No Girls Allowed

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/12/2/5143856/no-girls-allowed

by galaktor • 13 years ago

199 236 13 years ago

romanovcode2• 13 years ago

Not another one of these posts..

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

adamors• 13 years ago

You're right, we need more posts about Bitcoin and Something.js.

alex_c6• 13 years ago

It's actually not. This one was a good article.

k_os4• 13 years ago

I myself believe in market dynamics. If girls were interested in what boys had they'd pursue it. If girls hated barbies they would nag parents about getting a train or a car and market demand for barbies would dry up. The fact that toy dolls are a billion dollar industry should make one sceptical about the supposed 'girliness that society instills in girls'. I find that premise as silly as thinking boys were somehow 'indoctrinated' into liking computers.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

We have a house full of Disney princess stuff for our one year old. It will probably still be true when she's 5 and can actually influence our purchasing choices. But what will the "market dynamics" tell you about her preferences, other than they are stable once we established them?

Anyone who still believes in a simplistic rational actor desperately needs to read the work that's been done on behavioral economics. Dan Ariely's work is an approachable way to start. He hasn't tackled socialization yet, but it still gives you an idea of how human actors don't resemble the platonic ideal at all.

k_os4• 13 years ago

I believe feminism is most prevalent today than it ever was in history, are there any statistics showing that girl toy sales have declined?

From a quick search i find this : http://www.marketwatch.com/story/mattel-net-falls-24-as-barb...

Barbie sales declining but American Girl is up 14%.

You'd think that half a century of counter-culture would almost drive to the ground gender specific toy manufacturers.

octo_t• 13 years ago

Adult human beings are not rational actors, why on earth would you expect prepubescent children to be? the age group that is most targeted by advertising (because they're the most impressionable).

lclarkmichalek• 13 years ago

That argument kind of ignores marketing. If I spend several million (probably billions cumulatively at this point) telling people that product X should be associated with characteristic Y which is traditionally assigned more to one gender than another, then I'm likely to be modifying the market to an extent that you cannot truthfully say that market dynamics provide a reason for the disparity that will emerge.

crusso• 13 years ago

I'd be willing to bet that you don't have at least 2 non-twin children.

They want what they want. They have desires to be boys, girls, rough, quiet, loud, masculine, feminine, etc. all without (and often in spite of) being influenced to the contrary.

Advertising just showcases things that they already mostly want. It doesn't completely change their desires.

k_os4• 13 years ago

Do you believe marketers have an agenda about indoctrinating girls to like pink?

In the hopes that you are not a conspiracy theorist you must assume marketers haven't done any research about what girls innately like and are purely marketing products based on what you might call 'traditional' views.

It's much easier to market sugar than it is to market broccoli so that's what most foods marketed today contain. I don't believe we like sugarry treats because of marketing. I believe marketers market flavours of sugar because sugar is what we're wired to like first and foremost.

macspoofing• 13 years ago

And your argument just presouposes a certain causality. Do marketers market pink toys to girls because that's what they want girls to buy, or because that's what girls want to buy? It seems the latter is much easier, than the former, No?

It's so stupid, because the arguments are always structured as, "society forces behaviour on girls and boys", when it seems pretty obvious it's more of a feedback loop. Tendencies trend in a gender, that "informs" society, which then reinforces them, and so on.

mdisraeli4• 13 years ago

Children have no buying power. Parents and guardians actually perform the purchasing, and will only buy items that they consider acceptable. This is governed not just by their own personal values and media consumption, but importantly by the views of their family, friends and peers.

Children themselves are not immune to peer pressure, especially as they get older. They also want to meet the expectations of their parents and guardians. They too consume media, and like all of us make decisions based on both what they are told to want, and what they are told it is acceptable to want

knowitall12• 13 years ago

I suspect most parents hate pink, though - they just give in to the wishes of their daughters.

runarberg3• 13 years ago

According to your theory --of children as free thinkers whose actions represent their own 'free will'-- doesn't account for why advertizement works. If it were true, nobody would spend money on advertizement because everybody's actions is fully controlled by rational thinkers.

Nor does your theory account for insanity or stupidity (why do something stupid if you have full control of your actions?)

In fact your theory implies that children somehow are agents not affected by outside stimuli. Which would make them unique in nature.

Your theory in fact is by far more unbelievable then any theory of the powers of marketing.

bcoates• 13 years ago

Advertising can perform a signalling function without anybody involved being irrational.

rmc7• 13 years ago

Society was able to convince millions of LGBT people to suppress some pretty fundamental desired and wishes. It takes a lot of strength to overcome it, many people used to just kill themselves instead. And you think children are stronger than that when it comes to toys?

6d0debc0712• 13 years ago

Barbies are fun. But that's not the point. Marketing is about identity at least as much as it is about the product. You look at beer adverts, how many of them directly bear on the beer?

http://youtu.be/MX145Tu4MHY

That could be any beer, or a magic potion, you know nothing about it.

Or shower gel

http://youtu.be/DVm00UBdS0Y

Or cars

http://youtu.be/ox_uDBrkp-M

"You can have this car, and everything that goes with it."

"Now you can drive the story."

There's certainly an element of information there, at least when you start getting onto companies that have an advantage in a technical area. But often, you're being sold a role: Buy this and you'll get women, wealth, etc.

When I was a girl, and still to an extent now I'm older, I wanted the things I was told I was going to like, and which it was expected that I was going to. You look at something and you see someone like you, or with some aspect of life that you want to have. A lot of the pitch towards us isn't dolls, it's friendship, or fashion, or something like that - broadly speaking, group identity.

The problem is you don't see the comparisons. If there aren't people like you being forwarded as enjoying and having fun with something, you may never try it, and even if you do the chances are that few people like you will, so you lose a lot of the social enjoyment that goes along with a thing.

Of course you're right. If girls all really hated barbies, we probably wouldn't have played with them - though I've no doubt some of us would have out of a desire to fit in. But that's not really the point. The question is how closely that approaches optimal; the most enjoyment that we could have got from a range of options, only a narrow range of which are promoted to us and will allow us to still be accepted by our friends who have also had these identities sold to them.

numeromancer2• 13 years ago

    Barbies are fun.

[Citation needed]

/Manly man

alex_c6• 13 years ago

Counter-example: can you honestly say that you have never, not once in your life, paused to consider whether an item (a jacket, an accessory, sunglasses, whatever) is for males or females before deciding to buy it?

crntaylor• 13 years ago

I like the article. I think it's well written, an important subject, and the world would be better if more people read it and digested its message.

I still wish it didn't repeat the myth that Coca-Cola invented the modern image of Santa Clause, though.

http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp

dasil003• 13 years ago

I think Tim Allen invented the Santa Clause.

chongli3• 13 years ago

No, it didn't invent the image but it popularized this one particular incarnation out of the many that existed.

joshguthrie• 13 years ago

You can't fool me. There ain't no Sanity Clause!

xmonkee2• 13 years ago

I dunno if it's just me, but I usually skip an article that starts with something like "Four-year-old Riley Maida stands in a toy aisle of a department ...." and then there's a mile of scrolling to do. At least tell me what your central thesis is going to be if you're asking me to invest so much time and emotion into a story.

