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).

Hahaha. You got me on that one.

Women and men are not the same and do not have the same interests. Women do not play the same games as men, as a whole, and do not engage in the same activities and do not have the same job preferences. Earlier it was mentioned that less women are in competitive esports. Less women typically play those types of competitive games. Although my girlfriend has good tastes in games, she usually plays very different games than I do, and almost never plays anything with a competitive element.

What's important isn't whether there's a 50/50 parity on gaming demographics, and I feel it doesn't even matter why that is; if it's due to social circumstances shaping people into having different preferences, well, that's OK. What's important is that people aren't excluded and that it's open to everyone. I feel the gaming scene is pretty open. I think a lot of the perceived hostility some claim is by far due to different social dynamics between men and women; men tending towards aggression are more likely to trash talk, and thus female gamers may take a bit of in-game trolling more personally than male gamers that understand that ribbing isn't always so serious, or are used to it when it is.

I used to play WoW when I was younger, and did trash talk a few women in the guild, but I trashed talked everyone, and they trash talked me. That was the culture of our guild. The reasons anyone ever got angry or were mean to anyone else were always due to performance or behavior. Gamers tend towards more libertarian and permissive attitudes and this idea that gamers are all a bunch of women haters is something being crafted by people with a very specific ideology and political agenda to bring attention to their causes.

I concur completely with Markus G. He couldn't be more right on the money.

Though that all said, I certainly do wish there were more female gamers and game designers. More perspectives bring more diversity in storytelling and different ideas.

I suppose I should stick with playing The Sims and Candy Crush Saga, then. :P I admit I like The Sims but actually I've never played the likes of Candy Crush. I dunno, if I think of the various other female gamers I know, we're a pretty diverse bunch: as well as it being a genetic requirement for us to play The Sims whenever possible, some like shooters, many like RPGs, loads like online competitive games (though I personally hate any sort of MMO malarky) and I can't say that there's any really noticeable difference from the guy gamers I know: in fact I'd say that girl gamers and guy gamers aren't really a thing, there's just gamers.

As for online unpleasantness, I wonder if that might perhaps be more a matter of age than gender. Personally I'd rather not think too much about my obnoxious teenage years...

Don't listen to them lololol. There is nothing wrong with liking whatever it is you like, no matter that you are a man, woman, genderqueer, genderfluid, third gender, intersex or anything else, and "men and women are fundamentally different" is so backwards I don't have words. Not only is it ingraining an "us vs them" mentality, but is also wrong on so many different levels.

It's not wrong, it's simply a fact. BUT... the important thing is how it is handled.

I'm for example a wheelchair driver, I can't move my legs, that's a fact. But this doesn't mean I have to lay in bed the whole day... even while I may need the attentiveness for a different approach here and there. (note: I did not say 'help')

A different starting point doesn't mean the goal can't be the same. It's about the insight to understand and accept that.

PS:
And before people start to distort things... no, I don't put women on one level with a handicap...

lol, no. There is nothing, *nothing*, that men can do that women can't or vice versa (except pure physiological stuff like being pregnant). I didn't say they aren't different in some ways but you conveniently edited that part. I said they aren't *FUNDAMENTALLY* different, which they aren't. The differences are miniscule at best and they mostly relate to child rearing (on a psychological level). So you might wanna start dismantling that societal indoctrination.

My sentiments exactly, and... I didn't say anything else.

Just that there are different approaches, as already mentioned here, and this should be accepted and NOT rated.
So I for myself can't agree with the notion, that things are only equal if they are the same.

Different approaches how, exactly? Why do you think men and women need different approaches to be reached? What would that even look like? Equality has nothing to do with this though, but realizing that all people are the same bags of meat in the end, with the most abysmal and trivial *innate* differences, is a good start to reaching equality.

Differences between men and women are purely cultural - they started somehow biological ( I'm not sure the term is the right one ) as the human race was most animal than civilized, thousand of years ago. They'd act as slightly more evolved animals, but retain the basic instinct like male bringing food / female caring for offsprings. However, years after that, thanks to technology, the "natural" role of both genders started to blend, with the obvious exception of bearing the child. The psychological role, though, was lagging behind, as we mostly adopted patriarchal forms of societies until almost today. Throughout history, some societies rising to power were led by women, meaning we, as a specie, had a hard time finding our mark.

We evolved to the point most of the preconceived differences between men and women are just that : preconceived. They are leftovers of previous generations who still thought boys wear blue and play with tiny cars while girls wear pink and play with dolls. This, obviously, led people to believe that both genders can't do the same thing as they "clearly don't like the same thing".
Today, thanks to technologies that enabled communications from anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, as well as progress of education and overall better life conditions, those ideas are starting to finally disappear.
However, I see conventions and celebrations of anything woman-related as a bad thing. Not because they don't deserve it, but because any kind of focus on any kind of difference is bad. We are all the same, bags of meat as said Lacrymas, fighting our way through life only to loose in the end. The only thing that really differentiates men and women is physiology, everything else is cultural and, as such, purely subjective and artificial.

Point is : yes, there are PRESENTLY differences in what women will feel attracted too vs what men will like more, but those aren't innate. The more we try to embrace this idea and do not temper our approach of a person based on their gender, the more we will see that we just like the same things in the end.
Unless we want to mate. I strongly encourage taking genders into account, whatever floats your boat ( including not caring about the gender of course )

I'm starting to like you more and more.

