Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Swen a reply to Where are the women? Post

Game developers should seek to strike a balance between what makes financial sense to them and what their passion is. It's OK that there are games dominated mostly by males and mostly by females respectively; it is not and should not be a goal to get reach 50-50 gender representation in all games.

As many women play games as men do, but they're very different games; the majority-women games tend to be social (e.g. facebook games, dating sims, cooperative games), causal and mobile (e.g. hidden object, match-3, endless runner). Your semi-casual games like world of warcraft sit inbetween and are very even in gender representation. I would guess that divinity original sin was fairly even in gender representation as well; there's nothing that screams male-oriented about it; granted it does probably appeal more to people with a history of playing CRPGs and D&D.

There is no systematic oppression keeping women out of gaming and there never has been, but there is a bit of a catch-22. Men had a head start, because computers themselves were inherently interesting to many of us, even before the games were a mainstream thing. I remember the 1980's; it seemed like nearly half the boys in school had a Commodore 64, many made demos, toyed with music (either directly in assembly code or from tracker software). It tought a generation of boys to code, and a lot of game developers started out as little 2-man bedroom-scale operations. Nerds have been bullied, not least of all by women, for a very long time. It's not men keeping women out of games development. It's only the last decade or so that gaming has become a universal past time and it has ceased being OK to tease and bully the nerdy kids.

Where women are really underrepresented is hardcore, violent, competive games where individual player skill can make or break everything for your team; and that's OK. That's a female preference to not play those games. I'm not sure there is anything you can or should do about it. Ultimately, male spaces need to exist for men just as much as they do for women; the suicide rate for men is high enough as it is without eliminating the few such spaces remaining. Still there's maybe 10-20% women there, the ones who enjoy that environment and can take a dirty joke without being offended or trying to censor everyone.

The nature of those games is that they tend to involve a fair bit of trash-talking and lost tempers; some people just are like that. I have never observed women being especially targeted by trash-talking, in fact, they seem to get an inordinate amount of praise for the level of skill they display, just for being women. It is possibly true that women get more upset at trash-talking, but you can't solve this by making the game less friendly towards men; that's just going to kill the genre of games and hurt the developer. I don't see any cause for moral panic here.

The only times when I've actually seen the gender slurs come out (e.g. "get back in the kitchen"-type stuff) is when things get a bit like a mens only locker-room and some female player gets offended at a joke or something and feels entitled to control what other players can say, think or feel. This doesn't fly; it is predictably followed by trash-talking and righteous indignation. If this is a problem, you can just make your own servers where you disallow anything that offends you; the servers in these types of games tend to be player-run and administrated rather than centrally controlled by anyone. It's probably a good idea to provide some means for servers to signal what they do or do not allow in the server browser.

A possible solution in some competitive games is to simply disallow direct communication with people not on your friends list, as heartstone does.

What we have now in games development is mostly men, developing games mostly for men because that's what they know and care about as well as a number of developers, again mostly men, developing smaller titles for women, because it's sort of an accident that they made a game which appeals mostly to women and as it was commercially successful they just kept cranking them out. Men had a huge head start and women still aren't very interested in coding. In games like D:OS it's probable that catering more to women is a good idea, as I don't see any inherent barrier for women to play and enjoy the game. Men and women really are different, and it behoves female players to speak up during the alpha an beta phase as it's likely that Larian is composed of mostly men; again, because they're the ones who apply for the technical jobs and the women tend to be mostly in the artistic or writing side of things. When I say speak up, I don't mean the kind of bullying, harassment and moral condemnation comming out of anti-GG; I mean that you ought to keep reminding Larian what features, playable characters etc. you feel Larian have overlooked, it's more about adding than censuring.

Ultimately women have to start making games for women. There are likely entire genres of games out there that haven't been discovered which appeal very much to women. Making games is hard work, doesn't pay very well and often involves very brutal hours, especially during crunch time. It's an industry with a lot of burn-out, a lot of risk and turmoil that is suited only to the few percent who are eccentric and driven enough to do it anyway, which tends to be men. A possible reason why that tends to be men might be that men are biologically predisposed to risk taking and have more variability (hence more outliers on both the idiot side of the bell curve and the genius side of the bell curve).