Ambrosia• 13 years ago

Try reading the header

rmk23• 13 years ago

The underlying thesis is literally expressed in the subtitle, even above the beginning of the article:

Unraveling the story behind the stereotype of video games being for boys.

This tells you that there exists a stereotype. This stereotype suggests that video games are for boys. It also suggests that an unravelling is intended, i.e. a disentanglement of multiple connected strands related to the persistence of a stereotype. Furthermore, calling something a stereotype outside psychological research suggests that something is regarded as "a preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc." (as defined by the OED).

This suggests a thesis that

a) disagrees with the premise that video games are, indeed, only for boys

b) will try to portray how this stereotype came into existence, i.e. it will try to trace its genesis.

xmonkee2• 13 years ago

Thanks for all the condescension. That a gender stereotype exists in gaming is hardly new information. I would've liked something like "Shaky marketing in the 80's helped establish the current stereotype" and then I would've known that the article presents arguments to support this.

galaktor2• 13 years ago

I tried to squeeze the subtitle into the title of this post, too - but it didn't fit so I just left the main title there, assuming one could simply read the subtitle on the main site...

hownottowrite• 13 years ago

In 1983, North America experienced a massive recession in the video game industry, now known as the video game crash. The crash had devastating effects, bankrupting game company after game company. At its peak, the revenues for video games in the U.S. sat at $3.2 billion in 1983. By 1985, revenues fell a whopping 97 percent to approximately $100 million. There are many factors behind the crash. The key factor is that by 1983, the video game market was saturated with low-quality games, which resulted in a loss of consumer confidence. Anyone who could make a game was making a game, and there was little to no regulation on the part of the console makers. Players got burnt. Retailers got burnt. People stopped buying video games. The crash marked what many believed to be the end of the video game industry.

Sounds like today's "casual gaming" market.

nwh• 13 years ago

More than that, it's things like "free to play" also sucking the will out of the consumer.

Fomite• 13 years ago

That was my thought exactly.

Jare• 13 years ago

Appearances can deceive.

The current casual gaming market is also flooded with fantastic games, and with games that, despite being accused of low quality under certain criteria, have millions of fans and regular players that love them. There's a great game waiting for anyone who may want to play something. Low prices, Steam/etc sales, and free-to-play games mean that getting the wrong game is not painful to the consumer, and remove the problem where consumers stop buying games.

The games industry (including casual and hardcore) has many problems and pitfalls for individual studios or teams. But in terms of market size, it is pretty healthy and likely to stay that way.

anonymousab• 13 years ago

The crucial bit is that the public had almost no way of knowing if a game was even playable before buying. Complete opposite today, except for people who preorder every big name game and are likely satisfied regardless.

I can see some resemblance in the freemium market - consumer awareness and protections have not caught up with how bad everyone is getting gypped.

mogrim2• 13 years ago

The crucial bit is that the public had almost no way of knowing if a game was even playable before buying.

I don't agree: computer games magazines were huge back then, I remember reading and re-reading the reviews at school with my mates, even without the internet it wasn't hard to find out if a game was any good or not.

exelius• 13 years ago

The "casual gaming" market of today is a lot healthier than the console market of the early 80s. In 1983, the world was enchanted by the potential of video games but the technology just wasn't ready yet. If anything, the great gaming crash scared off the companies that jumped in because it was popular but weren't ready to innovate and paved the way for the real innovators like Nintendo and Sega.

The casual gaming market is nothing like that. It's really just the long tail of the larger $70 billion gaming industry. Add to that the fact that smartphone penetration ramping up in emerging markets that never really saw significant console sales and you've got access to a lot more consumers.

yxhuvud• 13 years ago

What? No, it sounds a whole lot more like todays blockbuster market with crap titles that cost way too much to produce.

spindritf3• 13 years ago

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it?

I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours.

Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing.

Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary changes in behaviour, if any. And when they do show something more, they're impossible to replicate, or straight-up fraud.

I don't buy it.

tomp• 13 years ago

I remember all the fear mongering about violence in computer games (especially first-person shooters). Now, there is a whole generation of 20-somethings that grew up staring at the screen and shooting people and monsters, and crime rates have not gone up (in fact, they are falling IIRC).

Accordingly, I don't think marketing can change our desires and behaviour. Sure, it can change what we buy through brand-perception, but the desire to buy must already be there (e.g. we want shiny rare objects -> we buy diamonds (due to marketing)).

samastur• 13 years ago

Your example may be a proof that violence in games does not cause violence in person, but it isn't a proof that it has no effect. In essence I may be fearful of the wrong scenario, but that isn't the same as me not having a good reason to fear.

Personally I think opulence of violence in media makes us number when confronted with images or stories of real violence then we would be otherwise.

ajitk• 13 years ago

Don't ads create false memories[1] and consequently our behavior?

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ads-implant-false-...

TheLegace• 13 years ago

Makes me think of this, obviously causation != correlation but it's a funny graph1[1] nontheless.

[1]http://blog.sid3windr.be/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/crimegam...

Kurtz79• 13 years ago

I think that there are many other factors (law enforcement policies, gun control policies, economic climate...) that would affect raw crime rates much more than violent video games (in any way or the other).

If there is an effect of sorts, it's probably lost among the various other factors.

forgottenpass• 13 years ago

Now, there is a whole generation of 20-somethings that grew up staring at the screen and shooting people and monsters, and crime rates have not gone up

Accordingly, I don't think marketing can change our desires and behaviour.

But first person shooters and the marketing thereof were never intended to make people more violent. They are designed to make people like and play more first person shooters. Even the crazies who claim games do make people violent, mostly don't claim that making people violent are their intended purpose.

VLM5• 13 years ago

1) fearmongers gotta fearmonger. There's a couple animal fables about how a scorpion has gotta be a scorpion because thats its nature etc. So if they were not fearmongering about violent video games, they would be fearmongering about internet social media, or pr0n, or immigrants, or liberals, or whatever. Their whipping boy of the day doesn't really matter. Also their market share of the overall population is extremely small.

2) Speaking of pr0n, I note the monkey see monkey do epic failure WRT violence stats, and notice that despite better pr0n availability that ever in the history of the species, monkey see monkey do birthrates are not going up.

