I spent Christmas in England this year.  I have family there, and also lived and studied there for several years, so I go back to visit when I can.  This visit was a sad one in some ways though, as my grandmother passed away in October and her absence was very noticeable.

My grandmother was an amazing woman and has been an example to me all my life.  She was a strong, independent woman who was also a loving wife, mother, and grandmother.  I lived with her for a few years in the late 90s while I finished my Masters of Science degree and started working in London.  Even though she was from a generation born long before the existence of the personal computer, at the age of 90 she declared she was tired of everybody being able to email everybody else and get all the news faster than her, so she went out and bought a computer and modem and set up an email account and got down to learning how to use it.  All her life she had been a copious letter-writer, and I think it bothered her very much that she was now receiving news weeks later than those of us with email.  In a fit of impatience very typical of her, she decided she was not going to put up with this and marched out to take care of the problem.

My job back then was in I.T. support, a field about which she knew very little, but she loved to hear me explain what I did at work and how I helped people.  She put my work skills to good use by having me write clear, concise, grandmother-friendly instructions on how to receive and write her emails on her new computer.  Some years later, when I started playing EverQuest and came back to visit her, she insisted that I explain all about the game, and how people in different countries could play together and make friends.  A challenging explanation to make clear to someone who has never played a computer game in her life, but I did my best.

Over the years as I continued my career in I.T., my tasks changed and so did the people I was helping, but any time I was called on to document any type of process, I always took care to phrase it as clearly and simply as my grandmother would demand.  Documentation was not considered clear or complete until it would pass the “grandmother test,” which is to say, would my grandmother be able to follow these instructions?  If no, then it needed rewriting.

These days I write less official documentation, but there is still plenty of opportunity to write instructions for people in the form of the quests we put in game and game content in general.  It is very hard for my generation to see what aspects of a game may confuse a new player, as we have been familiar with computers and computer games for years or even decades, and take certain conventions for granted.  What is a “hit point,” for example?  A health bar seems obvious to anybody who’s played any computer game, but ask anybody of my grandmother’s generation (or even my mother’s) and you’re unlikely to find many who can tell you what it is.  Yet I doubt that any game made this decade explains the concept, even if you dig deep down into the help files.  So I remind myself to ask now and then, would a completely new player understand where the quest is asking them to go?  Would they understand how to do this or that?  Would my grandmother?

I miss my grandmother very much and appreciate many of the lessons she taught me.  It’s nice to feel that she continues to teach me even now as I mentally run my game content through “the grandmother test.”  I’d love to see game play and UI designers taking the time to borrow an elderly or non-computer-savvy relative for a play test—I suspect that many games would be much improved for all their players as a result.

- Emily “Domino” Taylor

I read an interesting article today in Scientific American about getting more bicycles on city streets: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-more-bicyclists-on-the-road. The key point seemed to be that when it comes to cycling, women are on average much more risk-averse than men.   Women appear to consider safe bike infrastructure (as in off-street bike lanes and traffic calming measures) to be essential to the decision to bicycle rather than drive.  Thus, the article argues that a good measure of the “health” of a city’s bike infrastructure is to look at the number of women cyclists.  If the cyclists are mostly male, it probably still needs improvement.

It’s an interesting way of looking at things.  I know two people at SOE who regularly bike to work, and both of them live slightly further away than I do.  They’ve suggested to me on a couple of occasions that I should also, but so far I haven’t tried it.  Partly the logistics discourage me – I’m not sure where I’d put the bike, and there’s no gym near the office where I could take a shower and clean up if I arrive all hot and sweaty.  But the main discouragements are the complete lack of bike lanes, the crazy San Diego drivers and the fact I’d end up biking home in the dark.  Neither of these feels safe to me and it’s definitely a factor that bothers me, but apparently does not bother my male co-workers.

This may seem somewhat unrelated to games, but I wonder when I read articles like this whether the same risk aversion might apply to women when they play computer games.  Are women as a whole less likely to take risky chances in games?  Or does the risk-averse behavior not exist when it’s not a game?  Or a third possibility, perhaps when inside a safe game, women might be even MORE prone to taking risks, to compensate for the restraints we face in the real world?    And, taking that a step further, can we look at the behavior of women in games and use it as a measure of how the risk in the game is balanced (or not), the way city planners can use it to gauge the health of a bike infrastructure, or ecologists can use the local fish species populations to gauge the health of a river system?

