July 14, 2018 • 43 mins
In this update, A&B revisit an episode about the women making video games. What's it like for women in video games who comprise just 12 percent of the industry? Cristen and Caroline kick-off their two-part series on video games by looking at women making their way in the industry and the challenges -- and sometimes death threats -- they face.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi, this is Annie and this is Bridget, and you're
listening to stuff Mom Never told you. Well, depending on
what do you listened to this recently, I'll say recently,
we had a women in Online Gaming episode and we
(00:27):
thought that we would run the two part series that
Kristen and Caroline did on women and video games sort
of supplement that to give you all kinds of background.
So this first one, part one looks at women in
the video game industry and how we could really use
some more women in the video game industry. I at
(00:48):
the time was a producer for Stuff I've Never Told You,
and there are really rad women making really rad games
and off my Bridget and I were talking about one
that I can every time I get drunk, I am
guaranteed to bring up the Path. It sounded, so explain it.
So basically, it's a game, and I love video games
(01:08):
that do this that they play with the objective of
the game. So it's kind of a based on Red
Little Red Riding Hood and your objective is to follow
the path to Grandmother's house where you're gonna meet grandmother
but also probably the wolf. If you follow the objective,
you lose. If you do what the video game is
telling you to do you lose, so you have to
go off the path and you just kind of wandering
(01:30):
around and seeing the scenery is really pretty, and you
will encounter a wolf that takes the form of you
do this six times, I think, and it takes a
different form of I would say something symbolic of what
women face in our lives, and it kills you. And
then when you're the seventh one, I guess spoiler alerts you.
(01:52):
The only way you can succeed, or at least the
way I interpreted it is the only way you could
succeed was by the sacrifice of these other women to
complete your mission. It's just fascinating and I could talk
about it forever. The Museum mode A Museum of Design
Atlanta had Women in Video Games exhibit and it was
all games made by women a couple of years ago,
and we went and the videos online if you want
to see it. There's some really cool, interesting, beautiful stuff
(02:15):
that women are making and I would love to see
more of that. Hell yeah, yeah, I love this idea
of video games making arguments about society. Because people think
of video games it's just a fun little pastime. It
can be. But you know, there can be games like
The Path that really make a salient point about gender
in this country, and I love it. Yeah, I love
(02:37):
video games that play with the formula of the ending,
because for video games to work, there is a specific formula,
but games are sharing to kind of play with it.
And there's one of my favorite games. The ending is
pretty much a big f you, two gamers, but in
a fun way that I love anyway. This is part
one of our Video Game Update series about women in
the video game industry. And welcome to the podcast. I'm
(03:00):
Kristen's and I'm Caroline, and this is part one of
our two parter on women in video games. And originally
this was gonna just be one episode. We thought, hey,
women in video games about a being but a boom
wait now yeah, yeah, because we took to our Facebook
page to ask Sminty listeners what they want to hear
(03:22):
about in terms of women in video games, and once
we took that into account and started researching, honestly, this
could be a three parter if we really wanted to
make it that because things that were requested for us
to talk about had to do with women in gaming, credibility,
the girl gamer stereotype, getting hit on while playing multiplayer games,
(03:46):
what it's like for women in the gaming industry, and
just within those few topics, there's still so many things
to discuss. Yeah, women, I think women in the gaming
industry are so fascinating, mainly because I'm not a math
person or a science person myself, and so I think
these women who are creating these games are so fascinating
(04:06):
and and the women who play them. Um. But I
was telling Kristen that that there was an ick factor
for me when I was reading some of our sources
about this topic, And You're thinking, what ick factor? What's
your problem girls in gaming? You know? And No, that's
that's not at all. The ick factor stems from the
fact that these women who are both playing the games
and designing the games faced so much abuse, so many
(04:29):
threats from men and boys in the industry and other gamers.
It just created this really icky feeling. But the upside,
the bright side to all of the recognition and the
more media attention to those ick factors, is the fact
that regardless of that, these women who are making and
(04:49):
playing games are really starting to change an entire industry,
or at least broaden an industry that has such a
massive reach to so many people. And I'm glad you
mentioned to care lines science and math because this is
in a way an extension of our series on women
in STEM science, technology, engineering in math, because remember this
(05:09):
is this is a STEM field. Video games is STEM yeah,
and like the rest of the STEM fields, male dominated exactly.
So for this part one episode, we are going to
focus on the video game industry and women in it,
and in part two we'll talk more about the women
who are playing the games and the women actually in
(05:31):
the video games. Right, so let's look at a breakdown
of who has the controllers. Percent of Americans altogether play
video games. The average game player is thirty years old,
but the largest demographic is thirty six and over. Now,
if you're looking just at women, this is coming from
the Entertainment Software Association's report on gaming, women make up
(05:55):
forty five percent of the entire game playing population. And
I think that's an important point to make right out
of the gate, because I think the stereotype is that
there's like two women total anywhere. It's just you and
me sitting here with our old game boys and childhood.
But we should point out that when we say the
(06:15):
entire game playing population, those games are not only things
like Call of Duty, but also candy crush on your
phone or even board games. This is we're talking about
mega game here. But then if you look just at
video games, women still comprise of that gaming population. And
that's compared two boys seventeen and under, who comprise only
(06:40):
nineteen percent of the video game population. So there's still
plenty of women playing video games, and there are also
plenty of women buying video games. Forty six percent of
the time, women are the most frequent game purchasers, and
that might be because we are buying games for ourselves
but also buying games for gentlemen in our lives, or
maybe are women in our lives. Yeah, well, my mom
(07:01):
was the one who bought me video games when I
was a kid. Yeah, so there you go. There we go.
And by the way, if you can't keep up with
all of the sources that we're citing, don't worry. All
of them will be posted in the podcast post over
on stuff Mo'm Never told you dot Com because we're
going to cite a lot of statistics and we've got
a lot of sources coming your way. But don't worry
(07:22):
you will have one handy reference for that. Well. So
as far as what we are playing when we pick
up those controllers, Uh, this is coming from Variety back
in October. As many as thirty percent of women are
playing the more violent games like Halo. Uh. Call of
Duty counts about twenty of their players as women, while
(07:44):
Grand Theft Auto counts women as fifteen percent of its audience.
I will say Caroline that in regard to Halo, I
was just haloed out in college from sitting around more
hours than I care to even consider watching my then
boyfriend and his friends playing that game. I can't play
(08:07):
Halo for that reason. I mean, that's that's it for me. Um. Also,
I do take issue with this Variety article that repeatedly
referred to women playing games as quote unquote FEM players.
So strange just came out in Yeah that to me,
when you say fem, that has a totally different connotation
(08:29):
than just being a woman. Yeah. Now, when it comes
to who's making the games, the percentage of women shrinks
pretty drastically. Only eleven percent of video game developers are women.
And if we look inside the games, especially big name games,
you have even fewer women represented only four percent of
(08:52):
video game protagonists, for instance, among the top selling games
of two thousand thirteen. For instance, in two thousand thirteen,
among the top selling games, only four percent of those
games protagonists were women. And when you're in the store
looking at the boxes themselves, two thirds of all video
(09:12):
game box art features no female characters whatsoever. Now, there
are some games on the horizon that are adding, you know,
the option to play a female character. Games like Call
of Duty Ghosts you can customize your character and play
as a female soldier for the first time, which makes
sense considering women are now like legit allowed on the
(09:34):
front lines. So there's that um and the game Mass
Effect three has also added playable female characters. But I
mean you see that, like you see how the numbers
have decreased, as Kristen and I have ticked them off.
That you know, where you have thirty one percent a
video game playing people being women, but only of the developers.
(09:58):
It makes sense that they're you know, there's such a
all number of women actually developing the games, so that
kind of bleeds over into not having that many female characters. Yeah,
so let's talk for a minute about who these women
are who are working in video games and what kind
of stuff they're doing. First of all, I would like
to offer a shameless stuff mom never told you dot
(10:18):
com plug. We recently posted about Carol Shaw, who was
the first female video game designer, perhaps around the world,
but at least in the U S. She was definitely
the first. She worked her first job out of college
with Atari, and she created the highly popular game when
she moved over to Activision called Reberators. But the interesting
(10:40):
thing about her is that she's super low profile. She
got out of video games the gaming industry entirely in
the early nineties, essentially because she made some wise investments
in her husband made plenty of cash, so they realized
she was like, I don't need to do this anymore. Um.