3) However, taking into account your point and #2, people do not copy activities very well, but they do copy appearances. Mere observation tells anyone interested that "scary looking black guns" are a ridiculously popular fad right now compared to a nice hardwood finished stock. Its exactly the same firearm but just wanna be scary looking, sort of. Also it is supposedly a well known fact that womens, uh, bodily hair shaving habits WRT hair below the neck, or however you want to phrase it, have in recent decades been nearly universally oriented to match hairless pr0n images. Pr0n images have to be hairless otherwise guys are staring at a wool rug or whatever, and now women in general want to try to match that. I don't think either example has important social ramifications other than being somewhat profitable for certain mfgrs and retailers which is in direct opposition to your claim that marketing is ineffective. Go ahead, try and find me jpeg of a woolly mammoth of a woman carrying a classic traditional wooden stocked hunting shotgun to prove me wrong. Bet you can come up with 100x the number of counterexample pixs.

diydsp• 13 years ago

Crime as a whole in the United States has gone down, yet school shootings, which First-Person Shooters emulate, have gone up since about 1993, the year Doom was released. Yes, I have a source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...

Note that the list of the US shootings, where Doom was released, has its own page, and far outstrips the number of school shootings in the rest of the world.

You can also see a graph of this at http://i56.tinypic.com/29uo8wg.jpg

Roses are red, Violets are blue. They don't think it be like it is, But it do.

rmk23• 13 years ago

The analysis of the influence of media onto the individual was, in fact, the subject that was at the very heart of the establishment of modern empirical sociology. A good start for further reading is the Princeton Radio Research Project[1], with a follow-up reading on its director, Paul Lazarsfeld[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Project

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lazarsfeld

junto2• 13 years ago

Having a daughter about the same age so it gives me a bit of insight.

She doesn't get to watch TV. Her playgroup has no major bias towards pink for girls (actually even deliberate in their avoidance of such stereotyping). My wife secretly detests pink and girly stuff and is/was a tomboy at heart. We do not discourage or encourage any particular colour or style.

There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and toys.

I honestly can't fathom it. Pink attraction seems to be built in. Like a moth to a flame.

Recently she asked for a pirate ship for her birthday, so it isn't all bad.

maxerickson2• 13 years ago

If she is friends with even just one girl that likes pink, she has someone to copy from (share with, whatever).

I would also guess that there are individuals that she prefers as friends in the play group (so a survey might not be very revealing).

galaktor2• 13 years ago

Similar here. I think a major contributor are other social influences other than myself and wife - most notably friends at kindergarden/school, and teachers there, too.

There's much subtle influence that isn't obvious at first, at least wasn't to me. For example, notice how many people (say, neighbours or more importantly, grandparents or other relatives) will often congratulate little girls to being really pretty as the first thing that comes out of their mouthes. Not that they're deliberately trying to influence the girls, but it's sort of "default" boilerplate smalltalk with girls, say how pretty they are and how nice their dress is. Certainly that will affect their perception of themselves, what is pretty, what they want to buy...

Edit: just found the (oldish) opinion piece on huffpost [1] that originally got me thinking about just that last point

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bloom/how-to-talk-to-litt...

rmc7• 13 years ago

Peer pressure?

leokun3• 13 years ago

Recently she asked for a pirate ship for her birthday, so it isn't all bad.

Hrm, Jake and the Neverland Pirates fan? My daughter likes izzy and I saw an izzy costume on Halloween. Pirates are getting popular.

tehwalrus2• 13 years ago

My Niece's pink obsession began as soon as she started school - I think it's a mixture of peer pressure and subtle clues (e.g. the grandparent's "aren't you pretty" comment.)

It's actually amusing in her in particular - she must wear pink, and mummy must do her hair nicely, but then once that's done she's outside climbing trees and getting muddy. It seems that once she's put on the "girl uniform", she can go be herself again.

eseehausen• 13 years ago

Pink as a girl's color and blue as a boy's color is a relatively recent cultural assignation. Maybe she likes it on some genetic level, but your wife obviously doesn't, and the way you interpret it is based on marketing that assigned pink to girls.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-St...

minikites3• 13 years ago

There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and toys.
I honestly can't fathom it. Pink attraction seems to be built in. Like a moth to a flame.

Yeah, that doesn't actually make any sense. Pink:blue::girl:boy is 100% artificial and one recent source has it the other way around:

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

For centuries prior, both genders were dressed in white.

Here's the article I've quoted from:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-St...

It sounds like marketing is more pervasive than you may realize.

barney54• 13 years ago

Recently we visited some friends who have a 4 year old daughter. She was wearing a "pirate princess" dress. That could bring together the pirate and pink motif your daughter is secretly searching for.

gadders• 13 years ago

I think it's good if they have a balance. By all means wear pink party dresses and have tea parties with your dolls, but encourage them to climb trees, ride bikes and have rough and tumble time with their Dad [1]

I always remember some research about when parents are watching their sons and daughters on a climbing frame. With the boys it was "See if you can reach the top!" and with the girls it was "Be careful!". Don't do that.

[1] http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/02/07/the-importance-of-r...

aestra7• 13 years ago

Does one presume there is a "pink gene"?

Pink is an artificial societal constrict of recent invention.

chongli3• 13 years ago

There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and toys.

Does she go to school yet?

mogrim2• 13 years ago

My eldest was identical - gender neutral toys when she was small, a yellow-painted bedroom, no particular bias for or against pink (she had some pink clothes, but not all), then... Bam! Pink! She turned 4 or 5 (I forget) and suddenly her life was a pink tinged fantasy of Disney Princesses, Barbie etc. No idea why.

im3w1l• 13 years ago

Would it be all bad if she didn't want a pirate ship?

newnewnew2• 13 years ago

I can't understand the desire to eliminate all female-specific behavior. It seems that every adult feminist wants his little girl to grow up to be a little boy.

AlexandrB3• 13 years ago

Diamonds.

Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence.

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-b...

I think it's naive to think that marketing doesn't in some way shape and reinforce what one thinks is "normal".

k__• 13 years ago

The point OP made is the opposite.

Everyone already thinks marketing shapes our idea of what is "normal". The question is "Does it really do this?"

mseebach4• 13 years ago

Diamonds have a slightly more complex role than just being conjured from thin air by marketing.

Premarital sex is not, popular opinion to the contrary, a new discovery. In most societies we know of, however, men prefer to marry women who have never slept with anyone else. This creates a problem. Unmarried women are reluctant to have sex for fear that it will lower their ability to find a suitable husband, and as a result unmarried men have difficulty finding women to sleep with.

One traditional solution to this problem is for unmarried couples to sleep together on the understanding that if the woman gets pregnant the man will marry her. This practice was sufficiently common in a number of societies for which we have data that between a quarter and half of all brides went to the altar pregnant.

One problem with this practice is that it creates an opportunity for opportunistic breach by the man, the strategy of seduce and abandon familiar in folk songs, romantic literature, and real life. That problem can be reduced by converting the understanding into an enforceable contract. Under traditional common law, a jilted bride could sue for breach of promise to marry. The damages she could collect reflected the reduction in her future marital prospects. They were in fact, although not in form, damages for loss of virginity.

Starting in the 1930's, U.S. courts became increasingly reluctant to recognize the action for breach of promise to marry, with the result that between 1935 and 1945 it was abolished in states containing about half the population. This created a problem for women who wanted to engage in premarital sex but did not want to end up as single mothers in a society where that status was both economically difficult and heavily stigmatized.