I did a quick search for studies that might shed some light onto this question but I wasn’t able to turn up anything definitive.  In my own case, I think I tend to enjoy taking risks in game, and I’m probably more likely than the average person to go exploring in highly dangerous areas where I really shouldn’t be.  You wouldn’t catch me doing that in real life, but it’s quite liberating in a game like EverQuest II.  I can’t draw any broad conclusions based on just my own experience, though; I could be just a strange outlier in the data, not statistically significant.

Questions like this sometimes make me wish I had studied behavioral sociology or something similar instead of biology.  Online games raise so many fascinating questions about human behavior, and there is so much in this field that could still studied.

- Emily “Domino” Taylor

Happy Birthday, EverQuest II!

 By Emily “Domino” Taylor

This month marks the 5th anniversary of EverQuest II, the MMO that has been my main game of choice since it launched, and for which I am now fortunate enough to work as a game designer.  The design team celebrated with lots of anniversary cake, and the community team arranged a great party on EQII’s test server that all players (and designers) were invited to join.  I was able to slip away from working on the upcoming expansion for long enough to stick my head in, and it looked as if a good time was being had by all!  This screenshot sums it up quite well, I think:

The game’s undergone a lot of changes in the years since launch.  One of the most frequent comments we hear from returning players (who haven’t been back since the early days) is that “it’s like a whole new game,” and it’s very true–so much has been added and improved from the game I first saw during pre-launch beta testing!  

I could reminisce for hours about all the good memories and fun times I’ve had playing the game, and what a great game it is.  However, since this is really a blog about women in gaming, I thought that instead I’d share a few interesting statistics related to women and EverQuest II (all these statistics were presented publically at the Game Developer’s Conference earlier this year, and a transcript of the presentation is available at: http://tinysubversions.blogspot.com/2009/03/gdc-transcript-advanced-data-mining-and.html) 

• EQII players have a lower body mass index (BMI) than the average US population, i.e., they are on average healthier
• The healthiest group (best BMI compared to US average) within the EQII players studied was the older women.
• The gender breakdown of EQII players is about 20% female, 80% male.
• The average age of players is in their early 30s
• Women tend to be slightly older than men (33 vs. 30).
• The majority of female players are introduced to the game by males.
• Women play more hours per week than men and are more committed to the game (say they are less likely to quit soon, when surveyed)
• Women tend to under-report how much time they spend playing by significantly more than men.  This may indicate a heavier social stigma is attached to women who game.
• Women are generally happier when playing with their romantic partner than not, however, men are the opposite.

 Some of these findings may seem surprising compared to the stereotypical images of online game players.  For example, the typical gamer is portrayed as a teenage male, often overweight and unhealthy.  Clearly, at least within the world of EQII, this image is outdated or perhaps was never true to begin with.

Particularly worthy of noting, in my opinion, is the point about commitment.  If women tend to play more and be more committed to staying with a game, then perhaps game companies should be asking more carefully, how do we attract more women, and how do we retain them?

There were a lot of women in attendance at the EQII anniversary party and I hope to see them all again at the 10th year party.  Perhaps I’ll see you there, too!

This week, I took the opportunity to check in with Rebecca Gleason, this year’s winner of the G.I.R.L. scholarship.  Rebecca is currently in the middle of her studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and we touched base to see how it’s going.

Emily:  First of all, I hope you’re enjoying the program, although I understand it’s a lot of work!

Rebecca:  Thanks.  Yes, it is quite a lot of work!  But, it is very rewarding.

Emily:  Can you describe what your typical day is like these days?  Is it what you expected?

Rebecca:  I am trying to stay healthy and maintain a schedule, so I wake up early and go to the gym (otherwise I would be sitting all day).  Once I’ve showered and had breakfast, I get going on my homework.  There is so much ‘making’ to do in each course that I only really take small meal breaks during the day.  We are not only doing digital work, but also creating 3-D designs and hand drawings, so I have paper scraps and odd materials strewn about the place at all times.  My classes go from 6:30pm to 9:00pm every night and from 9:00am to 2:00pm on Saturdays.

