Genders in Gaming Target Audiences.

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@Acies: I'm sorry if I offended you in any way - it was not my intention to be so acidic. Sometimes I don't notice. Anyway...

Hahaha, no - they are not well reasoned arguments. They are straw-man arguments. You attribute the represenatation of females to 'laziness'. It is so statistically common that it's not an indication of laziness, but rather a mindset.

Badly written female or minority characters go hand in hand with badly written male/white characters. Unless you seriously think the majority of games and movies writers are rampant misanthropes or sociopaths - it's laziness.

I might ask you the same question in return, can not your personal opinion be wrong?

Maybe, but I'm not willing to accept that the majority of men are secretly highly sexist. Furthermore, I'm not willing to accept that women are magically not sexist at all. I find myself somewhat in doubt whether this is actually what you are saying. I apologize if it isn't, but that is the impression I get.

Do you not see how this analogy is wrong for the example at hand? There was a total of 174 notable games released that year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_in_video_gaming). What 'major city' has 174 inhabitants? Going back to the study, picking the 20 most popular games of that year means that you encompass a majority of the gaming market for that year. It seems like quite a logical choice to pick a sample size which allows you to analyze a majority of the market and the exposure, no?

Look, I didn't want to make such a big deal out of this minor point but it is undoubtedly a flaw. Ten percent is not a majority of the gaming market unless you meant the majority share of the total sales. Regardless, this is only one year and this paper is making sweeping statements about the entire medium using this data. One would think that 20 games and especially ten minutes worth of examination would not be sufficient for such a study which is what I hoped to illustrate with my hyperbolic analogy. I'm not trying to argue that the data is false in and of itself though, as I've already agreed that it is true. Most of these games however are only what serious gamers would begrudgingly call games and cannot be considered representive of games as art. It's the conclusions that you reach that I take most offense at.

Everyone of those studies pointed at the same results, each with more games in their sample. In return, you provide your own thesis and support it with a non-random sample selection of two games.

Well, as much as I'd like to spend all day compiling a list of games where the gender and race of the characters is decided by context, the point again wasn't to say that there is no misrepresentation, only to mention two examples off the top of my head where minorities become the majority in videogames because it makes sense in context. The paper should not have counted games like NBA in a study of gender representation because you are guaranteed never to find a major female character in such a game for one simple reason: it's a men's only basketball league. Is it a sexist game for being true to its source material? Otherwise I agree that it would not be negative if more female characters were introduced into games, provided it is not done artificially. I just disagree with the notion that it's sexism.

I think common sense would dictate that a group of females would not create games in the way described above. I am sorry but I don't think I'll partake in this 'trail of the discussion' anymore, as I can't really feel a meaningful exchange going on.

Well I personally think common sense would dictate that a group of skilled females would not create a game with poorly written caricatures of people, in the same way that skilled males are capable of doing. I think it's sexist to suggest that a female is naturally more adept at something not necessarily ordained by nature like art. Artists are as a general rule special cases. Even if they weren't, good artists should and do think very carefully about what they put into their works. Again, correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to suggest that males by virtue of being male are somehow incapable of thinking critically about themselves and their environment.

I think Kman previously raised some interesting points, things like that could stack up to deliver a different experience gameplay-wise :]

Interesting and most of them true to some extent but as I said, it doesn't actually make much of a difference when you start talking about great artists. You might think so, evidently we disagree on that. It is my experience that men and women are not exceedingly different past a certain point - take that as you will.