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Are you a boy or a girl?

Boy
Total votes: 147 (94%)
Girl
Total votes: 9 (6%)
Total votes: 156
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#91
Katawa wrote:Garrus, let's dance.
Shepard Shuffle, anyone? Image Anyway, I usually pick a female character as well. This is for:
a) DWMagus' reason
b) I am not, nor do I ever plan to be, one in real life. Living vicariously is fun!
c) Variations on DWMagus' reason

Except for Pokemon and a few others, then I was always male. I guess I just go back and forth in games. :roll:
“All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost." - J.R.R. Tolkien
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#92
Katawa wrote:This poll clearly should be have been:
[ ] broshep
[ ] femshep
Totally.
Linialomdil wrote:Anyway, I usually pick a female character as well. This is for:
a) DWMagus' reason
b) I am not, nor do I ever plan to be, one in real life. Living vicariously is fun!
c) Variations on DWMagus' reason
Image I think this is the most off topic a thread has gotten while technically staying on topic. :P
Image
Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#94
DWMagus wrote:
Linialomdil wrote:Anyway, I usually pick a female character as well. This is for:
a) DWMagus' reason
b) I am not, nor do I ever plan to be, one in real life. Living vicariously is fun!
c) Variations on DWMagus' reason
Image I think this is the most off topic a thread has gotten while technically staying on topic. :P
And we wonder why there aren't more females here :roll:
- The Snark Knight

"Look upward, and share the wonders I've seen."
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#96
Lum wrote:Because they don't want to speak freely about these topics? You get a bunch of women talking about hot men just the same we do. But normally those women don't like to play videogames, they go shopping or something else. That's stereotyping for you. But it's also representative. Some things don't change overnight. ;)
Holy baseless conjecture, batman!
woops, my bad, everything & anything actually means specific and conformed
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#97
Lum wrote:Because they don't want to speak freely about these topics? You get a bunch of women talking about hot men just the same we do. But normally those women don't like to play videogames, they go shopping or something else. That's stereotyping for you. But it's also representative. Some things don't change overnight. ;)
There was this one girl that liked shopping so much that on one trip to the shopping centre her boyfriend couldn't take it anymore and threw himself to his death, haha. Link!

O lawd, it was a shoe shop she wanted to go to as well.
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#99
Hyperion wrote:This is a MAAAN'S procedurally generated multiverse , but it wouldn't be nothing without a... dedicated man...
I hear what you did there. :)

So let's get specific: what game features do you folks think would attract more of the distaff sex to Limit Theory, and to this Limit Theory forum?

I don't think it's fair to ask people to answer that question, knowing that answering honestly could provoke personal criticism, without risking it myself. So here's my answer: human avatars and tamable pets.

To put it more generally: personal stories and nurturing relationships. Is that a generalization? Yes -- but it's one based on some years of observation and analysis of aggregate personality types and MMORPG features and players. The games that attracted a higher proportion of female players have been the ones that modeled people (e.g., The Sims) and that allowed taming and raising creature pets (FarmVille, Star Wars Galaxies).

So far, Limit Theory -- from Kickstarter to Prototype through the multiple Update Videos -- has appeared to be about space, computer graphics programming, ship models, shooting other ships, functional shopping, technology/research, a node-based user interface, scanning things, mining, and economic theory. Notice the rather distinct lack of "stories" and "people" and "relationships" in that list.

None of that is intended to be a criticism. LT is what it is. This is an observation that if you could create a list of things that men tend to like in computer games, and things that women tend to find attractive, the former list would probably come closer to the list of features I cited for Limit Theory so far.

Assuming that analysis is tolerated, how could it be used? I don't expect Josh will be adding creature pets or avatars to LT 1.0. But there's one possibility I can see, and that would be to strongly emphasize the NPC AI's ability to enable emergent stories. Being able to make friends for a long time with a particular NPC, and for all NPCs to communicate goals and beliefs and emotional states (beyond mere competitive utility) to the player's character and each other, and then for those other NPCs to act plausibly based on that information... if that kind of thing were emphasized through gameplay features, and if those features were highlighted and dramatized in an update video, then I would bet that you'd see a meaningful increase in the number of women expressing an interest in Limit Theory.