Emily:  You mentioned that you’ve been too busy to even check your email most days.  What is it that’s keeping you the busiest at the moment?

Rebecca:  The volume of work we are asked to produce is astounding.  Right now, we are working on several different projects where we have to diverge and create a multitude of visual explorations that convey a specific mood.

Emily: In your essay submission to the G.I.R.L. scholarship program, you shared some thoughts about women and girls in gaming, and how their relationship with gaming is sometimes different from that of men and boys.  Since the readers of this blog didn’t have the opportunity to read your essay, can you describe what key points you felt were most important?

Rebecca:  I feel that many women and girls are perhaps more drawn to creative games rather than the “shoot ‘em up” ones. We aren’t as easily captivated by those, as they don’t allow for any real personal exploration.  I’m not saying there aren’t any women who enjoy those.  They are great escapes and a lot of fun, but in order to want to keep coming back, I feel we need a little more interaction and creative control.

Emily:  Before starting the scholarship you mentioned that you would love to work as an artist, but you also mentioned an interest in other areas of game design.  Now you’ve had an opportunity to delve deeper into some of the different areas of gaming, have your preferences changed at all?

Rebecca:  I have always wanted to do something with my artistic talents, but I also have so many ideas about all aspects of a game.  My program is Experience Design and so that can be translated in so many ways.  Not only can I contribute to different aspects of game design, but also perhaps the marketing and promotion of the games.

Emily:  Have there been any big surprises?  Anything that you weren’t expecting, and have only discovered during your studies so far?

Rebecca:  No huge surprises yet.  Though I have come to understand the importance of suspending judgment and allowing ideas to form and be documented without trying to make them perfect the first time.

Emily:  Game design can be a very challenging and demanding career.  Do you think there are any specific challenges that are specifically relevant to women in gaming, that perhaps don’t impact men so much?

Rebecca:  Perhaps just the lack of women in some areas of design and the perception that it is hard to break into the industry as a woman.

Emily:  How about the reverse?  Do you think there are any challenges that men face in game design, where perhaps women aren’t as affected?

Rebecca: There is a lot of competition in a field like this.  I think men probably feel that quite a bit.

Emily:  I’m curious, why game design?  Was there anything specific that developed your interest in game design?  Is there any particular reason you’re so passionate about it now?

Rebecca:   I have always loved the sci-fi/fantasy genre and my art has reflected this interest.  Game design seems to be a place where my ideas are realized.  I see game design as the perfect outlet for my creativity and for further exploration in ways games can be used.

Emily:  You’ve mentioned that Civilization is one of your all time favorite games.  I’ve spent many happy days playing it myself, as well as its sequels like Alpha Centauri.  Are there any other games that particularly stand out as favorites?

Rebecca:  I’ve always loved Zelda and some other older ones like Crystal Castles, and Impossible Mission.  I also really like games where I’m learning languages or other things I can use in the real world.

Emily:  Are there any women in your life that have been strong role models for you?  How do they feel about you pursuing a career in game design, if so?

Rebecca:  My mom was always a great role model.  She is a wonderful artist and has had a huge influence on my own creative path.  She is happy I am using my creativity because there was a time when I had ignored it.  She is excited to see what I will bring to the mix and where this path will lead me.

Emily:  You mentioned that in the future you’d love to be able to continue to help women enter the gaming industry.  Do you have any specific ideas in mind about how you’d like to see women in gaming encouraged?

Rebecca:  I think things have really opened up in the past few years as far as integrating a woman’s voice in the industry by marketing to them and creating games especially attractive to them.  This awareness is something I’d like to build on so that girls will know that there is space for them to play in this world too.  I haven’t been able to think too much yet on concrete ways of doing this, but I’m still exploring many ideas in general so I know it will come.

Emily:  Any last words of advice or warning you’d like to leave for future G.I.R.L. scholarship applicants?

Rebecca:  I guess I’d just like to say that it is important to keep working on your craft and learning about the world.  Real life experiences are what bring the most interest and vibrancy to the table when you are trying to create something.  Use this experience as a step towards your goals.  Even if you don’t win, what you learn by doing it is just as valuable.  Learn what it takes to be great at something and work toward it every day.

