8 Ways to Make Games More Welcoming to Women & Girls

New York University had to install a metal detector so people could come to hear Anita Sarkeesian make these incredibly controversial and inflammatory proposals for making games more welcoming to women and girls:

• Avoid the Smurfette principle - Don't have just one female character in an ensemble cast, let alone one whose personality is more or less "girl" or "woman."
• "Lingerie is not armor" -- Dress female characters as something other than sex objects.
• Have female characters of various body types
• Don't over-emphasize female characters' rear ends, not any more than you would the average male characters.
• Include more female characters of color.
• Animate female characters to move the way normal women, soldiers or athletes would move.
• Record female character voiceover so that pain sounds painful, not orgasmic
• Include female enemies, but don't sexualize those enemies

Yes, Anita Sarkeesian needs a metal detector and a bodyguard to make totally reasonable, practical suggestions that every game developer should already be following out of pure naked self-interest.

Read about her whole talk as extensively covered by Stephen Totilo here.

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Comments

[Skillet]

This really is part of a larger issue going back thousands of years but now with the right technology maybe the best thing to do is castrate all new males in the USA, assign gender corrective surgery, that way once at a gaming age they just want to learn not to kill but further education.

All new births could be thru in vitro fertilization

One gender equals one peaceful world.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Regarding that bullet point list.

The general tone is right, but the issues are more complex than a simple bullet point list. There are lots of subtleties.

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Smurfette principle: I'd say, no "token female" just like no "token colored person" is something any sane person can realize. But this is not the same as having "one female". Lara Croft for example is not the token female. There are a whole bunch of other issues with Ms. Croft (many solved in the reboot of the title)... but not this one.
- But Croft is of course also not an ensemble title.

Star Trek's assorted shows almost always had that "one guy" or "one woman" thing going... and so too Star Wars... But notice how despite both being ensemble casts with technically a "token character" - it doesn't come off that way in Star Trek because the character has depth beyond a stereotype.

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Regarding Lingerie: yes. But also, oddly enough... no. Because a lot of skimpy wear is driven not by men telling women to dress that way, but women choosing to. The difference is in how you overdo it or emphasize it.

And if your world is something like a Conan novel - skimp is to be expected, but gender neutral.

Again this is similar to above issue: where is your emphasis and are you balanced about it?

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Rear Ends are bad... meet yoga pants.

Nobody is making anybody wear those yoga pants to the office... :)

But again emphasis. If your game is about sexualization you're going to have crotch shots, muscle shots, square jaws, boobs bigger than Texas, and rear ends that would make a baboon jealous.
- But if its not... why are you doing that?

And if you do it... consider spreading it around the genders.

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Characters of "color":

This is a no-brainer in 2015. Especially among younger audiences, even when you find a group of people of one ethnicity - they generally like to self-image themselves as more diverse and open to diversity than they actually are... And people find a mono-ethnic presentation to be "strange and alienating or out of date".

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Animation:

Yes. Animate people to be like real people. Or genre-people; which is to say if your female characters are all moving and gesturing like Sailor Moon, your male characters should all be gesturing like Tuxedo Mask.

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Voice overs of pain should not be done by Japanese anime studios... I think that would be enough right there... :)

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Sexualized female enemies - only to the same extent as any other enemy is sexualized. I'm wary of the theme of mixing violence and sexualization - but its overly popular...

[melponeme_k]

I know it would kill developers of other games to do so, but they should take a look at SL. SL is one of the games on the market that has the largest female audience, in fact about half or just more than half the game are women.

They should forget the sexy stuff, only minority of players do that regularly. What about SL is attractive to female gamers? What makes them stay? How do they play? Can these elements be transferred to other game environments?

Really getting more women into games is not a hard goal. What is really standing in the way is that most developers are male and they really don't want more women in their games.

[nonothingbutwhattheysay]

Prove the market, build a new tribe.

It takes Indies to prove the market, the big guys go after discovered markets. Influencers, try to influence them and maybe create ways for your fans to be infleuncers, if you are a game dev.

If you want more of it, buy INDIE games that have characters that you like. Tweet it, blog or website it. Instagram your character outfits, or items you bougt OR made yourself (indies may love this, merch is hard to do right...so, fans can do this and make them more famous and cool) THEN the big game companies will copy it and make it mainstream. THEN, hundreds of indies will also copy the larger game companies.

Issue is, your mind is asking it if the character is with your hunting group. Are they part of your video game tribe? It is memory, it is recognition turning into the chemical reactions that make your mind react. You want to create a new tribe, find another one because you don't like this one and feel as if it is a tribe that is building some kind of bad thing in the larger tribe? This hunting group is a bad influence. So, you need a new tribe? You start with people. Independent individuals, not large groups like companies. They are already happy with the present tribe and build characters who are in that tribe.

If people only got the stats in the past year or two (not game companies, but the stuff regular people hear in the news) it will take a while. People like a sure shot and an outlet for press releases and marketing.

PR the games if you are Indie game developer looking for a new market, a new demographic backed up by stats.

I bet we will see several, people are not silly and they know that some will like this.

But, at the end of the day I wasn't a plumber with a mustache when I was a kid. Never wanted to be one either. Yet, I played the game because my friends did. If they play a game with a girl, is it because they want to be a girl? If they play one with a guy mostly, are the guys who play it gay? You know, I think people look past the character and all it does is get attention and if likable characters have been played in movies by women, minorities, guys with accents different than the watcher, and so on then you know games will do this also. I would assume this is an odd anomoly that is rooted in what sells.

Rap music is an exact market that mirrors the game industry. It is edgy, purported to destroy the world as well. Violent stories, bad actions are spoken of to aid the imagination. Wominizing. The rap guys are sometimes hero guys, they are just alternative to the way we live. The video games are similar, the guys shooting people are sometimes the hero's just fighting for what they want. Drug dealers fighting to keep their lifestyle are sort of similar. Basically, you see most rap artists are black or brown skin toned. Yup, most people who buy rap CD's back in the day where white kids.

Identifying with a character isn't the issue, it is popular because of the sound of the voices (vocal track averages in people of darker skinned African decent skulls etc.) and cultural differences in speaking make black rap guys the most popular. Females do it do, they use the accent and the tone of their voice and speak about the same topic areas. This is complicated, it happens with food (Pepsi wins the taste test, Coca Cola wins in sales in the same group of people! They claim coca cola tastes better but blind tests have them ID Pepsi as the better one!) so we are doomed if we want different from mass market. We are sometimes doomed by our preferences because they are built and stored in memory, we don't escape our own mind. This is why drug addicts who are recovering avoid seeing paraphernalia.

People marry people who look similar to them. Science is against you, the stereotypes of game characters are sort of already built in some peoples mind. Like thier favorite crack pipe, they see it and the chemical reactions begin. The ex lover who just messes them up when they see them, or angers them. Just the sight of it. That is what you see in an advert. THAT is where skin (from a distance) and facial memory kicks in. Is this character of the tribe you hunt with?