As has been mentioned before, I’m no puritan when it comes to sex in my entertainment. I love me a good chain mail bikini, and I think it’s possible to love Bayonetta as much as one loves Batgirl’s new outfit. I’m a sex-positive lefty that’s perfectly happy with my entertainment containing a little jiggle factor, and I’ll fearlessly add it to games I work on as well if I think it’s right for the audience.
And therein lies the rub. It’s quite one thing to say that its okay for a game with a Porky’s attitude towards sexuality combined with a Vallejo sensibility towards what women should look like. It’s quite another to visual realize that it seems to many women that that’s the only thing that’s available on the shelves. It’s not just games – witness the sudden realization one father had when he took his daughter to the comic book store.
Geekdom is shifting, and it’s shifting fast. Two years ago, DC Comics was mocking and stumbling over issues of diversity in their lineup at the time that the Hawkeye Initiative was picking up steam. Marvel, on the other hand, has been crushing it, earning platitudes for its Muslim Ms. Marvel, its black alt-universe spiderman, its black Captain America, and most recently Thor’s recent gender-bending exercise. Some not-very-observant observers called all this the ‘ruin of a cherished art form’. Meanwhile, people who actually know the space observe that Marvel is absolutely crushing it on all fronts right now, including the popularity of the aforementioned experiments, and now DC feels compelled to follow suit.
Why? It’s not because these companies suddenly became altruistic and decided to pursue world peace and an end to the patriarchy. No, it’s because of money. Larger markets means more books and more movie tickets sold. Marvel is currently reaching for markets that have been ignored for years. If DC doesn’t wake up, Marvel could own these spaces for a nerd generation to come.
The truth of the matter is that the champions of diversity are going to win for one simple reason – money. As technology advances, the cost of creating the content for your average video game is simply going to keep going up, faster than the size of the audience that will buy that game. It’s not just games – Joss Whedon doesn’t get $220 Million to make the Avengers unless he can figure out how to put women and children butts in those seats as well.
On the flip side, more women are playing games than ever before. And yes, many of these women are playing facebook and mobile games, but what is capturing the eye of many game executives and designers is that that is shifting as well – MMO audiences used to be predominantly male, whereas now that split is narrowing, and at least one major single player hardcore geek genre – the RPG – reportedly at parity tipping towards the ladies. Yes, console ownership still slants heavily male, and many genres still are dominated by men – League of Legends, for example, is 90% male. However, progress in other genres has raised eyebrows and questions – could a MOBA with a less threatening environment and less revealing character art carve off its own niche?
So it’s not only about fear of rising budgets – although reducing risk has a lot to do with it. Just from the greed side alone, potentially doubling your audience (or greater, once you factor in reaching for other marginalized groups!) starts to turn into big rewards. And if you can reach that audience without making decisions that trample over your core artistic vision or alienating your existing baked in userbase, why wouldn’t you?
None of this is to say that the best old stuff is going away any time soon. There is at the movies, always room for Porky’s, not to mention all the films by Tarantino– and thank God for that! Similarly, the stockholders of Take Two, EA and Activision aren’t going to be happy if GTA, Madden and Call of Duty all suddenly turn into interactive versions of the Notebook. But if we can get a wider breadth of variety out of the rest of the games, and also increase the visibility of those games in marketing and the media, then perhaps we can actually broaden gaming’s reach even more, invent some new game genres, and actually add some stability to what is a very turbulent place to work.
BleedingCool has a monthly column where they count up the male/female ratio on released comics by Marvel and DC. At the end of the year, despite serious gains at mid-year, they were both still hovering at about 10% women creators, the vast majority of which were editorial, and of those, mostly junior editor jobs.
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2015/02/27/gendercrunching-december-2014-year-review-big-two/
Definitely a fair point in regards to hiring; however, I didn’t see anything in this article that talked about hiring, but discusses the consumer / audience. I think that hiring and retaining diverse talent becomes a very different discussion.
