@TheFantasticFillip said:
If women want the game industry to change, then women should change the game industry. It's really pretty simple guys. What posting articles like this, repeatedly mind you, is doing is saying that the men need to somehow help women to be equal in the game industry. You want to know why this kind of thing happens? Do you want to know why many women don't work in games?
I'll give you a hint: it isn't because of the patriarchy. There isn't a room full of men in suits, talking to each other over a stack of playboys about how they want women out of their video games. In a more realistic example, I would highly doubt the words "I don't want women at my company" have been said by a game studio executive in the past two decades. In fact, I'd argue it is easier for women to get jobs at a game studio, because they are starving for them, and hiring women at these places is perfect bait to make yourself look better and more diverse as studio. I'd guarantee a women get hired over a more qualified man so that the company doesn't have articles like this come out about it.
Even if you choose to not believe that women would be chosen over men, then that's fine. But what is true is that women have exactly the same freedoms and rights as men to pursue whatever field they choose. It is not any more legal for someone to discriminate based on gender than it is to discriminate on race, and doing so would, again, be begging for bad press like this to come out about them.
Let me get back to my original point. If women have the same rights as men, they why aren't they represented in game companies, and the greater gaming community as a whole?
It's really simple; most women don't like video games, or don't want to work at video game companies. This isn't a male dominated field for any reason outside of the fact that men like games more on average than women. Dead Island is going to sell to many orders of magnitude more men than women, if the opposite was true, you better believe we'd see a male bust here. Because money is what this is about. Demographics. Audiences. Not sex. Deep Silver didn't go out to try and objectify women. They went out to try and think of a creative and expensive pre-order bonus that people would buy. And who is the majority of their audience? Oh yes, males.
Also, to say that women don't play games because of things like this would be erroneous. Women make up roughly half of the population. This is a major market that is barely tapped by mainstream games (though it has been tapped with 'casual' games on smartphones). It would be insanity for a company to choose to alienate women, because it would cut them off from this massive market, and thus massive amounts of money. Are there women out there who don't play games because they are sexist? Sure. I'll bet there were men who wouldn't see Magic Mike because it was sexist, or thinks Twilight's a gross trivialization of males as a whole. But I'd argue these kinds of women are a very, very small minority. Ask your sister why she doesn't play video games, ask your female friends. They wont say "because Dead Island's pre-order bonus is in bad taste" or "Ivy is too busty". They will probably say it is because they aren't very interested in it as a hobby. If you were to ask for a specific reason, I doubt they could tell you anymore than that they just aren't interested. Because, on average, women don't even think about the video game industry, or Dead Island's pre-order bonus, or what some fighting game guy said.
Do I like this pre-order bonus? No. I think it is in very poor taste, but I'm not going to get riled up about it and start calling for the heads of the 'misogynist pigs' who conceived it. The people who made this probably just thought it was funny, there was no meaning behind it.
You want the gaming industry to open up to women? Then women should open up to the game industry. To say that men need to help them puts them in a place of inferiority they don't belong; the power to change how things work is up to women as much as it is up to men. Because we live an a society where everyone has the same rights, not some patriarchal rape culture. This dumb statue is a poorly thought out idea, not a symbol of sexist oppression.
Have you ever worked anywhere? Like, any kind of office, not even a game studio? Because you'd have to be legally blind to miss the ways that traditional work environments alienate women. It's not a HUGE LEAP to see how a traditionally male-dominated industry largely built around violence and objectification of women might be slightly more hostile to women than other industries.
In particular, I vehemently reject this part of your post:
In fact, I'd argue it is easier for women to get jobs at a game studio, because they are starving for them, and hiring women at these places is perfect bait to make yourself look better and more diverse as studio. I'd guarantee a women get hired over a more qualified man so that the company doesn't have articles like this come out about it.
Having worked at multiple game studios in the past (and with lots of friends elsewhere in the industry), this is fundamentally, absolutely wrong and demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about western society. To go straight from this to talking about how it's illegal to discriminate based on gender is just staggeringly uninformed. Here's how this works:
A studio where all the employees are male is going to be an implicitly hostile environment for women. This is not something WRONG with men or WRONG with women, it's just how these environments work. It's the equivalent of asking a woman to show up to work every day with her desk in the men's locker room. When all your coworkers are male, you automatically start acting as if they are all male, and those habits don't change overnight. What this means is that even if a qualified female candidate interviews, applies, and accepts an offer (despite the very obviously testosterone-heavy environment), once they show up, they're going to be continually confronted by a passively hostile environment. Please understand that when I say hostile I don't mean physical violence; what I mean is an environment that makes you uncomfortable and makes it harder to do work.
And I'm not talking about 'oh I'm offended because someone made an off-color joke', either - that certainly happens and is unacceptable, but it's much worse than that. I have first and second hand accounts from multiple studios of female hires being constantly accosted and interrupted on a daily basis by male coworkers, male HR/hiring staff fast-tracking hires of pretty female applicants over qualified applicants, inappropriate sexual harassment between supervisors and employees, female employees being denied well-deserved raises and promotions based on their gender, and workplace relationships causing teams to disintegrate and projects to fall behind. In these scenarios you simply cannot place the blame on one gender, let alone the minority that is struggling to simply fit in and find fulfilling work. Alongside this you don't have to look very far to find painfully public accounts of incredibly sexist, awful behavior on long-time game industry figures like Brad Wardell that show just how deeply-rooted this stuff is. It's a cultural problem.
This being a cultural problem means that to address it, you need to get to the roots of the culture: The industry as a whole needs to understand that certain behaviors are not acceptable. When you say that there is 'no meaning behind' an action (in particular one like the creation of this pre-order bonus), you are ignoring the huge impact culture has on everything we do, everything we say, even everything we think. Sexism is as deeply rooted in western culture now as racism used to be decades ago. The only way to address these problems is to repeatedly, incessantly, unambiguously declare that these behaviors are not acceptable and make a serious effort to fix the things wrong with our culture.
To attempt to ascribe all the blame for these problems on women - oh, this would get better if only women would man up and change the game industry from the inside - or say it's some fundamental problem with their makeup that can't be fixed - 'women don't like video games', 'women don't want to work at video game companies', as if these supposed facts are absolutes with no root causes whatsoever. If you think those two statements are true, WHY are they true? What makes women not like video games or not want to work on them? To make those blanket statements and not even bother to support them or peer into the reasoning behind them further demonstrates just how shallow and worthless this kind of thinking is: It makes no effort to improve the situation and provides no guidance on how to go about fixing things.
Doing this does not mean reducing the value of males, destroying people's freedoms, or elevating women onto some sort of a platter. It means encouraging others to be better, more mature human beings and living up to our own standards.
P.S. Anyone who suggests that a woman can deal with hiring discrimination easily because it's illegal doesn't know anything about hiring. Or the courts.
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