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Forum - View topicChicks On Anime - The Artist Alley (Part 2)
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1860 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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Marvel's head honcho is Joe Quesada. Transcription error?
Anyway, I tend to like cartoons based on superhero comics better than the actual current comics. Marvel and DC had way too many company-wide cross-overs recently. And the occasional sign that they're not really looking for more readers, female or otherwise. |
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Cait
 Posts: 503 |
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There is another female aesthetic in video games, though: the "kid sister" character. It's the girl that the guys have to protect because she's weak an innocent, and generally a child. Usually she's the object of kidnapping or the focus of the villains' attempts to make the hero's life miserable. I'm thinking about characters like Aura in .hack, the traditional Zelda in the Zelda games, Princess Peach in most of the Mario games, etc. Not a more positive aesthetic for female characters (or female gamers) to be sure, but still different.
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littlegreenwolf
 Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I'm seeing more and more girl-gamers, and I'm wondering if it's just a generation thing. The first girl gamer group I've come across is the "generation" in their early 20's, which incudes me, and seem to be from what I've seen heavily into RPGs. I remember when I was younger all there was for me to play were fighting games (at least at friends houses) and those never appealed to me, and in general I never really liked videogames out of Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country until I stumbled across FF7 and Pokemon. Then a couple years later FF8 came out and it was aweome to me and since I was officially hooked to videogames, or at least RPGs. These are the girls pre-ordering Nippon-ichi games, Final Fantasy, Star Ocean, etc etc.
Now I'm looking at my step-sister, age 16, and she's all over videogames, RPGs, rock band, the like (though Rock Band with us is more of a family night event thing, she still loves it). She just has more options I think. I have a mom addicted to the Wii, the Sims, as well as online puzzle games, and in general I think the female market is steadily growing. I just hope we'll get to the point soon where female-targeted games actually have a chance on their own here... I want some girl targeted/otome dating sims asap! *cough*Ouran DS *cough* |
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Cait
Posts: 503 |
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It might be a generational thing, but I was playing console RPGs (as a girl) way back in the late 80s. The generation you're thinking of is the one that grew up with the Playstation console system, the first big RPG of which was, indeed, Final Fantasy 7. For many of this generation, that was their first exposure to an RPG video game, however, the genre was well established nearly ten years earlier. But it is true that games back then catered more to male players than they do now. I think it was the integration of CG and more bishonen character designs that had a lot to do with it. I'm perfectly happy playing games like Chrono Trigger without the cutscenes, though.
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Jadress
 Posts: 808 Location: Seattle. It purdy and nerdy! |
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I think that all those girl-gamers in their 20s were the first ones to grow up with NES' in the house (whether it was supposed to be their brother's or not), so that explains why 20-somethings into games and RPGs (like myself) sort of seem like the "first gen." Although, I did go to a 40-something coworker's house party once where he had a Galaga machine in his garage and all these older women were going nuts for it and telling me that was "their game" back in the day.
 I delighted in that.
In our culture, I sadly don't hold a lot of hope out for otome/dating sim games, but what I'd rather see is games designed with a larger audience (including women) in mind, instead of games directly targeted at women. Well, both would be nice. Most casual game companies (including the one I work for) definitely design most of our stuff for women, middle aged women being the "bread and butter" of our customers, but even at such a company there are very few women producing games or in positions of power. Agh.. sorry for the game ramble. :p |
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Cait
Posts: 503 |
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Jadress, I'd have to disagree about your timeline there. My older brothers (who were 5 and 9 years older than my almost 30 year old self) were in the "first gen" that had the NES console. By the time girls who are now in their early 20s were exposed to most games, the SNES was old hat and the Playstation was the new kid on the block. The only reason I had any exposure to the NES was because of my older brothers, and I'm almost ten years older than this generation of "girl gamers." Most of the people I know in that age bracket started with the Playstation and worked from there (unless they also had much older brothers).
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littlegreenwolf
Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I'm not saying RPGs didn't exist before FF7, I'm well aware they did. I'm just saying at the time my generation had just reached middle school age. The Pokemon craze had just hit, appealing to both guys and girls (laying the seeds of interest in videogames for girls), and the kids in this niche had reached a reading level where something like a FF7 RPG wouldn't come across as a problem for them. Heck, I can remember the first time I saw FF7 was when my older male cousin was playing it, and I'd just sit there watching him play and liked the fact the girls in the game kicked butt. He eventually got bored with the game and gave it to me.