But the numbers of women working in video games isn't
all that greater than it was in Carol Shaw's days
(11:04):
when she was the only woman really hanging out at Atari. UM.
In her time in the eighties, for instance, women comprised
about three percent of the video gaming workforce, but today
again it's only around twelve percent. Yeah, and when you
break down even further, the women who are in this industry.
(11:25):
So we we mentioned that they're eleven percent of video
game designers, they make up three percent of programmers, sixtent
of graphic designers, and of the tech jobs involved, like
for instance, building the software. And when you look at
some of those names, we have Donna Bailey who started
at Atari as an engineer in nineteen eighty. She co
(11:46):
created Centipede, which I used to play on my t
I eight five during biology class and freshman year of
high school. Yeah, and it's interesting that that Bailey was
working at Atari the same time as Carol Shaw. She
came on right after Shaw, but she ended up leaving
the industry distinctly because of criticism that she had to
(12:07):
deal with from her male colleagues. There's an interview with
Carol Shaw over on this video gaming website, I think
it's called like Vintage Video Games or something, and she
didn't really acknowledge sexism as a issue that she had
to deal with on a day to day basis. But
she also talked about how growing up she was a
real math nerd and so she was used to being
(12:29):
the only woman in the room and it kind of
just rolled off her back. She said it would happen
every now and then, but apparently for Donna Bailey it
was a lot more of a potent issue. Um. And
someone else who also comes up, who's still in the industry,
she's a rare veteran who's been working in the industry
since that's Brenda Romero, and she has credits on more
(12:52):
than twenty games. Yeah, and I mean speaking of criticism
from male colleagues and and male gamers, etcetera, etcetera. Romero
had an interesting quote that I cannot say on the
podcast where you know, people were talking to her about
gender issues, and she was talking about criticism from men,
and she basically said, and I will admit the bad words,
(13:13):
but she basically said, hey, you guys, I helped build
this industry. Did you like all my pauses? Um? You know,
she's basically saying, like, I am a veteran, I don't
deserve any less respect than these these men that I
work with. And and so there was a lot of
frustration in her tone that the female gamers and game
(13:34):
designers have to put up with all that abuse. Well,
imagine too that if you're someone like her who has
been working in games since the early eighties, how many
times she's had to answer that question too. I'm sure
that gender is perhaps an annoying topic for her to
even talk about, because you know, she probably wants to
(13:54):
be recognized as simply an amazing veteran designer, not oh,
you're a woman, what's that like? How do ovaries feel
so today? Considering the fact that women are still only
comprising around of the industry, A lot of the advice
that you hear for women who want to break into
the ranks in order to do that, essentially what women
(14:17):
need to do is just start building games. There are
so many resources now, you don't have to be working
for Nintendo to build an amazing game. And so it's
sort of it reminded me actually of advice that we
would hear Caroline in journalism school of how to become,
you know, a credible writer is you just have to
start writing. Whether you're doing you know, freelance jobs literally
(14:40):
for free or just starting a blog, you just start
making your stuff so that you have some kind of
resume for people to look at and see that you
can actually build these products. And on top of that,
especially if you're a woman, you got to have a
lot of perseverance in order to break in well. Yeah,
and especially since women, young women might not have the
(15:02):
same avenues open to them that that men do, especially
you know, we've talked about this in the STEM fields.
Not only are there fewer women in the STEM fields
than men, but that just means that there are fewer
allies bringing you in or even raising your interest if
you're like a twelve year old in math or science class.
And that's that's something that Kate Edwards said. She's the
(15:23):
executive director of the International Game Developers Association UM and
she says that the root issue is that we really
need to bolster the availability of STEM programs for girls
and young women to get them interested in games as
a career path. And it's the same thing that Kristen
and I talked about in our whole STEM series. If
you get out there, if you get the idea into
(15:43):
girls heads from a young age that these are even
jobs that are available. Maybe they just don't know, or
maybe they think, no, that's just a guy thing. So
getting it into their heads is so very important, which
leads then and again echoing our STEM series, to the
importance of the visibility of women in games. While it's
a lot of fun to play or watch something like
(16:06):
let's say Halo, if I hadn't spent so many hours
watching an ex boyfriend played in college, those kind of
I mean, it's it's it's not saying that all all
video game characters need to be women in order for
this to happen, but there is a distinct absence of them.
And so one thing that comes up a lot when
you're talking about the video game industry are issues of sexism.
(16:29):
And that's a controversial topic to bring up because a
lot of gamers don't take too kindly to these kinds
of critiques on the industry. But when you simply look
at the numbers and how marketing money is siphoned out,
it's the same kind of assumptions that are made in
the video game industry as are made in Hollywood, in
(16:50):
terms of assuming that, well, you know what, if we
make a movie about women, guys aren't gonna want to
go see it, But if we make a movie about men,
than men and women are gonna go see it. So
we're gonna make a lot more money, even though statistics
suggest otherwise. So let's talk a little bit how that
applies to video games. When we come right back from
(17:13):
a quick break, Okay, so right before the break, Christian
was talking about some of the obstacles that women have
to face in the game gaming industry. Uh, one of
those being marketing and the fact that a lot less
money goes to women developers and marketing for women led games. Yeah,
(17:39):
because a lot of times when you get more women
on a creative team, they're like, oh, hey, you know,
we could we could make this game about a female
protagonist or at least have you know, women in addition
to men in the game that you that are playable characters.
But Jeffrey Zatkin, who's a video game analyst, talked about
this to Penny Arcades Ben Kachiera in this article that
(18:01):
was widely publicized, and zach And said, quote, games with
a female only protagonist get half the spending of female
optional protagonist games and only the marketing budget of male
led games less than that actually, because he goes on
to explain of that thinking that well, the only people
(18:24):
playing games or guys, so we gotta make games for guys.
And well, yes, guys do make up a majority, but
you still are overlooking a massive population. And one thing
they talk about as far as money goes is the
whole thing of Well, it would take so much time
and money to to, you know, redo some of these
(18:46):
characters to be women. And it's like it takes seriously,
it takes so long to craft realistic looking breasts, Caroline, Well, obviously,
I mean you see how long did it take to
demold Laura Crofts first first figure? And this is something
that the site VG two four sevens Brenna Hillier took
(19:07):
issue with. An example of this more recently when the
video game company Capcom was making this game called Deep Down,
and one of the gamemakers said explicitly, hey, we're not
going to have any female characters in this game, or
I think he more just said We're only gonna have
dudes in this game. But her point was, Hey, this
(19:29):
is a game about time travelers kind of going through
and fighting historic missions here and there, and I'm just
not buying this that somehow because they said, for quote
unquote plot reasons they could only stick with men, to
which she basically said, hey, you know what, I Hey,
I'm not buying it. And be quote better lazily crafted
(19:51):
women than no women at all. Basically, you can make
it work if you want to make it work. Yeah,
and she she writes this basically fake script between this
imagined converse station between a gamer and a developer and
just a woman just like woman character, and through this
conversation she has these these two dimensional characters realize like,
(20:13):
oh wait, if we make games that don't treat women
like subhuman dust bunnies, fit only to be rescued, kidnapped,
lusted after, or left out of the picture altogether, women
might buy more of our games. Yeah, and if you
want to remain a growth industry, then it would be
wise you would think to go after new audiences, new
(20:37):
consumers who were just sitting there waiting wanting to play games.
They're already playing games. And I liked how she pointed out, how, hey, listen,
if you're taking all of this time to make all
these different kinds of armor and weapons, and you know,
carefully sculpting men's pectoral muscles, then you can't just you
can't add another option, just a one more player option
(20:59):
for female. And on top of that, she before she
even goes into her explanation, sort of makes a preemptive Hey,
if you are about to comment talking about how women
have no place in video games, just save yourself the time,
because I'm not going to respond to it because this
is an argument that comes up all the time and
it's foolish. It's simply foolishness. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, so, Um,
(21:24):
moving outside of the game and into the real world,
let's look at the actual direct sexism that women in
the gaming industry experience. Um, Chris and I have talked
about on the podcast before. Different social movements that kind
of are birthed on Twitter, various hashtags that sort of
rally people to a cause, and the gaming industry is
(21:45):
no different. They got the One Reason Why hashtag back
in twelve that ended up revealing a lot of issues
that women in the industry face. Yeah, there are all
sorts of issues of harassment that women were sharing via
Twitter without hashtags, such as getting groped at gaming conventions,
issues of isolation, being dissatisfied with the product. One tweet
(22:07):
but for instance, said because I got blank stairs when
I asked why a female soldier in a game I
worked on looked like a porn star. On top of that,
their issues of pay gaps. On average, for instance, women
make less than men in the industry, and on and
on and on and and in between those tweets about
(22:28):
issues of harassment. You also had a lot of women
stepping forward too and saying, hey, if we don't want
to discourage other women from getting involved in games, the
fact of the the matter is we need more and if
someone's looking for a mentor, I'll step up and do it.