The point that I got from Damion’s discussion is that there is a large audience that the corporations are looking to go after…and it is inevitable that they will be going after that audience. I would agree with the sentiment 100% since the whole purpose of a corporation is to make money, they will chase it if they think they can make good margins in the process. That is what they are seeing…the audience for heavy titillation, while not insignificant, isn’t nearly as large as the audience that is growing for more diverse content; so they are going to chase after it.
And this has played out before. The Playstation was marketed towards the adult gamer which was previously ignored, and it put Sony on the console map immediately. That was a different play on diversity (age in that case).
You get more female creators, you get the potential for more comics that appeal to women and girls.
Same goes for video games. It’s not a guarantee, because women are potentially just as bad at creating content as men, but it’s still true in both cases.
A MOBA with less T&A would definitely be a success, at least from my personal experience.
My friend was a big PvP player in MMORPGs, which I would guess since many more women play them, are how many female gamers are introduced to non-FPS PvP.
When GW2 went south, and we were looking for something to do until the next big MMORPG hit, we did look at some MOBAs for PvP. The one most like MMORPG PvP, Smite, would have fit the bill, as it was 3D, WASD, and very, very fluid. But the T&A was just over the top (buts wiggling, female heroes winking to the camera etc.), and my friend said she just couldn’t play it.
Heroes of the Storm might be fill that niche, but it is rather simplistic.
I’ve always found this narrative about Marvel being progressive and leading DC forward, and as a result falling into riches to be hilarious in how much of a lie it is.
Historically DC has always led Marvel when it comes to gender and racial diversity. If we are counting books by the protagonists gender and culture than DC was ahead with titles like Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, Catwoman and Batwoman. Thats not even taking into the diversity of the talent. Etc etc since at least the 90’s. Probably longer.
The only difference is Marvel treats their female books as if they are massive successes even when they are not. Marvel comics have overall trended south the last few years, and their books like Ms. Marvel aren’t exactly pushing millions of copies out there.
But comic books aside I am not a big believer that job stability and future financial success is in these “new markets” we’ve never tapped before.
1. Because we’ve catered to women for years now. Females have been buying games for at least the last two decades, and women have probably influenced the mmo and mobile market more than men since at least 2004.
2. Our problems have nothing to do with our consumer base size. Games have done nothing but grow and grow and grow, and yet more studios have failed. Unemployment is practically a seasonal exercise at this point.
The videogame industry has a culture of treating talent as if they are completely disposable and products as if they are essentially worthless. Until that is curtailed games are going to have a problem of job instability, and attracting talent.
“The only difference is Marvel treats their female books as if they are massive successes even when they are not. Marvel comics have overall trended south the last few years, and their books like Ms. Marvel aren’t exactly pushing millions of copies out there.”
Nothing is pushing millions of copies. This isn’t 1981. Ms. Marvel is in the top 3 for digital sales, though.
I’d agree that comics, as such, are largely doomed, though. How much of their value is bound up in the intellectual property vs. how much is due to their ability to put pictures on stapled paper and sell it to Diamond.?
I find these observations spot on. Embracing diversity has lead to improving sales of comics.
This blog on WSJ: . describes an overall comic sales increased 4.03% in 2014 with graphic novel sales bumping up 5.18% over the previous year. Speaking directly to the question of diversity: the new, female Thor was sixth best selling comic of the year and Image’s Saga took four of the ten best selling GN slots. In a separate article () Marvel editor Sana Amanat mentions that the new Ms. Marvel series, featuring a Pakistani American teen girl in the lead role, is that publisher’s best selling title.
The TBP of Ms. Marvel’s first story arc beat out The Walking Dead on the NYT bestseller list. I find that pretty impressive.
While number of comics sold have trended down since 1997, dollar sales started to rebound in 2003. Granted, the average price of a comic has increased more than a dollar from 1997 to 2014, but it’s still nice to see them bring in more money. (See for all sorts of interesting ways to dissect sales numbers.)
There isn’t some massive SJW conspiracy to embrace diversity in any business, IMHO. It’s just good business sense.
