Adam Ruins Video Games (Gender & Games)

King of Posters
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Adam Ruins Everything might be my favorite new show this year.

It’s got all the fun of Cracked-esque wisenheimer infotainment, but it attempts to be transparent about sources, and the scenario writing and production quality are leagues better than they need to be. It’s a well-produced, quirky edutainment show of the caliber of Bill Nye or Good Eats.

As part of an episode basically about things that kids like, Adam did a take down on the gendering of the video game industry, that’s pretty interesting:

I do have some beef with this portrayal, though. Basically, I think the Fall of Eden narrative of games starting out gender neutral is specious at best. They name a handful of female game designers from the 70’s and 80’s, but in doing so they name all the female game designers I can think of–hardly equal numbers to the male designers! Dona Bailey was famously the only female game designer or programmer at Atari, and Centipede was co-created by Ed Logg (Steven Kent makes some claim that Logg had more to do with the actual product than Dona, but I believe Dona had the initial idea–I’ve always been unclear on how equal the process was). Anyway, there are almost certainly more female game designers nowadays, though I don’t know how it works out by percentage.

I like the overall thrust of the piece, and I never thought about the gendered marketing of the 80’s possibly explaining the lean towards the masculine console space.

BUT.

I’ve always understood Pac Man as a conscious attempt to get women to into arcades. Are arcades incorrectly reported as being mostly male spaces–isthe current narrative revisionist history? All the shmups and military games of the 70’s seem to indicate a pretty male-dominated space. Bubble Bobble at least shows arcades as a joint, social space where people could bring dates. Though that might have been an Asian thing (the modern arcades I’ve been to in Bangkok have this vibe–lots of teen girls playing rhythm games and there’s some sort of touch game that couples like to play).

I think it would be more honest to look deeper at how gendered programming (thus video games) was in the US. When you read histories of the tech industry and computing, there are always women who pop up, but they always seem to fade. In Hackers, Levy directly acknowledges this, and one of the MIT hackers of the 50’s claims that only genetics could explain why women who worked in computers never seemed to become obsessive nerds.

I can think of another explanation. In Hackers, a clear distinction is made between grad students using computers responsibly to do their academic work and the obsessive undergrads who broke rules to get extra computer time and eventually took over the computer rooms as their territory. While much is made about the inclusiveness and territoriality of the hacker sub culture at MIT, this ultimately sounds like a very competitive, insular space, based around having few social concerns. How many women of the 50’s who made it to graduate studies at MIT are going to feel the sort of freedom that allows one to waste one’s genius on silly computer diversions? Sure, making Space War turned out to be more important than rigorous STEM work being done by straight-laced grad students, but it makes total sense to me that of the ten people who threw their lives away to worship at the altar of the bit, a statistically non-existent amount happened to be women.

It’s unsurprising that programming started as a male space, and so it’s unsurprising to me that it continued as one. It’s therefore unsurprising to me that games continued as such. Though I totally buy that advertising and in-store branding masculinized the console market. I just don’t think it was divergent from the general historical trend.

And yeah: everything said after that is spot on. It’s a cool thing to have been on TV, for sure. It just…maybe could have been a bit less deceptive about bending history to fit a whodathunk narrative.

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standard post about how Ada Lovelace was the first programmer and Hedy Lamarr co-developed the technological basis for wifi with a composer in her spare time.

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In relation to basically nothing, I wish Adam’s hair wasn’t so terrible. It’s so terrible.

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I haven’t had the chance to watch the video yet, but yeah, wasn’t computer programming originally viewed as the field for women while the physical building of the computers were for the men? A cursory Google search makes this seem true.

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So what’s the People’s History of US version of how programming was usurped by the patriarchy?

In case it’s not clear from the OP, any disproportionate gender distribution in programming I basically see as the result of the creation of a boys’ club. (Tulpa, I still haven’t read that article you sent me forever ago, though it sits prominently in my bookmarks bar and I often accidentally click on it: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/gender-gaps-stanford-94.html?_r=0).

My COO commented recently there seem to be a lot of female programmers in Thailland. Not sure what that means yet, but maybe I’ll find out. Could just mean a 40/60 distribution or something or could mean that programming was categorized as Women’s Work long ago in Thai culture–who knows? Working in travel, so you see the gendering of professions between cultures. In Japan, guides tend to be older women, probably because it was an independent professional avenue socially allowed to women. In the US, travel in general is a largely female industry, seemingly for the same reason. In Indonesia and Cambodia, guides seem to be mostly men. In Thailand, it seems about 50/50.

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There’s not really a people’s history but saying that you can’t think of more female game designers doesn’t make that true (Indeed when they got to Roberta Williams I was disappointed they didn’t name the other, much more talented female designers at Sierra)

Even stepping aside from the question of who’s making it, it’s undeniable that pre-toy-aisle, games were marketed broadly (you would be surprised how often girls show up in ads for early editions of DnD, and not even as token ‘girl who can be in the boys club because she tolerates casual sexism’; Arguably one of the more influential (for good and ill) designers in tabletop games history was Margaret Weis, who basically innovated the notion of putting stories into DnD adventures, not very successfully of course because there wasn’t much technique yet present to focusing on the actual narrative in RPGs in those days.