I didn’t have a lot of heroes as a child.  There were various fictional characters that I wanted to emulate (at one point I was very cross that my parents hadn’t abandoned me as a baby in some African jungle to become Tarzan), but that’s not quite the same thing.  Through childhood and into adulthood, although there are many people I admire, there are very few that I would consider a “hero” to me.  So, I was quite surprised to discover I currently have a small case of hero worship.

If you work or play extensively in the game industry, chances are pretty darn good that by now you’ve seen the music video, “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU , or watched the web series “The Guild” http://www.watchtheguild.com/ .  The writer, the brains and the driving force behind these is a lady by the name of Felicia Day.  A few years ago she would have appeared to be yet another struggling actress, picking up small parts on this sitcom or that, good enough looking but not the typical sculpted-and-airbrushed beauty that’s really going to turn heads in Hollywood.  There must have been a thousand other young actresses in the same position, but what’s different about her?

First, she plays computer games; second, she admits it; and third, but far from least, she creates her own opportunities.  Since she had a lot of knowledge about MMO games, she made a sitcom pilot.  And when Hollywood wasn’t interested, she turned it into an online web series.  Found co-stars, found staff, worked entirely off fan donations until she found sponsors, and created a series that’s now followed by fans around the world.  Not only is she a good role model for anybody who’s not yet where they want to be in their career, but she’s also a fantastic representative of women in gaming.  To the old refrain of “girls don’t game” we can now say, look!  A woman MMO gamer who is attractive, successful and smart.  She’s far from the only one, but she’s certainly the highest profile one around right now, and by doing what she’s doing, she represents all of us.  And so, she’s my new hero.  Good for you, Felicia Day, for refusing to give up, for not accepting the judgment of Hollywood, and for finding a way to balance gaming, career, and femininity so that all three end up stronger.

- Emily “Domino” Taylor

When I was maybe 10 or 12, my parents gave me a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook.  I don’t remember exactly when it was, and I’m not sure what prompted this gift as they had never played D&D themselves, but I’m guessing it was probably around the time that the Dungeons & Dragons animated series was on TV as I watched that every week.

While a D&D manual was a pretty awesome gift to give a young girl with an active imagination, unfortunately they couldn’t provide me with the other thing needed to enjoy D&D: a gaming group.  I spent ages reading the manual and my brother and I collected lots of dice and tried a few games, but two people (one being the GM) does not make for a very satisfying D&D experience.  We eventually gave up trying to play D&D on paper, and moved on to writing vaguely D&D themed text-based computer adventure games in BASIC (most of which I programmed to include cheat codes for me, and ways to imaginatively kill my brother).

I was fascinated by the idea of D&D and similar games, but unfortunately, they did not seem to be something that girls played back then.  My female friends had never heard of it and didn’t seem in the slightest bit interested in learning more.  My brother was a bit luckier – being both male, and a couple of years younger than me, he eventually found a group of friends in his teens that he could game with.  However, girls most definitely did not hang around with their baby brother’s all-boy gaming group either, and all the boys of my own age who might have been gaming were far too shy to talk to girls about it, let alone invite them to join.  So it wasn’t until university that I actually had the opportunity to play some tabletop role playing games with a real gaming group.  That didn’t last long after graduation, however, as I moved countries a few times and ended up working for a mainly marketing and publicity company whose employees (although wonderful people) tended to look at me like some kind of weird alien when I talked about things like roleplaying games or MMOs.  I played some Traveller (a space-based science fiction roleplaying game) for a few years via a remote client with assorted online acquaintances all around the world, but mostly satisfied my roleplaying interests by playing MMOs.

There is a happy ending though; since starting work at SOE, I’ve been blissfully surrounded by hundreds of gaming geeks who enjoy every type of game imaginable.  When asked what I did on the weekend, I can reply that I killed a dragon, and nobody will even blink; if anything, they’ll just enquire how, and which dragon.  I now have not one but two regular D&D games, and we’ve been trying out the latest edition of D&D.  Somewhere in the back of my parents closet, my original first edition D&D handbook is probably still languishing while I run around with a fourth edition rogue and a warlord.

