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

washingtonpost.com

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

#31

Post by m_mueller »

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…

There's hope though - Minecraft seems to be immensely popular with children, and for a good part because it's so hackable and moddable.

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

#32

Post by amagumori »

KnightHawk3 wrote: post #5
cplease wrote: post #3

Wow, nice find. The dismissive contempt half of the commenters have for the 12-year-old girl who meticulously researched and wrote this article is appalling but not surprising.

Because she is a girl or because she is 12 years old?

it's because she's a girl.

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

#33

Post by egypturnash »

Let's see how long it takes for HN to insist that this is particularly normal and acceptable because most games are only played by boys, as folks did when this sort of thing came up with regards to the lack of female characters in games for grownups.

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

#34

Post by tessierashpool »

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…

plenty of games have tremendous educational value, and I'm sure every pro-gaming argument you ever thought of which didn't involve hacking still remains as valid as ever.

tetris teaches geometry, word games teach vocabulary, strategy games teach strategy - I don't even understand how you got upvoted. you kind of just sound like the guy who hates his favorite band because they got popular.

kids can get so much more attention from figuring out a hack today than ever before. when I figured out a hack as a kid, the best-case scenario would be that my nerdy friends were the only ones who noticed. but a decade ago, having the best CSS hack on MySpace was something everybody in school would know about. today, being able to hack your phone is one of the coolest things a kid could ever brag about.

software is eating the world, so competence with computers is becoming indistinguishable from competence, period. the fact that iOS does not provide you with a shell account can't change that fundamental fact.

this popular iOS game was co-developed by a five-year-old girl and her father:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissy%27s_Magical_Ponycorn_Adve...

I think you need to let the kids walk on your lawn a little, dude.

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

#36

Post by cbd1984 »

jessaustin wrote: post #18
ars wrote: post #15

Maybe they sell Girl characters because girls are willing to pay for them, and boys aren't? Or because girls are willing to play as boys, and then pay to play as a girl? But boys are unwilling to even play as a girl? I prefer to look for rational (for example economic) reasons for things, and not assume everything is because of bias.

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.

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

#37

Post by ekanes »

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. :)

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

#38

Post by zanny »

lkbm wrote: post #13
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 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.

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

#39

Post by mbesto »

> If I were an app maker, the ethical issue of charging for girl characters and not boy characters would be enough reason to change.

I chuckled. App makers (especially the ones in the "top 50 essential apps") are well oiled capitalist money-making machines. Ethics rarely come into play when the A/B tests they run suggest that the product direction go one way (towards money) and not the other ("but what about the children!").

I personally don't feel this way, but you can imagine how businesses at that level would.

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

#40

Post by zanny »

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 the status quo.

It is why it is so hard to break childhood stereotypes, because unless you can get a majority of parents to pressure the disjunction, the culture of their classroom will limit what you can do.

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