You know, there's there's clearly some solidarity that's going on
as well. Yeah, but then you have the issue of
women leaving the industry altogether because of that harassment and
(22:52):
death threats and rape threats that they have faced online.
Zoe Quinn, for instance, she created the game Depressed in Quest.
She received an onslaught of harassment basically just because of
her gender, because she dared, as a female create a game. Yeah.
I forget the name of the site, but essentially she
made this game herself and posted it on um some
(23:16):
kind of like game sharing site and just got dog
piled with all of this harassment going on. And I mean,
the the interview that she gave to Vice magazine was
heartbreaking because she just she was clearly so exhausted by it,
like it was to the point to where, you know,
when when you get to a point to where rape
(23:37):
threats really don't have any impact on you. That's not
a good place to be in and that's not the
way it should be. Absolutely not. And Kate Edwards, who
we mentioned earlier, she's the executive director of the International
Game Developers Association. She was talking to Polygon and saying
that the organization is looking into starting support groups for
(23:59):
developers because of this problem. And she says that while
the harassment isn't having a major impact on development yet,
she said, we're at the cusp of where it could.
And while men do get death threats too, I mean,
the bulk of them are against women. I mean former
BioWare developer Jennifer Helpler, her name is in the news
(24:19):
a lot because she received death threats against her children. Yeah,
the story of her harassment is just kind of mind
boggling in the way that it took off. Because there
was a snippet from some interview that she had done
years ago about her like gaming habits or something, and
it got reposted on a forum and essentially a cyber
(24:41):
mob organized around it, and eventually it got to the
point to where people we had found out not only
her address but also the address of her children's school,
and we're posting it online, threatening to you know, kidnap
her children from school, telling her that her ldren should
have been aborted, threatening to rape her. And and even
(25:04):
when male developers get death threats as well, because they
also deal with this. You know, we don't want to
say that women are exclusively the targets of this kind
of cyber harassment, but a lot of times too, when
men get threats, it's often linked to and we're going
to rape your wife. They're always these like just violent
rapey threats that happened. And if they're not threatening their
(25:26):
wives or with violence, they're just talking about how you're gay,
like well in in possibly other words, but I mean
that's the gist, like we're going to insult you and
threaten you by saying that you're gay. Yeah, And this
is this is the dark side of the gaming, the hardcore,
the hardest of the hardcore gaming community. Which there was
one article that I was reading talking about how a
(25:49):
lot of them actually might be younger boys, that subset
of the you know, the seventeen and under demographic who
might be making more of these direct kind of threats
because older men with jobs might not you know, might
be a little wiser to putting leaving a breadcrumb trail
of cyber harassment that could possibly threaten their employment at
(26:11):
some point. Um. But it's horrifying to see what women
like Jennifer Helper and Zoe Quinn are having to put
up with that shouldn't be part of the expected job.
And that was the thing Kate Edwards was saying, was that,
I mean, it's really becoming something that you need to
especially if you're a woman in the industry you've got
a prep for. Yeah, it has a total chilling effect
(26:33):
not only on women wanting to enter the field, but
on them wanting to stay in the field. Yeah. And
it's also a byproduct too of social media in the
sense that you know, there has never been a thinner
line between you know, the industry side and the player side,
where now, you know, thanks to social media, you can
you know, tweet directly to these people whatever you think.
(26:54):
And I think also part of the harassment that Heppler
was receiving was because she was um influential in making
the switch in a BioWare game to allow gay romance
among male protagonists. Yeah, you know, but I mean, speaking
of that, that social media, that fine line, that one
(27:15):
one thing we read was talking to this guy who
was basically the quote unquote sheriff. He worked for Microsoft
when they were developing this game and there were changes there.
There were going to be changes happening, and so as
the sheriff for kind of social media interaction, he was
tasked with dealing with some of this harassment and these
these basically crazed fans, this core group of gamers who
(27:38):
were so upset by the changes, and he, because he
was a public face, he himself became the like, got
the brunt of the abuse, and he was like, look,
I'm not I'm not dealing with that. I think he
moderated Xbox Live, which I cannot even imagine because the
kind of there are studies that have been done analyzing
(27:59):
the events that players will make back to each other
while they're you know, playing games together, and it's like
horrific stuff that they say back and forth. So you
can only imagine if they're disgruntled at some kind of
game change that is being made. And he said he's
no longer working there, but he told the interviewer that
he still gets like fifty emails a day from people
(28:22):
who are just enraged about something. Um, I feel like
those people should like take up a volunteering project or
or become a social advocate for something like, direct that
passion into something useful. I don't know, well, I think
it's I don't think it's because working on the Internet.
I don't want to believe that it's because people are
(28:45):
evil in their hearts, because that would just make it
really hard for me to wake up and go to
work in the morning. I think it's because of the
anonymity of the Internet. This is the awful byproduct of it,
is that people are growing up more and more having
no consequence for their communications because we are communicating more
and more via text message, via you know, instant message, Twitter,
(29:07):
YouTube comments, and you just say whatever comes to your mind.
But I do wish they would direct the rage into
something more productive. Yeah, you and me both, um. But
moving away from this dark underbelly of what it is
like sometimes to work in video games, let's go on
(29:28):
the complete opposite end of the spectrum to not so
much the women making the games, but the women who
might be promoting the games at conventions like E three.
Although I think E three is cracking down on this. Um,
we gotta talk about booth babes for a minute, Yeah,
and booth babes. You know, it might be models, it's
(29:50):
it's typically really attractive younger women who do know a thing.
They tend to know a thing or two about the games,
whether it's whether it's just to be able to answer
basic questions from guys that convence, or whether they're actual
gamers themselves. But there there are a lot of stories
same same with um booth babes at marijuana weed conventions,
(30:11):
at UH beer tasting conventions, like it seems to be
a common thread through conventions really. But anyway, um, whether
it's sex cells, Oh my gosh, did I just coin
a term? I think you just coin yeah, that we're
onto something. But so anyway, these these booth babes as
they're called, are pretty popular way to kind of like
(30:33):
chill your product, draw people to your booth, you know,
attract more men to your product. But they're kind of
not as big of a thing as they used to be. Yeah,
I think that as there has been more speaking of
the power of social media, I mean, for every evil,
there's also a lot of good, including like the one
reason why hashtag. But also I think that this is
(30:55):
partially why UM booth babes are seen in a less
positive simply because everybody's seeing them now. Whenever a giant
gaming convention happens, you know, there's now this, well, who's
using booth babes? Are we still trying to use boobs
to sell video games or technology? UM and Spencer Chin
(31:19):
wrote a piece for tech Crunch about a little experiment
that he did with a split test for UM and
I forget which company it was, but it was some
tech company and they were allowed to have two spaces
at a convention. He was like, you know what I'm
gonna do. I'm going to have just knowledgeable people at
one and I'll have booth babes at the other, and
(31:41):
we'll see how many sales are converted for one versus
the other. And guess what. The booth babes don't actually
help sell products because a lot of times the men
who you know swarm to booth babes are probably not
the key stakeholders that you need to talk to in
order to actually sell your product, and mass a lot
(32:03):
of times they're just maybe lower level employees who are
really pumped about seeing, you know, getting to go to
Vegas for a week and maybe take pictures with booth babes. Um.
Whereas when you stock your booth, which is knowledgeable people
who may or may not be in bikinis, you actually
sell things a lot more effectively. Yeah, especially if if
(32:24):
the person walking around from booth to booth is a woman.
