I tried to break out of the gender box earlier yesterday, the second day of the Women's and Austin Conference by attending a couple of sessions in the Austin conference's Massively Multiplayer Online Game design stream. I was, quite frankly, horrified. Oh how pleased I was to return to the preserve of the much more grown-up women's conference, where double entendres, in-jokes and a lack of lateral thought were distinctly absent. How utterly depressing. If any of the men attending that conference had any sense, they'd have the cahones to attend a couple of the sessions at the sister gig. Perhaps they would learn why women don't play their games and how they could change our minds.
But apparently, with some significant exceptions, most have no intention of leaving their nice little garden paths. Men appear to have an interest in such topics, because they'll attend the male-heavy panels on diversifying the markets, but they'll predictably ignore sessions on the exact same subject from a female perspective. Interestingly, while the men's sessions are dedicated to cracking into the female audience, the women's sessions are about attracting players within a broader sense of the word diversity, including minority players, disabled players and those hordes of men who don't play games. Solution in the men's? Make games that are easier and are coloured pink. In the women's? Twofold: change game mechanics to be more inclusive, not simpler. In the words of Kiki Wolfkill, Art Director at Microsoft, "The female market wants to be mentally challenged, not challenged on how quickly they can use their thumbs and push four buttons". Secondly, as suggested by sociologist and games academic TL Taylor, deal with the issues that are endemic in the culture of videogames – the marketing, the game shopping environments, the social mechanics. Future conferences truly interested in broadening the audience would definitely benefit from a strip down of these, with an audience of marketers, PR people and sales staff.
The session on taking design risks in games at the Austin show - another conference, the same hot topic - was a pure representation of this division. The moderator was the same, Sony Online's Raph Koster, and while in the women's conference he was able to have a stimulating and pragmatic conversation with the panellists, in the design discussion he was challenged by the short-term solutions of the contributors and the guffaws of the crowd when someone had the gall to mention the word "penis". Sigh.
Koster did a commendable job trying to throw in some really excellent and sometimes ridiculous propositions into the mix, but the panellists were too busy dissecting their latest product within the niche, in niche language, that Raph's suggestions were lost. My inner dreams of a-broader-market-by-design were dashed against the proverbial virtual rocks. I wanted to find out more about games that can help us solve the puzzle for the cure for cancer, teach us how to play a musical instrument or work like the extra-terrestrial beacon device SETI @ home, not about how Shadowbane related to World of Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot. Blah blah blah.
If the industry is truly interested in thinking about new and different markets, it needs to integrate conferences like these, and plant the seed of adulthood amongst the delegates so grown-up conversations can be had from which mutually successful solutions can emerge. At this point, we're still as different as Mars and Venus.
