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No Girls Allowed

polygon.com

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Re: No Girls Allowed

#181

Post by mindcrime »

gcb0 wrote: post #177
alex_c wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I think you're overstating how much power the article ascribes to marketing. The article makes two arguments: 1) Video games being mostly "male" is a feedback loop of marketing (targeting) and product design, amplified by most of the industry being male. It's not that marketing has overnight caused everyone to…

No, the article just stirs a lot of empty fox news style outages. First makes you feel bad because there are a girls toy section. Then right away tries to make you feel bad because there isn't one game girls section. Anyone with half a brain would notice this paradoxical trolling and ignore this article. The fact it has so many votes is scaring. Nobody reads anymore.

The fact it has so many votes is scaring. Nobody reads anymore.

Votes don't necessarily mean "I read this article and agree with every word in it" or even anything close to that. In fact, as ill-defined as the semantics for voting are, a vote could just as easily mean "I read this article and disagree with almost everything in it, but I think this is a topic that is worthy of discussion so I'm upvoting it", or even "The headline sounds interesting, and since 'upvote' and 'save' are the same thing on HN, I'm upvoting this so I can find it to read later".

Re: No Girls Allowed

#182

Post by numeromancer »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #62
k_os wrote: post #3

I myself believe in market dynamics. If girls were interested in what boys had they'd pursue it. If girls hated barbies they would nag parents about getting a train or a car and market demand for barbies would dry up. The fact that toy dolls are a billion dollar industry should make one sceptical about the supposed 'girliness that society instills in girls'. I find that premise as silly as thinking boys were somehow…

Barbies are fun. But that's not the point. Marketing is about identity at least as much as it is about the product. You look at beer adverts, how many of them directly bear on the beer? http://youtu.be/MX145Tu4MHY That could be any beer, or a magic potion, you know nothing about it. Or shower gel http://youtu.be/DVm00UBdS0Y Or cars http://youtu.be/ox_uDBrkp-M "You can have this car, and everything that goes with it."…

    Barbies are fun.
[Citation needed]

/Manly man

Re: No Girls Allowed

#183

Post by numeromancer »

I, for one, look forward to the glorious day when all children are grown in vats and reared in communal nurseries by hermaphrodites, so girls will never have to be subjected to the horrible sight of a mother nestling her baby, which unjustly conditions them to prefer baby dolls to Tonka trucks.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#184

Post by spacehome »

aestra wrote: post #111
AlexandrB wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diamonds. > Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-b... I think it's naive to think that marketing doesn't in some way shape an…

Thank you for sharing the diamond story. It really was one of the first national marking campaigns. De Beers paid celebrities to wear diamond engagement rings and talk about their diamond engagement rings, and now everyone "has" to have a diamond engagement ring. Men wearing a wedding ring, another marking campaign invented in the 1940's.

> Men wearing a wedding ring, another marking campaign invented in the 1940's.

Do you have a reference for this statement?

Re: No Girls Allowed

#185

Post by omonra »

leokun wrote: post #75
spindritf wrote: post #24

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours. Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary cha…

> I don't buy it. There's an entire branch of social science that spends a lot of time on marketing, sociology. I recommend reading up on it from an academic perspective. Marketing is very influential but it isn't mind control. I'd say it shapes expectations more than create demand for particular products. And from an anthropological perspective I'd say marketing actually reveals more about a culture than it creates.

You know, saying 'I recommend reading up on X from an academic perspective' is a fairly useless cliche. If you want to be helpful and feel that there is a specific book or study that someone should read - go ahead and mention that. Just saying 'go read a book or paper or something' adds nothing.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#186

Post by C1D »

It was a very interesting and eye-opening article though I don't think we can wholly blame this on the marketing of video games. I have a sister who has never liked video games and instead spent her time with dolls even though me and my brother had always tried to get her into video games.

I remember when we got our first Tamagotchies. My sister fried her's by sticking it in a bucket of water. When we got her another one she used it for a few seconds and then played with her dolls.

I think -as seen in a article recently posted- that since boys brains are wired differently we are into different things and that is natural.

Also there isn't anything stopping girls from playing video games. To be honest I think a girl that plays video games is more attractive and I bet most men would.

NOTE: I am in no way saying "toys" are limited to boys or trying to imply anything sexist but what I am saying is that the division of boy toys and girl toys isn't wholly because of marketing.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#187

Post by pistle »

They get the 80's crash analysis all wrong. There was never a demand implosion due to uncertainty of quality. These were 8 bit sprites. Crap was standard. Crap was good. All 8-bit console games look low quality compared to the first 8-bit computer games. We still bought. Something way more important was the first widely-available consumer 8-bit computers. Compare Atari 2600 Pac-man to Atari 400 Pac-man... and that's not the Atari XL line.

