About half of U.S. adults (49 percent) now report that they play video games on a computer, game console (an Xbox, for example), mobile device (Android or other mobile telephone), or a combination of the foregoing.1 By mid-2012, the gaming industry’s annual revenues had grown to $78 billion, while the worldwide motion picture industry recorded revenues of $86.7 billion.2 One venerated ninety-year-old film studio, ranked third in global box office, has video game revenue exceeding that of films.3 Two and a half years after the 2012 industry-wide report, in December 2014, CBS Evening News reported that the video and computer gaming industry’s revenues had exceeded twice those of the motion picture industry.4
Individual successes have been stunning. Pokémon Go, which Nintendo introduced in the summer of 2016, was the latest evolution in the Pokémon series. Nintendo initiated the series for play on Game Boy devices of the 1990s. Marketers estimated that the newest Pokémon will bring Nintendo and its partners $5 billion in annual revenue.5 Nintendo’s share price doubled in the first two weeks after the game’s North American release, adding $9 billion in market capitalization.6 Nintendo’s introduction of the game in Japan was “treated as a national event, with widespread news coverage and a cautious endorsement from the government.”7
Pokémon Go’s predecessor as a hot release, Candy Crush Saga, produced $2 billion in revenue for Irish company King Digital Entertainment.8 Grand Theft Auto V produced $1 billion in annual revenue, spiking a 77 percent rise in share price for Take-Two Interactive Software.9 Call of Duty is a line of best-selling games produced by Activision Blizzard. A recent iteration, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, although panned by the reviewers and other critics, makes the thirteenth sequel to the original, following predecessors such as Call of Duty: Constant Warfare.10
One observer believes that computer games have become “crack cocaine” for youth, highly addictive and likely to produce significant revenues and profits for developers/publishers.11 In addition to the content of the games, as an industry, gaming is more male-dominated than even information technology as a whole. Virtually no women occupy leadership positions. As to content, the games the industry produces are characterized by violence and cruelty, designed to appeal to adolescent males. The games feature women mainly as objects of sex or violence.
The industry derisively terms the games and software it does produce for girls and young women as “pink ware.” It accounts for less than 5 percent of the industry’s output. Pink ware developers’ designs are crude, unsophisticated, cheaply produced, and force-fed to retailers at bargain prices, with little or no marketing to accompany them.12 Another pejorative term for cheaply produced software of that ilk is “shovel ware”: products made for a quick profit with little concern for quality.13 Examples include games such as Barbie, Groom and Glam Pups, Disney Sing It, and High School Musical.
To market their products, gaming company marketing and sales executives rely upon the objectification and demeaning of women just as much as game designers do in the games’ content. Gaming companies hire professional models, outfit them in scanty attire, and use sex to introduce and sell products. The trade refers to these scantily clad models as “booth babes.”
All the foregoing takes on triple or quadruple significance because gaming is, if not crack cocaine, the gateway drug, so to speak, for young men and women who later on follow up on nascent interests developed through computer and video gaming. The through-and-through misogynistic soul of the gaming industry is a principal reason for females’ reduced presence in information technology. Gaming industry reform is a sine qua non for increasing the number of women in the information technology field.
The developers include Atari, Nintendo (Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Run), Activision Blizzard (number one producer by market capitalization), Take-Two Interactive, Electronic Arts (Battlefield I, Titanfall II, Heroes of the Galaxy), Ubisoft, and Niantic (spun off from Google), to name a few. Others include foreign firms such as Rovio Entertainment (Finland). Many users find Rovio’s principal product, Angry Birds, to be addictive.14 The foregoing is, however, misleading. Smaller developers and producers dominate the industry, many of whom hope “to catch lightning in a bottle,” as Rovio did with Angry Birds or King Digital Entertainment (Ireland) with Candy Crush.15
Eighty-eight percent of the personnel in these organizations are white males.16 The developers’ group makeup contrasts with the makeup of the user group: 57 percent of young African Americans and 66 percent of Asian Americans play video games, as contrasted with whites, of whom 53 percent play. The group in which women do have a significant presence is the group over age forty, in casual games, defined as quick and simple games that do not require long periods of play.17 Solitaire and Angry Birds are examples. By contrast, female representation in complex games is very low.
For example, Riot Games is the creator of one of the world’s most heavily played computer games, League of Legends. The company has also created, as an adjunct to the game, a global professional gaming league called the League Championship Series. There are sixteen teams in North America and Europe. Not a single member of any of those teams is female.18
With regard to gender diversity, from within the industry, an anonymous British computer game developer observes that “marginalization is happening in the very fabric of the design process and this is just as damaging to the health of the industry and its ability to hold our attention—both as developers and as gamers.”19 The marginalization within the industry extends beyond the marginalization of women or other ethnicities to the marginalization of large numbers of white males as well.
