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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?

#81

Post by wongarsu »

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.

She analysed the top 50 Endless Running Games, that sounds like a fair sample of popular games, not just games she wants to play. She also agrees with you in the article that female protagonists exist, in exactly 46% of these Endless Running Games (but only in 15% free of charge). She doesn't complain about non-identifiable gender at all, she only quickly notes that those exist and then talks about the rest of the apps.

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

#82

Post by NoPiece »

hackuser wrote: post #50
_bfhp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is indeed sad; I think history has shown that most people who benefit from a system of advantage just reflexively don't like when others talk about how it works, but that's just how I see it. I'm playing OlliOlli (edited the name in since a user asked), a really awesome and successful game right now from a small (ish?) company (they're even making a sequel) where you only get one character to play as, and he is de…

Definitely point it out, here and to the game developer. To a great degree it just comes down to awareness, and the best fix for that is to talk about it. The beneficiaries don't want to be sexist (of course there always are exceptions); people just don't notice it unless it happens to them -- just as people ignore most risks in other areas of life, such as lack of backups or weak passwords, health risks, etc. until…

I think that is great advice - if it bugs you, You should reach out to the developer. Email or tweet them, and say, Hey I have a daughter/girlfriend/wife and she wishes she could play OlliOlli as a female.

What is unfortunate is that there is a growing group of activists who will start the discussion with a public accusation or attack.

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

#85

Post by imron »

michaelchisari wrote: post #68
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.

Perhaps because he would like future generations to be able to win also, rather than having the game taken away.

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

#86

Post by JDiculous »

wongarsu wrote: post #69
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.

I think we just tend to make games that we relate to.

Look outside of games. If I told you to write a novel, would you write it from the perspective of the opposite gender? Personally my gut instinct is to write from the perspective of a male, because that's what I relate to most.

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

#87

Post by comex »

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?

Here you go: http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ You need a PC for that, though. If you want to stay on the phone, or accomplish more powerful things, you need to jailbreak. This theoretically voids the warranty, but kids don't usually care about that; on the other hand, consider that many of them would be using dedicated game consoles (home or portable) for equivalent purposes back then, and those typically required buying (i.e. for a child, convincing one's parent to buy) a physical cheating device, whereas jailbreaks are free downloads.

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

#88

Post by hkmurakami »

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 hear ya. But there's probably still something different that these kids will get out of their particular version of the experience.

Maybe it'll be battling Minecraft plugins and building one on their own (after all, this is still the #1 game among children from what I understand). It might be developing an instinct for great UX and media execution (games like Candy Crush for instance).

Only hindsight will tell, but I don't think it'll be entirely for naught.

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

#89

Post by _bfhp »

NoPiece wrote: post #77
_bfhp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

One example would be Dragon's Crown, which caught a lot of heat over the "Sorceress" character. http://kotaku.com/game-developers-really-need-to-stop-lettin...

OP said "perfectly align to various norms" -- where was this or any commentator demanding alignment with norms at all, much less demanding perfection?

From what I can tell, the character already aligns perfectly with the norm of "woman as object", and if people get "castigated" (actually harmed or affected in some way, rather than criticized online by a few commentators) for creating characters like that, I've yet to hear about it.

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

#90

Post by _bfhp »

NoPiece wrote: post #82
hackuser wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely point it out, here and to the game developer. To a great degree it just comes down to awareness, and the best fix for that is to talk about it. The beneficiaries don't want to be sexist (of course there always are exceptions); people just don't notice it unless it happens to them -- just as people ignore most risks in other areas of life, such as lack of backups or weak passwords, health risks, etc. until…

I think that is great advice - if it bugs you, You should reach out to the developer. Email or tweet them, and say, Hey I have a daughter/girlfriend/wife and she wishes she could play OlliOlli as a female. What is unfortunate is that there is a growing group of activists who will start the discussion with a public accusation or attack.

I feel for that woman in your life, who would be called an "attacking activist" if she ever strayed outside of your proscribed guidelines of civility. It's unfortunate that women have to deal with violence and discrimination from men so much that they get tired of it and express deep anger on the internet. I as a male sympathize with the anger, not the targets of the anger.
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