199 réponses à ce sujet

[Allan Schumacher]

Any kind of gaming is relevant to a discussion on gaming!

 

Someone who plays on the Nintendo (which is awesome) is not less of a gamer than someone who plays on PS4.

 

All gamers are constantly looking for new games. Someone who plays mobile games is a gamer.

 

You can't possibly be seriously discounting all of these people?

 

I think it's still important to recognize who plays what types of games.  I could market DAI to my Mom and Dad, and I doubt either of them would be interested, all the one of them does play a lot of games (my Mom).

 

I think it's tricky because I think it's too convenient for people to dismiss women numbers in gaming because the data doesn't break that down enough.  Even then, if the numbers is 25%, I still don't consider that a trivial number.

 

 

So would I, it's crazy how it's 2014 and gaming is lagging so far behind socially. Women are generally portrayed as damsels or sex objects, lesbians are butch psychos (or male fanservice) gay men are clownish weirdos, black guys are pimps and thugs and every other race pretty much doesn't exist.

 

Is it really?  It sounds like there's still large problems in other forums of entertainment, at least from what little I have done.

 

I do agree that gaming is starting to outgrow it's "boys for toys" roots that was heavily influenced back in the mid 80s and beyond when the consoles came crashing onto the scene.

[Allan Schumacher]

If someone today were to sign up for BSN and post about how they are outraged that they cannot play a dwarf in DA:I people would be very quick to point out that they in fact can.

 

It is their fault for not being aware of all the options in the game.

 

 

Perhaps a better job can be done of moving away from a "default" character, but that doesn't excuse ignorance about all the options available.

 

I'm of the opinion that most people don't even go onto game forums.  I think if we restrict our gaming audience to "those that have the interest in going onto game forums" we start to shoot ourselves in the foot.

 

Further, it's also possible that people don't really frequent game forums of companies of games they have not yet played.  I don't consider it "laziness" I consider it a "fact of life" of selling games to people.  In fact, most people that buy our game simply won't finish it.  Note that this actually doesn't tell us anything more than "they didn't finish the game."  It doesn't tell us "did they like it" even though I could make logical conclusions about whether or not they enjoyed it.

[Allan Schumacher]

In which case the advertising needs to appeal to lowest common denominator in order to get as wide an appeal as possible on a marketing budget.  The perception today is that straight, white, relatively young, male's dominate the market and this group should be advertised to.

 

That demographic is clearly not the only one of significant size, but I am willing to bet that it is still the single largest individual group

 

Moving to PM then.

[Allan Schumacher]

Someone's got to do it right?

 

If you're implication is "someone needs to Devil's Advocate" then I'd actually wager no.  Devil's Advocacy is a tricky thing and it can be all too easy to get caught up in now arguing the position (and it coming across as it being your own position) because of the human brain having a strong inclination to defend itself from being wrong.

 

(Pleasant reading IMO: http://www.cracked.c...-you-think.html though I'd prefer comments about this to come as PMs than to derail the topic further)

[Allan Schumacher]

Trying to expand your demographic is an unsafe strategy?  Funny, because I thought that's how businesses ultimately succeed.

 

Just to note, I suspect (as in, I can't say for certain) that part of the problem in gaming marketing is that it's a big boat that is slow to turn.

There's increasingly more data that shows that, well, old data may not be fair (i.e. looking at a game that featured more female presence that sold poorly and concluding that THAT is why the game sold poorly, as opposed to other measurements), but there's also going to be comfort/safety with the status quo, even if I don't like it and even if it can frustrate me as well.

 

But it's easier for me to say this because ultimately hundreds of jobs don't rely on my decision being the correct one.  I'd like to think that I'd be just as "stick to my guns" about it as I am right now, but I could possibly have different perspectives if I was the studio GM or anything like that.

 

 

As an aside, I disagree that "businesses ultimately succeed" by expanding their demographic.  I think that it's one way to grow, and I think that this sort of stuff is a good way for BioWare (and EA) to grow towards, but I also know products and games that succeed by simply delivering on what their target audience wants.  Many Kickstarter projects do just this, and a game like Eve Online is very successful by focusing specifically on what their audience wants, rather than trying to lure me into the game experience.

