Digital Girls Can’t Jump.
This is a weird article for somewhatnerdy, and for me. First off we generally stay away from these types of topics. I’m no keyboard crusader attempting to advance the species through rapidly typed and reiterated litany. I’m just a Nerd like you probably are and generally I like focusing on the positives in the world of Nerdom instead of bashing on game designers or comic artists (or whoever) for not being up to some standard of social conscience or ethics that I see fit. The other reason this is a strange topic to appear on the site is because it’s about sports games. Sports games are decidedly not nerdy. I love Madden and NBA, and I think I gave myself a rotator cuff problem playing Tiger Woods Golf on the Wii, but that doesn’t change the fact that sport themed games just aren’t something that fits into the world of nerd.
Strange as this topic may be I still decided to address it. Gaming is by definition nerdy and sports games are some of the top sellers. What games like Madden and NBA2k are able to achieve financially on a yearly basis is the envy of every AAA game publisher in existence. From Activision turning COD into a yearly blockbuster to Ubisoft grinding out Assassin’s Creed after Assassin’s Creed it’s pretty obvious that publishers saw what EA was able to achieve with yearly sales and have pulled no stops trying to replicate that in other games, and not just sport related titles. If you’re still not buying my theory of sports games leading the charge just think about this; The first video game ever was Pong, the first national midnight release was Madden, and Fifa brought micro-transactions to consoles.
Sports games have been leading the industry since gaming even became a thing and it’s time for them to make their mark again.
I ask this; How do we expect women characters or female-centric story telling to grab it’s fair share of the market when that same market’s guiding light, sports games, has consistently ignored the fairer sex? Video games are fantasy, be it a swords and knights fantasy or a military fantasy or a fantasy about being an NBA guard, it’s all fantasy. It seems to me that someone, male of female, being able to gun down whole battalions of soldiers single-handed is a bit more of a stretch than *gasp* a girl making it into the NBA. Let me stop before this starts to sound like “one of those” articles, I assure you it’s not. There are much greater atrocities in the world than a young lady not being able to scan her face appropriately into NBA 2k16 (which is an overall broken mess of a game to begin with btw) however it seems like there’s no good reason NOT to do it. I understand that EA and 2k are publicly traded companies and in that situation they are hand-tied into doing the most immediately profitable thing. If not their shareholders, many of whom probably don’t even play games, will go bananas. BUT I think this would be the most profitable thing. How many young girl basketball fans are out there who would absolutely freak out over the chance at being able to put themselves in the NBA? Maybe not enough to immediately justify the addition to the game but over the course of time all it could possibly do is expand the market, and not only that but the first game to do it right will gain a legion of die hard fans.
Ten years ago most people only played Madden. Yeah, you read that right. In 2005 most “gamers” were actually just sports gamers who picked up a couple extra titles a year to stave off time in between their yearly athletic themed game of choice. These were “normal” people (I mean not the typical MTG tossing, D20 rolling nerds) who liked sports and since video games had advanced to the point of giving a fairly realistic depiction of a sporting event they decided to try them out. They may have had a Nintendo growing up or even have had a PlayStation already in their house but it was a casual affair for them with them maybe gaming at a clip of ten hours a week or less.
You may have been one of these people, I have many friends who were, there’s not any shame in admitting that maybe Madden acted as a gateway drug to more hardcore experiences like FPS or RPGs. Over the last decade or so these “sports gamers” have changed. It started with games like Guitar Hero, experiences game that could be played at parties with friends and in short bursts. Then it moved them onto things more like COD, a game that is fast, competitive, and can be played with friends much like Madden or NBA but now everyone could play at once instead of taking turns. You can see this metaphorical person and their evolution as a gamer that I’m describing now can’t you? This is what happened. This is what made gaming what it is today, an industry bigger than Hollywood.
All I’m saying is why not hook the girls in too?
We all know girls are starting to play video games more. We are now in a time where gaming no longer stands behind television or film, it’s leading the charge. The entire hobby itself has become incredibly mainstream for both children and adults yet it still seems like the industry is having a hard time bringing in the female dollar. You can go on Google and type in “female protagonist” and read a wide variety of different articles by women writers who were left unimpressed if not offended. Of course the internet and us writer types will make a mountain out of the smallest of molehills but there is some truth to these claims, which cannot be disputed, and that is that the majority of top selling single player games are male driven power fantasies and most top selling multiplayer games are thoughtless frag-fests, or they are sports related.
To ask why this is the case yields some interesting and honest explanations. One being that the industry was just not prepared for such an increase in interest from potential female customers, another being that most people involved in games production are men. Those are two undeniable facts that are hard to work around, asking a man to craft a female-centric experience is going to go about as well as asking a female to lead production on a traditionally male focused experience. It’s achievable but it’s difficult and a much bigger risk than marketing to an already established base of active customers is. Bottom line on this is that if girl gamers want more girls in games they need more girls in development. In order to get more girls in development they need to get more girls into gaming. How do they do this you ask? How do big companies hook anyone, by dangling a carrot in front of their nose. That carrot is sports games.
I bet some nerdy girl just read that last sentence and choked on her Nutella, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, us nerd girls want a Dr. Who game, not sports games!”. While that may be true these companies don’t care about “nerd girls” or any other cultural niche we think that these products have spawned. They care about money and big money is made by marketing your product to “normal” (in this case meaning non-nerd) people. Much like EA, Activision and 2K hooked a generation of bros, and reeled them into the land of gaming with touchdowns and slam-dunks, the same can be done to increase the interest of possible female customers. They don’t need to start by adding an entirely playable and fleshed out WNBA mode, they don’t even need to tweak the commentary if they want to be really cheap about it in the first year. All they need to do to start is add in a believable female player model and motion capture a handful of female players.
Making a custom female char in NBA 2K16 isn’t going to immediately change the demographic of our hobby but it is going to open that door and lead the way for a new generation of gaming that is much like Hollywood now, where not all films are the same or try to appeal the same people.