I’m glad that I get to play now, but I do still regret that I didn’t have this much fun back when I first got my original player’s handbook.  I know that games like this are slowly becoming more main-stream, and I hope that nowadays there are enough girls who are interested in D&D that they can find friends to play with if they wish.  If that’s not the case yet, then hopefully we’ll get there soon!

- Emily “Domino” Taylor

What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

So says Shakespeare’s Juliet, referring to Romeo, but although Juliet seems sure that names are irrelevant, I still find it one of the hardest parts of creating a quest, and I know I’m not alone there.

Right now I’m creating some quests for the upcoming expansion in EverQuest II.  The outline of the quest series is written, but I took the lazy way out and just referred to the characters as “Far Seas NPC” and “questgiver NPC” etc. without thinking up names.  Now I’m actually sitting down to make the quests, my first step is to make the characters, and this is where I always have trouble.

The temptation is often to name them after people I know, or famous people, or make some kind of joke about it, and many games and designers slip references like this in here and there — hence the original EverQuest had the pair of bankers “Mort” and “Gage”, World of Warcraft has characters like “Haris Pilton”, and EverQuest II has a pair of Hooluk (owl men) called “Orly” and “Yarly”.  However, too much of this and the game world just starts to look silly and immersion-breaking.

Coming up with original names can be certainly stretch the imagination, however.  Lately I’ve been picking random names from things I see or have read, whatever randomly springs to mind.  I recently implemented a small market fair type area for which I had to create and name a number of characters.  Here’s a closer look at how they were named:

• Jenni Merrytoe, a halfling food merchant:  first of all, she’s a Halfling because Halflings are well known to enjoy their food and enjoy cooking.  She got the name Jenni because it’s short and cheerful, like a good halfling, and because my friend Jennifer happened to IM me while I was working on the festival, so the name was fresh in my mind.

• Sanya Farshore, another market merchant:  Sanya is a half elf, just because half elves are a convenient race to use for npcs of no specific alignment, since they can live in any of the cities in our game.  I pulled that name out of the air as I happened to be reading a blog earlier in the day that’s written by someone of that name, and Farshore indicates her travelling nature – half elves often have surnames indicative of nature, travel, and their love of water.

• Sussan Swiftneedle, a kerra tailor selling clothing:  Susan is a nice name, and Sussan is also the name of a women’s clothing store I used to shop at when I lived in Australia, and the Swiftneedle indicates her trade as a tailor.

• Thomas Strongbellow, a barbarian crier announcing the fair:  as a crier, he roams around shouting out the news of the fair, so Strongbellow seemed a great name.  Thomas was very random, the character appearance just looked like a Thomas and it sounded good with Strongbellow.

• Mystic Margreth, a genie fortune teller:  I was playing with the name of a well known character on English television, “Mystic Meg”, who gives lottery predictions each week.  I was originally toying with the idea of making this character a ratonga called Mystic Megrat which would be both a play on Mystic Meg and also a play on Terry Pratchett’s witch character Magrat in the Discworld series of books, but I decided a genie looked better as the fortune teller, so Margreth is just a version of Margaret.

• Kella Swampfoot, a troll supply quartermaster:  trolls are from the swamps of Innothule, and swampfoot is both a type of plant found there, and an infection of the foot that non-troll races can be susceptible to if they spend too much time in damp boots.  Kella was just a random collection of syllables that sounded good with Swampfoot.

Another designer on the EverQuest II team told me once that while he was working on an overland zone for one of our previous expansions, he also was driving back and forth to Arizona a lot as his father was ill.  Most of the guards and sentries in that zone are now named after exits on the freeway between San Diego and Arizona.  Yet another designer decided an entire race of characters (the fae, in Kelethin) would have names based on the Finnish language.

It can be surprisingly challenging coming up with names that suit the characters, fit into the world, and aren’t repetitions of names someone has used before.  Sometimes you just feel inspired; other times, you sit there racking your brains.  However, writing this little blog has successfully helped me procrastinate the naming of today’s first quest character for a little while at least, and now I’m off to lunch – perhaps the waiter’s or waitress’s name will suit a quest character!