[Allan Schumacher]

What I saw him argue when he played devils advocate was

1. Becaude demographics, more male players means other potential demographics should be ignored

2. Because business, poor marketing is the ONLY reason games fail

3. Catering to a wider demographic dilutes focussed marketing

4. Marketing to women can be compared to marketing icecream in Alaska and Rolex watches in Walmart.

 

He should have stayed with his argument of "I am of the opinion that more advertising should go to the different kinds of Inquisitor that there will be, showing off the CC" is actually more reasoned base for his argument against including more marketing to women than the spurious ones he offered as devils advocate.

 

It seems that you're saying "He should have gone with the argument that falls more in line with mine" which seems like a fairly obvious position to me.

 

His attempt at Devil's Advocacy was to try to thought experiment reasons for why this process may not happen, certainly as quickly as we may like.  Unfortunately such decisions don't rely on you (nor even me).  Just know that it's something that I escalate and I know that there are others at BioWare that feel the same way, so hopefully we'll get inertia to help steer the big ship in a direction that we like.  And hopefully it's successful to boot because that'll only speed the process along.

[Allan Schumacher]

As for marketing aspect, I think it's more, for me at least, not expanding the market so much as cluing in the market already there that your games are something a person would want to buy.

 

How many women have commented that they'd only bought games when they realised that they could play as a lady or that the games were something up their alley by word of mouth. I'm sure many more people that are ALREADY gamers, who aren't marketed to, wouldn't know that this was an option for them unless they're informed.

 

I don't know how many have, unfortunately.  Unfortunately, the same arguments I use that the game forum or online community is a poor example of confirming why marketing should target men can be turned around back on me.

 

 

The biggest challenge I see with marketing a product like this is that we don't have controlled experiments with controlled variables (and we likely never will).  So a game will be marketed with a woman in mind, and it will fail to achieve expectations.  This creates all sorts of complications because we can ask:

 

• Were the expectations fair? (and this goes both ways.... would they expect it to be higher or lower... if so is that a problem?)
• What conflating variables exist between this product and a similar product marketed to more to men?  (Are the games still of similar quality? Did they receive a similar support for development?  For marketing?)
• Are there any other factors that would affect game sales?

 

I mean, I'm curious how successful the game would be if we blinked the forums out of existence, and no one that posted here regularly bothered to by the game.  It'd at least be interesting from a "how much of the total fanbase does the community make up?"  How many people would even disappear? (lets say we define "regularly posting" as once a week).

 

 

Because we can't actively experiment in a controlled environment (risk and possibly ethical concerns), those unknown conflating variables will be interpreted by people that have their biases.  If we market more to women and sell as many games as we normally do... was it worth it?  Some would say yes (they'd feel appreciated).  If the cost was the same then I don't think there'd be much resistance.  But even then, if DAI sells about the same as DAO, does that mean that marketing to women is not worth it?  What if most would consider DAI a better game, or even interestingly, a worse game?  But it's hard to tell and one of the only consistent metrics of success is how many people pick up the game.  There are so many factors, in my opinion, that influence that.

[Allan Schumacher]

I understand that business wants to be conservative in the marketing choices they make. But the 'you win we lose' mentality seems a little over the top considering there are other more significant issues that make a game succeed or fail.

Sorry, "you win we lose?' mentality? I think there are a lot of issues that make a game succeed or fail. I'm not privy to all the factors that people consider important. I'm not a marketer, and for the most part the entire marketing profession seems to be a whole bunch of data of "experiements" were too many variables change. As such it's more art than science. But games will succeed and fail that I wasn't expecting, and sure enough there are people taht predict it and go "Well yeah, because of X"

And yes technically, business ultimately succeeds by selling more product, sometimes irrespective of quality, but you can saturate the demographic. There are only so many men and boys wanting to play Bioware games, whilst I'm pretty sure, as evidenced by you Allan at PAX, that there is definitely increasing interest in Bioware games amongst female gamers, I don't see how marketing to them is going to make the game a failure.

This is becoming tangential, but business succeeds by delivering a product or service to enough of a market that they are able to sell that product and turn a profit.