The solution they found was described in "Rings and Promises," an ingenious article by Margaret Brinig. The practice of a man giving his intended a valuable diamond engagement ring is not, De Beers' ads to the contrary, an ancient custom. Data for diamond imports in the early part of the century are not very good, but Brinig's conclusion from such information as she was able to find was that the practice only became common in the 1930's, peaked in the 1950's and has since declined.

Her explanation was that the engagement ring served as a performance bond for the promise to marry. Instead of suing, the jilted bride could simply keep the ring, confiscating the posted bond. The practice eventually declined not because of further legal changes—at present no states recognize the action for breach of promise to marry—but as a result of social changes. As pre-marital sex became more common and virginity of less importance on the marriage market, the risk of opportunistic breach, and thus the need for a bonding mechanism, declined.

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Laws_Order_draft/laws_order_ch...

So there was an opening market for something that could be construed as both romantic and serve a strictly financial purpose. Diamonds could fit that bill, and DeBeers deftly latched onto it and milked it hard.

I think marketing has power to shape and inform already existing needs and desires, but it has extremely limited power to create need where none exists. That is, you can plausibly make me want a BigMac over a Whopper, but you can't make be want a burger if I'm already full.

aestra7• 13 years ago

Thank you for sharing the diamond story. It really was one of the first national marking campaigns. De Beers paid celebrities to wear diamond engagement rings and talk about their diamond engagement rings, and now everyone "has" to have a diamond engagement ring.

Men wearing a wedding ring, another marking campaign invented in the 1940's.

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

30s of research gives me this http://www.google.co.uk/patents?id=0eBEAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&dq=%2...

It's a patent application from 1928 which speaks about engagement rings with a bezel for a stone.

I'm going out on a limb and saying that diamonds would be one choice for the stone prior to 1928. They certainly are only one amongst many choices in the present day too. Do USA-ians only have diamond engagement rings?

The cited Priceonomics article contains a logical flaw. It says demand was created in the De Beers campaign but then goes on to describe how great demand was purposefully under-supplied by Rhodes in order to prop up the price. Similarly it says roughly 'you like diamonds because a marketer told you to' but also then says that diamonds prior to establishing large mines were the preserve of Kings and Queens ... why then did they like them; they are just people too. The answer of course is that they're durable and look pretty and aren't [or weren't] commonly available. It's a great article, but they like you I fear have just pushed it that tiny little bit further seems supported.

Some other citations from a couple of minutes searching:

- this patent suggests that large settings on narrow bands were the fashion in 1927, http://www.google.co.uk/patents?id=LtZEAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&dq=%2...

- Beck vs Cohen, 16 March 1933 concerns the specifics of engagement rings being part of an obligation to marry; suggesting they were a customary part of betrothals at that time.

- from 1868, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tL1YAAAAcAAJ&dq=%22engage..., suggests at pp18-19 that when betrothal fell out of fashion in the middle ages engagement rings were retained.

TL;DR - the suggestion in your post is that engagement rings were very uncommon [my word, AlexandrB's was "occassional"] in USA prior to a De Beers campaign. This seems to be an exaggeration. Perhaps De Beers instead achieved the end of making diamonds the fashionable stone to choose for the already customary engagement ring.

runarberg3• 13 years ago

Just think of two opposing theories. One account scribes that humans are not rational thinkers, our actions constitutes of the stimuli around us. We can be pursued against our best interest.

The other accounts for humans having 'free will'. Our free will explains our rational thinking, we will always maximize our utility. Advertizement has no effect if it doesn't meet our utility.

Now if you thing about those two theories and compare them. Look at evidences for either ones and evaluate their validity, surely you must come to the conclusion that either we humans are special in nature of being able not to respond to stimuli due to some 'free will apparatus' or, more likely, marketing agents have the ability to control us. Or at least, by Okham's razor, the media explanation is the more plausible one.

rmc7• 13 years ago

Gay people. There are considerably more open gay people today than 50 or 100 years ago.

Either there are more gay people naturally today, or the societal pressures 50 to 100 years ago to marginalise gay people were successful and were able to convince lots of people to stay in the closet.

If society can do that to gay people, can the same happen to gender roles?

spindritf3• 13 years ago

There are considerably more open gay people today than 50 or 100 years ago.

There are considerably more people having pre-marital sex, too. My pet theory is that with the increase of wealth and progress in technology, medicine, we can afford more risk including tolerance of risky behaviour.

With things like the antibiotics, condoms, hormonal contraception, abortion (that is not likely to kill you) and just generally low risk of destitution, people don't need to be as careful as they used to. Many religious taboos are guidelines for surviving in a harsh world, and the world just isn't that harsh any more.

But those are real, material changes. It's not a matter of perception.

leokun3• 13 years ago

I don't buy it.

There's an entire branch of social science that spends a lot of time on marketing, sociology. I recommend reading up on it from an academic perspective. Marketing is very influential but it isn't mind control. I'd say it shapes expectations more than create demand for particular products. And from an anthropological perspective I'd say marketing actually reveals more about a culture than it creates.

omonra• 13 years ago

You know, saying 'I recommend reading up on X from an academic perspective' is a fairly useless cliche. If you want to be helpful and feel that there is a specific book or study that someone should read - go ahead and mention that. Just saying 'go read a book or paper or something' adds nothing.

joosters2• 13 years ago

Look at the gigantic sums that companies spend on advertising. They can't all be throwing their money away. You can either assume that all these companies are complete fools, or the marketing works.

In fact it's getting easier to prove nowadays, with so much more data from the likes of adwords, loyalty cards and so on. Marketing has more 'real numbers' behind it to give confidence in spending the money.

Everyone likes to think that advertising doesn't affect them. But, it does. You are not immune to it.

spindritf3• 13 years ago

They can probably make Coors sell better than Miller, or vice versa, OK. But that's a minor adjustment, even if worth a lot of money, not a massive change in behaviour like stopping half the population from discovering readily available video games.

samsonasu• 13 years ago

I think we as a group tend to underrate the power of marketing because it doesn't make s lot of analytical sense, but marketing is hugely important as anyone who had founded a business learns very, very quickly. This is just more anecdotal evidence, but the effect the hunger games movie/books have had on female enrollment in archery clubs is staggering: http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247379498/more-girls-target-ar...

Here's another article that purports the rise (and now domination) of women in forensic biology to be predicated on the media's portrayal of the career and the large number of female role models in the field.

There is nothing special or innately "male" about video games, and I think the real thesis of the article is that player demographics are much more evenly split than we think; we just assume video games are for boys because the video games that girls play (candy crush, the Sims, etc) aren't marketed as being "video games" at all

girvo• 13 years ago

You have to admit the two types of games are very very different, though.

michalu• 13 years ago

I am not sure there is evidence our brains are wired differently http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-bra...

and different behaviour can be observed among girls and boys in a very young age (<5) J. Medina describes it in his book "Brain Rules" women have some areas of more developed and vice versa, therefore they perceive some things differently, such as they they tend to process information in more complexly. So I am not sure it's "all marketing" although I think it plays part.

chongli3• 13 years ago

You're right in that these studies do not support the article. The question I have is this: how do you study this alleged phenomenon in a controlled way? Culture, by its very nature, is a vast and complicated mess of interactions between individuals in society. If you take a group of people out of society and study them in isolation, you aren't going to see the same effects. It's like trying to analyze a drug in vitro and then draw conclusions about it in vivo; it just doesn't give you the whole picture.