Women tend to avoid the booth babes there. Yeah. Um,
but I will say this remind me to of that
email that we received and read at the end of
our marijuana episode from a craft beer model, a beer babe,
if you will, and she was basically saying, listen, I
(32:45):
have blonde hair and big boobs, and I really enjoy beer,
and this is a stereotype that I have to deal
with the assumption that just by virtue of how I look,
that I'm a bimbo and so booth babe. Elaine Lowe
wrote sort of a similar self defense over at Jezebel,
basically being like, hey, listen, booth babes are getting all
(33:06):
sorts of flak, but we're usually just trying to make
a buck at these things. Yeah, she says, the depressing
truth is that standing around in a costume at a
convention pace, far better than writing ever has so it's
it's being used to supplement other career goals, and I'm
sure she probably makes more doing that than she would
like waiting tables at a coffee house or something. Yeah,
(33:26):
and the thing about it too is that you are
There was an article published at The Verge in early
two thousand thirteen talking about how booth babes are gradually
being replaced by booth bros and booth bots, which makes
so much more sense because this is technology. Robots, John Robot, Yeah,
(33:47):
he was talking about how people just like flocked to
these booth bots because they're interactive and you can you know,
I mean and robots. Your your audience is gamers, and
you're putting a big old robot in your booth like
that's awesome. Yeah, I would want to go play with
the robot. I'd rather go play with the robot. And
I think as this has gotten more and more attention,
sort of like with the whole bro grammar culture in
(34:11):
you know, the tech industry as well, where it's being
a little bit more looked down upon. To be so
directly insensitive to the women who are starting to comprise
greater numbers of your industry, it just makes you look
a little foolish if to use that kind of knee
jerk promotion. And I don't have her name in front
(34:31):
of me, but there was actually a relatively high profile
women women in video games who stepped down from a
position because with a with a company, because she went
to an event and they were booth babes everywhere and
she was just like, Nope, you don't know you clearly
your company, you know standards, clearly don't align to my standards.
(34:54):
See you later. I'll find somebody who actually gets it interesting. Yeah,
And so I mean that kind of leads a to
this question of is it getting better? And yes, I
think it's absolutely getting better. There are still so many
horror stories, particularly coming from you know, just these cyber
mobs that pop up every now and then, but I
think in terms of the industry itself, there's at least
(35:17):
more recognition and there are a lot of women at
the top. We don't want to make this a totally
deb downer kind of episode because there are a lot
of women who are doing a lot of amazing things.
You've got women like Jade Raymond, who's the head of
Ubisoft Toronto, who oversaw three person team creating Tom Clancy
Splinter Cell Blacklist. Yeah, there's also Bonnie Ross and Keikey
(35:40):
wolf Kill at three three industries that are heading up
high profile games such as my favorite, the Halo franchise. Um.
There's also Kim mcculloffe and Elizabeth Sampett who are leaving
leading game designers at Microsoft Game Studios and Storm eight.
Hope Cochrane is the CFO of king which publishes Candy Crush.
(36:03):
Let's be honest with women, we love some Candy Crush,
uh indicate CEO is Stephanie Bearish. Um. There's also hollylu
who co founded CABAM, which is known for its Kingdoms
of Camelot franchise. And there are I mean, we could
go on and on and on. There is literally a
laundry list of women sitting on these notes in front
(36:25):
of my face. And I don't want to just turn
this into calling a you know, a roll call of
every single woman, but it is excited to see, whether
it's with independent games or with larger corporations, you do
have women at the top levels. Kind of it's reflective
of what's going on in the broader tech industry where
you got we got plenty of women on the top,
(36:45):
and we have a lot of women I think too,
really want to break in there. It's like, how can
we build that bridge to where you know, there's more
of a direct pipeline between the two because the younger
women need mentors. And one thing that's come up to
in conversations of women in the industry is how it
is so important to create an environment that will keep
(37:07):
them around long enough to where to where they are,
like a Brenda Romero who has veteran insight. Yeah, that's important. Yeah. Well,
a lot of the women, UH, in the list of
women at the top of the industry, some of them,
you know, rose to the top, but some of them
co created their companies or solely created their companies, and
there is some recognition for that. Microsoft's recent Women in
(37:29):
Gaming Awards has quickly grown in just six years. It
began as a series of informal dinners hosted by a
group of female developers from the Xbox division UH, and
this past year they honored Anita Sarcasian, whose name is
all over everything when you look up anything about women
in gaming. Yeah, and talk about controversial. Lord, We're gonna
(37:50):
talk about Anita Sarcasian in our next episode, I'm sure,
much to the chagrin of at least one person listening
who posted about how he didn't want to hear about
her name on our Facebook page, but we have to
talk about her. She actually just received a huge award
from the UH Game Developers Association. It's some sort of
ambassadorial award recognizing people who have changed the industry for
(38:14):
the better. And I think that right there is assigned
to of how the industry is improving. So you know,
there's a lot of it's a tough road to hoe
right now. I think for if you if you're a
woman in gaming. But I mean having Matt and talked
to women in the industry knew and who have been
in there for a while, I mean women they do
(38:35):
it because they love it. They're making things that that
are really fun to play and really enjoyable, and and
I feel like that passion for games sort of balances out,
at least to some extent, the issues the harassment or
sexism that they might have to deal with, at least
for a little while, because I mean, the fact is
(38:57):
a lot of that abuse is coming from people who
feel threatened. A lot of men and boys who feel like, no,
this is a male dominated industry needs to stay a
male dominated industry. So I'm going to abuse you into
maintaining the status quo. Yeah, or just kind of the
misguided logic industry wide of thinking that you have one
(39:20):
specific demo of, you know, an eighteen year old male
gamer who is the only person that you should cater to.
But I think that perspective is absolutely changing, and we're
going to talk a lot more about that and about
the women who are playing video games and the women
in video games in our part two of Women in
(39:42):
video Games. So now I hope that there are some
people men, women, whomever who are working in the industry
or might have some insights that they can share with us.
Let us know your thoughts. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can email us. You can also
tweet us at mom Stuff pod Cast, and we've got
a couple of messages to share with you when we
(40:03):
come right back from a quick break. I have a
letter here from Megan about our cars episode driving in Gender.
She says, I just wanted to let you guys know
that I am a woman and mom and I am
the main driver in my household. For a long time,
(40:26):
when we rode anywhere as a family, we rode in
my car just because that was where my daughter's car
seat was, and I almost always drove. But since then
we've bought a family car, both mine and my husband's,
but I still drive of the time when we go
somewhere together. Like in relationships where the man usually drives,
I typically drive because my husband is kind of a
nervous driver and he prefers to ride. He still comments
(40:48):
about me speeding and such, but he just gets much
more frustrated when he is driving, so it's just easier
for me to do it. I typically don't mind it,
but when he does drive, I enjoy the break. That's funny, Megan.
My boyfriend also comments on my speeding, and he can
just deal with it because I'm drive in So thank you.
Uh well, I've got an email here from Heather, also
(41:10):
about our men and Cars episode. She said I had
to laugh because this was a timely episode. I'm forty
three and just purchased a new car last weekend. Since
both my husband and son are in a physical therapy
assistant program right now, I'm the primary breadwinner. I went
to see about getting a car for my son, and
ended up buying a car for myself instead, and got
(41:31):
my son a perfectly good hand me down. He was
totally happy to get it. By the way, even though
the salesman knew I was the primary breadwinner and that
my car was paid off, he still asked me if
I was okay to buy the car without my husband.
I smiled and simply said yes, even if he was here,
I would be making the same purchase. And she goes
(41:52):
on to say, Another thing I found funny is the
stereotype that women don't know how to drive manual transmissions.
I was taught on a stick shift and actually for
to drive them to an automatic. I think it's because
I'm such a control freak. Many times over the years,
salespeople have said, oh, this is a stick shift, Is
that okay? I tell them that I actually prefer that,
and they relax. The funny thing is that I've never
(42:13):
seen this happen when my husband has gone looking for cars.
My last car was a stick and when the woman
came out to go over the final paperwork, she was
reading quickly and started handing me the keys and then
pulled them back as she said, oh, this is a
stick shift? Can you drive a stick I thought, really no,
I just figured out how to drive one with a
brand new car. Here's your sign. Some thing's never change.
(42:34):
The can you drive a stick has now become are
you okay to buy this without your husband? For the record,
I have the better driving record in our household, and
the way we decide who drives is by whose car
we're taking. If it's mine, I drive, If it's his,
he drives. However, on long trips we take turns. So
thanks Heather, and thanks to everybody who's written in to us.
Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
(42:56):
email us and to find links to all of our
social media as well as this podcast episode with all
of our sources included. And you know, if you want
to watch our videos and read our blogs as well,
there's one place to go. It's stuff Mom Never Told
You dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
Hi, this is Annie and this is Bridget, and you're
listening to stuff Mom Never told you. Well, depending on
what do you listened to this recently, I'll say recently,
we had a women in Online Gaming episode and we
(00:27):
thought that we would run the two part series that
Kristen and Caroline did on women and video games sort
of supplement that to give you all kinds of background.
So this first one, part one looks at women in
the video game industry and how we could really use
some more women in the video game industry. I at
(00:48):
the time was a producer for Stuff I've Never Told You,
and there are really rad women making really rad games
and off my Bridget and I were talking about one
that I can every time I get drunk, I am
guaranteed to bring up the Path. It sounded, so explain it.
So basically, it's a game, and I love video games
(01:08):
that do this that they play with the objective of
the game. So it's kind of a based on Red
Little Red Riding Hood and your objective is to follow
the path to Grandmother's house where you're gonna meet grandmother
but also probably the wolf. If you follow the objective,
you lose. If you do what the video game is
telling you to do you lose, so you have to
go off the path and you just kind of wandering
(01:30):
around and seeing the scenery is really pretty, and you
will encounter a wolf that takes the form of you
do this six times, I think, and it takes a
different form of I would say something symbolic of what
women face in our lives, and it kills you. And
then when you're the seventh one, I guess spoiler alerts you.
(01:52):
The only way you can succeed, or at least the
way I interpreted it is the only way you could
succeed was by the sacrifice of these other women to
complete your mission. It's just fascinating and I could talk
about it forever. The Museum mode A Museum of Design
Atlanta had Women in Video Games exhibit and it was
all games made by women a couple of years ago,
and we went and the videos online if you want
to see it. There's some really cool, interesting, beautiful stuff
(02:15):
that women are making and I would love to see
more of that. Hell yeah, yeah, I love this idea
of video games making arguments about society. Because people think
of video games it's just a fun little pastime. It
can be. But you know, there can be games like
The Path that really make a salient point about gender
in this country, and I love it. Yeah, I love
(02:37):
video games that play with the formula of the ending,
because for video games to work, there is a specific formula,
but games are sharing to kind of play with it.
And there's one of my favorite games. The ending is
pretty much a big f you, two gamers, but in
a fun way that I love anyway. This is part
one of our Video Game Update series about women in
the video game industry. And welcome to the podcast. I'm
(03:00):
Kristen's and I'm Caroline, and this is part one of
our two parter on women in video games. And originally
this was gonna just be one episode. We thought, hey,
women in video games about a being but a boom
wait now yeah, yeah, because we took to our Facebook
page to ask Sminty listeners what they want to hear
(03:22):
about in terms of women in video games, and once
we took that into account and started researching, honestly, this
could be a three parter if we really wanted to
make it that because things that were requested for us
to talk about had to do with women in gaming, credibility,
the girl gamer stereotype, getting hit on while playing multiplayer games,
(03:46):
what it's like for women in the gaming industry, and
just within those few topics, there's still so many things
to discuss. Yeah, women, I think women in the gaming
industry are so fascinating, mainly because I'm not a math
person or a science person myself, and so I think
these women who are creating these games are so fascinating
(04:06):
and and the women who play them. Um. But I
was telling Kristen that that there was an ick factor
for me when I was reading some of our sources
about this topic, And You're thinking, what ick factor? What's
your problem girls in gaming? You know? And No, that's
that's not at all. The ick factor stems from the
fact that these women who are both playing the games
and designing the games faced so much abuse, so many
(04:29):
threats from men and boys in the industry and other gamers.
It just created this really icky feeling. But the upside,
the bright side to all of the recognition and the
more media attention to those ick factors, is the fact
that regardless of that, these women who are making and
(04:49):
playing games are really starting to change an entire industry,
or at least broaden an industry that has such a
massive reach to so many people. And I'm glad you
mentioned to care lines science and math because this is
in a way an extension of our series on women
in STEM science, technology, engineering in math, because remember this
(05:09):
is this is a STEM field. Video games is STEM yeah,
and like the rest of the STEM fields, male dominated exactly.
So for this part one episode, we are going to
focus on the video game industry and women in it,
and in part two we'll talk more about the women
who are playing the games and the women actually in
(05:31):
the video games. Right, so let's look at a breakdown
of who has the controllers. Percent of Americans altogether play
video games. The average game player is thirty years old,
but the largest demographic is thirty six and over. Now,
if you're looking just at women, this is coming from
the Entertainment Software Association's report on gaming, women make up
(05:55):
forty five percent of the entire game playing population. And
I think that's an important point to make right out
of the gate, because I think the stereotype is that
there's like two women total anywhere. It's just you and
me sitting here with our old game boys and childhood.
But we should point out that when we say the
(06:15):
entire game playing population, those games are not only things
like Call of Duty, but also candy crush on your
phone or even board games. This is we're talking about
mega game here. But then if you look just at
video games, women still comprise of that gaming population. And
that's compared two boys seventeen and under, who comprise only
(06:40):
nineteen percent of the video game population. So there's still
plenty of women playing video games, and there are also
plenty of women buying video games. Forty six percent of
the time, women are the most frequent game purchasers, and
that might be because we are buying games for ourselves
but also buying games for gentlemen in our lives, or
maybe are women in our lives. Yeah, well, my mom
(07:01):
was the one who bought me video games when I
was a kid. Yeah, so there you go. There we go.
And by the way, if you can't keep up with
all of the sources that we're citing, don't worry. All
of them will be posted in the podcast post over
on stuff Mo'm Never told you dot Com because we're
going to cite a lot of statistics and we've got
a lot of sources coming your way. But don't worry
(07:22):
you will have one handy reference for that. Well. So
as far as what we are playing when we pick
up those controllers, Uh, this is coming from Variety back
in October. As many as thirty percent of women are
playing the more violent games like Halo. Uh. Call of
Duty counts about twenty of their players as women, while
(07:44):
Grand Theft Auto counts women as fifteen percent of its audience.
I will say Caroline that in regard to Halo, I
was just haloed out in college from sitting around more
hours than I care to even consider watching my then
boyfriend and his friends playing that game. I can't play
(08:07):
Halo for that reason. I mean, that's that's it for me. Um. Also,
I do take issue with this Variety article that repeatedly
referred to women playing games as quote unquote FEM players.
So strange just came out in Yeah that to me,
when you say fem, that has a totally different connotation
(08:29):
than just being a woman. Yeah. Now, when it comes
to who's making the games, the percentage of women shrinks
pretty drastically. Only eleven percent of video game developers are women.
And if we look inside the games, especially big name games,
you have even fewer women represented only four percent of
(08:52):
video game protagonists, for instance, among the top selling games
of two thousand thirteen. For instance, in two thousand thirteen,
among the top selling games, only four percent of those
games protagonists were women. And when you're in the store
looking at the boxes themselves, two thirds of all video
(09:12):
game box art features no female characters whatsoever. Now, there
are some games on the horizon that are adding, you know,
the option to play a female character. Games like Call
of Duty Ghosts you can customize your character and play
as a female soldier for the first time, which makes
sense considering women are now like legit allowed on the
(09:34):
front lines. So there's that um and the game Mass
Effect three has also added playable female characters. But I
mean you see that, like you see how the numbers
have decreased, as Kristen and I have ticked them off.
That you know, where you have thirty one percent a
video game playing people being women, but only of the developers.
(09:58):
It makes sense that they're you know, there's such a
all number of women actually developing the games, so that
kind of bleeds over into not having that many female characters. Yeah,
so let's talk for a minute about who these women
are who are working in video games and what kind
of stuff they're doing. First of all, I would like
to offer a shameless stuff mom never told you dot
(10:18):
com plug. We recently posted about Carol Shaw, who was
the first female video game designer, perhaps around the world,
but at least in the U S. She was definitely
the first. She worked her first job out of college
with Atari, and she created the highly popular game when
she moved over to Activision called Reberators. But the interesting
(10:40):
thing about her is that she's super low profile. She
got out of video games the gaming industry entirely in
the early nineties, essentially because she made some wise investments
in her husband made plenty of cash, so they realized
she was like, I don't need to do this anymore. Um.
But the numbers of women working in video games isn't
all that greater than it was in Carol Shaw's days
(11:04):
when she was the only woman really hanging out at Atari. UM.