- Emily “Domino” Taylor

It’s my birthday this week and since I’m feeling old, I got to thinking how very much computer games and multiplayer environments have changed since I was a wee young thing.  I was fortunate that my family had a personal computer from almost as soon as they were available, and I enjoyed playing around and learning some basic programming from a very early age.  The new world that computers were creating really opened up to me though when we got our first modem.  Yes, back when home computers were still a pretty rare thing, before the world wide web existed, and back when a 2400 baud modem was the epitome of fast data transfer, I discovered the wonders of Bulletin-Board Systems (BBSs).  These were text-based message boards, or in the more sophisticated cases, multi-user chat rooms and text games, where geeks like me could talk with other geeks on a wide variety of topics or nothing at all.

Most of the BBSs I frequented consisted of someone’s home computer and a dedicated phone line, and users like me would directly dial the phone number of the BBS.  The computer would answer the phone and you’d log in to whatever type of BBS software the owner had set up.  Since there was only one phone line, only one person at a time could call in, and so it was considered bad manners to spend a long time logged in reading the messages directly.  Instead, one would use a piece of software called an offline message reader.  This would download all the new messages since you last called that particular BBS, and then allow you to read and answer them while offline, so that next time you phoned in to that BBS, your new posts could be delivered.  The first OLMR I used was called SLMR – Silly Little Message Reader; later I upgraded to the Blue Wave message reader which allowed you to add little humorous taglines at the end of each post, which would be randomly selected from a text file.  Many people made almost a game of collecting as many funny taglines as they could, and I was no exception: I had a file with hundreds and hundreds of the best taglines that I’d collected and culled from other people’s posts and tagline files.  I probably still have that file somewhere, although taglines seem to have gone the way of the dodo.

Another feature that many BBSs offered were “door games”.  The “door” referred to the fact that the game itself was run externally, not as part of the BBS software.  You would phone up the computer, which would answer the phone and log you into the BBS software.  The “door” was essentially a gateway out of the BBS software itself and to programs that would run on the computer beyond.  So “door games” were small games that could be run on the host computer and accessed through the “door” program by people who were dialed up and logged into the BBS software.

Although there were some multi-line BBSs back then, the large majority were still limited to having one person connected at a time, so most door games were either single player, or multiplayer but turn based.  Whereas most of the multiplayer games we see now days are “multiplayer online” games (meaning, multiple players can be online together), door games were generally “offline multiplayer” games, where many people were playing, but only one could be active at a time.  Sometimes it didn’t matter in what order players connected to play their turn, and in other games, logging on first could allow you to get the jump on the other players.  One of my favorite door games back then was called “Usurper”, a vaguely dungeons-and-dragons style text game which allows you to enter dungeons and fight monsters, level up, buy and sell equipment.  Once your turn for the day ended you could pay money to sleep in the inn, or you could sleep for free in the public dormitory, or you could also spend the night at the beggar’s wall, where people could donate money to you if they were feeling nice.  However, in the latter two locations, other players could also murder you while you slept if they were not feeling nice.  Thus, whoever logged in first had the advantage of being able to slaughter any other players who’d ended their turn at the dormitory or beggar’s wall.

BBSs were my first introduction to virtual communities, and Usurper was my first multiplayer computer game.  Both multiplayer environments and computer games have come a long way since then, and now we have massively multiplayer and fabulously graphical online environments that we could barely dream of back in the days of BBSs.  Still, I guess you never forget the magic of your first multiplayer game, no matter how basic it may seem now.  I still think fondly back to the days of BBSs, and hurrying to be the first to get to the door games to avoid being murdered in my sleep; and even though I play newer, fancier, prettier multiplayer games these days, I’ll always have a soft spot for Usurper and the BBSs that pulled me into this whole gaming world and, ultimately, my current job.

- Emily “Domino” Taylor

I am one of those people who loves character creation and can spend ages playing around with all the different options.  I generally start any game by attempting two different things:  I try to make a character who looks as much like me as possible, and then I try to make a character that looks appealing, but as unique as possible from what the majority of other players are choosing.  In games that have a choice of different races, that usually means that I’ll choose an underplayed race; in games with limited or no choice of races, I’ll try to find some variation of customization that is uncommon.

