Why Marketers Fear The Female Geek
Here is the reasoning, that drive execs and marketers to pro-actively exclude women from their audiences and to pro-actively encourage a culture in which women do not feel welcome. This is why we can’t have nice things… or can we?This is an excellent piece, by someone inside the industry, outlining quite clearly how and why so many games all but refuse to acknowledge women gamers even exist.
And it really is tough sometimes, in games. Perfectly good, reasonable people just succumb to the prevailing wisdom, feeling helpless. I’ve written female characters in games with attitude and agency, then been required to tone it down for fear of offending male players.
In one (unreleased) game, I was told to change a cut scene because “the woman NPC can’t try to save herself, the male PC must save her.” And the number of times I’ve had to remove snarky comebacks from a female NPC (“the player won’t be attracted to her”), I can’t even count.
And these were not horrible, raging sexists. But they were following market wisdom, doing what they knew publishers would require of them.
(I should add that these are all AAA games I’m talking about. The indie/mobile space I’ve worked in is so, so much more progressive.)
(Also saddening: almost exactly the same reasoning applies to the comic market’s obsession with superheroes.)
Anyway. Great article, well worth a read.
Since we’ve resumed getting the smug messages telling us that since x artist has y identity and is credited with the design of z character… well they never really elaborate beyond that but the implication is we shouldn’t worry about the design and instead should consider it above judgement.
These people always act as though the concept artist is always given unlimited creative freedom and that companies would never hire someone based off their willingness to produce problematic content whatever their background and that companies might want to hide behind the “well it was created by a woman so how could it be sexist?” rhetoric.
For some reason they are deeply concerned that criticism might cause “self censorship” (not in the actual sense of fear of being blacklisted but “making a product that targets a wider demographic sense”) but never concerned about executives making creative decisions for questionable reasons.
Honestly, nobody wishes that was true more than us – for it would mean the end of the tyranny of Creepy Marketing Guy. Demographic hiveminds would also mean there were quick and easy solutions to pretty much every social issue since any random member could be trusted as an appointed representative. It would also have prevented things in history like… war.
Aside from the obvious issues of working out exactly who’s responsible and under what basis any particular creator was hired, there’s the larger issues these things don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re part of a trend and they’ve evolved into what they are over time.
Left unchallenged, they will continue down these paths simply because publishers are adverse to risk even if it means opportunity.
– wincenworks
