Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it?<p>I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours.<p>Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing.<p>Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary changes in behaviour, if any. And when they do show something more, they're impossible to replicate, or straight-up fraud.<p>I don't buy it.
I like the article. I think it's well written, an important subject, and the world would be better if more people read it and digested its message.<p>I still wish it didn't repeat the myth that Coca-Cola invented the modern image of Santa Clause, though.<p><a href="http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp</a>
I myself believe in market dynamics. If girls were interested in what boys had they'd pursue it. If girls hated barbies they would nag parents about getting a train or a car and market demand for barbies would dry up. The fact that toy dolls are a billion dollar industry should make one sceptical about the supposed 'girliness that society instills in girls'. I find that premise as silly as thinking boys were somehow 'indoctrinated' into liking computers.
<i>In 1983, North America experienced a massive recession in the video game industry, now known as the video game crash. The crash had devastating effects, bankrupting game company after game company. At its peak, the revenues for video games in the U.S. sat at $3.2 billion in 1983. By 1985, revenues fell a whopping 97 percent to approximately $100 million. There are many factors behind the crash. The key factor is that by 1983, the video game market was saturated with low-quality games, which resulted in a loss of consumer confidence. Anyone who could make a game was making a game, and there was little to no regulation on the part of the console makers. Players got burnt. Retailers got burnt. People stopped buying video games. The crash marked what many believed to be the end of the video game industry.</i><p>Sounds like today's "casual gaming" market.
I thought the more important point was how much these differences were in the eye of the beholder rather than actual objective facts.<p>For example, the various farm sim, candy crush, peggle, word game, social things that many "non-gamer" women in my life seem obsessed by get quietly excluded from discussions about games and gamers because they don't fit the stereotype.<p>Similarly, Barbie is a "doll", she lives in a "doll house", and boys don't play with dolls or doll houses. No, the small minature people my son plays with are action figures and have "bases", or are "knights" and have "castles", or are lego people, who do have houses (though usually of fairly avant-garde design). Could you explain to a martian why these are supposedly such different activities that were encoded for back in the hunter-gatherer days?
That was really freaking long.<p>I can't help but notice the recurring theme that the actual game designers are trying to make fun gender-neutral products but the marketing and leadership is the source of misogyny. I mean, when they start talking about the PS1 era their examples are WipeOut (the only "gendered" thing in the game is the announcer) Tomb Raider (Croft has somewhat absurd proportions but she's a far cry from the kind of exploitative stuff you see in the Dead or Alive games and whatnot) and Gran Turismo (masculine only by the technicality that it's about cars).<p>I'm a guy, so this is obviously a "check my privilege" thing, but I feel like the misogyny of the gaming industry (and geek culture at large) didn't really take hold until console gaming went online and the collective sea of poop-throwing 4channers got their he-man-woman-haters club into games. The games were <i>targeted</i> at boys well before then, and the themes got heavily masculine in the mid-'90s with the FPS revolution... but the active You Are Not Welcome thing seemed to take hold later.<p>I mean, obviously geek culture was a bit unsettling for women before then because the combined awkward sexual frustration of a zillion nerds isn't exactly <i>comfortable</i> to be around, but I don't think the outright <i>hatred</i> of women had taken hold.<p>It seems like the door was open... not so much, anymore.
If you look at the early atari 2600 commercials it is clear they were just throwing stuff at the wall with no clear audience in mind. One that sticks out in my mind features a "Valley Girl" that is so stereotypical it is hard to tell if it was supposed to be a parody or not: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ze1neVziE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ze1neVziE</a>
Okay, so girls get princesses and My Little Pony. Now listen to what they do with them. My 3 year old is in the next room playing playing with her My Little Pony dolls right now. Story lines more complex than the typical evening sitcom. Action and violence. Shouting and passion. They are learning story telling and narrative. And the narrative is not all tea parties. If the toys do not inherently give them plots and conflicts, they will build it up for themselves.
These articles always walk a very fine line between opposing views. How do you simultaneously claim that pink dolls are marketed to girls and that's bad. Then also claim that there are no video games that have pink dolls, so therefore girls are excluded.<p>As a father, I worry that if we 'encourage' our girls too much to discard girly pink things, they might receive the message that girly things <i>are inherently worse.</i> It's perfectly ok to ensure your kid isn't forced into some role because of their gender, but be careful not to preclude/deride things they may genuinely desire. Don't be worried about attending a tea party with your girls. The 'message it sends' is that you care enough to play what they want.
