharp with neon accents. Even the names "Steam" and "Valve" are so aggressively industrial sounding as to paint an image of soot-stained men laboring in a subterranean boiler room. The presentation lacks any warmness or humanity, which probably works for your average soylent sipping redditor who looks forward to swapping out his meat body for a robotic upgrade when the singularity hits, but it's pretty unwelcoming to pretty much anyone else.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 6:33 PM on August 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


I thought this was pretty telling:

"The first force is disqualification: It takes into account the fact that girls almost certainly have played video games, but then carefully categorizes the games they're most likely to play as illegitimate. It’s not hard to find this attitude wherever games are discussed. A mystery thriller like Her Story, a narrative exploration game like Gone Home, bestselling titles like Animal Crossing and The Sims, all manner of virtual pet sites: Not real games! Walking simulators! Boring! Easy! Dealing with women’s emotions, not having guns, or simply being enjoyed by women en masse—all of these qualities act as disqualifiers. It's not just that women supposedly aren't interested in games; it's that the mere presence of femininity defines the games they like out of existence. "

I've never been much of a gamer--I have a short attention span for games--but this was the sort of thing I might be into: "girly, so it doesn't count."
But hoo boy, would I NOT EVER get involved in any game "community" in the year 2015. Oh god no. If I were into any games, I'd keep that as hidden as a porn stash. I'm probably never going to get into gaming because it isn't worth risking my life to get anywhere near that crazy and it's been made 200% clear that bitches ain't shit and either fuck us or GTFO. I don't know why this is shocking news to see under the circumstances.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:05 PM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm probably never going to get into gaming because it isn't worth risking my life to get anywhere near that crazy and it's been made 200% clear that bitches ain't shit and either fuck us or GTFO.

Yeah, as someone female-ish who plays some games offered on Steam but doesn't really hang out there, what I dislike about it isn't the name or the design or the array of games offered, all of which I like fine. No, what I find off-putting is that when I looked up the reviews and boards for Gone Home, a game I love, they were full of misogynist, homophobic trash. And you can switch out that title for pretty much anything nontraditional or not centered around a narrow slice of male experience and it would still be true. The games I like are indie games, casual games, experimental narratives: in other words, "not a game" to the loudest, most aggro segment of gamers. So I don't worry about being counted in anyone's statistics or being part of a community; I just look for the stuff I like and go home. If the game companies are really interested in not losing my business, they could start by taking an active stance against hate.

That Juliet Kahn piece is excellent. I hope somebody's listening.
posted by thetortoise at 12:36 AM on August 21, 2015 [5 favorites]


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