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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?

#61

Post by nacs »

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…

> Even in Minecraft

Not sure if you're saying Minecraft does or does not have female characters but Minecraft has actually supported skins pretty much since the beginning (over 4+ years now) so you can be male, female or whatever you want to be really.

Also recently they added a default female character skin so players without a custom skin are randomly given a male or female skin.

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

#62

Post by JDiculous »

A huge reason why there aren't as many "girl" characters is because most games are made by men. Thus the games naturally caters to themselves.

I'm male. Back when I experimented with game development, all the games I wanted to make involved the main character being male. It's not something I ever consciously thought about, it's just how it happened to be. Does that make me sexist? Of course not. I can make whatever the hell game I want. You can't tell an artist how his art has to look.

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

#63

Post by morgante »

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.

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

#64

Post by munro »

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

Where have they been found? This doesn't prove your claim that Tetris teaches geometry, or anything really, there's no data. I'm sure it does have some affect though, like playing a lot of Tetris improves your ability to play Tetris. :)

Unrelated, I notice the Tetris effect [1] strongly when I play RTS games too long. I still see the game when I go to bed, and I get weird urges to perform the actions of the game when I'm not playing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

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

#66

Post by falcolas »

Perhaps because it's more profitable to not give away what girls will buy, or they are simply not the target for the games where there are no female protagonists.

There's a popular view on hacker news of corporations which are nothing but money grubbing entities bent on doing anything for profit. This doesn't jive well with the view of these game corporations as mysoginistic entities out to repress girls intentionally or unintentionally.

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

#68

Post by michaelchisari »

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…

Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about it.

Why? You won.

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

#69

Post by wongarsu »

JDiculous wrote: post #62

A huge reason why there aren't as many "girl" characters is because most games are made by men. Thus the games naturally caters to themselves. I'm male. Back when I experimented with game development, all the games I wanted to make involved the main character being male. It's not something I ever consciously thought about, it's just how it happened to be. Does that make me sexist? Of course not. I can make whatever t…

I don't think we make male characters because we are male, it's just because that's what we are used to. If the default character in nearly every game would be an emo girl, we would all make games with emo girls without thinking about it. Right now the default is the muscular white male, so that's what we all make if we don't think about it.

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

#70

Post by _bfhp »

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.

>they also run the significant risk of being castigated if said female character doesn't perfectly align to various norms

I'm interested in this apparent phenomenon, can you an example?

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