Genders in Gaming Target Audiences.

[Acies]

Spoiler below!

You don't need to write an academic paper about it, just name the traits you have noticed in your own experience and we can determine if they are reality.

Academic Paper

Just finished reading it and was not impressed. I would need to do a quite lengthy analysis of it to fully explain why but I'll give you a few bullet points.

• Obviously women and minorities are "misrepresented" in the majority of video games, but is that discrimination or laziness? I argue that it's laziness. I asked a perfectly reasonable question earlier: Do these games even represent white males? Being in a leading role does not necessarily mean you are well written.
  
• Context is king. Yes, I would very well expect a NBA game not to have female characters because it is a men's only league and it makes a lot of sense for it to have more black characters because a whopping 78% of the NBA is black. Otherwise, consider that a game set in the US is likely to have a lower percentage of black people than a game set in some African nation because black people only make up around 13% of the nation. Here's a game set almost entirely in Brazil and lo and behold, it has only one Caucasian leading character. The enemies are mostly non-Caucasian because you wouldn't expect to find a lot of Caucasians in Brazil where they are a minority. Here's another example of that. The game takes place mostly outside of the US, and the enemies are whatever nationality you would expect to find in the country the particular level is set in. I could go on and on listing examples, but this type of arithmetic doesn't jive with me. It goes completely against common sense. Would you be happy if the ratio of ethnicities and genders were all 1:1, even where it doesn't make any sense or is distracting?
  
• The sample is way too small. Top 20 games 2006? That doesn't give you any useful information at all, it can so easily be heavily skewed. To say nothing about the quality of the games they picked. I'm not riveted by most of them, and they are not what most people take seriously. It's akin to doing a study of the most popular stupid movies that everybody hates and which are not the subject of critical analysis. And they even reference a study of NES and Genesis games all the way back in the dark ages of gaming without irony (not to mention suggesting that studies have confirmed that violence and video games are linked - which has been debunked over and over.)
  
• They only played the first 10 or so minutes of a game (or viewed the introductory cutscene) and called it a day. That's extremely poor methodology to me. Not even a fraction of useful information can be deduced from that, and a lot of absolutely non-sexist games would be immediately labeled as sexist.
  
• They imply that video games directly influence people's views and can have harmful effects especially on adolescents. Maybe if you completely immerse yourself in video games so that you literally don't know what reality is anymore and have no upbringing, but that is hardly representative of most people.
  

Just for example.

I was asked to provide a few pointers from personal experience, but managed to find an academic study relating closely to what we are discussing. Obviously any "personal experiences" I would have provided would have met the same demise as the statistical data just presented before you :] Well, I am not arguing wheter the reason is discrimination or 'laziness' (which seems like a straw-man's attempt at an argument, but anyway) I am just arguing that:

I believe the gender of a person has influence on the artistic work they produce (and by an extension to this thread: a group of females would produce a different type of game than a group of males).

To quote your words:

Obviously women and minorities are "misrepresented"

Which is why I'd argue that such a misrepresentation would not exist in a game created by a group of females. I'd believe there would be more variations than that, but at least this variation can be factually proven (and actually admitted to being existing in your eyes).