In her time in the eighties, for instance, women comprised
about three percent of the video gaming workforce, but today
again it's only around twelve percent. Yeah, and when you
break down even further, the women who are in this industry.
(11:25):
So we we mentioned that they're eleven percent of video
game designers, they make up three percent of programmers, sixtent
of graphic designers, and of the tech jobs involved, like
for instance, building the software. And when you look at
some of those names, we have Donna Bailey who started
at Atari as an engineer in nineteen eighty. She co
(11:46):
created Centipede, which I used to play on my t
I eight five during biology class and freshman year of
high school. Yeah, and it's interesting that that Bailey was
working at Atari the same time as Carol Shaw. She
came on right after Shaw, but she ended up leaving
the industry distinctly because of criticism that she had to
(12:07):
deal with from her male colleagues. There's an interview with
Carol Shaw over on this video gaming website, I think
it's called like Vintage Video Games or something, and she
didn't really acknowledge sexism as a issue that she had
to deal with on a day to day basis. But
she also talked about how growing up she was a
real math nerd and so she was used to being
(12:29):
the only woman in the room and it kind of
just rolled off her back. She said it would happen
every now and then, but apparently for Donna Bailey it
was a lot more of a potent issue. Um. And
someone else who also comes up, who's still in the industry,
she's a rare veteran who's been working in the industry
since that's Brenda Romero, and she has credits on more
(12:52):
than twenty games. Yeah, and I mean speaking of criticism
from male colleagues and and male gamers, etcetera, etcetera. Romero
had an interesting quote that I cannot say on the
podcast where you know, people were talking to her about
gender issues, and she was talking about criticism from men,
and she basically said, and I will admit the bad words,
(13:13):
but she basically said, hey, you guys, I helped build
this industry. Did you like all my pauses? Um? You know,
she's basically saying, like, I am a veteran, I don't
deserve any less respect than these these men that I
work with. And and so there was a lot of
frustration in her tone that the female gamers and game
(13:34):
designers have to put up with all that abuse. Well,
imagine too that if you're someone like her who has
been working in games since the early eighties, how many
times she's had to answer that question too. I'm sure
that gender is perhaps an annoying topic for her to
even talk about, because you know, she probably wants to
(13:54):
be recognized as simply an amazing veteran designer, not oh,
you're a woman, what's that like? How do ovaries feel
so today? Considering the fact that women are still only
comprising around of the industry, A lot of the advice
that you hear for women who want to break into
the ranks in order to do that, essentially what women
(14:17):
need to do is just start building games. There are
so many resources now, you don't have to be working
for Nintendo to build an amazing game. And so it's
sort of it reminded me actually of advice that we
would hear Caroline in journalism school of how to become,
you know, a credible writer is you just have to
start writing. Whether you're doing you know, freelance jobs literally
(14:40):
for free or just starting a blog, you just start
making your stuff so that you have some kind of
resume for people to look at and see that you
can actually build these products. And on top of that,
especially if you're a woman, you got to have a
lot of perseverance in order to break in well. Yeah,
and especially since women, young women might not have the
(15:02):
same avenues open to them that that men do, especially
you know, we've talked about this in the STEM fields.
Not only are there fewer women in the STEM fields
than men, but that just means that there are fewer
allies bringing you in or even raising your interest if
you're like a twelve year old in math or science class.
And that's that's something that Kate Edwards said. She's the
(15:23):
executive director of the International Game Developers Association UM and
she says that the root issue is that we really
need to bolster the availability of STEM programs for girls
and young women to get them interested in games as
a career path. And it's the same thing that Kristen
and I talked about in our whole STEM series. If
you get out there, if you get the idea into
(15:43):
girls heads from a young age that these are even
jobs that are available. Maybe they just don't know, or
maybe they think, no, that's just a guy thing. So
getting it into their heads is so very important, which
leads then and again echoing our STEM series, to the
importance of the visibility of women in games. While it's
a lot of fun to play or watch something like
(16:06):
let's say Halo, if I hadn't spent so many hours
watching an ex boyfriend played in college, those kind of
I mean, it's it's it's not saying that all all
video game characters need to be women in order for
this to happen, but there is a distinct absence of them.
And so one thing that comes up a lot when
you're talking about the video game industry are issues of sexism.
(16:29):
And that's a controversial topic to bring up because a
lot of gamers don't take too kindly to these kinds
of critiques on the industry. But when you simply look
at the numbers and how marketing money is siphoned out,
it's the same kind of assumptions that are made in
the video game industry as are made in Hollywood, in
(16:50):
terms of assuming that, well, you know what, if we
make a movie about women, guys aren't gonna want to
go see it, But if we make a movie about men,
than men and women are gonna go see it. So
we're gonna make a lot more money, even though statistics
suggest otherwise. So let's talk a little bit how that
applies to video games. When we come right back from
(17:13):
a quick break, Okay, so right before the break, Christian
was talking about some of the obstacles that women have
to face in the game gaming industry. Uh, one of
those being marketing and the fact that a lot less
money goes to women developers and marketing for women led games. Yeah,
(17:39):
because a lot of times when you get more women
on a creative team, they're like, oh, hey, you know,
we could we could make this game about a female
protagonist or at least have you know, women in addition
to men in the game that you that are playable characters.
But Jeffrey Zatkin, who's a video game analyst, talked about
this to Penny Arcades Ben Kachiera in this article that
(18:01):
was widely publicized, and zach And said, quote, games with
a female only protagonist get half the spending of female
optional protagonist games and only the marketing budget of male
led games less than that actually, because he goes on
to explain of that thinking that well, the only people
(18:24):
playing games or guys, so we gotta make games for guys.
And well, yes, guys do make up a majority, but
you still are overlooking a massive population. And one thing
they talk about as far as money goes is the
whole thing of Well, it would take so much time
and money to to, you know, redo some of these
(18:46):
characters to be women. And it's like it takes seriously,
it takes so long to craft realistic looking breasts, Caroline, Well, obviously,
I mean you see how long did it take to
demold Laura Crofts first first figure? And this is something
that the site VG two four sevens Brenna Hillier took
(19:07):
issue with. An example of this more recently when the
video game company Capcom was making this game called Deep Down,
and one of the gamemakers said explicitly, hey, we're not
going to have any female characters in this game, or
I think he more just said We're only gonna have
dudes in this game. But her point was, Hey, this
(19:29):
is a game about time travelers kind of going through
and fighting historic missions here and there, and I'm just
not buying this that somehow because they said, for quote
unquote plot reasons they could only stick with men, to
which she basically said, hey, you know what, I Hey,
I'm not buying it. And be quote better lazily crafted
(19:51):
women than no women at all. Basically, you can make
it work if you want to make it work. Yeah,
and she she writes this basically fake script between this
imagined converse station between a gamer and a developer and
just a woman just like woman character, and through this
conversation she has these these two dimensional characters realize like,
(20:13):
oh wait, if we make games that don't treat women
like subhuman dust bunnies, fit only to be rescued, kidnapped,
lusted after, or left out of the picture altogether, women
might buy more of our games. Yeah, and if you
want to remain a growth industry, then it would be
wise you would think to go after new audiences, new
(20:37):
consumers who were just sitting there waiting wanting to play games.
They're already playing games. And I liked how she pointed out, how, hey, listen,
if you're taking all of this time to make all
these different kinds of armor and weapons, and you know,
carefully sculpting men's pectoral muscles, then you can't just you
can't add another option, just a one more player option
(20:59):
for female. And on top of that, she before she
even goes into her explanation, sort of makes a preemptive Hey,
if you are about to comment talking about how women
have no place in video games, just save yourself the time,
because I'm not going to respond to it because this
is an argument that comes up all the time and
it's foolish. It's simply foolishness. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, so, Um,
(21:24):
moving outside of the game and into the real world,
let's look at the actual direct sexism that women in
the gaming industry experience. Um, Chris and I have talked
about on the podcast before. Different social movements that kind
of are birthed on Twitter, various hashtags that sort of
rally people to a cause, and the gaming industry is
(21:45):
no different. They got the One Reason Why hashtag back
in twelve that ended up revealing a lot of issues
that women in the industry face. Yeah, there are all
sorts of issues of harassment that women were sharing via
Twitter without hashtags, such as getting groped at gaming conventions,
issues of isolation, being dissatisfied with the product. One tweet
(22:07):
but for instance, said because I got blank stairs when
I asked why a female soldier in a game I
worked on looked like a porn star. On top of that,
their issues of pay gaps. On average, for instance, women
make less than men in the industry, and on and
on and on and and in between those tweets about
(22:28):
issues of harassment. You also had a lot of women
stepping forward too and saying, hey, if we don't want
to discourage other women from getting involved in games, the
fact of the the matter is we need more and if
someone's looking for a mentor, I'll step up and do it.
