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I’ve noticed that the most popular genre of game amongst the female members of my family now is the relatively new Bemani type. Bust a Groove is absolutely adored here, as is Parappa the Rapper. Puzzle games like Taito’s Puzzle Bobble series also prove to be big hits.
Sega’s fantastic Samba De Amigo is the one that gets most attention, though. I suspect that it’s not only the musical nature of the game that’s enjoyed but also the sheer physical participation. Go into any large arcade and this theory is sort of backed up by the number of teenage girls hanging around the Dance Dance Revolution-style cabinets. Possibly it’s the direct association between physical action and on-screen result that’s the important factor here?
The following is pinched wholesale from the current issue of Edge (#110). If any moderators are worried about possible copyright problems feel free to delete these posts. I’ve got them on disk and can whack them back up after this issue comes off the shelves.
There’s absolutely shitloads of stuff here, some of which is relevant to this thread in its current state, some of which may open up other areas (race and sexuality) for discussion.
MINORITY REPORT
Recent research has highlighted the white, male and straight nature of videogame characters, but why is this the case and is the situation likely to change?
“I was working at this company and they were going to do a game called Honky and Nigger,” discloses one developer when asked about racism in games. “When they told us this, I and around seven other people in the team said we would not let the company do it. They dropped it immediately after that because they knew if we went to the press and told them about this game it would kill them financially.” At that point Honky and Nigger was canned, however, the fact that a company even considered releasing the game is shocking enough in itself. It may sound like a throwback to the days of Custer’s Revenge, the notorious Atari VCS title in which the aim was to rape a native American woman tied to a pole, but this project was conceived and binned at a time when videogames are beginning to cross over to the mainstream.
While both Custer’s Revenge and Honky and Nigger are extreme examples, a recent US study found that a heavy bias towards white game characters exists in the industry. The report, by the charity Children Now, trawled through the top ten selling games across the key games formats to assess how inclusive or exclusive they were in terms of both race and gender. The findings were not good news for an industry that makes a lot of fuss about generating more cash than Hollywood. The research indicates that you are more likely to get to play a non-human character than you are to play a woman, and in 73 per cent of cases you will be playing a man.
Further to this, half of the female characters that did appear in games were little more than props or bystanders with no particular role to play in the game’s proceedings. Also, 52 per cent of male characters are white compared with 78 per cent for female characters. Thanks to several sports titles in the sample the figure is lower than it would otherwise have been.
“Videogames do seem to do worse than other mediums, particularly when it comes to the representation of women,” says Patti Miller, director of Children Now’s ‘Children and the Media’ programme. “And the lack of racial diversity in videogames seems to be on a similar level t0 that of TV.” But some developers believe that small steps are being made. “About 15 years ago I was working on a game that got canned for having a female lead character who wore a vest top and shorts similar to Lara Croft, rather than dressed in leather and holding a whip,” notes Mucky Foot co-director Gary Carr. “So while Tomb Raider is not a particularly great victory for women it ids at least a sign that the goal posts are widening.”
However, the most damning finding of Children Now’s research was the complete absence of non-white characters in games aimed at children and, according to one developer who used to work for one high profile children’s games publisher, this is not necessarily accidental. “This publisher asked for black characters to be toned down or taken out of the products,” explains the developer, who asked to remain anonymous. “Its reason was differences between markets across the world, mainly Japan. I was surprised by this but it thought it wouldn’t go down well in Japan having black characters in its products.”
The colour of money
Despite this kind of whitewashing, the main reason for the lack of non-white characters is not deliberate racism according to Shahid Ahmad, managing director of Start Games. “It is not that they are consciously racist – it is not that at all,” insists Ahmad, whose company funds developers with innovative game ideas. “If they could find a way of making money out of blacks or Asians, or whatever, they would do it. But they know if they work to a certain formula they are more likely to make money – it all boils down to numbers. Publishers do believe that games with black or Asian characters could lose them money although they won’t openly say it.” The influence of the US audience is a particularly important factor, believes Ahmad, who over the years has worked on numerous well-known games including Jet Set Willy and Glover. “The question is: what would middle America buy? Would they buy a game with a black leading character or an Asian leading character? No. They will buy fucking Deer Hunter, that’s what they will buy. Those rednecks want to go out and shoot some animals. Having said that, if you do a game where ‘Pakis’ and ‘niggers’ are shot they’d probably buy even more of those in middle America.”
At the development level, questions over who or what a character should be tend to be pushed to one side to make way for coding and game idea concerns. “We don’t get together and say we’re going to create a character. In my experience, projects and characters are already defined and we just produce it,” explains Roger Mitchell, a senior artist at Climax London who lists Theme Park World among his credits. “It is not a question of ten people in a circle gathering around saying, ‘This is going to happen’, it is about what the publisher wants. Game design usually covers production values and technology.” Carr agrees, “Developers tend not to be as conscious of that side of things as much as publishers. Characters just come to mind and the decision on race or gender is not conscious. Our first game, Urban Chaos, was never focussed on having a female black lead character, it was focussed on the game idea.”
