The #1ReasonWhy Hashtag
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More pertaining to this particular community, how different do you think BG would/could have been (or BG3 might be) if there were more women involved in the development process?
More pertaining to this particular community, how different do you think BG would/could have been (or BG3 might be) if there were more women involved in the development process?
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The division between gamer vs. "normal" people has been weakening, but it's still there...
And, more shops? Pfft. Just point me to the weapon shop and then I'm out. I generally loot everything I need :P
It seems to me that the women that have been involved in game development up until now have been very successful.
Any explanation or reasoning behind why there aren't more women involved in game development, no matter how rational, could be condemned as sexism.
I hope that people pushing for more women in the gaming industry end up with more women on existing teams, and not this two tier system of "Games for guys" and "Games for girls" that some executive somewhere thought would be a good idea.
I hope we never develop the idea of games which are "girly" any further than it current has been
More than anything, I hope that more female gamers are exposed to awesome games like Baldur's gate, and not whatever tripe is being marketed to them by PopCap.
Keep in mind, those figures were accurate as of 2004. I'm off to work so when I get there I can look some more.
Here's a simple poll by another well-visited gaming site, from 2011: http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/index.html?poll=4333
The poll also links results from similar earlier polls with similar results.. though a trend where the fraction of female gamers has increased since 2003 can be surmised.
Here, this is more up-to-date. 47% of all gamers are women, up from 39% in 2004. And when I said substantial, I meant in comparison to male gamers. I would like to clarify that I mean substantial, and not "surpassing".
Sorry if my response isn't timely, I'm typing on my phone at workband it's slow posting!
Without background info and details, imo the stats you posted don't seem like a basis for concluding a whole lot either. Is someone a 'game player' if they played a videogame once? Spend x amount of hours per day/week on gaming? Own a console? Own a PC? Own x number of games? Spend x amount of money per month/year on gaming? Completed at least x games throughout their life? Etc, etc. Not to mention who and how many were included in the survey.
BTW, how do you know that women who flock to PopCap games are not genuinely enjoying them?
My sister was the same way, until recently she decided that she was so different from these societal stereotypes that she is, in fact, a man. So now she's trying to become a transvestite, when just a few years back she was happily married* and wanted so much to have children. But no, no children now. No job, no life. All that matters is becoming a man.
Thanks, society. You are an asshole.
[[ *They are currently still married but it's not exactly doing well, my bro-in-law says if she keeps up this "I'm not having kids" thing he's leaving her. Because, you know, he signed up for the marriage under the impression he would have kids. Can you really blame the guy? Nope. ]]
Yeah exactly, I'm not hating on the transgendered at all, thank you for understanding that. She does indeed make them look bad because it's more of a fad thing. Transgender is a huge life choice, and of course she acts like "I've always been like this, I just never understood," but trust me, I know my sister better than anyone, for the vast majority of her life she has been perfectly happy being considered a tomboy.
He definitely didn't marry her just for kids, but it was one of course one his - and her - primary interests. He is not as stubbornly traditional as I am, but he definitely believes that a key aspect of marriage is raising children. If they got married just for kids, I reckon he would've been gone long ago.
But then again, there are a lot of stupid people in general (just look at pretty much any election). A lot of them just happen to be playing/making games these days. I guess I just unconsciously hoped my hobby attracted "better" types.
In the end, however, I'm really happy this is getting so much attention. It's beyond due. If that's the case, is there a point to all this?
Seriously, though. I have been playing pen and paper D&D since 1977, and I seem to have been lucky enough that except for one convention, I never got any grief for wanting to play RPGs as a woman. And in that one convention, I was playing a game called "Merc", where you played Mercenaries, and I was one of the few people in the group to survive the mission. So... payback, I guess. (Three of the other players were cadets at West Point, where the con was being held. And they looked at me like I'd grown a second head when I wanted to play the game.)
One of the things I like about DnD / Forgotten Realms now I've experienced it - and yes I have said elsewhere that it once seemed to me like a boy thing, though that probably says more about the gamers than the game, even though we all loved the DnD cartoon as kids - is the general balance in equality it offers. I suspect the only thing which might have changed is the insistence on more than one female romance option making the final release of BGII and, from my pov, more options to call Anomen out on some of the more challenging aspects of his personality without necessarily putting an end to the romance.
BG probably would've been a more or less the same, since there isn't much in the game that emphasizes gender.
As for BG2, I imagine the romances might have been improved. Something besides Anomen for starters. The Viconia romance is kind of creepy, female input on some of those conversations would've been welcome.
EDIT: I completely forgot about Shar-Teel, I realize the term "straw feminist" probably wasn't that common back in the day, but it would've been nice if someone on Team BG realized she was a really awful stereotype.
- NPCs addressing your character as boy, lad, fella, sir, and man. No female counterparts.
- NPCs referring to your group as a whole as gentlemen, fellas, good sirs, and men. No female counterparts.
- An NPC seeing through your disguise by exclaiming, "You are no manservant!"
- An NPC asking if you're there for "wenchin'" and recommending straight female prostitutes to you.
- An offhand reference to your character's "codpiece."
- Character creation instructions referring to you as male even after you've selected your gender.
- All class and item descriptions and the vast majority of spell descriptions using exclusively masculine pronouns as well as many masculine nouns. No feminine nouns. (Same thing in the manual.)
BG1 content requiring the presence of a male character with no female counterpart:
- Safana as a joinable NPC and her treasure hunt quest.
- Shar-Teel as a joinable NPC.
- Oublek mistaking a character for Greywolf. You can get either 200 gold or a Reputation +1 out of this. If your speaker is a woman, the ensuing dialogue will be downright bizarre since Oublek's lines mistake her for Greywolf (whose gender isn't mentioned), and she in turn will somehow conclude she has been mistaken for a man, including possibly insisting she is "Greywolf himself."
- Some flirtatious dialogues.
BG1 content requiring the presence of a female character with no male counterpart:
It's indisputable that men get more content and far fewer immersion-breaking moments. That's not even touching the BG2 romances.
I believe these are oversights, not signs of intentional misogyny. If someone had pointed out these issues early enough in development, I'm sure something would have been done about them. (Except maybe the romances, which require more time and resources to make. We all know whose content gets cut first!)
But it's not as simple as having more women on the dev team. For one, not all women care about or even notice* these things. And those who do aren't guaranteed to speak up for a myriad of reasons ranging from crunch time to believing their role excludes them from creative input to worrying that their suggestions will be taken badly. And believe it or not, there are sexist women, too. It's just too simple to say that hiring more women will solve the problem.
On the flip side, being a man does not make you incapable of caring about the experiences of players who are not like you, nor does it make you automatically less competent at spotting weird, unbalanced, or offputting content with respect to women. Seriously, I cannot stress this enough. @Dave and @AndreaColombo were and are continuing to look out for these things, including some things I didn't think of, and they both deserve some serious kudos for ensuring that BG:EE's text isn't as overwhelmingly slanted as the original.
* It's totally possible for someone not to notice in time, especially if they're not in a creative role. When you fire up those early builds, you're not looking out for immersion—you just want the game to work!
I'd just note that the pronoun problem is more an issue with the English language and its lack of a gender-neutral singular pronoun (and while you could use "they" in some cases, it's really rather cumbersome).
BTW brilliant use of spoiler tags