I never really got into the Superhero comics.
Living in the UK and growing up through the 80’s my main comic source was 2000AD. Typically male dominated, although it wasn’t uncommon to have strong female characters included as well.
Within the Judge Dredd storyline, Chief Judge McGruder, Judge Hershey and Psi Judge Anderson all stood out… and while the standard judges uniform was figure hugging they didn’t have to overtly reveal their cleavage to get recognition.
Unfortunately the coverage outside of that core strip was a little more hit and miss with only the ‘Ballard of Halo Jones’ sticking in my memory as a female led story and that a fixed story.
I would much prefer to see the growth of female writers and artists that want to tell stories for an audience that don’t rely on pushing almost-patronising clichés of the existing characters. I’d much rather see a new superhero introduced on their own merit rather than draped in the baggage of existing characters.
But then my tastes are unlikely to go back to superhero comics. I only watch the films because there is such a dearth of good Sci-fi and Fantasy films, the latest run of Marvel and DC tie ins supply that eye candy instead.
I would comment on Japanese manga/anime, there’s a huge variety across the medium (although a cultural bias that does seem to trade in violent misogynistic fan service as well, but I think that is partially due to how diverse and readily incorporated the various strands are). Some of the better Anime (and this shows my personal tastes 😉 ) ‘Ghost in the Shell’ , ‘Cowboy Bebop’, ‘Samurai Champloo’, pretty much anything by Studio Ghibli, are very open to male/ female leads with little to no fan service.
But my graphic intake tends more towards the like of ‘the Walking Dead’ these days. I think the subject material of struggle and survival without the ‘superpowers’ chimes more with a female readership. But I’m sure reams and reams have been written about role-identification and empowerment in media.
I’m sure that Marvel’s success and DC’s falling behind has less to do with this “diversity push” and far more to do with the fact that since 2008 Marvel has been making one of the most successful movie franchises in history, while in the past 10 years DC has only had 2 movies that were major box office successes.* And since every Marvel shared universe movie so that wasn’t an ensemble has starred a cis straight white male, I don’t think diversity has anything to do with it. On the other hand Marvel’s most recent movie did star a white dude, a green woman, a gray skinned man with a social disability, a talking raccoon, and a walking tree. Hard to get more diverse than that.
For both companies, comic sales are a drop in the bucket in terms of their revenue stream, and have been for decades. The real money is in movies, TV shows, video games, and, most of all, toys. Things like the female Thor are probably mainly publicity stunts to promote the brand, but that’s been standard practice in comics from the beginning.
* The Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises, as you probably guessed. A general rule of thumb is that a movie has to make back its production budget with the domestic gross for it to make a profit after things like marketing money and the smaller cut from international theaters are taken into account, so Batman Begins and Man of Steel probably made small profits by Hollywod blockbuster standards. Certainly there were several reports that Man of Steel failed to meet the studio’s (totally unrealistic) box office expectations.
I heartily wish the outcome of all this cultural war were just more diversity in games, more games catering to all genders, more games created thinking on women, PoC (I must disclose, I am Latino myself). However, I think that won’t be so simple.
This article by Leigh Alexander, cites Raph Koster on online communities, stating that: “Given a limited population, over time, not only will we [form] groups that are like us, but the larger group will exterminate the other one”.
I don’t wan’t the call-out culture, that considers me not a person with feelings, experiences, personal history, but some sort of awful mythical bowl of potentially poisoned m&m’s, to take over and exterminate geek cultures. I don’t want them to dictate what is admissible and what is not, to justify libeling people who dissents from their worldview like they did to Brad Wardell. I still like Ivy’s revealing costume. I still play some Japanese doujinshi games. Will they discover that and when I become a nuisance to them, try to doxx me, try to make my bosses fire me from my job, try to paint me as some sort of dangerous person?