Interestingly, this lack of focus on character can change drastically in later stages of development when the game starts getting the once over from focus groups set up by the publisher. These groups, which consist of various representatives of the publisher including marketing departments, can often influence which characters actually make it to the shop shelves. “Sometimes characters are examined and generally they want more stereotypes. If you put an unattractive or normal looking woman who isn’t evil into the game, the feedback is usually to make them less scary or more attractive. Often these characters aren’t event he central ones, they are just there as run-of-the-mill characters,” adds Carr.
Balbir Blugan, business development manager at Kuju, believes much of this comes down to catering for the existing game-playing audience. “Most of the people in the US who buy games are white and people play games they relate to, so they find white characters more real and more like them,” she argues. “It is even the case with the games coming out of Japan now. Their global idea of beauty is very much the European idea of beauty – a certain face shape, a certain nose shape. Even a lot of Japanese characters have very Eurasian features.”
It is not just female characters that are pushed into particular body shapes. To a lesser extent male game characters also receive the ‘perfect body’ treatment. Men are often drawn to resemble muscle-bound, six-packed body builder types while women are twisted into silicon-enhanced mirror-images of Daily Star favourite Jordan. But female characters are most often sexualised says Nikki Douglas, founder of women gamers’ site Grrlgamer.com. “Big burly male characters like Duke Nukem do fit into the Arnie stereotype for example, but then you do also get characters like Freeman from Half Life who is your everyday kind of guy thrown into extraordinary circumstances,” says Douglas. “But that doesn’t seem to happen with women and there are few female protagonists that react in interesting ways. Although Funcom’s The Longest Journey does manage this quite well, for the most part you don’t see Julia Roberts-style regular girls in games.”
Well-worn imagery
Similar clichés surround the representation of black and Asian protagonists in games as well, with characters such as Ready 2 Rumble’s Afro Thunder and the never-ending stream of Bruce Lee clones in beat ‘em ups. Gay and lesbian characters also get the same treatment in the few games in which they do make an appearance. Mincing Village People types combing the warehouse district of Grand Theft Auto III is the most obvious example. “Gay people are as diverse a group as any and the stereotypes of an effeminate acting man with a lisp wearing daisy dukes doesn’t apply to most of us,” says Chris, a gay gamer, of Grand Theft Auto’s moustachioed clones. “It wasn’t completely necessary to add that lispy YMCA-looking guy because for all we know one of the gangster guys could be gay or the hookers, or whatever.”
Imbuing any game character with even a rudimentary personality is a difficult task and as a result most developers fall back on the well-worn imagery used in cinema to represent particular people. So evil characters are ugly, scarred or deformed, heroes white and blue-eyed, women vulnerable and virginal and gay men camp. “When the backstory for a game is developed there is an obvious discussion of a character’s look and what effect this will have on the character’s personality,” says Piers Blofeld, managing director of scripting firm Turning Point. “Some developers will decide that a sly and deviant lead character who is also a blonde male hunk is confusing for players as that kind of character is usually a hero,” Carr concurs, “It is difficult not to resort to using stereotypes, as unlike Hollywood you don’t have the dialogue to expand on a character. You could use cut-scenes but most people, myself included, skip through them. So to some extent you have to fall back on stereotyped imagery to use as shorthand for particular characters. In a movie you can get slightly quirky characteristics across which you can’t do in games. It is difficult to create an anti-hero in a game and put across any idiosyncrasies of a character.”
This tendency to fall back on stereotypes could be harming the industry, warns Frontier Developments’ David Braben, particularly if it wants to reach out to more than just young males. “One of the steps we need to take is producing more interesting dialogue,” notes Braben, who insists that his next project, currently under wraps, will do this. “The characterisation of women in games does make games feel like a niche activity. Games are looked down on by half the population because of their violence and their treatment of women.” Jim Pride, Sega Europe’s head of product marketing, also feels these changes need to take place, “The size of the games industry at the moment is huge but we can only get bigger if we produce content that draws in more users whether that be women or people of a particular sexual orientation. We need equivalents to chick flicks and guy flicks.”
Under pressure
However, actually reaching that stage is fraught with problems, particularly from a publishing point of view. Game can cost millions to make and shareholders are likely to be unimpressed if a publisher spends a fortune making a game with a wider audience in mind only to find the massmarket and traditional gaming community ignore it. The business pressure to stick with the familiar is almost choking and only firms such as Sega with its army of development staff can afford to dabble on the borders of the known market. “Publishers know if they work to a certain formula they are more likely to make money,” argues Ahmad. “For example, take ‘East is East’. A fantastic film but it is never going to be massmarket. It is about an Asian family and who wants a story about an Asian family? A lot of this country doesn’t, America certainly doesn’t – less so after September 11. But if you wanted to make a videogame out of something like ‘East is East’ how much would it cost you to do it justice – a million quid? How many units is it going to sell? Are you going to break even? No. It is much harder to do niche videogames or a game with niche characters or a niche story than it is to make a niche film.”
