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No Girls Allowed

polygon.com

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Re: No Girls Allowed

#191

Post by ajensen4 »

minikites wrote: post #81
junto wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a daughter about the same age so it gives me a bit of insight. She doesn't get to watch TV. Her playgroup has no major bias towards pink for girls (actually even deliberate in their avoidance of such stereotyping). My wife secretly detests pink and girly stuff and is/was a tomboy at heart. We do not discourage or encourage any particular colour or style. There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that…

> There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and toys. > I honestly can't fathom it. Pink attraction seems to be built in. Like a moth to a flame. Yeah, that doesn't actually make any sense. Pink:blue::girl:boy is 100% artificial and one recent source has it the other way around: > For example, a June 1918 art…

Note that that is more or less an imaginary fact.

See

Del Giudice, Marco. "The Twentieth Century Reversal of Pink-Blue Gender Coding: A Scientific Urban Legend?." Archives of sexual behavior (2012): 1-3. http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_2012_r...

Re: No Girls Allowed

#192

Post by gk1 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #98

Sorry about the off-topic: does anyone knows whether the caricatures that illustrate the article belong to a concrete category and/or are associated with a particular style? I'd really like to read more about it, but the books I've found about cartooning are very different from this style.

It can be called illustration or cartoon illustration. "Cartooning" alone usually refers to strip comics, gag cartoons, or political cartoons. I'm not aware of a more specific term for this style.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#193

Post by xerophtye »

berrypicker wrote: post #173
xerophtye wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, gamer girls = supremely attractive! I always get jealous of gamer couples i encounter on real life and online. My own gf is a hardcode mobile gamer (there hasnt been a single app game that i can beat her at. and i have been gaming all my life!) But i wish she'd try the more complex games... like FPS or top-down strategy or atleast LoL!!

"Girl gamers" are well-known on the Internet for being some of the most obnoxiously annoying people on the planet.

Really? Haven't had much experience with those types yet. Most i have ran into were really great!

Re: No Girls Allowed

#194

Post by newnewnew »

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.

Feminist link-bait is popular nowadays.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#195

Post by newnewnew »

junto wrote: post #37
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…

Having a daughter about the same age so it gives me a bit of insight. She doesn't get to watch TV. Her playgroup has no major bias towards pink for girls (actually even deliberate in their avoidance of such stereotyping). My wife secretly detests pink and girly stuff and is/was a tomboy at heart. We do not discourage or encourage any particular colour or style. There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that…

I can't understand the desire to eliminate all female-specific behavior. It seems that every adult feminist wants his little girl to grow up to be a little boy.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#196

Post by egypturnash »

knowitall wrote: post #29

While I think the history of marketing of games is interesting, to be honest to me this read like "bla bla bla... Video games were heavily marketed as products for men, and the message was clear: No girls allowed.... bla bla bla" Meaning the conclusion "no girls allowed" is just randomly inserted somewhere in the middle of a wall of text. Just because boys and men were identified as a large audience and targeted with…

Hi, I'm a lady.

Have you noticed that pretty much all "hardcore" games have male protagonists? These games tell players that they are fantasies for guys to have; women are relegated to the roles of support or prizes in most of these games. It sucks to try to be the hero when the shape of the fantasy is constantly telling you that you're not one.

And then we have the advertising campaigns mentioned in the article that market it explicitly to boys, with girls as a prize.

There have been some big-budget games with character selection screens that let you choose a lady, but how many of them prominently feature that in the marketing? Skyrim, Mass Effect, or Saint's Row all feature a male protagonist on the box, despite me enjoying all of these with a female character.

Hell, even in the realm of little casual games, it's there. I've played a lot of iOS games that have a male character from the start, and offer a female one as something you can unlock... after collecting five zillion coins, or dropping $10 in in-app purchases. Men are normalized, women are an expensive bonus prize.

Trust me, there is a constant message that "video games are for boys" running through much of the medium. Yes, women play them anyway. But we are constantly being told that the big budget action-oriented games are not for us by what roles they offer for us to play.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#197

Post by Kronopath »

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…

It's always interesting to me to see how many things people take as sentimental, even sacred, rituals and practices, things that people write poetry and music about, turn out to be coldly economic when looked at in a broader historical context. This is especially true when it comes to anything having to do with marriage.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#198

Post by alex_c »

Pxtl wrote: post #125

That was really freaking long. I can't help but notice the recurring theme that the actual game designers are trying to make fun gender-neutral products but the marketing and leadership is the source of misogyny. I mean, when they start talking about the PS1 era their examples are WipeOut (the only "gendered" thing in the game is the announcer) Tomb Raider (Croft has somewhat absurd proportions but she's a far cry fr…

Funny, I don't think of it as misogyny as much as wasted potential in the industry. I greatly enjoy many of the male-targeted games today and have zero interest in a game like The Sims, but looking back I realize that many of my all-time favorites were fairly gender neutral. This wasn't because of any political correctness or some great social mission as much as simply games that were made to be fun without targeting to a specific demographic.

Thankfully, the PC indie game market seems to be recapturing much of that lost innocence in the industry (partly due to lack of marketing budgets which means they have to focus on the game being fun, first and foremost). I find myself playing a lot more indie games than AAA titles lately.

Re: No Girls Allowed

#199

Post by aestra »

spacehome wrote: post #184
aestra wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, I do. From the Journal of Social History.

A "Real Man's Ring": Gender and the Invention of Tradition

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790353

It wasn't until 1944 when a Catholic priest asked if a double ring ceremony was permitted by the church. Previously it was called for only the women's ring to be blessed in marriage rites.

There was social change at the end of WWII that lead to that adaptation, but it was invented by marketers that wanted to sell jewelry.

For more information about the history about diamonds and De Beers, see this crazy long article (from 1982!):

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you...

Re: No Girls Allowed

#200

Post by kyberias »

watty wrote: post #44
kyberias wrote: post #34

Very difficult page to read due to ugly color combinations. White on pink, next white on green. It literally hurts my eyes.

It sounds like you have some eye issues or perhaps it's just aging. Try readability, it's great for older folks. You should avoid magazines though, they often have similar designs yet lack a real world "readability" :) http://www.readability.com/

To be honest, you may be right, although I'm not that old. ;) Quit with the downvotes, people.
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