As a parent of two pre-school girls, this is a concern of mine. But in some ways I think this issue is worse for boys than girls. Girls are "allowed" (but not encouraged) to shop from the boys section. My daughters have and use some boys' clothing, toys, furniture, etc. But a boy wearing pink clothes or dancing or playing with dolls is setting himself up for extended teasing.
Thank god. Video game addiction is destroying an entire generation of boys. We see the results in declining male college enrollment and graduation. Games have been tweaked and adjusted until they have become electronic cocaine, and the result is that boys spend virtually their entire time at home playing them. The last thing we need is for the girls to go the same way.
Although the site looks snazzy, it's annoying that page-down goes one line too far.<p>Page-down. Huh? Oh. Line-up. Ah.<p>Page-down. Huh? Oh. Line-up. Ah.<p>. . .<p>Frustrating reading experience that distracts from the message.
They get the 80's crash analysis all wrong. There was never a demand implosion due to uncertainty of quality. These were 8 bit sprites. Crap was standard. Crap was good. All 8-bit console games look low quality compared to the first 8-bit computer games. We still bought. Something way more important was the first widely-available consumer 8-bit computers. Compare Atari 2600 Pac-man to Atari 400 Pac-man... and that's not the Atari XL line.<p>No consideration of a sudden shift in early adopters to Atari XL and Commodore 64 computers?? What year did those drop 82-83? The games for those PC-precursors were 1) way better and 2) pirate's booty. The abilities of those machines moved beyond what could be packed into consoles and the margins seemed higher. The price for a game went to free. That meant you could buy second floppy drives, 300 baud modems, dot matrix printers (24 pins FTW!) instead of games.<p>Computer clubs were not uncommon and literal swap meets of 5.5" floppies. Early modems gained access to BBS's and created cornucopias of free software - legit and not.<p>They should also review Master's of Doom and get insight into the personalities behind the seminal FPS. There were no marketers outside of the dev team there. They were making something they loved to play and they loved the thrill/hilarity of over-the-top power and gross-out humor. If you want to empower or blame the feedback loop of marketing driving development, you shouldn't ignore all the history prior to the present-day machine.<p>Thank goodness they are writing an article which confirms that the world is changing because women aren't sitting quietly by, letting history be written by loud-mouthed men any more.<p>But it's an awkward dance to read trying to fill enough space to provide ample vertical scrolling to get a sense for why it took so many people to construct the page...
I dunno if it's just me, but I usually skip an article that starts with something like "Four-year-old Riley Maida stands in a toy aisle of a department ...." and then there's a mile of scrolling to do. At least tell me what your central thesis is going to be if you're asking me to invest so much time and emotion into a story.
I, for one, look forward to the glorious day when all children are grown in vats and reared in communal nurseries by hermaphrodites, so girls will never have to be subjected to the horrible sight of a mother nestling her baby, which unjustly conditions them to prefer baby dolls to Tonka trucks.
I wonder if it's a simple market differentiation factor, like why there are 100 different kinds of breakfast cereal. Creating two immiscible classes of toys effectively doubles the variety, and the floor space devoted to toys in stores. It makes hand-me-downs less appealing if you've got one kid of each kind. That factor alone would create a noticeable sales bump for toy stores, even if the differences were totally arbitrary. But the differences have to be strong enough so that the toys of each sex invoke the yuck response in the other sex.
There's a reason most boys gravitate towards guns, monster trucks and blow-em-ups. There's a reason why most girls gravitate towards dolls, ponies and puppy dogs. It's called evolution aka 200,000 years of it. Many iterations, regression testing etc.<p>Put quite simply, it works for the propagation of the species.<p>You can argue all you want with 200k years of evolution and or civilization, isn't going to change a thing. We are first and foremost made to procreate and natural systems are all about efficiencies - White Knights and Jezebels notwithstanding.
For the first several years of her life, I would not buy anything pink for my daughter. Her baby clothes were white and yellow and powder blue ( a great color for a red headed girl with blue eyes). Then when she got older it became harder to avoid pink in new clothes shops, so we went to second hand shops instead and found wonderful things like a dark purple dress with a metallic green waistband. We also always check the boys section for clothes that are not blatant marketing stuff and buy a few items for her, mostly darker colors.
