Larian Studios - Swen In Search of Women

[Saxon1974]

"Men really like our game, how horrible! Those evil men!!!"

In my experience the only female gamers I run into are players wives with very little exceptions. My wife isn't a gamer but she does play candy crush. I don't like all this "We must find more women because its good to force diversity", how about you make the game that inspires you and whoever likes it then great? I have no issue with female gamers but I don't see very many of them. I also think men and women are different and like different things (on average).

Larian has actually turned me away from pledging as they are coming across as a bit left wing and I wish they would just make the game that inspires them and be happy with whoever likes it. I was on the fence on pledging anyway though.

 

[Cacheperl]

It is probably true that computer games are still viewed as a boys hobby. And this is not just limited to gender expectations. It's also about age. Grown men are also not expected to play games. Because games=toys=childish.
What can we do about that? Probably start thinking (hence acting) more confident/positively about our own hobby. And wait.

And with regards to female gamers? Well, telling them they are not supposed to like all these complex games will certainly not get them interested.
Sure, there are some obvious things to do for developers, e.g., allow for (reasonably well implemented) female main characters. Everyone wants to be able to identify with the main character of a story/book/movie/game. Human nature. Apart from that, it is probably not really the games that must change but rather the (self-)perception of the whole medium.

Wanna make ur game appealing to womens?
Then dumb it down!

Are you guys idiots or are you playing dumb?

I didn't expect the watch to be this retarded but apparently I was wrong.

Why the fuck do you think AAA games are so dumb this days?

I dont know, but I'm willing to extrapolate based on your posting behavior.

 

[rjshae]

The gaming industry as a whole is still trying to figure out how to create and market games that appeal to a significant proportion of women. So this isn't really much of a surprise.

I may be totally off base here, but my conjecture is that, at a primitive level, CRPGs generally resemble a group hunting activity. (You have a group of participants who need to work together to overcome obstacles, then track and kill [or capture] a target.) That characteristic by itself is going to tend to limit the audience somewhat. To expand its base, the role-playing experience itself is going to need to diversify and allow for more forms of success.

 

[Edgy]

Like I said- retards.
I brought you a study that prove my points and you start deviating from the arguments.
I am not saying women are disqualified.
They just don't play as much the games you guys do.
Accept it already.

 

[DArtagnan]

Failing to convince and calling the unconvinced retards is such a powerful approach. If only it would work on adults in the real world

 

[rjshae]

Like I said- retards.
I brought you a study that prove my points and you start deviating from the arguments.
I am not saying women are disqualified.
They just don't play as much the games you guys do.
Accept it already.

Your conclusion doesn't match the ones presented in the studies you posted. The first study show that the primary differentiators in categories of games played are based on how the players schedule and prioritize their game time; not in whether the game is "dumbed down".

Basically you're just being a troll.

 

[sjett]

Probably fewer women than men played D:OS, but that aside, Google Analytics really has no way of knowing the gender of a visitor unless it has been told. It has to guess. There's a page that lets you check what Google thinks it knows about you (unfortunately I didn't bookmark it when I found out about it a while back). At the time, it told me that I'm a 34 year-old man (wrong on both counts). Sven posted an update to his blog post that shows how Google bases its gender guess on which websites you've visited. I'm a gamer, I visit a lot of gaming sites, so...

Any generalizations being made on this thread about what type of games women like are nonsense (I'm pleased to see that most of the stuff in here is reasonable). I'm not a typical female gamer by any means, but I've been gaming for years and love RPGs, whether they're narrative-driven, sandbox, stats heavy, whatever. I also love shooters, racing games, and other crap women apparently aren't supposed to like. I run into more female gamers now (those that play "real games", not casual ones) than I did 20 years ago. It's great.

Anyway, I think Google Analytics is probably underestimating the number of female gamers because...surprise! Those of us who know about the kickstarter and backed it probably also visit gaming sites, and so we've been pegged as male by GA.