Blugan believes, if sold in a palatable way, such a game could prove a success in a similar way to the film ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. “’Crouching Tiger’ did so well in the west because it was made with a western audience in mind,” she explains. “It shows that traditional cultural things can go down well in a society that doesn’t understand it and does not want to understand it. So to make money out of you have to tailor it.” Other efforts to reach out to traditionally non-gaming markets, particularly women, had also been made by Microsoft in the run up to the launch of the Xbox.
Among a series of efforts to get women interested in the console, Microsoft held a women-only Xbox preview night, went round to magazines such as ‘Cosmopolitan’ to show off the Xbox and hired female student representatives to promote the console to the university market. “We see the Xbox brand as being inclusive, positive, creative, passionate and stimulating so we don’t want it to be dark and mysterious to women. We want to pull away from it being something men do in their bedrooms and provide a more inclusive experience,” says Michele Marchand, brand product manager for the Xbox. “We see Munch’s Oddysee as a key title for attracting women gamers as it contains emotive characters but also Dead or Alive 3 as it is a very sexy game.”
But Microsoft’s attempts to seduce women outside of the gaming sphere is still an uphill struggle. ‘Cosmopolitan’ was dismissive when Edge asked if its preview of the Xbox would result in column inches. “We wouldn’t cover it, it is not something that our readers are interested in,” snorted a member of the editorial team when asked. ‘Cosmo’s attitude, and those of other women’s magazines, provokes annoyance from Blugan. “They should be printing it, they have features on female mechanics and women in the aeronautical industry and so on, but they are absolutely not interested in covering anything to do with games or technology,” she says.
No way out
Rhona Robson, a senior programmer at Kuju, who has recently worked on Microsoft Train Simulator, agrees: “There is no actual way of advertising games to women. All the women’s magazines are the same and they’re basically selling cosmetics, clothes and jewellery. I personally find it hard as there are no women’s magazines that I want to buy and while I like what is in the men’s technology magazines, I don’t want to be sold technology with a page three model draped over4 the cover.”
But if female and non-white gamers are ignored by the industry, spare a thought for the gay community. Fact is, little research has been conducted on the number of gay and lesbian videogame players, so no one knows how much they spend on games. On top of this, some publishers would rather not have their games perceived as popular with gay men or lesbians as was the case after the gay press began to show an interest in Lara Croft when the ‘Tomb Raider’ film was released. One gay magazine was refused pictures of the digital Lara Croft by Core Design on the grounds that, “We don’t really want Lara at this point to come across as a lesbian or gay icon. We do not want to portray her in that way because she wouldn’t ever do that. We have quite a rigid set of guidelines about what she will and won’t do and becoming a gay icon is one thing she would not do.”
Despite reluctance among some publishers, others have been more willing to approach the gay community, notably Sony which made its presence felt at the London Mardi Gras gay pride events in recent years. Despite the monetary pressure for the industry to remain in its cultural cul de sac, most developers are hopeful that change is inevitable, the only question is how long it will take and whether it is the industry or the buying public who will drive the change. “We can’t really chain ourselves to the railings demanding female brand characters in games,” notes Blugan. “There is a limit to what we can do, and anyway is it a case of us driving the change or should the consumers drive the change?”
Ahmad believes such a change must come from within the industry. “The games have to come first and they will create the market,” he insists. “The huge problem you have right now in fostering change, is that it costs too much. Once the technology, platforms and middleware get good enough you can bolt them together and then add characters, creativity and design very cheaply. The whole game-building process becomes a design and art issue rather than a programmer-led issue. That is when things will change because the economics will mean you can sell a game to 100,000 people and still bring in money.”
Very bad things
Despite the accusations of stereotyping that have been levelled at Grand Theft Auto III, Ahmad believes it may yet take a publisher like Rockstar to actually open the doors for the rest of the industry. “The breakthrough has to come from a really big, risk-taking publisher and the only one out there taking big risks is Take 2/Rockstar with Grand Theft Auto III,” states Ahmad. “Nobody else would have had the guts to do it. You can do absolutely obscene things in that game, it is a truly outrageous amoral game but it has been a huge success so everybody wants to do something like that now.”
A general move towards more mixed game content may be two or three years away but there are signs that the industry is making slow cautious steps forward. From the rising number of games with women characters to EA’s willingness to highlight the gay aspects of The Sims in US television commercials.
Mitchell believes it is only a matter of time before the industry will make even greater efforts to target an audience outside its white, male and straight image. “Look at TV. For years you never saw any black faces selling anything and I remember my mum used to say, ‘What, we don’t buy soap powder or washing up liquid?’ But now they’ve fallen over themselves because they realise that that market is big and it’s money and it is the same with the Asian market. Eventually the games industry will say, ‘We need to find a new market, what haven’t we touched? Oh – Asian kids, black kids, they’ll buy this stuff.’ And so they will push it to them.” |
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