VLM5• 13 years ago

Although its a bit off topic, the "standard american hearty breakfast" simply didn't exist more than a century ago.

Highly processed breakfast cereals are also relatively recent.

Corn syrup soda apparently becoming primary/sole source of hydration rather than a special treat.

All humans must consume vast quantities of dairy products is fairly recent.

Could just say "diet in general".

How about "Natural is good for you". Or greenwashing sells.

twoodfin4• 13 years ago

Going out to restaurants more than once a month or so wasn't a common household experience either.

Essentially all of these things are possible due to a rise in living standards and income. That money was going to go somewhere, and no matter where it went, you would inevitably be able go back and tell a just-so story about how it went one way instead of another because of marketing.

parasubvert• 13 years ago

One could argue the whole distinguishing feature of modern for-profit organizations is that they are marketing entities with a side of innovation. Markets aren't created by God, they're created by marketers (or entrepreneurs acting as marketers).

Advertising (and broadcast media in general) seems to be an amplifier of existing beliefs or desires. I agree there's little statistical or scientific proof it can convince people of something the opposite to something they already believe -- though there's centuries of evidence that people CAN be sold to.

Marketing itself is a much broader function that also includes the supply-side: understanding the customer, and shaping the customer's complete experience with the company. Thus why it also includes branding, segmentation, and even product design / quality.

twoodfin4• 13 years ago

If marketing really were that powerful, why the hell would the console makers decide they're only interested in half the market?

alex_c6• 13 years ago

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it?

I think you're overstating how much power the article ascribes to marketing.

The article makes two arguments:

1) Video games being mostly "male" is a feedback loop of marketing (targeting) and product design, amplified by most of the industry being male. It's not that marketing has overnight caused everyone to decide that video games are for boys: it's that video games designed for boys are marketed to boys, sell well, and lead to more games for boys being produced and marketed.

2) Video games are not as "male" as we think, but video games that do not fit the stereotypical mold - The Sims, Farmville, casual games - are dismissed as "not real video games". The reasons for this are complex and the article does not go into them (that would be an essay in itself). Marketing is certainly part of it, but far from the only factor.

You're doing a big disservice to a great article by reducing it to something it does not claim. It's a bit unfortunate that this simplification is influencing so much of the discussion here (not attacking you, it's just a property of ranked threaded discussions).

gcb0• 13 years ago

No, the article just stirs a lot of empty fox news style outages.

First makes you feel bad because there are a girls toy section. Then right away tries to make you feel bad because there isn't one game girls section.

Anyone with half a brain would notice this paradoxical trolling and ignore this article. The fact it has so many votes is scaring. Nobody reads anymore.

splintercell• 13 years ago

Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing.

But...but...but its so convenient. We won't have wars if there weren't armament industry, we wouldn't have alcoholics if we didn't have brewery, we wouldn't have crappy music if we didn't have Robin Thicke. Humanity is better than what we see around us!

znt• 13 years ago

White font on bright pink background is not a pleasant combination. Maybe use paler colours next time?

watty2• 13 years ago

Are you a designer (serious question)?

knowitall12• 13 years ago

While I think the history of marketing of games is interesting, to be honest to me this read like "bla bla bla... Video games were heavily marketed as products for men, and the message was clear: No girls allowed.... bla bla bla"

Meaning the conclusion "no girls allowed" is just randomly inserted somewhere in the middle of a wall of text.

Just because boys and men were identified as a large audience and targeted with marketing does not imply that girls are not allowed.

Nobody is forcing you to choose either aisle in the toy shop. Just the other day I bought a playmobil horse for my son that came in a pink box. Whatever...

What exactly do they mean by girls not allowed? Girls are not allowed to play first person shooters? How would such a rule even be enforced?

Or the right games are not being made for girls, then there would be more female gamers? I think whoever believes that should go out and make those games. Put their money where their mouth is.

Never mind that there are already lots of games that are being played by lots of girls/women. "No girls allowed" simply has no foundation in reality whatsoever.

dsirijus5• 13 years ago

To my eyes, they're trying to bring attention to a non-existant problem (that has been solved pretty darned well with casual games ages ago) to increase readership on a pretty flamey topic, together with their twitter buddies.

I believe there are very fundamental differences between males and females and that the optimal game design would target very specifically those differences (or at least be very aware of them), unless the core of the design is the actual male-female dynamic or ecosystem. It is also more optimal to target one or the other because of the ad networks in today's world.

knowitall12• 13 years ago

Psst, you are not allowed to say that :-)

I don't know - there certainly are women who play "hardcore games".

The more I think about it, the less understand what the problem is? For whatever reason, women seem to play less hardcore games. OK - but what is their problem? Do they think women unfairly miss out on all the fun? Then why don't they just tell women "hey, there is this thing called games, it's fun, try it" instead of whining that society made them miss out? Or do they complain that the wrong games are being made - which would be rather weird, because people are apparently buying these games. Or in other words, to me it seems a bit like saying "I would really like spinach, if spinach would taste like chocolate". Yeah, but spinach doesn't taste like chocolate, if you want chocolate, eat chocolate, but leave people who like spinach to their spinach. No need to convert all spinach to chocolate.

Kequc• 13 years ago

The article seemed to suggest there was a "girls section" and that everything else was the boys section. To my eyes and I assumed every sane person, it appears there is a "dolls section" and then every other section. The dolls section isn't exclusive to just girls and the rest of the toy store certainly isn't exclusive to just boys.

Similarly with what the author called the "girls games" section of the games area. It is my understanding that the games are organised into genres. The "cutesy" section isn't exclusive to just girls and the rest of the video games aren't exclusive to just boys.

egypturnash2• 13 years ago

Hi, I'm a lady.

Have you noticed that pretty much all "hardcore" games have male protagonists? These games tell players that they are fantasies for guys to have; women are relegated to the roles of support or prizes in most of these games. It sucks to try to be the hero when the shape of the fantasy is constantly telling you that you're not one.

And then we have the advertising campaigns mentioned in the article that market it explicitly to boys, with girls as a prize.

There have been some big-budget games with character selection screens that let you choose a lady, but how many of them prominently feature that in the marketing? Skyrim, Mass Effect, or Saint's Row all feature a male protagonist on the box, despite me enjoying all of these with a female character.

Hell, even in the realm of little casual games, it's there. I've played a lot of iOS games that have a male character from the start, and offer a female one as something you can unlock... after collecting five zillion coins, or dropping $10 in in-app purchases. Men are normalized, women are an expensive bonus prize.