You know, there's there's clearly some solidarity that's going on
as well. Yeah, but then you have the issue of
women leaving the industry altogether because of that harassment and
(22:52):
death threats and rape threats that they have faced online.
Zoe Quinn, for instance, she created the game Depressed in Quest.
She received an onslaught of harassment basically just because of
her gender, because she dared, as a female create a game. Yeah.
I forget the name of the site, but essentially she
made this game herself and posted it on um some
(23:16):
kind of like game sharing site and just got dog
piled with all of this harassment going on. And I mean,
the the interview that she gave to Vice magazine was
heartbreaking because she just she was clearly so exhausted by it,
like it was to the point to where, you know,
when when you get to a point to where rape
(23:37):
threats really don't have any impact on you. That's not
a good place to be in and that's not the
way it should be. Absolutely not. And Kate Edwards, who
we mentioned earlier, she's the executive director of the International
Game Developers Association. She was talking to Polygon and saying
that the organization is looking into starting support groups for
(23:59):
developers because of this problem. And she says that while
the harassment isn't having a major impact on development yet,
she said, we're at the cusp of where it could.
And while men do get death threats too, I mean,
the bulk of them are against women. I mean former
BioWare developer Jennifer Helpler, her name is in the news
(24:19):
a lot because she received death threats against her children. Yeah,
the story of her harassment is just kind of mind
boggling in the way that it took off. Because there
was a snippet from some interview that she had done
years ago about her like gaming habits or something, and
it got reposted on a forum and essentially a cyber
(24:41):
mob organized around it, and eventually it got to the
point to where people we had found out not only
her address but also the address of her children's school,
and we're posting it online, threatening to you know, kidnap
her children from school, telling her that her ldren should
have been aborted, threatening to rape her. And and even
(25:04):
when male developers get death threats as well, because they
also deal with this. You know, we don't want to
say that women are exclusively the targets of this kind
of cyber harassment, but a lot of times too, when
men get threats, it's often linked to and we're going
to rape your wife. They're always these like just violent
rapey threats that happened. And if they're not threatening their
(25:26):
wives or with violence, they're just talking about how you're gay,
like well in in possibly other words, but I mean
that's the gist, like we're going to insult you and
threaten you by saying that you're gay. Yeah, And this
is this is the dark side of the gaming, the hardcore,
the hardest of the hardcore gaming community. Which there was
one article that I was reading talking about how a
(25:49):
lot of them actually might be younger boys, that subset
of the you know, the seventeen and under demographic who
might be making more of these direct kind of threats
because older men with jobs might not you know, might
be a little wiser to putting leaving a breadcrumb trail
of cyber harassment that could possibly threaten their employment at
(26:11):
some point. Um. But it's horrifying to see what women
like Jennifer Helper and Zoe Quinn are having to put
up with that shouldn't be part of the expected job.
And that was the thing Kate Edwards was saying, was that,
I mean, it's really becoming something that you need to
especially if you're a woman in the industry you've got
a prep for. Yeah, it has a total chilling effect
(26:33):
not only on women wanting to enter the field, but
on them wanting to stay in the field. Yeah. And
it's also a byproduct too of social media in the
sense that you know, there has never been a thinner
line between you know, the industry side and the player side,
where now, you know, thanks to social media, you can
you know, tweet directly to these people whatever you think.
(26:54):
And I think also part of the harassment that Heppler
was receiving was because she was um influential in making
the switch in a BioWare game to allow gay romance
among male protagonists. Yeah, you know, but I mean, speaking
of that, that social media, that fine line, that one
(27:15):
one thing we read was talking to this guy who
was basically the quote unquote sheriff. He worked for Microsoft
when they were developing this game and there were changes there.
There were going to be changes happening, and so as
the sheriff for kind of social media interaction, he was
tasked with dealing with some of this harassment and these
these basically crazed fans, this core group of gamers who
(27:38):
were so upset by the changes, and he, because he
was a public face, he himself became the like, got
the brunt of the abuse, and he was like, look,
I'm not I'm not dealing with that. I think he
moderated Xbox Live, which I cannot even imagine because the
kind of there are studies that have been done analyzing
(27:59):
the events that players will make back to each other
while they're you know, playing games together, and it's like
horrific stuff that they say back and forth. So you
can only imagine if they're disgruntled at some kind of
game change that is being made. And he said he's
no longer working there, but he told the interviewer that
he still gets like fifty emails a day from people
(28:22):
who are just enraged about something. Um, I feel like
those people should like take up a volunteering project or
or become a social advocate for something like, direct that
passion into something useful. I don't know, well, I think
it's I don't think it's because working on the Internet.
I don't want to believe that it's because people are
(28:45):
evil in their hearts, because that would just make it
really hard for me to wake up and go to
work in the morning. I think it's because of the
anonymity of the Internet. This is the awful byproduct of it,
is that people are growing up more and more having
no consequence for their communications because we are communicating more
and more via text message, via you know, instant message, Twitter,
(29:07):
YouTube comments, and you just say whatever comes to your mind.
But I do wish they would direct the rage into
something more productive. Yeah, you and me both, um. But
moving away from this dark underbelly of what it is
like sometimes to work in video games, let's go on
(29:28):
the complete opposite end of the spectrum to not so
much the women making the games, but the women who
might be promoting the games at conventions like E three.
Although I think E three is cracking down on this. Um,
we gotta talk about booth babes for a minute, Yeah,
and booth babes. You know, it might be models, it's
(29:50):
it's typically really attractive younger women who do know a thing.
They tend to know a thing or two about the games,
whether it's whether it's just to be able to answer
basic questions from guys that convence, or whether they're actual
gamers themselves. But there there are a lot of stories
same same with um booth babes at marijuana weed conventions,
(30:11):
at UH beer tasting conventions, like it seems to be
a common thread through conventions really. But anyway, um, whether
it's sex cells, Oh my gosh, did I just coin
a term? I think you just coin yeah, that we're
onto something. But so anyway, these these booth babes as
they're called, are pretty popular way to kind of like
(30:33):
chill your product, draw people to your booth, you know,
attract more men to your product. But they're kind of
not as big of a thing as they used to be. Yeah,
I think that as there has been more speaking of
the power of social media, I mean, for every evil,
there's also a lot of good, including like the one
reason why hashtag. But also I think that this is
(30:55):
partially why UM booth babes are seen in a less
positive simply because everybody's seeing them now. Whenever a giant
gaming convention happens, you know, there's now this, well, who's
using booth babes? Are we still trying to use boobs
to sell video games or technology? UM and Spencer Chin
(31:19):
wrote a piece for tech Crunch about a little experiment
that he did with a split test for UM and
I forget which company it was, but it was some
tech company and they were allowed to have two spaces
at a convention. He was like, you know what I'm
gonna do. I'm going to have just knowledgeable people at
one and I'll have booth babes at the other, and
(31:41):
we'll see how many sales are converted for one versus
the other. And guess what. The booth babes don't actually
help sell products because a lot of times the men
who you know swarm to booth babes are probably not
the key stakeholders that you need to talk to in
order to actually sell your product, and mass a lot
(32:03):
of times they're just maybe lower level employees who are
really pumped about seeing, you know, getting to go to
Vegas for a week and maybe take pictures with booth babes. Um.
Whereas when you stock your booth, which is knowledgeable people
who may or may not be in bikinis, you actually
sell things a lot more effectively. Yeah, especially if if
(32:24):
the person walking around from booth to booth is a woman.