Character creation and customization is an area that I think can have a very strong impact in whether a game seems welcoming to women or not.  Although this really applies to both genders, it’s been my experience that women are much more likely than men to identify more personally with their character’s appearance, and therefore to feel more uncomfortable if the customization options cannot create a character they would like to represent them.  I recall looking at one game’s character creation options for the female characters, and discovering that the only appearance options for the female characters were best described as “hot”, “bimbo”, and “hooker” while the men got to choose from three body types which varied from “skinny geek” to “muscular” to “incredible hulk”.  The male character choices varied in body weight by at least 100lb and had completely different body types; the female character choices varied mainly in breast size and degree of lack of clothing.  Confronted with these choices, I opted to give this particular game a miss entirely.   Not only was I not happy about representing myself as any of the available appearance options, I also felt that they were a telling comment on the attitudes of the game’s designers towards women in general, and one that I strongly disliked.

In multiplayer games where others are seeing only the in-game character that represents us, the appearance of that character is extremely important.  Humans are hardwired to draw instant and unconscious conclusions about other people based on their appearances, and if the only thing I have to represent me within a game is my character’s appearance, then I want to be absolutely sure that I’m comfortable with the way it represents me.  If I am not given sufficient customization options to give me a choice that I’m comfortable with, then I’ll never really feel truly comfortable playing that game — or, as in the previous example, I won’t play it at all.  Didn’t include any female appearances that don’t look provocatively sexy?  Those who prefer not to represent themselves as blatantly sexy will not feel comfortable in your game.  Didn’t include any skin tinting options except caucasian?  Those who prefer not to represent themselves as pale skinned will feel unwelcomed in your game.  And so on.  Of course, it’s good to have the option to look sexy … but to be forced to do so all the time against one’s will is an entirely different thing.

As a game designer, I know very well that there are time and cost limitations that affect the choices games allow in character customization.  Vary the body types too widely and you add an ongoing extra cost in ensuring that all new clothing fits all the body types.  Vary the skin tones too much and you may come across odd tinting issues that make your characters look really bad when players try to tint to extremes.  Add too many customization options and you may add lag when large numbers of players are in the same place and their compters have to render all of each others’ customizations.  All of these are choices that design teams (or key people in them) decide how to deal with in each game, and every game will have different factors that influence what gets included. The fact that one particular option was not included doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any conscious discrimination or statement being made.

The fact remains however that the character creation options do still reflect the priorities and attitudes of the game team.  At some point someone still decided, “THIS appearance option is the one we will do first, and THAT option is just not important enough that we can’t launch without it.”  It may not have been maliciously intended, but it still represents what ultimate value judgments were made about what was seen as an essential feature and what wasn’t.  More important, it’s irrelevant to the customer whether there was a technical restriction that meant you had to exclude certain options:  they don’t know that, they simply see what made the final launch product.  The customer enters the game, and can feel either comfortable or excluded before ever leaving the character creation screens.

I know from personal experience that character customization options can make or break a good game experience for me, and I doubt I’m alone in that, but I wonder how many game companies actually sit down and plan out this very important first impression.  If we ensure that more women feel more comfortable wearing the virtual skins of our virtual worlds, would it ultimately translate to more women playing for longer, and a lower barrier of entry for women who are newcomers to gaming?  I don’t know the answer to that, but doesn’t it seem worth investigating further?

Emily “Domino” Taylor

When talking to my male friends and co-workers about games, one thing I often seem to hear is that I’m unusual in the things I like.  It’s true, I don’t like some things they like, and they don’t like some things I like, and I think that’s quite normal.  Everybody has slightly different tastes about everything, and diversity adds interest to life.

One thing that annoys me to hear though is when acknowledgement of our differences crosses the line into implying that my tastes are strange or unusual or just plain wrong because they’re not the same.  For example, I don’t generally like PvP and raiding, and I do generally like sim-type games and games that involve crafting.  Unfortunately, to some of my acquaintances that just makes me weird.  They assure me that PvP content will appeal to “everybody” if it’s done well, assure me that “nobody” they know would be interested in a crafting-oriented game, and dismiss my disagreement as a statistical exception that proves the rule.  Yet, in a world with a population of over 6,000,000,000 people, I’m not so egotistical to think that there’s anything special or unique about my views and tastes.  Even if my tastes are so rare that only 1% of everyone is similar to me, that still means 60 million people in the world do have similar preferences.  And since I know quite a few other people already who enjoy the same things I do, I suspect the percentage like me is much, much higher.  It is indeed probably an accurate observation that the majority of the people my acquaintances know share their tastes, but it’s a serious mistake to draw conclusions about all computer gamers in general from that observation.