At the time I didn't think there was anything bishonen about the characters, but I will say the relationships and hints of romance in the game helped appeal to me. FF8 in that matter is a whole nother monster which I think pretty much sealed my fate as an RPG gamer. I only got around to playing Chrono Trigger for the SNES after playing Chrono Cross on the PS1 (which I loved, but no idea if I would of liked it as much if I played CT first). I have no idea what I would have thought of it if I had played it when it just came out, which would have put me around the age of 10, but I doubt I would have had the attention span for it then. I grew up with a NES for all the kids, but I never really got into them outside of playing Super Mario every now and then, and whatever other random games we had. My brother played it a heck of a lot more than I ever did. Last edited by littlegreenwolf on Tue Aug 11, 2009 4:38 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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FanFicGuru
Posts: 159 |
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As the oldest of 6 with 5 younger sisters, I can tell you exactly why there are so many girl gamers: they grew up with it.
As people are pointing out, the end of Generation X'ers has a very small pool of girl gamers. That is, girls who were playing the NES at age 2 like I was and kept playing all the latest and greatest systems as they came out. My sisters, however, grew up in an environment where I was playing video games for 1-2 hours a day and 3-4 hours on the weekends. They saw the hardware, they "wanted a turn" and they became engrossed in the concept of video games. They found out what they like to play and stuck with it and now my sisters are arguably bigger gamers than I am! lol... It's definitely a generational thing. But hey, more power to the players! |
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Jadress
Posts: 808 Location: Seattle. It purdy and nerdy! |
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Well, 20s-early 30s I meant. I didn't mean to sound so specific. Personally I loved my parents' Intellivision II before we ever got an NES, but no one can deny the awesome power of Mario 3. |
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Odd_shapeshifter
Posts: 15 |
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I must admit at first I laughed really hard when reading the end of the artist alley article part 2, when the conversation goes towards games and the gaming industry and then I was saddened by it that even still these days this prejudice is being kept up by the media and, as by this article as an example, even by females who want to work in the industry.
Don't get mad yet, it's a very blunt and crude statement, it hits sore spots but let me explain it a little bit before shooting me and decapitating me with a giant axe
Surveys are just that, surveys and we all know you can play with the numbers when it comes to surveys and research tipping it to your favor, usually by lighting up the numbers you want people to catch but I do think that to some degree they still show a certain perspective of "truth", for example a survey by a game company Nexon Corp., a Korean company, based on their user data, of their game Kartrider http://english.kbs.co.kr/life/trend/1349162_11857.html, if we look at this article and the numbers and statements one out of every four Koreans play Kartrider, that's a lot, but that also means a very large portion of the players are female, I think we can at least all agree that the Korean population aren't all men. To look at some more numbers and surveys here's one by NIELSEN (known for TV ratings) did a survey on PC Gaming: http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/04/07/nielsen-females-25-and-over-are-the-largest-group-of-pc-gamer/ Yeah it's from another site and you can temper with the results on websites but I doubt they did, if you really want to check the numbers you could always buy it, but I found that too much effort for this so let's just look at those numbers for PC Gaming, 46.2 percent of PC Gamers are females of 25 years or older, compared to their male counterpart of of 30 percent that's 16.2 percent more. The ESA http://www.gamersgame.com/womengamers/ reports that 38% of all gamers are female, I'm assuming this is just video games because if I look at gaming in it's broad-spectrum I just can't imagine that the amount of old ladies that play cards, the Asian females that play Mahjongg (with actual stones around a table) are counted in those figures because I'm sure that percentage would be a lot higher than 38 percent. You could argue they aren't really gamers and definitely not hardcore but in my eyes they are very hardcore, they play these games a lot, often more than once a week, not only that, especially the older ladies playing cards, have played these games so long that there isn't a video game that has have such a loyal fan-base in history, not even mentioning girls not wanting to play mahjongg with guys because they are slow or in more gamer words, n00b. Even my grandmother who would never play a card-game on the computer even when it comes free with windows, plays that same card-game hardcore at her card club around the table, 3 times a week from 10:00 to 16:00 for over 30 years, can you honestly say she's not a hardcore gamer? I don't know a World of Warcraft player or a Quake player that has played it for 30 years do you? As for females working in the