CCP isn't really interested in growing its population base. They seek to keep them engaged so that they keep playing, because it's a recurring income. Kickstarter projects actively seek to constrain their audience size, by building a game that focuses specifically on a subset of the market, rather than growing their market.

Now it's fair to say that BioWare's games are continuing to grow in scope and cost, and in that sense yes we need to grow our audience to keep up. But that's a bit different as there's nothing stopping a company from actively trying to keep their fanbase engaged with future products without seeking to grow. It just means that the company is likely not a growth company.


But as you say, you (and I) can't see how marketing the game to them would make it a failure (depending on how we define the term failure, I suppose... how about we define it as "the game would not see a measurable decline in sales than had the game been marketed more status quo). But, how do we test this? How can we know what influenced the game to have the sales that it did?

So we can't see it. But obviously others don't see it the same way as us. I think what Steelcan was trying to do was to examine why those people can't see it, because ultimately they are the ones that need convincing. Sadly, me going "wow there's a lot of women here" at PAX only makes me stroke my chin and go "Hmmmmmm."

[Allan Schumacher]

I don't really like this whole marketing to women thing being akin to some dangerous scientific experiment at the lab that may or may not cause the whole building to blow up. I know that's not what you're saying, but that's what it makes me think of.
 
So because there are a lot of factors to consider and we don't know what the results will be, does that ultimately mean we shouldn't be bothering doing it in the first place?

NO.  It absolutely does NOT mean that "we shouldn't be bothering doing anything in the first place."  I don't think anyone, not even Steelcan, is saying that.

 

I'm saying we have to KEEP saying it.  I'm also saying that I don't think it's going to turn as fast as we'd like (which is a crappy thing, for the most part....) but I do think it's worth it and maintaining your visibility is important.

 

The only other thing I could realistically think of would be to form a giant coalition of all women that will by the game, and have them wait for some time so that people could clearly see "this is the jump in sales that happened with women."  But that would require you to delay having fun with DAI when it gets released and would probably have logistical challenges that would be nearly impossible to overcome, especially since the internet is the best way to get that widespread appeal but I've already stated my skepticism that the internet DAI community makes up a large enough portion of the fanbase.

 

Unless people had other solutions.  You could twitter bomb Fem!Quisitor images and the like....   But like I said, I'm not a marketer... a lot of this stuff is magical hoodoo to me so what proactive methods are out there that we could take to make it seem more obvious?

[Allan Schumacher]

Well no, that's not the case, his arguments were poorly formed, based on spurious statistics and exaggerations employed as comparisons that were not logical and bordered on insulting.  Just because he's 'thinking out loud' doesn't mean if he says something that we disagree with we can't call him on it.  His argument for marketing to focus on the races and CC rather than more for the fem Inquisitor was far less loaded.

 

I won't dispute that Devil's Advocacy is tricky.  I took our tangent to PM because I had more specific questions about it since I was getting confused with his positions.  But that's also why I responded to the other chap that I don't know if Devil's Advocacy is required to put forth, since I think being effective at it is challenging.  There's also the risk that people will lose track that it's Devil's Advocacy and just ascribe that position to you.

 

I can understand that I am taking a risk by doing so myself, with more recent posts, because I may make mistakes and undermine where people think I lie on this spectrum.

 

And you're right the decisions don't lie with us, but isn't this the feedback and suggestion section?

 

This is.  And its feedback and it can't stop IMO.  I'm not suggesting that it should stop at all.  If people are taking my posts this way, I think there's been a misunderstanding somewhere and perhaps something I said wasn't as clear as I had intended it to be.

[Allan Schumacher]

@ Allan Sorry should have clarified 'you win we lose' as - 'by marketing to women - female gamers feel more included and may want to purchase the game but some other aspect of the game is going to suffer.'

I agree with you. I don't think that including some marketing towards females would have a huge impact probably one way or another. Certainly not that any aspect of the game is going to suffer.
 

CCP? 
 
I'm not a business person, or marketing person, just a lowly bug scientist who likes to play games, so I can't argue against anything you've said on that topic.