Again, I express no opinion here on how I believe anything "should" be or about the behavioral preferences of any individual man or woman; this is my opinion on how I think things are regarding sex-based behavioral predisposition patterns in large numbers of people. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#100
Flatfingers wrote:I don't expect Josh will be adding creature pets or avatars to LT 1.0. But there's one possibility I can see, and that would be to strongly emphasize the NPC AI's ability to enable emergent stories. Being able to make friends for a long time with a particular NPC, and for all NPCs to communicate goals and beliefs and emotional states (beyond mere competitive utility) to the player's character and each other, and then for those other NPCs to act plausibly based on that information... if that kind of thing were emphasized through gameplay features, and if those features were highlighted and dramatized in an update video, then I would bet that you'd see a meaningful increase in the number of women expressing an interest in Limit Theory.
Sheesh Flat, now you tell me. I thought we were getting all of that as a standard part of the Limit Theory experience. No wonder Mr Parnell goes quiet when I ask him about how he intends representing graphically those who become important in our LT game lives. I just wanted to have similar relationships to those I experienced in Mass Effect. Or those knowing relationships I had with NPC's in Freelancer where I tended to seek out a character several times for missions because she (almost invariably a female) would greet me with a "good to see you again" line of dialogue. I would have warm fuzzy feelings and would do my best not to let her down by accepting another crap mission just so I could return to someone who seemed to care. It came as a real blow to find LT would be devoid of that part of Freelancer. I can live without tribbles and I've seen enough pet simians to last me a lifetime but I need my in game emotional fix of companionship with human souls.
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#101
I reckon a good start would be:

Not talking about female characters as if they only exist to be looked at by horny male gamers;

Not talking about female gamers as if stuff like "pets" and "stories" is something only they are are interested in because of their girl gamer chromosomes.

Women like shooting stuff too you know. They play CoD and SimCity and Left 4 Dead and Fallout. And the males of the species like stories and "pets" and whatnot - or at least, some do.

Let's presume that women are human beings, and that appealing to "women" is just like appealing to "men" - you can't actually do it because some women like space games and some women don't, just like some men like space games and some men don't.

For the parts of the game where "gender" is important, let's just try to get to an equal split so that people who want to play as one or the other can do so (or even, include nonbinary-friendly options so that people can go with both/neither if they want). For the rest of it, let's presume that girls who want a kickass space game will want it just as much as boys, and that "appealing" to them via some gendered mechanism is, well, a bit patronising really.
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#102
McDuff wrote:Not talking about female gamers as if stuff like "pets" and "stories" is something only they are are interested in because of their girl gamer chromosomes.

Women like shooting stuff too you know. They play CoD and SimCity and Left 4 Dead and Fallout. And the males of the species like stories and "pets" and whatnot - or at least, some do.
I don't think it's unfair to argue that women and men on average tend to value different things within games the most and therefore a game can be made more popular among a particular gender by featuring content that appeals to what the average member of that gender group values most. Especially when it's backed up with research [1] [2].

That being said I would really love space-pets!
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#103
That's pushing the very edge of the limit of what I'm prepared to consider "research" there.

Given how difficult it is to cohesively and accurately even decide what we mean by "gender" these days, claims to have decisive research about differences between them, even on average, need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

People are complex. If you're marketing to the demographic "people who like in depth space sim games," I'd suggest that's already a niche enough category, and the variance between "girls who like space sim games" and "boys who like space sim games" isn't going to be very broad at all. Talking down to people by saying "oh you can have a space pokemon (if you're a girl)" is going to piss off the girls who like the shooty bits and the boys who like the space pokemon.

Don't gender stuff that doesn't need to be gendered.
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Re: Forum demographics (Horrible Stereotyping)

#104
McDuff wrote:Given how difficult it is to cohesively and accurately even decide what we mean by "gender" these days, claims to have decisive research about differences between them, even on average, need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
I can't speak from anything but personal experience, but pretty much everyone I know seems to be cis-gendered and consider themselves either male or female. If this pattern holds over the larger population, research that considers people to fall into either one or the other category should still be fairly valid even if there are a few complex outlier cases.
McDuff wrote:Talking down to people by saying "oh you can have a space pokemon (if you're a girl)" is going to piss off the girls who like the shooty bits and the boys who like the space pokemon.

Don't gender stuff that doesn't need to be gendered.
Well you don't have to do that. You just identify the kind of gameplay that research shows that particular gender groups enjoy and you implement that in the game. You don't need to say "We've included this gameplay to appeal to gender group X". If you find that girls like space pokemon, you incorporate that into Limit Theory if you think it would fit without explicitly stating that it's a feature designed to primarily appeal to girls. If girls like shooty-stuff, they're happy. If boys like shooty-stuff, they're happy. If girls like space pokemon, they're happy. If boys like space pokemon, they're happy.

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