 

[azraelck]

Another thing is that female gamers often don't advertise. I've ran into plenty through pugging in DDO that wouldn't use voice chat unless they were comfortable with the others in the group. I also witnessed why; in one particular pug, a young lady said "hi" into voice chat, and was promptly shredded by nother member of the group. Why? For being a girl. He felt threatened by the mere existance of a gamer girl I guess.

Studies can be easily skewed simply by adjusting where you get your participants from. Ask 1000 people at a Megadeth concert if they like metal music, and you'll probably get a high percentage who do. And about 10% who are there to complain about how much better Megadeth was during the <insert perferred era here>.

 

[CelticFrost]

Back to Edgy's point woman are to busy cooking dinner, making babies and crying to play games.

 

[Zloth]

Probably fewer women than men played D:OS, but that aside, Google Analytics really has no way of knowing the gender of a visitor unless it has been told. It has to guess. There's a page that lets you check what Google thinks it knows about you (unfortunately I didn't bookmark it when I found out about it a while back). At the time, it told me that I'm a 34 year-old man (wrong on both counts).

There's actually a link on the Google page explaining how the demographics work:
https://www.google.com/settings/ads

Wow, I'm signed up for Google Fiber and the thing doesn't know my gender? It's got my age range right but it's a 10 year span.

Anyway, I think Google Analytics is probably underestimating the number of female gamers because…surprise! Those of us who know about the kickstarter and backed it probably also visit gaming sites, and so we've been pegged as male by GA.

There might be another thing, too. They also pull information from "partners" that sell them demographic information. That's tied to an ID in the browser's cookie list. If two different people are using the browser under the same Windows account then it's going to get confused - especially if one person is more likely to sign up with these partners than others.

Then there's the accuracy of the demographics. If a forum (or whatever) asks you your gender and defaults to the wrong one, is it worth the bother to change it?

 

[Silver]

Sweet Swen - In the Search for Women

*plays leisure suit larry tune*

 

[lostforever]

Anyway, I think Google Analytics is probably underestimating the number of female gamers because…surprise!

Google Analytics is huge in the marketing industry and its very accurate for almost all *practical* purposes hence why pretty much everyone uses it. What is a surprise is to say Google Analytics is wrong since it does not match your own personal experiences...

 

[azarhal]

Google Analytics is huge in the marketing industry and its very accurate for almost all *practical* purposes hence why pretty much everyone uses it. What is a surprise is to say Google Analytics is wrong since it does not match your own personal experiences…

Google Analytic is accurate for personal interests which is directly tied to the websites people's frequent because that requires exactly 0 action from the user to track. It cannot be accurate for gender or age because that information is not available anywhere unless the user is stupid enough to gives it directly to Google on top of always using a none-shared browser that is totally devoid of privacy-protection systems (which comes as built-in on most browsers and turned on by default now).

Google Analytic use partner websites own analytic about gender and age distribution to dump users into categories for other websites of similar style. It is as accurate as predicting the weather by looking at previous years data and ignoring current weather patterns.

 

[lostforever]

It cannot be accurate for gender or age because that information is not available anywhere unless the user is stupid enough to gives it directly to Google on top of always using a none-shared browser that is totally devoid of privacy-protection systems (which comes as built-in on most browsers and turned on by default now).

You don't need to tell Google your age or sex for it to figure that out. It will be happy to use that info but it it also uses your web behaviour to learn about you. Privacy protection is turned off by default? And how many ordinary people will know where the privacy option is to turn it off? How many people do you think will turn off the data gathering in Win 10? I would go far as to guess that 80% of all win 10 users will not turn off any of the data gathering!

It might not be accurate for the internet savvy who can hide their identities and behaviours but the point still stand that for all practical/statical purposes its accurate. Many studies have been done to show how good google-analytics is. See link below,

The results were stunning! When we compared both data sources, Google Analytics reported the same tendencies as the CIM Internet study. The ratios for the variables sex (47% woman en 53% men) and language (64% Dutch en 36% French) were identical in both. For the variable age we noticed some small differences. This was mainly caused by the different division into age groups: CIM includes minors (-18), while GA doesn't. If we exclude the minors from the CIM data, we notice that the ratios of the age groups are very similair. Their was a maximum deviation from only 2%.

