Over the last few years, video games have commonly been referred to by piteous pop culture critics and embittered Tumblr dwellers alike as being a “boys club”. Each and every time this tired term is incessantly imposed upon any male-oriented medium to wear as a badge of shame, I am left bewildered.
What is wrong with a medium or hobby tailored mostly to the interests of one gender over the other? I wonder if the same people that complain about this alleged “boys club” complain about women-only gyms? Or romance novels, which are written predominantly by, and for women, and uniformly feature “objectified” muscled, shirtless men on the front covers? What about women’s magazines with sexualised male celebs and articles about fashion rather than cars? Do any guys complain about feeling left out from those “girls clubs”? Have you ever once heard men whine about how body-shamed they feel by the media preference towards six-packs? Or how triggered they feel about the rape-like connotations of the lad in distress on the front cover of My Fair Viking? While you scratch your head, trying to remember the last time you had heard of a man so testosterone-deficient and insecure in himself that he would bleat about such trivial matters, please allow me to talk a bit about the gaming boys club and why this demand for “positive” representation is, not only needless, but counter-productive.
Lara Croft comes to the sudden, painful realization that she’s a tool of the patriarchy.
If you recall back in the early days when the gaming industry was first finding its feet, most games didn’t even have human protagonists- and were therefore not tailored to any specific gender. (Spacewar, Pong, Tetris, you get the idea…) Yet who was it that transformed this small budding medium into the massive industry that it is today? It was mostly boys and men. And so is it any surprise that game companies in turn, develop their games mostly to appeal to said boys and men?
I know what you are thinking: “but women are 48% of gamers”. Well… this isn’t entirely true. If you spend any amount of time gaming online, you’ll quickly observe that this simply isn’t the case, at least not in the AAA scene. The numbers were bogus anyway with a small, non-representative pool of respondents and a very broad, lenient definition of what constitutes being a “gamer” (have you ever once bought a game in your entire life- yes? OMG you’re a gamer). If you classify people that play phone games, as gamers, then by all means you can make the claim that half of the gaming population are women.
But it’s not representation in smartphone games that people complain about, is it? It’s the AAA games, the space that happens to be dominated by men. Because once you enter the realm of Facebook and smartphone gaming, which are predominantly the games which females tend to gravitate to, you see games like Candy Crush and Farmville which do not have you playing as a specific gender.
When dealing specifically with the hardcore gaming scene, is just painstakingly obvious that men are the majority of gamers. The most reliable numbers we have demonstrate that hardcore male gamers outnumber hardcore female gamers 7 to 1, and that’s a very lenient figure, as it is based upon young university-goers, and we know for a fact that the average male gamer is in his 30’s. If women were indeed half of gamers (strictly speaking about AAA or “hardcore” gamers), then why would the industry purposefully overlook half of its demography, and thus potentially miss out on half of the potential sales for something so easily implemented as a female protagonist option? It’s a ridiculous assumption to make and bears no resemblance on the reality of business and marketing.
“What did you say about dismantling the boys club?”
I don’t for one second fault any female gamers, who are into the hardcore or AAA scene, for desiring more representation. We all strive to better our immersion, and so playing as a character more similar to us is something that can understandably help in that regard. However, a fairly robust survey, asking 1583 students if they care about gender in video games, shows that only 20% of boys were more likely to play a game based upon the character’s gender, with 28% of the girls in turn. So not only is the amount of female gamers in the AAA market significantly fewer than those of the males, the amount of females within that market who will actually buy a game based upon the gender of the protagonist is even less significant!
Now you are beginning to understand why it really is not all that important to have playable female protagonists with the market in its current form, but on the counter-balance it would seemingly not be hugely detrimental either, as indicated by the fewer amount of boys who care about what gender they are playing as. However it is still worth acknowledging that this 20% of boys will make a bigger dent on a game’s sales than the 28% of girls, if you consider the percentage will be based upon a number of men approximately 7 times greater than that of women. To put it simply, imagine a game grabs the interest of 7 million males and 1 million females, if the game has a male protagonist, around 280,000 of those women will be dissuaded from buying the game. If it has a female protagonist, around a million and a half males will be put off from buying the game. This is not a perfectly accurate example as there are other variables, but you get the general gist. Unless the company have the time and resources to grant players the option to play as either gender, they are more likely to go with the biggest market that will more than cover the loss of the much smaller market.
Frankly I don’t believe women’s place in the hardcore scene is going to expand considerably, as hardcore gaming in its very nature is a very male hobby. The competitiveness, the trash-talking, the guns, the cars, the blood n’ guts, the violence…they all play into male testosterone and the innate wiring of men’s brains to be hunters, fighters and conquerors. Indeed, hardcore games satisfy men’s survival instinct-which is different to the survival instinct of women. Men use similar hand-eye, spatial and coordination skills in these games as they would in real combat and a real hunt- it is a training ground of sorts, and us men are chemically rewarded for it in a way that women are not.
That is not to say women cannot enjoy these games. Heck, I know some girls that enjoy some of these games more than I do, but on the whole there is a trend that has remained consistent for many years and so I have no reason to believe that the amount of female gamers will change very dramatically. That being said, women are of course welcome into our “boys club”! In my experience most male gamers are very supportive to our female newcomers in this hobby, and sometimes manage to do so without being condescending or patronising. Sure, there are a bunch of pigs in the environment who struggle to contain their sexual urges, but that just goes with the nature of a predominantly female-deprived environment. Think of it as the military or prison, and reflect on what happens to the some of the softest men in those environments. Obviously not as serious as all that…but I digress.
Feminists took to twitter in outrage when fully-clothed Lara Croft was “almost raped”. How many of them complained about this?
While developers might be targeting males primarily, there is an increasing amount of representation in the industry, with even Treyarch adding a female protagonist option in the campaign of the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops III, a first in the Call of Duty series. I severely doubt that this will significantly increase the amount of females playing Call of Duty but at least that option is there for those that are already fans of the franchise. It is very easy to mistake this as a new “progressive” phenomenon, but you would be remiss to claim that there isn’t a lot of empowered and badass female protagonists already out there, from the obvious; Lara, Bayonetta and Samus, to the gravely overlooked; like Aveline, Nilin, Konoko, Joanna, Kameo, Nina, Samantha, Clementine and Abigail. In fact, Let me sing you the song of my people;
There is no doubt that video games are chiefly a male-oriented medium, but you would have to be a severely sick individual to take issue with men sharing a common interest. The whole premise of that school of thought is founded on a double-standard that “it’s only sexist when men do it”. By all means, if you surmise that a “boys club” is an inherently undesirable trait, then continue to throw that stone, and do it again, over and over ad nauseum, as it’s plain to see inside that glass house of yours, that you don’t have many others.