Thread by @Delafina777

flashback to meeting for AAA shooter franchise

marketing revealed their new ad idea, which implied that the one recurring female character in the game was being violated with a chainsaw

when we protested, they said they needed to make sure audiences knew it wasn't a "girl game"

https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1397922940876849161

Like, just sit with that for a moment. This super testosterone-y game about shooting things, well into its franchise life, and marketing is worried that if they don't show the only female presence in the game being violently sexually violated, people might think it's too girly.

And now imagine--big room, big meeting, all these dudes--being a woman in that room, one of 2 or maybe 3 among like 15 or 16 guys.

And you're like hey maybe let's not do this?

And a marketing guy says it to you, in the tone one would use with a particularly dense child.

And that's when you realize that it's not just that you're working on a game that's not really *for* you.

You're used to that, hey, it's a paycheck in a tough industry and despite having no maternal instinct whatsoever, you've been able to find joy and creative fulfillment working on some kids' games.

Not every game you work on is going to be for you.

But that's when it hits you.

It's not that this game isn't *for* you.

This game *hates* you.

It's not content to just be probably-uninteresting to you.

It's not even content to be a male-dominated space, like some hardware stores used to be, where everyone kind of side-eyes you if you walk in.

No, they're actively trying to create a space where any hint of anything female has to eliminated, and eliminated with sexual violence and degradation.

And when you protest, and people react like you've just said some sort of bizarrely stupid thing, then you start to realize how much this fucking industry is gaslighting you.

Because "hey, this is gratuitously cruel and contemptuous and degrading to some of the people who play our game, and more importantly, to roughly half the population" is not the strange, illogical, or irrational position.

Wanting to *do that* is the strange, illogical position.

So, I was young and still relatively new, so I didn't push it, and I was only temporarily on that game until we hired someone else to cover it.

But the whole experience started to feel an itchy seam in my clothing.

(Eventually, btw, they scrapped that ad concept, so sense did prevail. I suspect some woman higher up was able to put a foot down.)

So eventually I was sitting and talking with a user researcher. And having, at this point, heard the unquestioned "fact" that women will consume media with male protagonists but men will not touch media with female protagonists a billion times, I asked about it.

And he was like, yeah, that's just something everyone knows, but I don't know where it comes from. I'll look into it.

Months later, when I'd forgotten I'd asked, he came back to me, very excited. Digging up where this accepted creative wisdom (which, btw, I understand is also canon in toys, the movie industry, etc.) came from had been a pretty epic mystery hunt.

Turns out that this accepted "fact", steering the marketing in all these multi-billion dollar entertainment industries is based on *one study* from, IIRC, the 1940s, with like 8 children.

They put some boys and girls in a room with toys and dolls and books, some with girls on the cover and some with boys.

And the male kids picked up the male dolls and books first, while the girls didn't discriminate.

Like, that's it. The boys weren't, like, repulsed by the girl dolls or books with girls on the covers. They didn't refuse to touch them. They just picked up the stuff with boys on it first.

But a while back, marketers came up with "market segmentation" -- the idea that you can sell more shit if you gender it.

And like, okay, fine, with deodorant or whatever, I guess I can see it.

It starts to get really silly with pens.

But with games, it gets *violent.*

And, like, there's nothing wrong with making a game that tends to appeal to one particular audience segment more than another one.

But when you need to violently keep that other segment out, then we've got a problem.

I should add that the worst part about this is that video game marketers leaned so hard into a weakly supported assumption from an 80-year-old study done with, at minimum, 1/100 the sample size it should have had that they created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

They didn’t just market based on a giant leap of logic from a study with eight kids, they managed to *actively instill the ideology they derived from it into their audience.*

Fast forward a decade and: GamerGate, an organized attempt to expunge the industry of women.