The mainstream industry is preoccupied with adolescent power trips and gritty revenge sagas. . . . The lack of gender diversity doesn’t just affect players, it affects employees within the industry, especially women . . . outside of the shooter-killer wavelength. . . . Eventually the industry will feel like it’s just not a place for people who aren’t interested in heavy weaponry [which will exclude large numbers of white males as well].20
For its part, when the industry does speak, which given its dispersal and atomization appears to be rarely, it avoids the pithier problems. For instance, the Entertainment Software Association blames the lack of diversity squarely on the paucity of women and African Americans with STEM backgrounds. “University graduates with STEM degrees were highly likely to be white or perhaps Asian males. This has created a widespread and prejudicial expectation [with the industry] about people who [would be] good at STEM subjects and would like to pursue careers in gaming.”21 The industry’s response to the problem is thus a shrug of the shoulders, a “whatya-gonna-do” expression. The gaming industry’s diagnosis of the problem accepts the status quo, foreseeing an industry makeup that replicates itself. Gaming’s developers appear prepared to be inclusive only in words and not in deeds. It seems the gaming industry could not find a proper path to achieving diversity even with GPS route guidance and a seeing-eye dog.
Reform may be difficult. For the most part, larger producers such as Nintendo, Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, or Atari were predominant early on and still loom large today. Midsize producers such as Take-Two Interactive or Rovio are publicly held and visible.22 We know their addresses. But, as seen, there are a myriad of small developers who pop up here and there, have a hit or quasi-hit (again, as seen, to “catch lightning in a bottle”), and disappear.23 They will be much more difficult to reach or reform. Their visibility is ephemeral.
A principal reason for the predominance of smaller developers is the absence of significant barriers to entry. Opening a software shop entails far less cost than, say, building a steel mill or producing electric cars (Tesla). Rovio developed Angry Birds for $140,000. A team of fewer than ten developed Candy Crush for King Digital.24 The downside of that is that smaller producers may have far less concern for diversity either in their leadership and staffing within their firms, or in the games they produce, both as to content and as to projected audience, and the manner in which they market their games.
Another change affecting the industry is the movement from desk and laptop computers and game consoles to mobile devices:
Technology companies have increasingly turned to mobile as their customers give up their desktop computers and shift . . . to smartphones and tablets. But mobile has proved to be a difficult area to make money, in part because smaller screens do not offer as much space for advertising.25
Be that as it may, the treatment of gender diversity, or the lack thereof, in the gaming industry must return to the fore.
Changes in the way producers and retailers market and sell games support the trend toward survival of, or even increase in, the number of smaller producers. In days gone by, producers sold games through specialized retailers located in shopping and strip malls. The industry leader was GameStop, with 20,000 employees and 7,117 stores in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Europe.26
Taking a cue from the video store industry’s demise, along with Netflix’s ascendancy and the rapid rise of streaming direct to end users, analysts predicted that GameStop would quickly dwindle and perhaps disappear. “Comparisons are rife between the video-game retailer[s] and defunct video-rental giant Blockbuster.”27 The computer game retailers, however, have not gone the way of Blockbuster, which disappeared rapidly. One reason is that a principal portion of GameStop’s and its rivals’ businesses has been trade in used games, for which the markup ranges from 42 percent to 48 percent.28 Further, hands-on browsing is much more prevalent in used as opposed to new games. Stores and inventory within them are conducive to browsing and used game sales.
Nonetheless, the introduction and evolution of new games have moved from retail stores to the cloud and direct streaming to gamers. In that milieu, barriers to entry that may have existed in the days of brick-and-mortar retailers, principally in marketing and sales, have become lower. Marketing muscle is not so important. The opening for smaller producers has expanded.