Trust me, there is a constant message that "video games are for boys" running through much of the medium. Yes, women play them anyway. But we are constantly being told that the big budget action-oriented games are not for us by what roles they offer for us to play.

knowitall12• 13 years ago

Edit: TL;DR I think you make the mistake to assume that games and ads targeted at men imply that there are no ads or games for women. It is OK to target games at men or women imo. I seem to recall a lot of ads for gender neutral Wii games, too.

It's probably true that a lot of games are targeted at men. Presumably because more men are into buying them than women. So what? There are enough games with female protagonists.

I am a man and a lot of "hardcore games" don't appeal to me (the ones that advertise on the box with "choose from 300 different weapons"). I scratch my brow and wonder about the people who enjoy that kind of thing, and move on. Luckily there are many, many good games, too.

Most games I picked for myself also have female main characters. For example I played a lot of Left 4 Dead, Tomb Raider, and many RPGs which almost always have a "customize your character" option which usually means you can play a female.

I hesitate to mention it, because I don't want to consign women to certain genres, but I don't complain about games that are about horses or whatever, either.

There are also big budget games targeted for women, like "The Sims".

Do you think a lot of women would like to play hardcore shooters? I don't know, but frankly, I am doubtful. I am not saying they shouldn't, just that perhaps companies have tried to estimate the size of the market before gendering the main hero.

Do you happen to know if the games with female heroes sold a significant amount of copies to women? I don't, but would like to know.

Edit 2: I think in most games where you can play a woman you have to do the same things as the male characters, so what do you mean by "the roles they offer for us to play"?

kyberias2• 13 years ago

Very difficult page to read due to ugly color combinations. White on pink, next white on green. It literally hurts my eyes.

watty2• 13 years ago

It sounds like you have some eye issues or perhaps it's just aging. Try readability, it's great for older folks.

You should avoid magazines though, they often have similar designs yet lack a real world "readability" :)

http://www.readability.com/

gabemart• 13 years ago

A color combination that works for a printed page may not work well for a luminescent display due to the inherent superiority of printed material in terms of readability and eye comfort.

I don't have any eye issues and am not in the "older folks" demo. I still found the page annoying to read.

kyberias2• 13 years ago

To be honest, you may be right, although I'm not that old. ;) Quit with the downvotes, people.

knowitall12• 13 years ago

My first girl-friend threatened to leave me in case I bought a game boy. It's not just stereotypes from the media, it's also an experience that lots of men have made in their lives. But that doesn't mean we don't like the idea of women playing games. Quite the opposite. I still remember the first time I saw a woman wearing an Atari T-Shirt. I could hardly believe my eyes... Turns out by then Atari didn't really exist anymore and was being rebranded by whoever bought the Trademark, but still (I was attracted, but I didn't talk to her, so no further story to that).

It's just that it feels like a waste of time trying to get women interested in games. If they want to play, fine, but why try to make them? (Speaking from the consumer perspective - game makers of course have different incentives).

Next week I plan to have a C64 revival party. I will invite women, curious to see how many of them will also play...

My advice for women interested in computer games: just do it/try it. Don't waste time wondering if you are allowed to do it.

xerophtye2• 13 years ago

Yep, gamer girls = supremely attractive! I always get jealous of gamer couples i encounter on real life and online. My own gf is a hardcode mobile gamer (there hasnt been a single app game that i can beat her at. and i have been gaming all my life!) But i wish she'd try the more complex games... like FPS or top-down strategy or atleast LoL!!

antimagic• 13 years ago

Tower defence games are the gateway drug to top down strategy games. Just sayin'.

berrypicker• 13 years ago

"Girl gamers" are well-known on the Internet for being some of the most obnoxiously annoying people on the planet.

milliams• 13 years ago

No GirlS... we're allowed one.

thejteam• 13 years ago

Okay, so girls get princesses and My Little Pony. Now listen to what they do with them. My 3 year old is in the next room playing playing with her My Little Pony dolls right now. Story lines more complex than the typical evening sitcom. Action and violence. Shouting and passion. They are learning story telling and narrative. And the narrative is not all tea parties. If the toys do not inherently give them plots and conflicts, they will build it up for themselves.

ZeroGravitas• 13 years ago

I thought the more important point was how much these differences were in the eye of the beholder rather than actual objective facts.

For example, the various farm sim, candy crush, peggle, word game, social things that many "non-gamer" women in my life seem obsessed by get quietly excluded from discussions about games and gamers because they don't fit the stereotype.

Similarly, Barbie is a "doll", she lives in a "doll house", and boys don't play with dolls or doll houses. No, the small minature people my son plays with are action figures and have "bases", or are "knights" and have "castles", or are lego people, who do have houses (though usually of fairly avant-garde design). Could you explain to a martian why these are supposedly such different activities that were encoded for back in the hunter-gatherer days?

PeterisP3• 13 years ago

Hah. My kid (3yo boy) got strange questions about going to kindergarten with a baby-doll in a pram - but that's just naturally "following male role models", doing as the father does pushing his little sister around.

I mean, in an entirely sexist manner, men should be the ones primarily pushing baby carriages because, say, pushing them through snow-covered sidewalks at any reasonable distance requires physical effort that's simply too tiring for most women, especially soon after childbirth or cesarean. (If you drive everywhere like in much of USA, then it might be different).

And the current modern society expects grown men to do so... but the same society doesn't expect little boys to play the same role. How does it make any sense?

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

men should be the ones primarily pushing baby carriages because //

Use a baby-sling. They use far less resources to make, far far less. They can aid the child in learning to talk quicker (face-to-face position). They're easy to take anywhere you can walk. They pack down almost to pocket-size. [Though no-one ever held a door open for me like they do for pram/stroller users].

Both our boys imitated carrying children in slings. They also both loved playing with toy push-chairs when they were available to them but they did so in a distinctly different manner to other kids, they never bothered with having "passengers" on theirs.

Soon after birth or a caesarean a woman should be resting, not pushing a buggy around just as anyone should be resting after a massive pelvic dislocation or abdominal surgery.

analog31• 13 years ago

I wonder if it's a simple market differentiation factor, like why there are 100 different kinds of breakfast cereal. Creating two immiscible classes of toys effectively doubles the variety, and the floor space devoted to toys in stores. It makes hand-me-downs less appealing if you've got one kid of each kind. That factor alone would create a noticeable sales bump for toy stores, even if the differences were totally arbitrary. But the differences have to be strong enough so that the toys of each sex invoke the yuck response in the other sex.

jccalhoun• 13 years ago

If you look at the early atari 2600 commercials it is clear they were just throwing stuff at the wall with no clear audience in mind. One that sticks out in my mind features a "Valley Girl" that is so stereotypical it is hard to tell if it was supposed to be a parody or not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ze1neVziE

dsirijus5• 13 years ago

Oh, you'll love this one then https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufYYOXiEtxM

LekkoscPiwa4• 13 years ago

This is idiocy beyond comprehension. Why not to complain that there aren't as many dresses or boys in department stores. Maybe sue them to, huh?

normloman3• 13 years ago

Nobody's complaining in this article, and nobody's suing anybody. It's just an article about video game marketing. Why do you feel threatened?

