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I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

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Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#51

Post by MichaelGG »

zanny wrote: post #40
MichaelGG wrote: post #29

My daughters are 6 and 8. One of the biggest questions they have before starting any new game is "can I be a girl?" Even in Minecraft, their favorite, they try to dress up the character as much as possible. They're terribly disappointed when where are no girl characters and offhand, they only bought/play one game without a girl character (GTA V, though we skip the missions which contain the questionable for kids cont…

> (We severely restrict the amount of shitty girls kid's TV shows, no Barbie, no Disney products, biggest toys are LEGO, etc.) If they go to public school peer relations and student body culture will override prior teaching. When presented with the girls sitting next to them talking about the shows and toys you never exposed them to, they are met with the decision to have faith in their parents or seek to fit in with…

Fortunately, at the moment, we have a governess so there's not that particular issue. But I do see the pressure applied from friends that... lack taste. What can you do but try?

In the future I hope to be able to afford private schools with a focus on getting students interested in things. That'll hopefully bring out like minded families. Basically, I just want to increase their saving throws vs crap.

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#52

Post by venomsnake »

ChazDazzle wrote: post #25
opso wrote: post #9

This is a bit tangential to the article, but the first paragraph stuck out to me. For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side. Back in my day, I was playing video games all the time, hacking them with debug cheats and GameShark. This was universally called a waste of my time by e…

This is a prevalent meme on Hacker News but it's nothing more than the tech version of Old Man Yells At Cloud.

This old man seems to be unable to find the built in file explorer in iDevices with which to be able to find the savegame location and edit the number of coins he has.

Enlighten me, youngster how is that accomplished without breaking the warranty of the device?

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#53

Post by sjm »

lkbm wrote: post #10

> Not all apps have taken this route. “The Hunger Games” lets you choose between being a girl or boy for free. The Hunger Games app? As in, an app based on a book with a female protagonist? That's kind of like saying "Oh, hey, the Pride and Prejudice game lets you play as a girl!" It's a telling detail that could slip past if you're unfamiliar with the story.

I agree, and actually find it a bit telling that a game based on a story with such a strong female protagonist feels the need to have a male playable character at all.

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#54

Post by marssaxman »

zanny wrote: post #38
lkbm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still seen as a waste of time, I think. Just has finally been accepted as normal. And while you may have been firing up hex editors, that probably wasn't the norm. YOu are right, though, that the computer games of the nineties offered a lot more hackability than iPhone apps. ZZT was an introduction to OOP for many kids, Red Alert had rules.ini that defined the stats for each unit, and Duke3D had configuration fi…

I got into programming a decade ago with Quake 2 engine forks and Neverwinter Nights private servers. You would never have avenues into that kind of thing from the ios platform at all. It is very much like how anyone from the Windows GUI generation never touched a terminal so they do not even know what a program / file / etc really is to begin with.

I don't know about that. I grew up on classic Mac OS with nary a command line in sight, and I found my way under the skin just fine. I was building compilers and writing device drivers before I ever learned how shell scripting worked. I think people who want to get inside will generally figure out how; the information is all out there for the asking. My pet theory is that there are just as many people interested in the inner workings as ever, but that we're a much smaller proportion of the total computer-using population now, and so we have a much smaller influence on the culture around computers and networks than we used to.

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#55

Post by wutbrodo »

opso wrote: post #9

This is a bit tangential to the article, but the first paragraph stuck out to me. For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side. Back in my day, I was playing video games all the time, hacking them with debug cheats and GameShark. This was universally called a waste of my time by e…

Those two things are pretty tightly related (though of course, that doesn't make it correct at all). It's a lot easier for people to vilify something that's relatively uncommon (gaming back then) vs something that's ubiquitous. People en masse are stupid and lazy, and being uncommon is an easy (albeit idiotic) heuristic for "not an excusable use of time".

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#56

Post by PhasmaFelis »

opso wrote: post #9

This is a bit tangential to the article, but the first paragraph stuck out to me. For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side. Back in my day, I was playing video games all the time, hacking them with debug cheats and GameShark. This was universally called a waste of my time by e…

The people like you grew up and had kids, and every parent wants their kid to have what they couldn't have.

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#57

Post by hackuser »

cbd1984 wrote: post #36
jessaustin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps at the initial stage of analysis this situation is not "because of bias", but don't stop thinking after just one thought. Why are boys like that? (Ignoring the exception that would seem to have been made for Lara Croft.) Why are girls like that? Do you really think it's biology, or is there perhaps some cultural reason why one group of children would be somewhat comfortable undermining their identity while a…

And then think a few thoughts further, to "How can I fix it?" and realize there's nothing I can reasonably do which isn't already being done, and, at my most engaged, I could cheer-lead established efforts being lead by people with more social capital than me. So... consciousness raised and subsequently tamped back down, I suppose.

> there's nothing I can reasonably do which isn't already being done

You can't change the world by yourself but we all play a necessary role: Politely and respectfully speak up where people are not aware. IMHO no individual, no matter what their social capital, can substitute for people seeing and hearing these things from their peers. Also, we tend to be follow the herd; even in an angry stampede, one voice can make several others in the herd slow down and think.

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#58

Post by wutbrodo »

tessierashpool wrote: post #49
michaelbuddy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tetris teaches geometry? Bit of a stretch there. It may use geometry but it's not teaching anything I ever learned in geometry. Wife loves Tetris and she can't geometry for nothin'

"Even computer games that were not developed with the explicit intent to provide such training, such as Block Out and several versions of Tetris, have been found to contribute to enhancing spatial skills." http://web.jhu.edu/cty/STBguide.pdf

I can see how he was confused by the conflation of "teaches geometry" and "improves spatial skills" (though I can of course see how you could say the former and mean the latter).

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#59

Post by indians_pro »

userbinator wrote: post #22
lkbm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still seen as a waste of time, I think. Just has finally been accepted as normal. And while you may have been firing up hex editors, that probably wasn't the norm. YOu are right, though, that the computer games of the nineties offered a lot more hackability than iPhone apps. ZZT was an introduction to OOP for many kids, Red Alert had rules.ini that defined the stats for each unit, and Duke3D had configuration fi…

The "hackability" (and decrease thereof) isn't something exclusive to games - just look at what happened to the UIs of popular programs like browers, for example. Everything is becoming hidden away and more difficult to configure. In contrast to the many menus and dialogs we had before that encouraged users to explore and customise, it seems that apps now are far more opaque to the point that many users don't even re…

The latest versions of firefox are a painful reminder.

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#60

Post by wutbrodo »

ekanes wrote: post #37
bramgg wrote: post #26

> In one game, “Survival Run with Bear Grylls,” you can put the character in a Santa Claus suit for $1.98, but there is no girl to be had at any price. Does this mean that girls aren’t capable of escaping a bear, but Santa is? Another classic example of girls that are capable of escaping bears being unrepresented in tech. I kid, by seriously the cause of this isn't game devs being sexest against girls, it's (IMO) soc…

Girls playing boys isn't so much normal as it's the only option they've had. Also, the solution is simply to offer the option of playing a girl character. Then anyone can play whomever they want. :)

> Girls playing boys isn't so much normal as it's the only option they've had.

Those two things aren't mutually exclusive; in fact they're quite tightly related. Though that does raise the interesting point that the feedback loop has to be broken somewhere, and starting by adding female characters is as good as any.

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