What seems like an important change within
a male-dominated industry apparently is a
motivation for some to make the lives of
females working in this multibillion-dollar
industry a living hell. Nevertheless, these
young female students remain ambitious to
choose International Game Architecture and
Design (IGAD) as a starting point for their
professional careers. This diversity is already
noticeable and will without a doubt be the
fresh change the industry needs.
Until recently, women were quite rare in video games. Both in terms of female
protagonists within video games as they were in the credits. Next to the increase in the
amount of female protagonists in video games of today, female game developers are
popping up faster than LEGO games.
Text RUUD OOMENS Design REBECCA HAMERS
14 THE CONTRIBUTOR
To illustrate the importance of diversity in the
video game industry we need to focus on the
modern gamer. According to Sven Grundberg
from the Wall Street Journal, last year 47%
of all gamers were women. This proves that
solely targeting male gamers is not the way
to go in 2015, and the industry is starting to
recognize this. The last couple of years have
brought a new wave of female protagonists to
games: Lara almost literally returned from the
dead, Faith climbed and jumped off
skyscrapers, and Lightning even got a Final
Fantasy game with her name prominently in
the title. As every gamer has different wants
and needs regarding their video game
protagonist, more and more games are
providing gamers with the opportunity to
create their own character. But it is not just
about appearance anymore. Gamers tend to
seek more and more logic behind the gender
choice than is required. Male protagonists
are often believed to be stronger and female
characters are often believed to be more
agile. Therefore choosing a male or female
protagonist nowadays seems to depend more
on skill and other benefits than it
depends on gender preference.
Still most video game protagonists are male
and researchers suggest that this is caused by
the majority of game developers being male.
When Ubisoft, known for their support of
diverse employees, announced that there
were not going to be any female playable
characters in Assassin’s Creed Unity, they
stated that female characters would simply
cost too much to animate. Critique arose,
from both male and female gamers, which not
only proved that the target audience is almost
evenly divided, but also that that audience
embraces this division. The amount of female
game developers has almost doubled over the
last few years, from 11,5% in 2009 to 22% in
2014. These numbers look promising and will
most likely prevent another ‘Unity incident’
from happening again.
THE CONTRIBUTOR 15