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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?

#91

Post by wongarsu »

_bfhp wrote: post #76
wongarsu wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because 12 year old boys like to play as somebody who looks like them just as much as 12 year old girls do. Games offering both options is exactly what the article was advocating.

Edit: see wongarsu's comment below, as what I say below is uninformed. The author was advocating for games in general offering characters of both sexes more often; I doubt she'd assert that every single game must have female options. Hunger Games an existing plot, and just as girls have been dealing with male-character-only games for decades, boys can deal with games that stick to the plot -- and I think 12-year-old…

I wouldn't complain if the game wouldn't have male characters. What the game offers (after thirty seconds of google search [1]) is that you can play as different characters (there seem to be multiple males and multiples females), and all of them are prominent characters in the story (at least in the movie). As this isn't shoehorning something in, I can't see anything to complain about. There's legitimate reasons for including male characters and as there's already multiple females to choose from it's only logical to allow male options too.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-hunger-games-panem-risin...

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

#92

Post by _bfhp »

wongarsu wrote: post #91
_bfhp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: see wongarsu's comment below, as what I say below is uninformed. The author was advocating for games in general offering characters of both sexes more often; I doubt she'd assert that every single game must have female options. Hunger Games an existing plot, and just as girls have been dealing with male-character-only games for decades, boys can deal with games that stick to the plot -- and I think 12-year-old…

I wouldn't complain if the game wouldn't have male characters. What the game offers (after thirty seconds of google search [1]) is that you can play as different characters (there seem to be multiple males and multiples females), and all of them are prominent characters in the story (at least in the movie). As this isn't shoehorning something in, I can't see anything to complain about. There's legitimate reasons for…

That's logical, I agree; I wasn't aware of that.

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

#93

Post by A_COMPUTER »

enneff wrote: post #21
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…

It's interesting. When I first started using computers it was to play games, and in those days the only way to play those games was to either type up the BASIC code by hand, or learn the incantations to load the programs from disk or tape. In either case, you needed to (rote) learn some technical skills to have a bit of fun. In retrospect, I see I was lucky enough to come into computing at exactly the right time. Whe…

When I was a kid, hacking was a means to an end. If I wanted to play a game on my Commodore 64 or an Apple ][, I had to learn some basic skills on the computer, not tap an icon. Before I had a disk drive, I typed BASIC programs into the C64 from Compute Gazette, and learned programming via osmosis. If I got stuck in a game, the world wide web and gamefaqs didn't exist yet, so I figured out how to hack the savegame file.

I'm not a natural hacker. If I was a kid now, I'd just play games on an iPad and effectively learn nothing because there's no friction. This isn't a slam on the ipad or misplaced nostalgia, just a recognition that sometimes you are forced to learn things out of necessity, and if you're born into plenty, you never are forced to grow. On the other hand, for anybody who's a born tinkerer, the fact that iPads are locked down and super easy to use is irrelevant because you have a thousand other cheap hackable devices like Raspberry Pis or Arduino. For someone who's not a born tinkerer though, they may never pick up a hackable device, and will miss some opportunities for growth.

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

#94

Post by imron »

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…

I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out.

Like you, playing video games from a young age was the entry point for me into computing, but (partly also due to every adult saying they were a waste of time) I didn't realise until much later (17-18) that I could take that interest and make it in to a fulfilling career.

Despite the walled gardens, tools are still out there for people who want to make new or hack existing games, and people who want to do that will find a way.

They will have a curiosity about how things work that won't be quelled until they figure it out, and the process of figuring it out will be half the fun plus a large chunk of the learning.

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

#95

Post by a3voices »

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…

You can be a heavily customizable girl in GTA 5 online.

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

#96

Post by acjohnson55 »

morgante wrote: post #63

Unfortunately, this is likely a side-effect of the majority of game developers being male. A male making a female character is an altogether dicey proposition. Not only do they have to go through extra effort to imagine said character, but they also run the significant risk of being castigated if said female character doesn't perfectly align to various norms.

What's more harmful, catching some blowback or perpetuating the status quo that tells women from an early age "it's not for you"?

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

#97

Post by lips »

venomsnake wrote: post #52
ChazDazzle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the prominent divide between console and casual gaming hides the fact that iDevices behave much more like the consoles of yore (Cart and early CD based systems), which were, to the vast majority of kids playing them, pure black boxes of tech. My tinkering began with Apple II/Mac/PC games.

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

#98

Post by imron »

michaelbuddy wrote: post #45

I've seen plenty of female characters lately. I guess my definition of plenty is what others think of as absent?

That's a great anecdote.

I look forward to seeing the results of your research at a level at least as detailed as that performed by the 12 year old author of the article, to see how well the subjective recollection of your recent experience matches with objective data.

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

#99

Post by imron »

nitwit005 wrote: post #47

It's clearly not true that female lead characters don't exist. What seems to be the issue for this girl is that they don't exist in games she actually wants to play. I'd note that she complains about games where the protagonist has no identifiable gender, or is an animal. That's often done quite intentionally to dodge try to dodge this problem.

>I'd note that she complains about games where the protagonist has no identifiable gender, or is an animal

I'd note that she doesn't complain about this.

She simply mentions the data because it is relevant to the overall research she is doing.

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

#100

Post by bhayden »

Am I wrong for thinking it sounds really antisocial for girls to have sleepover and then play on their phones? When I have a kid I really don't want them to be exposed to mindless consumption but it sadly seems like it's not going to be possible unless they're home schooled. At the very least, they're getting a very locked down smart phone.
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