I'm not seeing the big issue being raised here. I think much of how a child turns out in life depends on their parents.<p>My wife likes pink, but she's also better at repairing cars, playing video games, repairing smart phones and target shooting than myself. She would be an awesome programmer or system admin, but likes project management and people more than I do. She is the one in her family that bought the gaming consoles starting with the NES.
It was a very interesting and eye-opening article though I don't think we can wholly blame this on the marketing of video games. I have a sister who has never liked video games and instead spent her time with dolls even though me and my brother had always tried to get her into video games.<p>I remember when we got our first Tamagotchies. My sister fried her's by sticking it in a bucket of water. When we got her another one she used it for a few seconds and then played with her dolls.<p>I think -as seen in a article recently posted- that since boys brains are wired differently we are into different things and that is natural.<p>Also there isn't anything stopping girls from playing video games. To be honest I think a girl that plays video games is more attractive and I bet most men would.<p>NOTE: I am in no way saying "toys" are limited to boys or trying to imply anything sexist but what I am saying is that the division of boy toys and girl toys isn't wholly because of marketing.
Outside the fps genre are video games really that gender based? Pretty much every Nintendo game is enjoyable by boys and girls. Many ubisoft games are gender agnostic, all puzzle games are. I'm not a big fps guy so looking at my personal library, almost all my games are gender neutral.
Sorry about the off-topic: does anyone knows whether the caricatures that illustrate the article belong to a concrete category and/or are associated with a particular style? I'd really like to read more about it, but the books I've found about cartooning are very different from this style.
i am a liberal fan of freedom and equal rights - within reason.<p>i applaud the sentiment but this is just one of many symptoms of 'women don't like taking risks and don't like stem fields'<p>whats more i like to think that women are allowed that freedom of choice - so its a double edged sword.<p>the side effects suck but these scenarios /come from/ freedom and equal opportunities for women. why is nobody looking at cultures which are oppressive to women or have lower quality of life as counter examples? not only do they not have this kind of marketing... but actually more women enter stem fields and do 'male' traditional roles out of necessity or societal pressure.<p>its a horribly complicated problem. extra sad that i can't make a 'sexist' joke here as a punchline for fear of reprisal...
The text is too long, but I really enjoy the cartoons from David Saracino.<p><a href="http://davidsaracinoart.com/" rel="nofollow">http://davidsaracinoart.com/</a>
While I think the history of marketing of games is interesting, to be honest to me this read like "bla bla bla... Video games were heavily marketed as products for men, and the message was clear: No girls allowed.... bla bla bla"<p>Meaning the conclusion "no girls allowed" is just randomly inserted somewhere in the middle of a wall of text.<p>Just because boys and men were identified as a large audience and targeted with marketing does not imply that girls are not allowed.<p>Nobody is forcing you to choose either aisle in the toy shop. Just the other day I bought a playmobil horse for my son that came in a pink box. Whatever...<p>What exactly do they mean by girls not allowed? Girls are not allowed to play first person shooters? How would such a rule even be enforced?<p>Or the right games are not being made for girls, then there would be more female gamers? I think whoever believes that should go out and make those games. Put their money where their mouth is.<p>Never mind that there are already lots of games that are being played by lots of girls/women. "No girls allowed" simply has no foundation in reality whatsoever.
My first girl-friend threatened to leave me in case I bought a game boy. It's not just stereotypes from the media, it's also an experience that lots of men have made in their lives. But that doesn't mean we don't like the idea of women playing games. Quite the opposite. I still remember the first time I saw a woman wearing an Atari T-Shirt. I could hardly believe my eyes... Turns out by then Atari didn't really exist anymore and was being rebranded by whoever bought the Trademark, but still (I was attracted, but I didn't talk to her, so no further story to that).<p>It's just that it feels like a waste of time trying to get women interested in games. If they want to play, fine, but why try to make them? (Speaking from the consumer perspective - game makers of course have different incentives).<p>Next week I plan to have a C64 revival party. I will invite women, curious to see how many of them will also play...<p>My advice for women interested in computer games: just do it/try it. Don't waste time wondering if you are allowed to do it.