I want to be free to play and create whatever I want. I want a world where Depression Quest, Dragon’s Crown, Soul Calibur, Revolution 60 could coexist, where nobody has the right to judge or sic mobs on another people just for a difference of taste. Both channer, everything-is-right-if-its-worth-some-lulz culture and extremist call-out culture are obstacles to that, and terrible candidates to be the culture that takes over the global community of the Internet. But what will replace them?
I have no problem with companies meeting market demand. If there is enough female comic/game fans then sure there should be products targeted with them in mind.
What I have a problem with is activist using popular media to try and push a social message. Whatever the message may be. For example I saw a very old batman show from the 1940s. In the show the bad guys are referred to as ‘dirty japs’, ‘slant eyes’. Batman ended up defeating the ‘dirty japs’.
Propaganda in media, to include comics, is not new. It was wrong then and is wrong now when it is done.
Now, I do not consider making captain America black to be propaganda. I do however notice when comics or games try to push a sly social narrative.
So I assume you object to Obsidian pushing anti-Trans propaganda as part of their social agenda? Great! I also oppose Obsidian pushing anti-trans propaganda as part of their social agenda. “Ha-ha people who have sex with people like you want to kill themselves afterwards” is a very strong political statement, especially when phrased as a joke. Imagine the reaction to it if it had been “found out they slept with a gamer / so they killed themself” instead.
1940s Batman didn’t contain a deliberate social message, I don’t think — it contained what people thought at the time, which happens to have been very racist. This wasn’t propaganda; this was just a product of a racist time. If Batman had said “No, Robin, don’t call them that. They’re people, just like us,” then THAT would have been a social message, and one I would strongly approve of. (And not including racial slurs in the first place, in a time where they’re commonplace, is ALSO a social message I would approve of.)
Every story pushes a social narrative by normalizing what happens in the story. That’s what stories do, and I’m sure there’s an anthropologist somewhere that’s argued that that’s part of what stories are FOR.
Well another line in the show was ‘our wise government confined them in camps’. Them referring to Japanese americans, the show was the very definition of social propaganda. It recently aired on TMC, you can find it if your so inclined.
Also I did not give an example of modern propaganda, which is my fault. So for example I often notice that DC seems to only show republican presidents in a bad light in their comics but dem pres as ‘good guys’. I’ll admit I have not really dug into that to see how true it is, but I do remember Nixon/Reagan being ‘bad’ and carter/Kennedy/Clinton shown as ‘good’.
Admittedly you don’t see real world presidents pop up in comics much now.
But it is an example of propaganda.
At any rate, at the end of the day, I think most liberals are good people and that most conservatives are good people. But I think these people (especially liberals) can be blinded by their moralistic politics.
Just my point of view.
True; I wasn’t arguing that the Batman comics didn’t carry a social message, I’m just not sure whether it was a social message because they were trying to push a point, or a social message because it was the accepted wisdom of the time. I suppose the distinction isn’t particularly important.
Which is to say, social messages stand out as social messages the further they are from whatever your cultural norms are. And there are a lot of different cultural norms within a country; for a fairly extreme example, consider the amish. For a more common example, democrats vs republicans. If you, yourself, are a Republican, then the times when republican presidents are treated poorly will stand out to you in a way that treating democrat presidents poorly won’t — it will feel like a social message when they’re portrayed poorly and won’t feel like one when they’re treated well. I know of someone who sends out a humour mailing fairly regularly, and bashes both democrat and republican politicians on a fairly even basis: he’s been accused of being a crazy left winger and a crazy right winger based on the *same mailing*. Everyone who reads anything reads it through their personal cultural lens.
Saying “I don’t want to see social messages” can often be interpreted as “I don’t want to see messages I disagree with” — because those are the ones that stand out. It’s an understandable reaction: social messages that contradict closely held beliefs can have VERY strong emotional reactions.