industry, since the video game industry is such a fast developing media the amount of females working in the industry is increasing a lot, for an example I actually know quite a few, the characters designed in Sudeki, an Xbox title from Climax which is a company in the UK, was designed by a female and a lot of the monster of the game were created and animated by another female. You might argue that these are bottom positions in the gaming industry and I would then point out to Jade Raymond from Ubisoft who the producer for Assassin Creed, triple A title and Producer ain't a bottom position or what about Megan Gaiser, president & CEO of HerInteractive. Of course it's still a small portion but there are many, many more females involved in the gaming industry. Yes there should be more females working in the game industry, but the situation isn't as dire as the media still portraits. But what do I know making such claims. Not much but this is just my opinion based upon some surveys and my own observation as a gamer. To be honest I enjoy playing against girl gamers more than other guys, they are more social and often much more skilled players than one can imagine, they can be less competitive than most male gamers I know, there are exceptions, but that doesn't make them less skillful, I'm proud to acknowledge that I've got my ass handed to me by some very skillful female Starcraft players so many times that keeping score was useless and many other games as well, the best thing, they don't mind teaching you new strategies, where's with a lot of guys you'd have to go elsewhere to learn new strategies, you don't find that many guys teaching another guy the strategies that would beat his own. These are just PvP based based games but there are also many games that are cooperative games or sandbox games where winning is not the goal of the game, take farmville for example on facebook, more than half the players on my friendlist are female and a lot have a much more productive farm then I do. All in all, I think that yes, with video gamer the females are possibly still in the minority but in the overall as gamer (including, card, board and other forms of game and play) females are in the majority and now is the time to work on a nice and balanced percentage in the industry. |
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Odd_shapeshifter
Posts: 15 |
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It's not the kid sister character you are referring to but the damsel-in-distress, however the kid sister character is an archetype and it's used in a lot of games but none that you are referring to, it's mostly used in the ren'ai / dating-sim games. |
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Cait
Posts: 503 |
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The thing about the age groups, though is that the 80s were really a time when technology was just starting to explode into mass market appeal. There's a seriously defined generation gap that occurred in that decade between people who were too old for the "new" gaming consoles and the people who were born after the NES came out (20 year olds today were born in 1989!) and never even knew the earlier generation consoles (my brothers had a ColecoVision). So, there really is a difference between "early 20s" and "20s/30s," not that I'm really trying to be nit-picky about it. It's just that the way I experienced it growing up, the shift towards a more egalitarian appeal between the genders of video gaming occured in the mid 90s with the Playstation (notably the Final Fantasy 7/8 games), and not with the earlier consoles that I grew up playing. littlegreenwolf, I didn't mean to sound like I was disagreeing with you, I was just trying to add a little more to the discussion from my own perspective growing up some years earlier. Sorry if I sounded like I was arguing with you. |
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nhat
Posts: 922 |
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Ziang If you look at the women in video games, for the most part, they are voluptuous and curvy and drop dead gorgeous. I think the AI character in Resident Evil 5, in the very first scene, was the first woman whom I thought was attractive to me as a person - as a female gamer. Usually, those characters aren't designed with females in mind; they are aimed at a male fanbase. Although there are avid female fans out there.
Ok I never really understand this because the guys are drawn/modeled unrealistically too. To be honest it sounds like a double standard so probably someone can enlighten me on this logic. |
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Jadress
Posts: 808 Location: Seattle. It purdy and nerdy! |
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Odd_shapeshifter,
I'm not really sure what your point is. You mention how it's sad and laughable that we're saying there are not many women in the games industry, and then you seem to completely agree with the points we're making by saying we need more balance in the industry. So.. we're agreeing, then...? Why laugh? ^^;; |
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animeboy12
Posts: 160 |
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count me in that too but I get it's because the female design is more sexualized than there male counterparts, but at the end of the day they're both pretty idealized so it just seems like a double standard to me. |
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