Computer games and sex difference

The suspicion exists that there are not enough computer games being programmed by women for women. Yet women do play computer games.

Introduction: sexism in the making and use of computer games

On the Brighton to London train, women commuters in one carriage are busy. They are playing BrickBreaker, a spatially orientated dynamic puzzle, on their Blackberry personal digital assistants. Blackberries come equipped with BrickBreaker. Women – and men – can now play the game while they are going through railway tunnels, and at the same time take a phone call there. A German mobile communications operator, T-Mobile, has put WiFi in the train carriage, and has provided a whole lot of other connections besides.

With new handheld devices come new games which women play. It is true that most games have, since the mid-1990s, been about shooting or sport – pastimes that, on balance, appeal to men more than women. But as the psychologist Aleks Krotoski has ably pointed out, there is now ‘a loud but proud subculture of women who beat the boys at their own games’. And there are other developments in videogame content that confirm how computer games are not simply a male pursuit:

• Climax’s Shining in the Darkness has offered women the chance to save a princess since 1991
• Creatures, launched in 1996, and The Sims, launched in 1999, have added nurturing to the computer games genre
• Women now lead men in the playing of mobile games.(1)

Yet despite the euphoria that often surrounds the simple fact that women do play computer games, people feel uncomfortable about the issue.

First, it is argued that there are not enough women working in certain roles in the videogame industry: that occupational segregation, or a gender gap, exists in the process of making games. The BBC laments how the University of Derby’s new degree in games programming has failed to attract a single woman among 106 applicants.(2) Moreover, women make up only 16-17 per cent of the UK games sector’s 8000-strong workforce, and only two, three, five, eight and nine per cent, respectively, of posts in programming, audio, design, production and art.(3)

Second, it is alleged that, in use, today’s games products lack appeal to female gamers. As Doug Lowenstein, president of the US Entertainment Software Association (ESA), said in May 2005, at the start of the world’s largest video games show, the E3 expo in Los Angeles:

‘We need a cultural shift so that young girls and women feel that playing games is not a testosterone monopolised [sic] hobby reserved for their boyfriends and husbands’.(4)

These two worries play on each other. Games products, indicted as broadly ‘boys’ toys’, are held to reinforce games industry processes that are skewed toward male, rather than female jobs. There appears to be a chicken and egg problem: men write games that men like playing – games with an emphasis on guns and cars. In turn, such products seem to attract men to the industry and its processes more than women. Where women work in UK games, they tend to be in administration, marketing, story development, production, and in the conceptualising or animating of models through artwork.(5) They are not in programming.

The suspicion exists that there are not enough computer games being programmed by women for women. Yet women do play computer games. In America, for example, teenage girls play with computer games for about five hours a week, even if, with teenage boys, the figure is more like 13 hours.(6) These facts already expose as crude the idea that, somehow, boys simply design games that generate jobs only for boys. Nevertheless, the issue of sexism in the making and use of computer games will not go away.

Since the massacre of innocent children at Columbine High School, near Denver, on 20 April 1999, computer games such as Doom have come to be seen as disposing teenage males to violence, the most extreme form of aggression.(7) Today’s discourse about women and games, then, needs to be seen against a background of a wider culture war against what are seen to be male values. While mobile phones are widely indicted for inspiring adult infidelity, teenage illiteracy, street theft and much else besides, computer games tend to prompt fear about the irredeemably sexist nature of society. Cars still suffer from the stigma of a strong association with men, speed, ego and all that. Feminists have also continued to attack pornography as both a symptom and a cause of women’s subordination to men. Nevertheless, the love young boys have for computer games underlines the special role that games are now felt to play in helping sex society.

Attempts are now being made, in Britain and America, to integrate games into education. In the US, where such efforts are particularly advanced, there are fears that the size of Lara Croft’s breasts will not just put girls off computer games, but off IT as a discipline. Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that, being the first introduction girls have to computers, sexist computer games are partially responsible for the gender gap in the whole of US computer science.(8)

In the UK under New Labour, cultural industries such as computer games software have gained in prominence. At the same time, Conservative leader David Cameron has joined the Equal Opportunities Commission in highlighting the lack of progress Britain has made in properly rewarding women at work.(9) Put these two developments together, and the male/female dimensions of computer games processes and products look likely to remain under the spotlight. Her Majesty’s Government already blames games for encouraging obesity.(10) But computer games will also continue to inspire unusual passions as a potent symbol of, and force for, differences between the sexes – or what some experts term sex difference.

We live in a misanthropic culture.(11) Thus games processes and products appear not just as very deeply sexed, but also as a striking, mass-market monument to the unchangeable character of sexual difference,, and in particular the unchangeable defects of men.. To many, games embody much that is shameful about society. Lara Croft, Germaine Greer has said,

‘is a sergeant-major with balloons stuffed up his shirt… a distorted, sexually ambiguous, male fantasy. Whatever these characters are, they’re not real women.'(12)

It is good to learn that Lara Croft is not a real person. But so long as critiques of computer games remain at such a banal level, women will make no progress. This paper looks at some of the intellectual history that surrounds the politics of difference between men and women and asks four questions:

• Q1: Are the differences between men and women around the making and use of computer games to do with culture, or – as Doug Lowenstein’s reference to testosterone suggests – to do with biology?
• Q2: Are occupational segregation and the paucity of female games programming jobs part of a wider problem of discrimination in engineering, computer science and IT industry?
• Q3: Will games only fully appeal to women if women programme them?
• Q4: Is the playing of game products by women unequivocally a Good Thing?

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