The thing is, I don’t really care if you put a female avatar into Assassins Creed. You can put as many women as you like into Fifa, or make the entire cast of Gears of War tough action chicks – I still won’t play those games. I don’t care about climbing a tower to reveal more of the kill-map, I don’t care about shooting people, I don’t care about winning the World Cup.
Different people like different genres and you don't like some of the really popular ones, that's fine. It's not a gender thing either, I fucking hate Assassin's Creed and find sports games unappealing.
Adding representational diversity to those kinds of games is important
But you just gave a good counter-argument why it really doesn't matter, something that's backed by research that shows that most gamers aren't bothered by the gender of their in-game avatar too much.
Mainstream big-budget video games have been shifting towards a mechanical singularity for years,
What's that mechanical singularity? Assassin's Creed, Gears of War and FIFA really aren't too similar. In fact if you merged them together you'd get something fairly unique: A gory sports game with free running and climbing that also has guns, kinda like UT2004's Bombing Run mode.
and it’s really time to ask if that’s something that might be keeping people away too?
Why would it? You might have to look a tiny bit deeper than the front page of IGN but there are a ton of games out right now that don't follow the mainstream. Want a 90s-style CRPG? Divinity OS or Shadowrun. Classic adventure game? King's Quest or Deponia. 4x? Civ 5 or Age of Wonders. Roguelike? Too many to count. Platformer? Likewise. And so on. This is a great time for fans of smaller genres.
I’ll have indie games, sure, and Nintendo will always be there for me, but nowadays, AAA titles are just something other people play.
There is nothing wrong with not being interested in the big AAA titles. Look at /v/, all they seem to like is anime bullshit. And Nintendo? Well, they are a big company with lots of money and their games manage to sell their consoles all on their own. If that's not AAA then I don't know what is. Could it be that your definition of AAA involves "guns" and "a dull colour palette"? If so that's silly, circular logic.
The kinds of games that I enjoy have been pushed out of that space and I’m being pushed out with them.
What space? The "AAA space"? What is that? Why does it matter? How is this a gendered problem when fans of Real Time Strategy games, for example, had a big drought for a long time as well?
The most recent titles in the Resident Evil series dropped the old inventory management system, got rid of the hacking puzzles and upped the ammo count, turning this tense and terrifying series into a sequence of mindless cover shooters.
Okay, I gotta admit that I don't know any decent new game that follows that particular formula. Doesn't mean it's gone for good though. Too bad they fucked up the Amnesia series with that last installment.
This is presumably because somebody pointed to a pie chart and said that young men like to feel powerful and you can’t do that if you only have a torch.
Nah, I think the Jews are to blame /s
Underlying all of this is a central notion that games are best for shooting or killing things – or scoring goals – and all other intricacies are subservient.
Says who?
The excuse that “games are good at binary states – alive or dead – not the complexities of emotion” is often carted out to explain why violence is the focus of the majority of blockbuster titles.
Who the fuck says that?
But games have always been about more than that. What of exploration? What of puzzles? What of rhythm action and strategic salt-on-the-fries theme park economics?
Minecraft is still a massive success and there's a lot of (hopefully warranted) hype around titles like No Man's Sky and Star Citizen. Puzzles are still in games (too bad Silent Hills was cancelled, P.T. sure was one hell of a puzzle). There is a new Roller Coaster Tycoon in development right now. What's your bloody point?
Narrative games, multidirectional platformers, strategy sims and “casual” puzzle apps aren’t weird outliers, they’re all the bits of games that have been jettisoned in the race toward the perfect shoot-’em-up mono-experience; they’re every idea a dev has had that was considered too much extra effort to fit into a sprawling AAA epic, or was “too girly” to appeal to the target audience;
... huh? That makes no sense. Why would you fit a platformer or a "strategy sim" (whatever that is) into another game? Or Bejewelled for that matter.
they’re what happens when people want to focus on mechanics that do something other than kill, race or score.
So they are other genres then? Yeah, no shit.
Indie games (and to some extent the smartphone sector) are now the spiritual remnants of a time when mainstream titles were still trying to figure out what games were, when they could just as easily be about jumping on platforms or dancing or talking to weird fish men.
The fuck? Platformers were the dominant genre for much of the 80s and 90s, dancing games had a huge mainstream boom and are still around (and the plastic instrument games are coming back too, all I do is press buttons and life has no meaning) and Seamen was an odd thing that happened because of the Tamagotchi craze that happened at the time. Is this just a huge bitching session about how your favourite genre isn't trending right now? Because I could join right in with that, except that I won't pretend that it's because of gender bullshit.
[Splatoon]
But everything is still bad and Nintendo doesn't count as AAA, right?
Splatoon subverts the conventions of the first-person shooter genre, twisting the mechanic from killing to painting.
Third person. Geez, come on, even I know this and I don't have a Wii U.
We all like different things. That’s not about gender, that’s about being human.
... what was all that nonsense about then earlier? I mean, good, case closed, article over, right?
The lack of genre diversity doesn’t just affect players, it affects employees within the industry – especially women, who are more likely to have grown up enjoying slightly different games, the ones that now don’t count as games – the one’s outside of the epic shooter-killer wavelength. With fewer and fewer of these titles being made by big studios, eventually the mainstream industry will feel like it’s just not a place for people who aren’t as interested in heavy weaponry.
There is no lack of genre diversity, it's just that the popular stuff is popular and therefore gets more money thrown at it. Platformers were in that spot, RTS were in that spot, adventure games were in that spot, now it's third and first person shooters. How would you even go about "fixing" that?
And what games don't count anymore? Frickin' Mario and Monkey Island?
If your dream job is to work on a game such as Halo, there are multiple studios that have touched that franchise, and many more working on similar sci-fi shooters.
So let me get this straight: The problem is that women don't like shooters and therefore won't work in big-budget studios that make them. Big budget studios make them because evil men like them. Therefore the industry must change. That's idiotic on so many levels.
Sure, the industry is a tough place for everyone – it’s constantly changing. But if you already fit in, you’re going to have more ways to chase your passion through the hazards.
Does that mean it's not even really an issue then? What was all that about then? What a waste of time.