No consideration of a sudden shift in early adopters to Atari XL and Commodore 64 computers?? What year did those drop 82-83? The games for those PC-precursors were 1) way better and 2) pirate's booty. The abilities of those machines moved beyond what could be packed into consoles and the margins seemed higher. The price for a game went to free. That meant you could buy second floppy drives, 300 baud modems, dot matrix printers (24 pins FTW!) instead of games.

Computer clubs were not uncommon and literal swap meets of 5.5" floppies. Early modems gained access to BBS's and created cornucopias of free software - legit and not.

They should also review Master's of Doom and get insight into the personalities behind the seminal FPS. There were no marketers outside of the dev team there. They were making something they loved to play and they loved the thrill/hilarity of over-the-top power and gross-out humor. If you want to empower or blame the feedback loop of marketing driving development, you shouldn't ignore all the history prior to the present-day machine.

Thank goodness they are writing an article which confirms that the world is changing because women aren't sitting quietly by, letting history be written by loud-mouthed men any more.

But it's an awkward dance to read trying to fill enough space to provide ample vertical scrolling to get a sense for why it took so many people to construct the page...

Re: No Girls Allowed

#188

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mseebach wrote: post #105
AlexandrB wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diamonds. > Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-b... I think it's naive to think that marketing doesn't in some way shape an…

Diamonds have a slightly more complex role than just being conjured from thin air by marketing. Premarital sex is not, popular opinion to the contrary, a new discovery. In most societies we know of, however, men prefer to marry women who have never slept with anyone else. This creates a problem. Unmarried women are reluctant to have sex for fear that it will lower their ability to find a suitable husband, and as a re…

> That is, you can plausibly make me want a BigMac over a Whopper, but you can't make be want a burger if I'm already full.

But that's all the power in the world because it's what allows you to sell something not as good for more money instead of selling something better at razor-thin margins.

Go back to the diamonds. If the purpose you state is correct then anything of similar value could substitute instead. It could be an emerald, or a platinum bracelet, or real estate. Anything that serves as an appropriately valuable engagement present.

Moreover, diamonds have been particularly poor at serving that purpose because they don't have high value. Ever try to sell one? De Beers had a de facto diamond monopoly and artificially inflated retail prices by restricting supply and controlling resellers. But if you go try to sell a diamond as a private individual, you won't get anything like what someone would pay for it at retail, because the retail prices were set artificially high by De Beers. Compare this to e.g. precious metals where you can walk into a pawn shop and buy or sell for only a small percentage deviation from the spot price. Meanwhile you're just asking for someone other than De Beers to discover large deposits of diamonds and break the monopoly which will cause prices to crash much harder than they would for a normal commodity with the same new resource discovery, which is exactly what happened a little more than a decade ago. And this is before we even get to the whole issue with conflict diamonds.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#189

Post by alex_c »

gcb0 wrote: post #177
alex_c wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I think you're overstating how much power the article ascribes to marketing. The article makes two arguments: 1) Video games being mostly "male" is a feedback loop of marketing (targeting) and product design, amplified by most of the industry being male. It's not that marketing has overnight caused everyone to…

No, the article just stirs a lot of empty fox news style outages. First makes you feel bad because there are a girls toy section. Then right away tries to make you feel bad because there isn't one game girls section. Anyone with half a brain would notice this paradoxical trolling and ignore this article. The fact it has so many votes is scaring. Nobody reads anymore.

You... missed the point of the article so completely that I don't even know where to start. That, or you're trolling.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#190

Post by maxerickson »

alandarev wrote: post #161
maxerickson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If she is friends with even just one girl that likes pink, she has someone to copy from (share with, whatever). I would also guess that there are individuals that she prefers as friends in the play group (so a survey might not be very revealing).

The same logic could be applied other way around: "If one of her friends does not wear pink, she now has someone to copy from." Not saying it is likelyhood. And I agree, that majority can influence minority, especially in youngster social circles.

Well, in your example it would not be a potential explanation for her preference for pink. But peer influence is probably a likely explanation.

For the second, part of what I was getting at was that there doesn't need to be a majority if she only really identifies with a few members. The members that she thinks of as her friends are likely to have much more influence over her than the overall group.

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