Women tend to avoid the booth babes there. Yeah. Um,
but I will say this remind me to of that
email that we received and read at the end of
our marijuana episode from a craft beer model, a beer babe,
if you will, and she was basically saying, listen, I
(32:45):
have blonde hair and big boobs, and I really enjoy beer,
and this is a stereotype that I have to deal
with the assumption that just by virtue of how I look,
that I'm a bimbo and so booth babe. Elaine Lowe
wrote sort of a similar self defense over at Jezebel,
basically being like, hey, listen, booth babes are getting all
(33:06):
sorts of flak, but we're usually just trying to make
a buck at these things. Yeah, she says, the depressing
truth is that standing around in a costume at a
convention pace, far better than writing ever has so it's
it's being used to supplement other career goals, and I'm
sure she probably makes more doing that than she would
like waiting tables at a coffee house or something. Yeah,
(33:26):
and the thing about it too is that you are
There was an article published at The Verge in early
two thousand thirteen talking about how booth babes are gradually
being replaced by booth bros and booth bots, which makes
so much more sense because this is technology. Robots, John Robot, Yeah,
(33:47):
he was talking about how people just like flocked to
these booth bots because they're interactive and you can you know,
I mean and robots. Your your audience is gamers, and
you're putting a big old robot in your booth like
that's awesome. Yeah, I would want to go play with
the robot. I'd rather go play with the robot. And
I think as this has gotten more and more attention,
sort of like with the whole bro grammar culture in
(34:11):
you know, the tech industry as well, where it's being
a little bit more looked down upon. To be so
directly insensitive to the women who are starting to comprise
greater numbers of your industry, it just makes you look
a little foolish if to use that kind of knee
jerk promotion. And I don't have her name in front
(34:31):
of me, but there was actually a relatively high profile
women women in video games who stepped down from a
position because with a with a company, because she went
to an event and they were booth babes everywhere and
she was just like, Nope, you don't know you clearly
your company, you know standards, clearly don't align to my standards.
(34:54):
See you later. I'll find somebody who actually gets it interesting. Yeah,
And so I mean that kind of leads a to
this question of is it getting better? And yes, I
think it's absolutely getting better. There are still so many
horror stories, particularly coming from you know, just these cyber
mobs that pop up every now and then, but I
think in terms of the industry itself, there's at least
(35:17):
more recognition and there are a lot of women at
the top. We don't want to make this a totally
deb downer kind of episode because there are a lot
of women who are doing a lot of amazing things.
You've got women like Jade Raymond, who's the head of
Ubisoft Toronto, who oversaw three person team creating Tom Clancy
Splinter Cell Blacklist. Yeah, there's also Bonnie Ross and Keikey
(35:40):
wolf Kill at three three industries that are heading up
high profile games such as my favorite, the Halo franchise. Um.
There's also Kim mcculloffe and Elizabeth Sampett who are leaving
leading game designers at Microsoft Game Studios and Storm eight.
Hope Cochrane is the CFO of king which publishes Candy Crush.
(36:03):
Let's be honest with women, we love some Candy Crush,
uh indicate CEO is Stephanie Bearish. Um. There's also hollylu
who co founded CABAM, which is known for its Kingdoms
of Camelot franchise. And there are I mean, we could
go on and on and on. There is literally a
laundry list of women sitting on these notes in front
(36:25):
of my face. And I don't want to just turn
this into calling a you know, a roll call of
every single woman, but it is excited to see, whether
it's with independent games or with larger corporations, you do
have women at the top levels. Kind of it's reflective
of what's going on in the broader tech industry where
you got we got plenty of women on the top,
(36:45):
and we have a lot of women I think too,
really want to break in there. It's like, how can
we build that bridge to where you know, there's more
of a direct pipeline between the two because the younger
women need mentors. And one thing that's come up to
in conversations of women in the industry is how it
is so important to create an environment that will keep
(37:07):
them around long enough to where to where they are,
like a Brenda Romero who has veteran insight. Yeah, that's important. Yeah. Well,
a lot of the women, UH, in the list of
women at the top of the industry, some of them,
you know, rose to the top, but some of them
co created their companies or solely created their companies, and
there is some recognition for that. Microsoft's recent Women in
(37:29):
Gaming Awards has quickly grown in just six years. It
began as a series of informal dinners hosted by a
group of female developers from the Xbox division UH, and
this past year they honored Anita Sarcasian, whose name is
all over everything when you look up anything about women
in gaming. Yeah, and talk about controversial. Lord, We're gonna
(37:50):
talk about Anita Sarcasian in our next episode, I'm sure,
much to the chagrin of at least one person listening
who posted about how he didn't want to hear about
her name on our Facebook page, but we have to
talk about her. She actually just received a huge award
from the UH Game Developers Association. It's some sort of
ambassadorial award recognizing people who have changed the industry for
(38:14):
the better. And I think that right there is assigned
to of how the industry is improving. So you know,
there's a lot of it's a tough road to hoe
right now. I think for if you if you're a
woman in gaming. But I mean having Matt and talked
to women in the industry knew and who have been
in there for a while, I mean women they do
(38:35):
it because they love it. They're making things that that
are really fun to play and really enjoyable, and and
I feel like that passion for games sort of balances out,
at least to some extent, the issues the harassment or
sexism that they might have to deal with, at least
for a little while, because I mean, the fact is
(38:57):
a lot of that abuse is coming from people who
feel threatened. A lot of men and boys who feel like, no,
this is a male dominated industry needs to stay a
male dominated industry. So I'm going to abuse you into
maintaining the status quo. Yeah, or just kind of the
misguided logic industry wide of thinking that you have one
(39:20):
specific demo of, you know, an eighteen year old male
gamer who is the only person that you should cater to.
But I think that perspective is absolutely changing, and we're
going to talk a lot more about that and about
the women who are playing video games and the women
in video games in our part two of Women in
(39:42):
video Games. So now I hope that there are some
people men, women, whomever who are working in the industry
or might have some insights that they can share with us.
Let us know your thoughts. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can email us. You can also
tweet us at mom Stuff pod Cast, and we've got
a couple of messages to share with you when we
(40:03):
come right back from a quick break. I have a
letter here from Megan about our cars episode driving in Gender.
She says, I just wanted to let you guys know
that I am a woman and mom and I am
the main driver in my household. For a long time,
(40:26):
when we rode anywhere as a family, we rode in
my car just because that was where my daughter's car
seat was, and I almost always drove. But since then
we've bought a family car, both mine and my husband's,
but I still drive of the time when we go
somewhere together. Like in relationships where the man usually drives,
I typically drive because my husband is kind of a
nervous driver and he prefers to ride. He still comments
(40:48):
about me speeding and such, but he just gets much
more frustrated when he is driving, so it's just easier
for me to do it. I typically don't mind it,
but when he does drive, I enjoy the break. That's funny, Megan.
My boyfriend also comments on my speeding, and he can
just deal with it because I'm drive in So thank you.
Uh well, I've got an email here from Heather, also
(41:10):
about our men and Cars episode. She said I had
to laugh because this was a timely episode. I'm forty
three and just purchased a new car last weekend. Since
both my husband and son are in a physical therapy
assistant program right now, I'm the primary breadwinner. I went
to see about getting a car for my son, and
ended up buying a car for myself instead, and got
(41:31):
my son a perfectly good hand me down. He was
totally happy to get it. By the way, even though
the salesman knew I was the primary breadwinner and that
my car was paid off, he still asked me if
I was okay to buy the car without my husband.
I smiled and simply said yes, even if he was here,
I would be making the same purchase. And she goes
(41:52):
on to say, Another thing I found funny is the
stereotype that women don't know how to drive manual transmissions.
I was taught on a stick shift and actually for
to drive them to an automatic. I think it's because
I'm such a control freak. Many times over the years,
salespeople have said, oh, this is a stick shift, Is
that okay? I tell them that I actually prefer that,
and they relax. The funny thing is that I've never
(42:13):
seen this happen when my husband has gone looking for cars.
My last car was a stick and when the woman
came out to go over the final paperwork, she was
reading quickly and started handing me the keys and then
pulled them back as she said, oh, this is a
stick shift? Can you drive a stick I thought, really no,
I just figured out how to drive one with a
brand new car. Here's your sign. Some thing's never change.
(42:34):
The can you drive a stick has now become are
you okay to buy this without your husband? For the record,
I have the better driving record in our household, and
the way we decide who drives is by whose car
we're taking. If it's mine, I drive, If it's his,
he drives. However, on long trips we take turns. So
thanks Heather, and thanks to everybody who's written in to us.
Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
(42:56):
email us and to find links to all of our
social media as well as this podcast episode with all
of our sources included. And you know, if you want
to watch our videos and read our blogs as well,
there's one place to go. It's stuff Mom Never Told
You dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
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