LekkoscPiwa4• 13 years ago

All this Political Correctness BS is a threat. We have to deal with Al-Quaida and others who want to destroy our Western Civilization from outside and then we have Leftists who do all they can to destroy it from inside.

Boys are usually more interested in computers. Males are more inclined to manipulate things (manipulate like in play, try to understand how they work, etc.) and relations that have to do with things. Females are more inclined to manipulate people (manipulate like in play, try to understand how they work, etc) and relations that have to do with people. And no, I don't have a scientific research to "prove" that. It's an observation that derives from common sense.

Ever noticed how women enjoy watching soap operas, but don't give a damn about a football game? Ever notice how men enjoy watching football game, but don't give a damn about a soap opera?

Because what men see in a football game that women don't is: strategy, tactics, manipulations, doing everything to win the game. Females don't see that there. They just see a bunch of brutes running around trying to get hold of a some stupid ball.

But women can definitely appreciate a soap opera. Because there they will see: strategy, tactics, manipulations, doing everything to win the game. Males don't see it there. Because this is not about things. It's about people and their relations. They are blind to that as females are blind to see interactions among objects. Males just see there a bunch of crazy people dramatizing.

Now, to expect this little girl not to play with dolls to mimic social interactions but to play with objects is BS. And pure Politicall Correctness. And that's a threat. I don't need my daughter to waste her life trying to compete in a game where males have natural advantage in their DNA. I'd rather have her spend her time analyzing people. Not objects.

That's all common sense dude. I'm threatened by you spreading enemy propaganda in my country. What about that? Go and teach that in Russia. Mess up their country. Not our own.

bryanlarsen3• 13 years ago

As a parent of two pre-school girls, this is a concern of mine. But in some ways I think this issue is worse for boys than girls. Girls are "allowed" (but not encouraged) to shop from the boys section. My daughters have and use some boys' clothing, toys, furniture, etc. But a boy wearing pink clothes or dancing or playing with dolls is setting himself up for extended teasing.

dsirijus5• 13 years ago

I was in a heated debate about this few nights ago and a drunken conclusion was that Tesla was right and women are due to dominate pretty soon.

Amongst the terms in the winning argument lines were, in no particular order: trousers, Candy Crush Saga, online marketing, e-commerce, uterus, toys, hipsters, self-modification.

Biker dudes will be a museum exhibit in 50 years.

All arguments fall flat on its face if we're due severe population cut due to war, disease, whatever.

aestra7• 13 years ago

This is annoying. If anything because "too girly" boys can't use it anymore too. For example, the formally boys names of Alexis and Evelyn. Girls started to outnumber boys with that name and suddenly you couldn't give your boy a "girl's name."

romanovcode2• 13 years ago

As the daughter of two pre-school girls.. Wait, what? ))

bryanlarsen3• 13 years ago

Fixed. thanks.

dsego• 13 years ago

Surely, you meant father? I think it's all in the environment. Me and my brother as kids used to play with a lot of girls. And after a while we asked our parents to buy us barbie dolls, and they did. Some of our parents' friends were a bit concerned that we were playing with girl toys, but they soon got used to it, and this was the early 90s in a more conservative country. But we also had wooden pistols and rifles and ran around the village "playing war" with other boys.

probably_wrong• 13 years ago

Sorry about the off-topic: does anyone knows whether the caricatures that illustrate the article belong to a concrete category and/or are associated with a particular style? I'd really like to read more about it, but the books I've found about cartooning are very different from this style.

gk1• 13 years ago

It can be called illustration or cartoon illustration. "Cartooning" alone usually refers to strip comics, gag cartoons, or political cartoons. I'm not aware of a more specific term for this style.

6cxs2hd6• 13 years ago

Although the site looks snazzy, it's annoying that page-down goes one line too far.

Page-down. Huh? Oh. Line-up. Ah.

. . .

Frustrating reading experience that distracts from the message.

dsirijus5• 13 years ago

For me, it was annoying in a general sense (can't pin-point it). I was going to article and out of it 3 times.

trying to read it / gah, can't / but there's interesting comments on hn about it / trying to read it / dammit! / it's being upvoted almost to #1 / ok, ok. i'll go through exruciating pain of reading it / it wasn't worth a read anyway

xradionut• 13 years ago

I'm not seeing the big issue being raised here. I think much of how a child turns out in life depends on their parents.

My wife likes pink, but she's also better at repairing cars, playing video games, repairing smart phones and target shooting than myself. She would be an awesome programmer or system admin, but likes project management and people more than I do. She is the one in her family that bought the gaming consoles starting with the NES.

jheriko2• 13 years ago

i am a liberal fan of freedom and equal rights - within reason.

i applaud the sentiment but this is just one of many symptoms of 'women don't like taking risks and don't like stem fields'

whats more i like to think that women are allowed that freedom of choice - so its a double edged sword.

the side effects suck but these scenarios /come from/ freedom and equal opportunities for women. why is nobody looking at cultures which are oppressive to women or have lower quality of life as counter examples? not only do they not have this kind of marketing... but actually more women enter stem fields and do 'male' traditional roles out of necessity or societal pressure.

its a horribly complicated problem. extra sad that i can't make a 'sexist' joke here as a punchline for fear of reprisal...

normloman3• 13 years ago

Did you even read the article? This has nothing to do with women entering stem fields. It's about how video game marketers exclude women from their target demographic.

Poor guy can't even be sexist. Boo hoo.

jheriko2• 13 years ago

Yes, I read it in its entirety. The key point it seems to make is that men made games for men and the marketers cottoned on to the trend and ran with it - this is precisely to do with women not entering stem fields (computer games development).

Also, since we are picking faults its about /why/ they are excluded. Its pretty damned obvious how it happens...

... and yes it is a shame that I can't make a joke about women complicating things. They do, its measurable, its funny, its not sexist unless you somehow assume that men are exempt from the same criticism, which they are not.

Pxtl3• 13 years ago

That was really freaking long.

I can't help but notice the recurring theme that the actual game designers are trying to make fun gender-neutral products but the marketing and leadership is the source of misogyny. I mean, when they start talking about the PS1 era their examples are WipeOut (the only "gendered" thing in the game is the announcer) Tomb Raider (Croft has somewhat absurd proportions but she's a far cry from the kind of exploitative stuff you see in the Dead or Alive games and whatnot) and Gran Turismo (masculine only by the technicality that it's about cars).

I'm a guy, so this is obviously a "check my privilege" thing, but I feel like the misogyny of the gaming industry (and geek culture at large) didn't really take hold until console gaming went online and the collective sea of poop-throwing 4channers got their he-man-woman-haters club into games. The games were targeted at boys well before then, and the themes got heavily masculine in the mid-'90s with the FPS revolution... but the active You Are Not Welcome thing seemed to take hold later.