 

CCP makes the game, Eve Online.  They target a very specific part of all gamers, and tend not really see huge swings in their subscription numbers (although looking now, in recent years they did see a spike, so I suppose that it's not the best overall example).  But they focus on a particular type of gamer, and are content to not go chasing the larger numbers that a game like WoW once had, okay to carve out their niche.

[Allan Schumacher]

Ah. Okay. I think I got it. Thanks Allan.

 

Anyway I'm not sure all this "data" (which is murky at best) has to be analyzed, experimented with, etc to such an extent just to begin to mildly include an entire other gender.

 

That picture of both Inquisitors posted on facebook seemed to get tons of great feedback, mostly directed toward the female version. So clearly the people who are interested in a female Inquisitor are already in existence. I don't think we'd need to experiment with number of sales of this version versus number of sales of that version.

 

Well, when dealing with large sums of money data will probably always be required.  We best just hope it's accurate and the conclusions that we draw from it are fair to the data.

 

 

And yes, I think the facebook picture is a good thing and I'm glad that a lot of the feedback has been for more female inquisitor stuff.  I think people need to keep asking for that and it's why I have no issue taking part in a thread like this one.

[Allan Schumacher]

I think the difference is that you usually make it clear that you're bringing up a point purely for discussion purposes, not necessarily because it reflects your view.  You can't pretend to be playing Devil's Advocate while just aggressively trying to poke holes in every argument and being contrary for the sake of being contrary.  That's not Devil's Advocacy, that's just pissing people off.

 

Fair enough.  You can feel free to decide that someone was or was not just trying to hide behind the term Devil's Advocate.  I think many do feel Devil's Advocate is akin to be contrary.  I also think that many people (including myself) dislike being called wrong, and I will fully admit that I have effectively argued that the colour black is white (figuratively speaking) because of ego.  To me it's just a reinforcement that Devil's Advocacy is a tricky thing to execute.

[Allan Schumacher]

Okay, nevermind, not taking this discussion.

 

PS: Should I check my oppressive christian cis slave-owner white male privilege?

 

If you're not taking this discussion, why do you have a PS parting shot?

 

Stating that I feel I have a degree of privilege doesn't mean that I feel guilty about being white.  It's simply an understanding that not everyone experiences life the same way that I do, and that in a lot of ways those experiences are, in general, less ideal.

[Allan Schumacher]

But you do feel guilty for being white and male, don't you?

 

I absolutely do not.  Why should I?

 

 

 

 

I know your type.. You say that you ''have a degree of privilege'', which is probably the epitomy of irony (I presume you identify yourself as antiracist) since you seem to believe that you are automatically in a favourable position compared to non-whites, by default, because you are white and male, am I right or am I ''reading far too much'' into a thread with almost 40 pages seriously discussing the gender of a character on a bloody trailer for a video game..

 

I recognize that I can get pulled over by a police officer where I live and that there is a greater chance of me not getting a ticket than if I had darker skin colour.  I recognize that I can openly share my sexual orientation and that hardly anyone (if anyone) is going to say anything about it, let alone judge me for it.  I recognize that I can walk around a comic convention in cosplay and virtually no one will question whether or not I am a legit fan, nor will I get inappropriately touched simply because I'm wearing a costume.  Calgary ComiCon just happened, and one of my friends who is an avid cosplayer (and an excellent one at that) was happy because she was only fondled ONCE and declared it a new record for her.

 

 

I don't feel guilty that I'm a straight, white, male gamer.  I can't control any of that and there's nothing for me to feel guilty about it.  Recognizing the reality that these traits can provide me benefits is simply recognizing reality.

 

That I believe I am in a favourable position has nothing to do with whether or not I feel guilty about it.  I don't think anyone here would get the impression that I feel guilty nor that I should, either.

[Allan Schumacher]

Mobile games don't count.
Sims don't count.

 

I personally do not play Mobile games, and I enjoyed The Sims for about a day or two before going "eh, not for me."  But what I always loved about them (especially The Sims) is that I considered it a Gateway game.  People that wouldn't typically consider themselves "gamers" would give them a try.  Same with Nintendo's Wii (which was a platform I enjoyed for a little bit, but was ultimately glad I didn't pick up for myself).