Which isn’t to say that all social messages are equal, but those that aren’t are usually objected to for reasons OTHER that that they’re social messages. The problem with the Batman you referenced wasn’t that it took a position on the Japanese internment camps, but that it took a racist, xenophobic and authoritarian one. The problem with Obsidian’s anti-trans social message is that it is … well, a joke about how people would rather die than have sex with another group of people. It’s hurtful, and also unnecessary to the story or the world. (Really, almost any joke of the form “This person got drunk and had sex with X. Then they killed themselves because of it.” is going to be hurtful towards X, even if its intended target is the suicidal bigot. (Note that I don’t believe Obsidian (or even specifically the joke-submitter) are particularly anti-trans themselves — it’s quite possible to say dumb shit without meaning to, after all — but a lack of hurtful intentions doesn’t eliminate the hurt.) )
The only way to avoid social messages altogether is to be actively irrelevant; avoid anything that references any scrap of reality. Maximum abstraction. Tetris is pretty safe, I guess. Puzzle games in general can avoid a narrative. Not all of them do, but most of them can.
Trevel, you equate not wanting to see social messages as not wanting to see messages you disagree with (which I agree with, just to make clear). But you seem to disregard this point in your next paragraph. Maybe it’s overly morally relativistic of me, but aren’t anti-racism, anti-xenophobia and anti-authoritarianism beliefs you hold strongly? By your own logic, it’s only natural that you have a strong reaction against a conflicting message; would you argue that such messages ought to be silenced, or do you think people should be able to tolerate messages they disagree with, no matter which beliefs they hold?
More on-topic, although I don’t tend to read western comics, this reminds me a lot of what I hear about the supposed future of video games – from both sides, mind you. When I look at my favorite games, some have are quite diverse, and some are completely homogeneous. Some have all-male casts, some all-female, others with equal or unequal distributions. What ties them together is that I consider them good games. I think a good game can be made with any sort of cast. That’s why it bugs me when people seek to constrain who exactly games can be made by, for, and about. But it also bugs me when people make games, for example, solely for the purpose of being diverse. Sometimes it reeks of tokenism. Other times, the games are just plain bad – but if I dislike it, then I’m assumed to be against diversity in games.
Of course, what makes a game enjoyable is largely arbitrary, but my point isn’t that I want developers to cater to my taste (well, in a perfect world…). I just want them to avoid diversity for diversity’s sake or lack of diversity for the same reason. A painting can be a message, sure, but sometimes you also want it to be something you can hang on the wall. I want games that are actually games.
Still, I wouldn’t hold it against any developer that went either way, especially if it’s in the hopes of attracting a larger audience. We all have to make money somehow, and my backlog is so large I doubt I’ll be in need of any new games for a long while anyway.
My point was that the objection was to the CONTENT of the message, not that there was a message there in the first place. There’s a significant difference between “I don’t want [media] to contain political messages” and “I don’t want [media] to advocate raping babies”. (I am not aware of any media that does that; just trying to pick a message that hopefully everyone will agree with.)
Which is to say, the anti-political-messages people are either deluded or disingenuous: they either believe that their media contains no political messages (while it does), or they know that the messages they’re objecting to aren’t ones they want to openly oppose, so they pretend that they’re objecting to the PRESENCE of ANY message.
Note that feminist groups are generally quite open about which messages they object to: racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic. And yes, I generally agree with those values, for multiple reasons. Asking whether I think they should be silenced is somewhat disingenuous, since most “silencing” is of the “Hey, that was transphobic/sexist/racist/whatnotist” and then then the creators go “Oh, you’re right, that’s totally not what we meant to do, let’s fix that” and then completely unrelated people throw fits over what was a completely reasonable conversation and decision. That’s not censorship, that’s listening to your customers and not being a jerk.
So yes. I think some messages should not be in most media. I’m willing to say what those are and defend my choices. I don’t think the government should be involved any more than absolutely necessary, and I don’t think it’s necessary at all because I think most creative companies are either smart enough to realize that being offensive to a large portion of the market is foolish, when they’re already not wanting to avoid being offensive because they’re not jerks.
And yeah, good media of almost any sort can be made with any cast — but since we’re still making 90% white male media, maybe we can switch it up a bit?