“Ubisoft technical director James Therien told the Video Gamer about the decision not to include female characters in” Assassins Creed: Unity. He noted in 2013 that there had been a significant backlash from gamers to the predecessor game (Assassins Creed III: Liberation) that had depicted “Ellie [a woman] as a strong female character.”29 A 2009 study by researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Cambridge “found that depictions of women in video games [when they exist] are skewed toward emphasizing sex characteristics.”30
Within the industry, one critic notes, is “a central notion that games are best for shooting or killing things—or scoring goals—and that all other intricacies are subservient” at best.31 In the last several years, games include Call of Duty (thirteen or fourteen iterations total), Black Ops 3, War Halo, Fallout 4, Mobile Strike, Mortal Kombat X, World of War, Battlefield, Titanfall, Grand Theft Auto V, and Gears of War, in addition to the previously mentioned Assassins Creed games.32 “Narrative games, multidirectional platforms, strategy [simulations], and casual puzzle apps aren’t weird outliers: they are all part of games that have been completely jettisoned in the race toward the perfect shoot-’em-up mono-experience.”33
As one financial columnist observes, “Here, in a 100 billion dollar industry that is bigger than Hollywood, violence toward women is integral to the product itself. Games in which near-naked female characters are degraded or mutilated rake in billions of dollars for game publishers.”34
Near pornography appears frequently. In Revenge, the goal of a naked General George Custer is to reach a nude Native American woman tied to the stake. If Custer reaches the woman, the game then depicts Custer’s rape of her. Dead or Alive and Soul Caliber are well known for their scantily clad female characters. Multiple spin-off games from Dead or Alive feature buxom women characters playing in beach volleyball tournaments.35
What, though, of the claim that games potentially attractive to female players, especially games that are “too girly,” do not sell? Game producers’ decreased or minimal revenues do not lie. Yet there is a chicken-and-egg problem here. The argument goes that the egg must come first, the egg being more games attractive to young women. In turn, that introduction and use of those games will increase the flow of girls and young women into computer subjects, the computer lab, and, ultimately, into STEM subjects and majors. Then, so educated, certain of those women will matriculate to the entertainment software industry. A difficulty is that this particular scenario, as a solution to increasing diversity, may take fifteen years or longer to play out, with no guarantee that measurable improvements will follow.
A subsidiary problem is that those who have been critical of games’ content and have blogged or otherwise gone public with their observations and criticisms “have been hacked and cyber-bullied by some in the gaming community. . . . Some members of the gaming community have responded with threats of rape and death against” one critical blogger and her family.36
The troll fraternity is responsible for many of the defamatory and threatening actions. A troll is a gamer who in games or on gaming forums devotes time primarily to harassing others.37 Thought to consist mainly of teenage males, the troll fraternity tends to focus its ire on women, minorities, and gay, lesbian, and transgender members of the population. Among other things, trolls’ behavior has a chilling effect on female participation in online games or gaming forums.38 As a result, young women tend to have more negative gaming experiences than males do. In turn, observers hypothesize that young women’s negative gaming experiences play a significant role in discouraging them from pursuing information technology and game development careers.39
A subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Jigsaw has developed an algorithmic filter that uses artificial intelligence to determine which comments and threats are toxic.40 Both Facebook and Twitter have their own systems “for flagging abusive behavior and an escalating ladder of punishments for those who commit it.”41 The systems are nascent, not yet fully developed.
Within the computer gaming industry, the needle seems not to have moved at all. In fact, anecdotal evidence may point in the opposite direction, to the prevalence of the “bro culture.” Not long ago, Microsoft’s Xbox division held a “Women in Gaming” luncheon. As entertainment, the Xbox division leadership “hired scantily clad female go-go dancers” to perform at the after party following the luncheon.42
Game publishers continue to hire “booth babes,” attractive women attired in bikinis, who know little or nothing of the publishers’ products. The women’s principal role is to be highly visible at conventions and shows to lure customers to displays and booths.43 Booth babes are, for example, highly in evidence at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, held each January in Las Vegas, hosted by the Consumer Technology Association. The CES is considered a must-attend event for many of those who work in the information technology industry.44
The importance of remedying, at least in some degree, the female-male imbalance in all aspects of the computer gaming industry looms much larger than the gaming development and publishing business itself. It affects the entire future of gender diversity in information technology, lying as it does at the commencement of the pathway that would lead to computer courses, STEM majors, and jobs in systems analysis, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and robotics, to name a few. In short, gaming development, content, distribution, and sales will play a major role as the first stepping-stone to the future. Reform of the gaming industry, with an eye toward increasing gender diversity, is essential.
In this regard, no one silver bullet may be chambered that will fix or ameliorate all the problems. The need to generate revenue and profits likewise militates against any quick fix. But several policies would be important steps toward a solution:
A real impediment to all of this is the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That amendment, of course, guarantees to citizens the right of free speech (“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech”). The amendment pertains to abridgments by the federal government, by state governments, and by private actors if “state action” is involved in their dealings.
But our culture is such that acts by wholly private parties that impinge upon freedom of speech will be condemned. Going overboard in policing or attempting to police the output of game developers would run afoul of our free speech culture. Regulation and policing could certainly reach conduct by trolls that is equivalent to “shouting fire in a crowed theater,” or that defames other persons, or that puts objects of their actions in reasonable fear of an imminent battery (a harmful or offensive touching). But there are First Amendment considerations here, especially if instruments of government (courts, for example) are asked to enforce sanctions and thereby curb harmful behavior and if standards and sanctions go too far.
So the problems associated with achieving reform within the computer game industry are not simple. That is not to deny, however, that achievement of significant reform is essential to the entire information technology business and its legitimacy. Reform of the software entertainment industry, mainly including the gaming industry, has to be one of the very first steps.