Good post @Dr.Koin. You really deserve to be a norD! *wink*

You say that like physiology (including brain chemistry) has no influence on behaviour or development. Male monkeys prefer trucks and female monkeys dolls, without any societal pressure to conform with traditional stereotypes. Human girls exposed to higher levels of testosterone or androgen during prenatal development will often exhibit more 'masculine' toy preference and play behaviour, even if their parents encourage 'feminine' toys and behaviour.

There are lots of things for which gender is irrelevant, and technology is expanding that, but there are always going to be differences in what men and women feel attracted to (in terms of averages or tendencies of the groups).

And here I was thinking I was born with autism, but apparently that was just something cultural that I was trained... thanks for the insight. I wonder who "trained" me to have chronical depression as well. And here I take medication to try and influence my brain. Silly silly me...

There have been plenty of documented cases where someone young has been tried in every possible way to be "cultured" (as you call it) to be the other gender. Even a story about a young boy who something went wrong after birth, his manhood got lost, and they tried to make him a female, after all, it was all "how you raise them"... turns out, nope, despite being raised as a girl, getting female hormones and all that, he definitely was out of place amongst the other girls.

So I suppose that you can say it's just physical, but like Raze said, that physical change is also a different brain-setup, and as we all should know, your brains are pretty important for how you act, what you like and what you do.

So unless you also want to theorise brains are something subjective and cultural...

There's also the matter of transsexuals, few if any of whom would go through an aggravating, difficult and often dangerous transition if there was an easier and more straightforward approach, though sadly there isn't. There is a bit of a problem where some people won't accept that it's a necessity and still insist it's playing on gender stereotypes, though I think that position is becoming increasingly marginal, thankfully.

I may have not be clear enough, but my point is that anyone can like whatever he wants. But so far, the human race has been enclined to severely control what each gender should like and punish with varying degree of severity differences in what was ( is! ) perceived as an anomaly. Hence claims of what had me react in the first place, that boy and girl activities should be seggregated to the proper gender because they don't - can't - like the same things in the first place.
Brain chemistry is indeed an actor in what people like or not, but we can't deny the "stupidity" of the human race when it comes to forging children in what they view as a the "proper way to be". It is not wrong for a girl to like trucks. Maybe she does because her father is a truck driver, which would be cultural. Maybe she does because she is naturally enclined to liking trucks, which would be natural ( and hard to tell ). And maybe she is mocked/scolded/punished for liking trucks, which would be cultural.

A boy may like what is typically seen as a "girl" thing, and vice versa. Vometia pointed out the matter of transsexuals which are a clear indication that genders are a very subjective matter, since they are not always as clear and pre-determined as we think. A man feeling he is a woman may really be a woman, the only difference being the obvious physiological issue - and technology again can help break that boundary.



Come one, comparing autism to gender is quite wrong. Either you mean being of either gender is a mental disorder, or your saying autism is as okay as being a male or a female. Autism "fortunately"/"sadly" doesn't care about gender. I do not know whether you indeed have autism or not, but I can't let anyone think I am insulting people who are suffering of this, and their families.
You also somehow insult my arguments about the cultural environement by refering to as a "training", but you're actually somehow right : there ARE people harshly training their boys to be boys/girls to be girls and hatefuly segregating the genders, viewing any type of deviance as weaknesses.

The example of the boy is interesting though : it reflects that part of the society that desperatly clings to stereotypes. I guess it must be difficult to raise a child in this situation, but my best bet is try and go neutral until she starts to express what she likes best, embrace it, and go this way. If the girl likes boy things, let her like boy things. If she is mocked and feels out of place at school, it's because people still don't accept that girl can like boy things. Just like people are ready to blame LGBT people of everything bad, because they can't accept differences, because, again, of an upbriging that created a cultural hate of LGBT. Let's not pretend the hate of homosexual doesn't exist or that it is a natural state of the mind : it's a cultural legacy coming from, often but not only, religious beliefs.

So anyway that's why in the end I consider gender interests to be cultural rather than physiological : because the human race has been trying to mold his offsprings in a way that has always been considered the right way, even when it clearly wasn't, leading to stereotypes which are purely cultural. Obviously, liking something is the result of both natural ( brain chemistry ) and cultural ( upbringing, environment, society ) factors. It's just that we've been fighting the natural part for almost as long as man is man.

For the last couple decades, parents have been generally getting away from enforcing stereotypical toys. There are few realistic toy guns around any more, fewer toy guns in general, and more parents avoiding giving their kids toy guns (and they are banned in schools, etc). That hasn't stopped many boys from making guns out of legos, sticks, or a doll that can be bent into an L shape.
I know someone who gives their son a feminine present every year at Christmas, and their daughter a masculine present. They immediately trade.



Or dolls. And if more girls like playing with dolls than trucks, it isn't because society told them they were not allowed to like trucks.

I'm saying you're passing off proven differences in brain functionality as "just cultural and artifical"

Or tanks! I like tanks and shoes. I doubt I'd be allowed to play with a tank though, I'm dangerous enough when let loose with a car. So I'll play with my shoe collection instead.