Reply To: Out of touch view of young gamers

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

[More long, but hopefully not boring. Please bear with me. Or just ignore this. You do not need to tell me it is long. Yes, I see that. Really, I do.]

I teach human evolution in a biology department, so I’m pretty up-to-date on the state-of-the-art of the “nature vs. nurture” debate. The best and largest consensus is that human behavior is an amalgam of biological, cultural and environmental factors, which feedback and reinforce each other.

But there is a large biodeterminist minority coming out of ev psych which seeks to explain absolutely everything in human behavior as the result of genes, generally completely ignoring the fact that genes express according to the environment and that culture is humanity’s most important environment. Usually these guys will tell you such things as “human sexual behavior is determined by evolution”, ignoring the massive, radical, eminently observable changes in human sexual behavior that have taken place over the last hundred years… let alone the last 250,000.

For some reason, the Men’s Rights Activists love these sorts of biodeterminist arguments, largely I think for the good and classic reason outlined by Steve Gould decades ago: if gross inequality is written into one’s body, then calls for social change are utopian in the extreme.

Obviously, if one is a member of a class, caste, or other social group that has privileges and one is loathe to see these transformed into rights (because rights, of course, water down the efficacy of privilege), biodeterminist arguments become very attractive. This has always been the case in Western history. At moments when new subjectivities arise, traditional groups seek to protect privileges through biodeterminism.

You could see this happening all over the Gamergate scandal last year.

The fact of the matter is this: women are getting into gaming, computers and new digital technologies in a HUGE way. Just ten years ago, digital communications tech, the internet and what not was still very much a man’s world. The advent of tablets and smart phones has vastly leveled that playing field, almost overnight. Here in Brazil, for example, only 25% of the users of the internet and digital communications technologies were women ten years ago: now women are in the majority.

In only ten years. Explain that behavioral shift in biochemical determinist terms! 😀

And with that shift, women are really moving into on-line entertainment and gaming in a big way. About half of video/computer gamers are now women, believe it or not. And the market is noting that shift.

Sure, they’ll still make “guy’s games”, just like there are “guy’s films”. But up until ten years ago, that was pretty much all there was. “There are no girls on teh internet” was still a meme not even FIVE years ago.

And plenty of girls like shooters, strategy games, fighting games and etc.

So, once again, what was “a man’s [boy´s] world” is being forced to cater to new subjectivities. And it’s not due to censorship or government: it’s simply the market reacting to behavior shifts, as per usual.

If you’re a gender studies scholar, like me, you’ll notice that a lot of the same old rhetoric is being recycled these days. This crap about “boys being confused about what it means to be a man” and thus supposedly “drifting off into [this year´s moral panic]” is literally as old as mass culture. You can go back to the 1900s and see the exact same sort of arguments that Phil Z. is using being mobilized to explain the need for the Boy Scouts, the YMCA and Boys’ Camps. Often it is the exact same language.

There’s always Big Trouble Right Here in River City when the women move, en masse, into a part of the culture that was once supposedly the exclusive purview of men.

The rhetoric is always the same: loss of “real male role models” push boys towards delinquency and sexual deviance, needing the strong guiding hand of [your favorite moral entrepreneur here], duly empowered with grants (and maybe a few strategic laws) to get things back on track. And it’s always supposedly because men can’t change (in spite of the obvious, observable, empirical fact that men HAVE changed, a hell of a lot), bless their natural cavemen hearts.

And that’s why I am generally very skeptical of “just so” stories about gender which casts male and female behaviors as indelibly written into genes and biochemistry. This sort of thing has been said time and again, and always at moments of crisis when women are pushing into male-dominated spaces. And it is always, inevitably, wrong. It is quite easy to see this: just think of women’s sexual behavior in our mothers’ day and today: it is very different. Human behavior is extremely flexible. That is, of course, why we are such a successful species: we are culturally programmable and cultural change occurs much, much quicker than biological evolutionary change, allowing us to adapt with a speed no other species can match.

But what I find the most ironic of all in this state of affairs is how the ev pysch crowd and their MRA followers is in fact moving against the grain of biology in general.

Over the last twenty years, it has increasingly become recognized that animal behaviors are much more complex and variable than we ever believed before. The idea that animals are little robots running on instinct and instinct alone is being challenged all across the field. Hell, even National Geographic is doing articles about it.