We may conclude that Google is surprisingly efficient in making accurate estimations of your visitors' profile. The only requirement is that you have access to a large sample of data

http://www.humix.be/en/blog/how-accurate-are-google-analytics-demographics-reports

 

[Elel]

I really hope this google analytics report will have no influence on Larian games. I don't want them to suddenly decide that from now on their games will only feature a single male protagonist! It's too bad that 4 big (non-Larian) games I'd have loved to play have already excluded gender choice, with their devs explaining it away as "that requires too much resources". Oh well, if they don't want to spend resources, I don't want to spend money for their games It feels wrong to support such devs.

As for hardcore, most females I know play action games and driving games like GTA, etc. And while I'm not married, most women I know are busy with watching kids, cooking and whatever other family matters, so their husbands are the only ones who have time for long time-consuming games. I believe that's the the secret behind why the hardcore gaming community is male dominated, haha.

Although I question how much more it is in numbers. I remember reading a report on genres, the link to which I can't recall, but RPG was definitely among a dominating genre of interest for female audience. I chalk it up to frequent presence of protagonist gender choice in many RPGs. Hardly anything can be as openly inviting as that!

 

[ChienAboyeur]

hmm, how does Google analytic determine who is a woman and who isn't? I checked and kickstarter doesn't seems to keep that info in the account profile, so it can't be from there.

It's been now years that Google or other services like that perform profiling.
They have developped algorithms to determine who is who through analysis of center of interests emerging from their data mining.

Profiling is heavy on the internet.

 

[Eye]

Whether it's 95% male gamers or a 75% male domination: nitpicking. There ought to be more women who play RPGs, period. Everybody would benefit, the industry would make more money, the women would have more games to choose from, the men would be able to share more of their interests with the other sex, the games would be more colorful: more dimensions, more perspectives.

I am glad to see Larian has increased the number of women working on their latest game. I am interested to see the effect.
One thing I don't want are games that resemble action movies where the male makers have put some short romantic scene in it that only distracts from the excitement and the thrill - 'O, wait, let's not forget the wives and girlfriends that will be brought along': puh-lease, stop prejudiced, stereotype thinking.

Though I do believe there's one significant difference between men and women in our society: girls are encouraged to cooperate, to support harmonious teamwork, men are pushed to take the lead and to shine in the spotlight. So searching for (contact with) women in places that deal with technical stuff where the focus is on debate and fighting with arguments or remarkable oneliners will be disappointing I think.

 

[DArtagnan]

It might also help "the cause" if female gamers stopped blaming men for the state of the industry, and started convincing their female friends that gaming is cool.

Despite the fun of the blame game, one of the most significant reasons that women don't play games is that they don't play games.

Stop bitching and start playing would be a great way to promote the whole agenda.

 

[Eye]

It might also help "the cause" if female gamers stopped blaming men for the state of the industry, and started convincing their female friends that

Reminds me of men saying women should stop blaming men for the state of male dominance in decision making positions in the industry in general.

gaming is cool.

Despite the fun of the blame game, one of the most significant reasons that women don't play games is that they don't play games.

Stop bitching and start playing would be a great way to promote the whole agenda.

Women do play games.

Stop blaming women blaming men. Let's cooperate. Although that might be hard for a man like you.

 

[DArtagnan]

Reminds me of men saying women should stop blaming men for the state of male dominance in decision making positions in the industry in general.

I'm sorry, but I've never understood the point of the blame game. It seems such a waste of time and effort.

Focusing on solutions would seem to be much wiser.

Women do play games.

Then what's the problem again.

Stop blaming women blaming men. Let's cooperate. Although that might be hard for a man like you.

I find cooperation very easy, but it does take two. If you insist on creating a fantasy of blame instead of reading what's actually said - then it's going to be harder than it needs to be.

The point, essentially, is that blame is useless.

I don't blame you for bitching - I'm just pointing it out as useless.