I mean, obviously geek culture was a bit unsettling for women before then because the combined awkward sexual frustration of a zillion nerds isn't exactly comfortable to be around, but I don't think the outright hatred of women had taken hold.

It seems like the door was open... not so much, anymore.

alex_c6• 13 years ago

Funny, I don't think of it as misogyny as much as wasted potential in the industry. I greatly enjoy many of the male-targeted games today and have zero interest in a game like The Sims, but looking back I realize that many of my all-time favorites were fairly gender neutral. This wasn't because of any political correctness or some great social mission as much as simply games that were made to be fun without targeting to a specific demographic.

Thankfully, the PC indie game market seems to be recapturing much of that lost innocence in the industry (partly due to lack of marketing budgets which means they have to focus on the game being fun, first and foremost). I find myself playing a lot more indie games than AAA titles lately.

johnbm• 13 years ago

What articles like this completely ignore is that toy stores are not divided into a blue boy's section and a pink girl's section. There's the "girl's section", and then there's "everything else".

They are taking the fact that some things are marketed explicitly to women as evidence that everything else is marketed to men. It's absurd, but that's feminist navelgazing for you. Same reason they blame men for women's beauty standards, even though it's women and women's magazines who enforce them. Things marketed to women by women as being for women.

And then something like Goldieblox comes around that's like shitty pink meccano with dumb girlie stories attached to each box set, and behold! It's somehow going to set girls free of the pink tyranny... by being stereotypically aimed at girls.

Or you could just buy them ordinary gender-neutral LEGO. The one that boys and girls alike can enjoy.

Pxtl3• 13 years ago

Lego now makes a tonne of girly product, actually, starting with Disney Princess branded Duplo, and following into Lego Friends for the older girls. They do seem to avoid just slathering everything in pink, though, so that's something.

scardine• 13 years ago

The text is too long, but I really enjoy the cartoons from David Saracino.

http://davidsaracinoart.com/

tsax• 13 years ago

The Nurture Assumption -> http://www.amazon.com/The-Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revise...

Pxtl3• 13 years ago

Brevity.

cameldrv• 13 years ago

Thank god. Video game addiction is destroying an entire generation of boys. We see the results in declining male college enrollment and graduation. Games have been tweaked and adjusted until they have become electronic cocaine, and the result is that boys spend virtually their entire time at home playing them. The last thing we need is for the girls to go the same way.

numeromancer2• 13 years ago

I, for one, look forward to the glorious day when all children are grown in vats and reared in communal nurseries by hermaphrodites, so girls will never have to be subjected to the horrible sight of a mother nestling her baby, which unjustly conditions them to prefer baby dolls to Tonka trucks.

C1D• 13 years ago

It was a very interesting and eye-opening article though I don't think we can wholly blame this on the marketing of video games. I have a sister who has never liked video games and instead spent her time with dolls even though me and my brother had always tried to get her into video games.

I remember when we got our first Tamagotchies. My sister fried her's by sticking it in a bucket of water. When we got her another one she used it for a few seconds and then played with her dolls.

I think -as seen in a article recently posted- that since boys brains are wired differently we are into different things and that is natural.

Also there isn't anything stopping girls from playing video games. To be honest I think a girl that plays video games is more attractive and I bet most men would.

NOTE: I am in no way saying "toys" are limited to boys or trying to imply anything sexist but what I am saying is that the division of boy toys and girl toys isn't wholly because of marketing.

pistle• 13 years ago

They get the 80's crash analysis all wrong. There was never a demand implosion due to uncertainty of quality. These were 8 bit sprites. Crap was standard. Crap was good. All 8-bit console games look low quality compared to the first 8-bit computer games. We still bought. Something way more important was the first widely-available consumer 8-bit computers. Compare Atari 2600 Pac-man to Atari 400 Pac-man... and that's not the Atari XL line.

No consideration of a sudden shift in early adopters to Atari XL and Commodore 64 computers?? What year did those drop 82-83? The games for those PC-precursors were 1) way better and 2) pirate's booty. The abilities of those machines moved beyond what could be packed into consoles and the margins seemed higher. The price for a game went to free. That meant you could buy second floppy drives, 300 baud modems, dot matrix printers (24 pins FTW!) instead of games.

Computer clubs were not uncommon and literal swap meets of 5.5" floppies. Early modems gained access to BBS's and created cornucopias of free software - legit and not.

They should also review Master's of Doom and get insight into the personalities behind the seminal FPS. There were no marketers outside of the dev team there. They were making something they loved to play and they loved the thrill/hilarity of over-the-top power and gross-out humor. If you want to empower or blame the feedback loop of marketing driving development, you shouldn't ignore all the history prior to the present-day machine.

Thank goodness they are writing an article which confirms that the world is changing because women aren't sitting quietly by, letting history be written by loud-mouthed men any more.

But it's an awkward dance to read trying to fill enough space to provide ample vertical scrolling to get a sense for why it took so many people to construct the page...

etler• 13 years ago

Outside the fps genre are video games really that gender based? Pretty much every Nintendo game is enjoyable by boys and girls. Many ubisoft games are gender agnostic, all puzzle games are. I'm not a big fps guy so looking at my personal library, almost all my games are gender neutral.

mankypro• 13 years ago

There's a reason most boys gravitate towards guns, monster trucks and blow-em-ups. There's a reason why most girls gravitate towards dolls, ponies and puppy dogs. It's called evolution aka 200,000 years of it. Many iterations, regression testing etc.

Put quite simply, it works for the propagation of the species.

You can argue all you want with 200k years of evolution and or civilization, isn't going to change a thing. We are first and foremost made to procreate and natural systems are all about efficiencies - White Knights and Jezebels notwithstanding.

memracom• 13 years ago

For the first several years of her life, I would not buy anything pink for my daughter. Her baby clothes were white and yellow and powder blue ( a great color for a red headed girl with blue eyes). Then when she got older it became harder to avoid pink in new clothes shops, so we went to second hand shops instead and found wonderful things like a dark purple dress with a metallic green waistband. We also always check the boys section for clothes that are not blatant marketing stuff and buy a few items for her, mostly darker colors.

DanBC• 13 years ago

There's a niche in the market for gender neutral clothing with positive messages.

"HERE COMES TROUBLE" or "DADDY'S LITTLE PRINCESS" are sub-optimal.

johngalt• 13 years ago

These articles always walk a very fine line between opposing views. How do you simultaneously claim that pink dolls are marketed to girls and that's bad. Then also claim that there are no video games that have pink dolls, so therefore girls are excluded.

As a father, I worry that if we 'encourage' our girls too much to discard girly pink things, they might receive the message that girly things are inherently worse. It's perfectly ok to ensure your kid isn't forced into some role because of their gender, but be careful not to preclude/deride things they may genuinely desire. Don't be worried about attending a tea party with your girls. The 'message it sends' is that you care enough to play what they want.

No Girls Allowed

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