On Thursday, I went along to the Women in Games talk organised by WFTV. Lots of interesting points cropped up in the panel, which included Kim Blake from Blitz Studios and games-writer and journalist Rhianna Pratchett. The best parts of the conversation were about narrative and storytelling in games, and how the role of the writer is changing– or should change. But where the talk didn’t quite deliver, I thought, was on the titular subject itself, that of women and their role in the games industry, women as gamers and the way that women are represented in games. Having a vested interest in the subject– being both a woman and a gamer– I was disappointed that the panel didn’t engage more deeply on the topic, but not particularly surprised that they didn’t.

Talking about “Women in Games” is sort of doomed to begin with, weighted down with stereotypes and mudslinging and fudged stats and obvious jokes. It was a shame that the panel didn’t really manage to get away from the usual stereotypes: the jokes about cup-size, mentions of Lara Croft (let’s at least update the discussion with your friendly neighbourhood Bayonetta instead) and the weird schizoid reaction that characterises, particularly, women’s responses to question about women in games.

In my experience, the discussion goes something a bit like this.

-Assertion that “women do too game”! Cue reference to stats about women’s gameplay, ie, late 2008 Nielsen report that suggested that women accounted for 46.25 of PC gamers and 54.6% of gameplay minutes in Dec 2008*, or this report that suggests that most social gamers are women.

-Secondary assertion that “and not all games are First Person Shooters, ok?”

-Quickly followed up by “in fact, most games sold in the last [insert timeframe here] aren’t first person shooters”. This tends to be backed up by data on Wii and casual game sales outstripping even incredibly popular FPS titles like Modern Warfare 2 and GTA.

-This gets us into the ‘women are also interested in playing First Person Shooters and traditional shooty, bloody ‘boy games’ ‘. This argument tends to be backed up with lots of anecdotal evidence (look, I’ll give you some myself: I love House of the Dead, and grew up playing Street Fighter II Turbo.) It also quickly seems to devolve into some sort of boy’s club poseuring, with lots of backslapping and hell-yeah’s, and participation in the frankly shameful way that most gamers treat the “casual games” market, as something to be derided and ignored, as in some way ‘not real games’. Well, too bad, the ‘casual/party game’ is probably paying our hardcore gaming rent.

(Besides which– what does “casual game” really mean? Especially in a world where many people spend more time playing so called “casual games” than they do playing, er, “serious” games?)

What’s insane about the way this argument develops is that it almost always begins with the assertion that more women are playing games online, socially and casually, and– in fact– that’s where the games market is still growing, but then fails to actually discuss casual/social/party games. Instead of wearing our gaming proudly, these discussions turn back into whether we’re playing Modern Warfare or Killzone 2 or Call of Duty.

The panel at the event kept mentioning interesting points– like the prevalence of DS’s amongst kids (and other groups traditionally regarded as non-gamers– seniors, for instance), and how that’s affecting the games landscape. A quick look at Play.com’s top selling DS games reveals Peppa Pig, New Super Mario Pros, Puzzle World, Professor Layton and Zelda: Spirit Tracks at the top– not a shooter in sight. Wii Fit is outselling almost every other game in most markets. But somehow, these still aren’t games. How come we’re all (and yeah, the stats say that its not just the ladies!) playing these games but too embarassed to own up to them?

*as an aside, if you’re a TV/social TV buff, it might interest you to note Page 4, which talks about heavy gamers and their TV usage– most gameplay tends to occur around primetime…however, it doesn’t take into account TV watching that is timeshifted/online/torrented.

RPGs: A Step Too Geek?

Another huge omission from the panel discussion– RPGs. Especially if you want to talk about the representation of women in games as well as women gamers. Games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, Fable…all games in which you choose your gender, and interact deeply with characters of different genders/races and origins while mixing action, dialogue and puzzle-based gaming. The discussion about ‘cup-size’ and stereotyping really does take a few knocks when you move from the action/FPS genre to the RPG genre. Not only do RPGs spend more time establishing multilayered characters, they also have a wider range of them, and tend to subvert tropes quite happily. For every hair-whipping, poorly written Bayonetta there’s a scantily-clad but wisecracking, witty Morrigan. Just like all those male FPS protagonists: for every gung-ho, get some, personality-scrubbed Marcus Fenix there’s a ruthless-but-broken Garrus in the RPG world.

Push A Button, Tell A Story

The panel’s discussion shifted to storytelling and we still weren’t talking about RPGs or new kinds of storytelling. We didn’t talk about PS3’s interactive movie/storytelling driven Heavy Rain or Bioware’s scifi epic (that’s arguably halfway between RPG and action-adventure game) Mass Effect or the lovely understated story of iPhone game Spider: the Secret of Bryce Manor. Stories abound in games, just often buried and tangled up and told in ways that don’t necessarily announce themselves so readily. The FPS genre certainly isn’t devoid of interesting story or character. The Left 4 Dead series has always had a strong writerly presence, the completely silent protagonist of Half Life & Half Life 2 Gordon Freeman has a personality despite not really saying a word.

Venturing out from that: gameplay is itself a kind of narrative. Through playing with the story, we create one, and that’s especially true for co-operative and social games– we create as much anrrative as we want, engage with it on the level that makes sense for us. Increasingly, games are coming with inbuilt multiple levels of engagement: Guitar Hero is the perfect example. It can be played at parties with minimal engagement, or with a dedicated group of friends where you play a particular character/style a band/invest in your character’s appearance, personality, song choices, etc. But: even at it’s most ‘casual’ level of gameplay, people play Guitar Hero like they’re rock gods. Overwhelmingly, you play it standing up, rocking out, doing ridiculous moves and mashing on that plastic toy guitar like you’ve been possessed by the ghost of Jimi Hendrix. In your head, if nothing else, you’ve got a story. You’re pretending, at the very least, to be the rock god version of yourself.

Videogames vs. the World

To bring it all back round to embarassment about particular “types” of gaming, and women-in-gaming, it does seem interesting that it’s by and large the games that women, girls, kids and older people play that get classed as “not real games”. Casual games, social games, browser-based/online games, RPGs, sims– these kinds of games are outselling and outperforming even big budget, blockbuster triple-A games, so why are they “not real games”?

Similarly, why does the media treat video games like it’s a strange, threatening spectre that’s distinct from the greater continuum of game-playing? Partially, I think it’s because there’s a tendency in the console-gaming community to isolate itself. But videogames exist in the context of all kinds of games– from hopscotch to solitaire to hide-and-seek and Monopoly. Once you tuck God of War next to Simcity and Pictionary, and start to see them within the same larger cloud of gaming, the place of casual games and puzzle-games suddenly becomes much more clear. They’re not trying to establish themselves as games, they’ve always been games– they’re just arriving a little late to a console near you.

First Person Pretend

There’s a bigger picture here: games are about pretend. About playing house and playing marine and playing rockstar and gangster and princess and gamer-god. They’re about socialising with people online and offline. If you’re playing co-op Team Fortress on XBox Live, then you kinda can’t look down on people playing Scrabulous or Farmville on Facebook, or groups of players joining up to go on a raid in World of Warcraft. We’re all in the same business, hot pink DS’s and black-and-neon-green Alienware PCs nestling side by side as far as the eye can see.