The first reason it’s a mistake is very similar to what’s known in astrophysics as the “weak anthropic principle.”  This essentially states that we can’t draw any conclusions about how probable or improbable it is that the conditions for intelligent life developed here on earth, since if the conditions did NOT exist here on earth, we wouldn’t be here to draw any conclusions about it.  To use that principle in a computer gaming perspective, we can’t look at a particular computer game environment that would selectively encourage only certain play styles, and then use the abundance of those play styles in that computer game environment to draw conclusions about the overall frequency of those play styles.  The environment itself is biasing the sample of types of play styles that you’re observing.  For example, if you like to play puzzle games, you are likely to meet other people playing it who also like puzzle games.  You are highly UN likely to meet people who dislike puzzle games.  It’s accurate to observe that people who don’t like puzzle games are a minority in that one particular game, but you can’t conclude if they’re a minority of game players overall.
To actually get a realistic picture of who likes what types of games in general, you need a much broader survey than just the people who play the same games you do, or just the people you know from gaming, because you’ll tend to know people who have the same taste in games that you do.  You need to survey a wide number of people across a wide number of game genres and play styles, and keep very firmly in mind that you are unavoidably a biased observer simply due to your own preferences, and compensate for that.  Unfortunately, there’s a certain human temptation to look around at all our friends and acquaintances and take the easy conclusion that most people are like us.  I suspect that some of my friends and acquaintances are falling into this trap when they dismiss my enjoyment of certain play styles as just plain strange and aberrant; it doesn’t agree with their opinion nor the opinion of the majority of people they know, therefore they conclude (possibly correctly, but probably erroneously) that I am a very small and unimportant minority play style.

There is a second possibility for why my friends may feel my gaming preferences are a minority:  perhaps folks who like the things that I like are under-represented in computer games simply because they aren’t playing computer games of any sort.  That may sound like a justification for my friends’ belief that I’m just weird, but in fact it’s not.  Their opinion is that I’m just unusual in what I like to play.  I suggest it’s possible that I’m not unusual in what I like to play, but because there are not as many games that appeal to what I like to play, and because current computer game marketing doesn’t tend to target people like me, many people who share my interests simply aren’t even aware there are computer games out there that they might greatly enjoy playing.  This should in fact be an exciting prospect for computer game manufacturers, if it’s true – it would mean there’s a huge untapped market out there that could spell lots of new customers if they can figure out what games they want, and how to let them know the games are out there.  And there are in fact some signs that some companies are starting to realize this and try to reach those new markets.

The implication here for women in gaming is probably obvious.  While I’m not claiming to be a representative of what all women enjoy in computer games, we do know that there are some general differences in what different genders seem to find more enjoyable in computer games.  Indeed, there are probably many different ways in which we could divide people to identify differences in gaming preferences – age would be another good divider.  The point is that when we have an industry that’s composed of a majority of one particular demographic with certain preferred gaming play styles (whatever they may be), then if we’re trying to appeal to other demographics  we have to be all the more careful to make decisions based on unbiased data and facts, rather than what the “gut feeling” of the majority of that industry thinks constitutes a good game.  If we don’t remember to do this, and to check our assumptions frequently during development, we may be excluding a significant potential market, or even driving away a portion of our existing customers.

The wider a range of opinions and play styles and demographics we can get involved in the game development industry (whether it be more women, or a wider age range, or anything else), the better we should be at expanding the appeal of computer games and accurately understanding what people want to play – not just understanding what the people who are already playing computer games want to play, but approaching an understanding of what the entire potential market wants to play.  We can all contribute to this goal by being aware of our own biases, basing decisions on actual statistics and survey data rather than what we personally prefer, and making an effort to get the opinions of other people who don’t share our own preferences.  Continuing to increase the diversity of the people involved in game development is one of the goals that the GIRL scholarship aims to support, and I certainly feel that a continued movement in this direction can only be a good thing for the industry in the long term.

Emily “Domino” Taylor