And it is precisely at this moment that biology is opening up to the idea that genes and chemistry aren’t mechanical programing than the ev psych crowd wants us to believe that human behaviors are rigidly deterministic and coded into our genes.

This kind of view of women and gaming is pure venom for our hobby. Here is why…

Some twenty years ago, when the Great Comics Boom collapsed, Marvel employee Heidi McDonald wrote an excellent article for The Comics Journal entitled “You guys need to get laid”. In it, McDonald criticized the “chromium age” fixation with male superheroes, pointing out that it was comics’ ignoring half the population of the planet that ultimately put an end to the heyday of Muscled Men in Tights, taking a thriving hobby industry along with it.

Unfortunately, the only digital copy is behind a paywall at The Comics Journal, But here’s Heidi’s main point:

Once there had been comics for girls in the United States — just as schlocky as the comics for boys, don’t get me wrong — but existent and well distributed… Romance comics, all the Littles, Audrey, Dot, whoever, the models, the Archies… By the late ’70s they’d all crawled off into the bushes to die…. Marvel and Dc had given up on the newsstand, casting their lot with the Local Comics Shop system, where the only people they had to sell to were retailers and it was the retailers’ job to get the customers into the store to buy something.

And that’s where our troubles began. It doesn’t take a complete genius to realize that entrusting your sales to an untrained, obsessed and unreasonable sales force might not be the wisest plan. Because this sales force was only interested in selling things the LIKED. And what they liked was almost always superheroes….

[During the Chromium Age], survey after survey showed that only 5-10% of the comics readership was female…. Yet back in the ´50s, when more girl-specific and general interest comics were available, the female readership was 55%.

The dearth of contemporary women comics readers was also puzzling, given that so much of the book reading market is female. Women make up 45% of the SF readership and 55% of the horror readership. Obviously, women like to read and they like their genre materials…. Where did [the women comics readers] go? Why did they stop?

Could it be that women read comics when there were comics that were suitable for them to read?

Now, again, I’m sorry this is long, but I find it interesting and maybe you will too. Heidi then goes on to say that when she tried to get Marvel interested in diversifying comics, she heard some of the EXACT SAME biodeterminist arguments we are now hearing about women and gaming. Down to the very phraseology and appeals to “science”:

“Comics for girls!” I suggested. “Women have different visual perceptions,” I heard. “Women just don’t like the comics format,” I was told over and over and over, always by men in the comics business.

“But women read comic strips!” I pointed out.

“Oh, those are different,” I was always told. (Yeah they’re different. They´re aimed at a general audience. Duh!)

I heard all the reasons women didn’t like the comics medium so often I realized that it was dogma. For some reason, it was very important for these men to believe that women just weren’t interested in four-color fantasies.

During this same period, while on my travels around this great nation of ours, when I went into a comics shop, I would look for Disney Adventures. Usually I’d find it, but sitting in a very small, neglected children’s section that might have been set up by Jimmy Hoffa or Judge Crater.

“Don’t you want kids as customers?” I would ask.

“Well, I don’t really think kids in the store is right for my business,” I would be told.

No women or children — even as CUSTOMERS!

(You’ll recall that customers are those folks who come in and spend money: most retailers take quite a shine to them.)

Was this a business or the latest incarnation of the gentlemen’s club, where beleaguered bacon-winners could relax with brandy, a fine ccigar and a copy of Batman, far from the stress of home and hearth?

If there is one thing I’ve learned [from all this], it’s that once a fanboy, always a fanboy. Give the inner fanboy an inch and he’ll take a mile… even if it means cutting his own throat from a business standpoint.

Once again, I’m sorry for the length of this post. But I think Heidi very nicely summarizes why niche geek markets are often subject to masculine domination: it has nothing to do with “female biochemistry” and EVERYTHING to do with fanboys.

Roleplaying games got out of this rut with Vampire and World of Darkness. It looks like finally, hallelujah, videos games are starting to look at the possibility of taking a similar path.

If we want miniatures gaming to survive beyond 2030, we are going to seriously need to look at not only making games appealing to the young, but to women as well. And that is not going to happen if we keep telling ourselves just-so stories about how women are “biologically wired” to not like miniatures games.

And that, dear friends, is why I am so verbose about this point.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!