 

Some of those people will play those types of games, and that's all they want... which is fine.  Some, however, will play those games... and then try out different games.  And now some of those people are lobbying for more games that do things that I do enjoy in games.  I consider this a positive and in general am not against the growth of the gaming industry.

[Allan Schumacher]

I'm not saying an obese indian gay indian female character have to be given justification to be written in. I'm saying a writer should feel free to write the story they had in mind instead of worrying about lobby groups and accountants.

 

If the way for better representation of non straight white males is to have better representation in the people responsible for the production, then that's what we should push for instead.

 

 

 

ARTISTIC INTEGRITY

 

The challenge with this, I've started to learn, is that writers often do want to write this stuff in but it gets vetoed out by superiors.  I remember reading a recount from one of the leads on Sudeki, who shared that he was explicitly told to make a black character whiter as it'd be more appropriate for the "target demographic" (Japan).

[Allan Schumacher]

O___O

 

Please tell me you're joking, Allan. That's completely ridiculous.

 

 

I only have him to take at his word as it was just a commenter on an RPS article.  But to be honest I'm not sure why people would think that it doesn't happen.  It's just not visible to people and I think it's easy for people to go "Hmmm, the people put this out so obviously they are unanimous that this is what they wanted to put out."

 

It's a chap who's handle is "Sheng-ji" so you know what to search for and can be found here and here.  The latter citing the game specifically.

[Allan Schumacher]

That's fair, but I think it's still interesting to read what he has to say.

 

I find the artistic integrity claims to be inconsistently applied, as we were certainly raked over the coals by hinting at it for ME3, but when it comes to wanting to depict more people of a different ethnicity suddenly it's "just let the creator do what they want to do."

[Allan Schumacher]

And why the heck not?

 

Personally I'd like to see women interacting with each other? Is that a LOT to ask for, or... what? 

 

There are situations where the Bechdel test struggles.  A movie with only a single actor, a woman, would fail it by default.  Not saying that a movie like this would (or would not) be feminist friendly.

 

That said I have no major reservations with the test, generally speaking, as it's mostly intended for a quick shoot of the hip and is a pretty low measuring stick.

[Allan Schumacher]

A movie with a single female actor is a directly related problem, in my opinion.

 

I'm referring to a movie that only has a single woman in it, with no men.  I'm not sure if it'd be the same problem.  I imagine it be some sort of survivalist type of story.

[Allan Schumacher]

Oh I see! You mean like the movie Gravity? It was awesome, by the way. 

 

Oh and THAT reminds me - I recently saw George Clooney in some commercial referred to as "THE STAR OF GRAVITY." George Clooney was in that movie for like 20 minutes. The rest of it was solely Sandra Bullock.

 

UGH.

 

I haven't seen Gravity, though I have heard good things about it.  But yeah, something along those lines

[Allan Schumacher]

it's not necessarily the strongest marketing tool in a game where you have so many more choices than female human/male human.

 

I'm not sure if I agree with this.  It's long past now, but I do know that I can easily identify Hawke related art/cosplay and whatnot, which is an association with DA2.  I'm not sure if I feel I can do that with the Warden.  I have to rely on other characters, which may or may not be as ideal.

[Allan Schumacher]

I think that this is true, mostly because they hadn't yet come up with the Iconic Warden look in the first game. Now, that they have the one with the blue and white stripes... if I saw someone in that, I'd immediately know they were in cosplaying a Warden. If they have a motif/sigil/colour palet that's unique to the Inquisitor, then it'd be easy to identify, no matter what race/gender mix they are.

 

I agree that it doesn't require that a face be shown.  I think that DAI's helmet is done the way it is to look unique and identifiable as well.  And the glove/mark and whatnot.

 

I think there's still potential problems though, in that someone could be dressed like a Warden, have a killer moustache, and I go "Oh look Stroud!" and then he goes "No I'm THE Warden " and then I feel bad

[Allan Schumacher]

I hadn't thought of that. Yes, the Warden never had anything 100% uniquely belonging to them.

 

Just to be clear I'm not saying that it's required or anything like that.  Simply that it might still be effective advertising (I'm pretty oblivious to the arcane arts of marketing however, so it's just an assumption on my part)