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Well shit.

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this is a very specific case and not in any way indicative of any trend or attitude in 80s uk gaming, but the maker of 3d ant attack, sandy white, gave players the choice of a male or female character because they just assumed that boys and girls would both naturally be interested in something fun like videogames.

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For some reason I’m still more head-nod-yeah-of-course at the notion of surplus males burying themselves in tunnels of mania like programming than imagining women putting up with that in large numbers

I’d like to extinguish that impulse, mostly on the suspicion that society basically condones males being myopic weirdos and women are strongarmed into being Present and Social and Available at all times and in all contexts

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I know someone who is writing this! Kind of! It will probably be out in a couple years. I’ll let you know.

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I saw this too. I mean the advertising angle I buy. But it’s pretty hard to ignore that most girls I knew growing up played some games. I think ‘the industry’ could be more welcoming i think arguing video games were ever truly exclusive is weird.
I’m not arguing things couldn’t be done better to be inclusive, and the biggest step would be annoying trash talking 14 years olds telling everyone’s how they fucked everyone’s mom.

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Yes.

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Regarding the npr story, they blame the drop on the marketing of computers to boys in the mid 80’s but don’t explain the second (faster) drop that starts about 2003. I want to blame it on the original xbox but maybe that’s a stretch.

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Early 2000’s is when girls born in the mid-80’s would be choosing their college majors. Those born earlier than that would have spent their formative years w/ parents, etc. who hadn’t yet been subjected to that change in marketing tactics either. The second drop off could just be the second phases of consequences from that initial shift.

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I think it varied depending on the regional context - there’s some evidence to suggest that arcades in Australia and New Zealand, for example, were not explicitly gendered spaces.

But yeah, I think it’s pretty obvious that videogames were constructed as a gendered medium basically since their inception, and that the whole hacker mythos surrounding spacewar etc played a big role in cultivating the masculine identity of the gamer.

Something that’s often missing from these discussions about how videogame culture became sexist, I think, are gaming magazines. If you go back and look at UK and North American gaming magazines from the 80s/early 90s, they were total boys clubs. Sexist advertisements are one thing, but when women are actively excluded from the spaces where people discuss games and come up with vocabularies for appraising them, there’s a lot of symbolic power in that.

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now that we’re supposed to think that cell phones are sexy, I wouldn’t be surprised to see female programmer numbers start to rise again. especially with apps gently being marketed toward and coded as female as the years roll along.

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Yup.

http://selectbutton.net/t/more-fun-than-a-ferret-down-your-trousers/790/27

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Yeah, Iwatani specifically created Pac-Man to draw women into arcades. The way he saw it, which, well, whatever, was that women were into eating and fashion, so he made a colorful game about eating. He also made the walls “hollow” on purpose so that they didn’t feel oppressive and forbidding.

There was this whole thing where his boss insisted all the ghosts had to be red, because the colors served no purpose and it cost a little more for some reason. And Iwatani held his guns, almost got fired, saying no, the colors are the whole point of the thing. That’s the only way the game will be successful.

And, yeah, it worked, pretty much. The story about Ms. Pac-Man is a little off also, if you know even a little about how that game came to be.

This would have been a good place to talk about Bubble Bobble, yeah. Or even the Japanese industry that produced the games marketed to boys over here, which at the time had lots of women in prominent creative roles. Especially in Sega, it seems like.

Dona Bailey is a weird case, because I don’t want to take an accomplishment away from the only female designer in a major company, but it really really feels like an Ed Logg game. It follows all the logic and sensibility of his other games from the period. The one maybe-unusual element is the scenario, which is far more detailed and fantastical than Logg’s generic situations.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the breakout: Bailey on the premise, Logg on the logic.

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Ever since I read about Bailey designing the color scheme for Centipede, I’ve been thinking about how powerful color is at messaging within and across genders.

Actually my first thought was Ranma: the color covers of the Ranma manga very much followed the trend of late 80’s: faded pastels of pink and baby blue and yellow–Easter colors, basically. By the time the 90’s anime was out, the colors became more primary with deeper reds and harder blacks. These were obviously painted cells rather than whatever markers or watercolor pencils Takahashi was using.

Anyway, in addition to all the other aspects of Ranma that came from a female perspective (fun female characters, a more cutesy, non-pervy sort of sexualization, a sitcom sense of social relationships), I’ve been thinking that the colors alone could have been part of its broad charm. I mean, it’s an action/comedy comic, starring a male martial artist. It seems like that aspect drew men in well enough, and everything else about it takes on this unisex quality into relation to that.

I think Steven Universe has basically the same thing going for it.

Anyway, the colors of Centipede made me think of that, and so did your mention of Iwatani caring so much about being colorful. Obviously, our gendered color associations are constructed, but people really respond to that sort of coding.

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That’s a good mental leap – the colors of Centipede, and the colors of Pac-Man. Want to chew on this more…