FemDevs: The Debut Discussion

Drawing on the wit and wisdom of some of today's leading female MMOG developers we present to you the first installment of a topic driven discussion. Participants are drawn from many companies in the industry. In the interest of privacy, we're only showing you their first names and company names (although some of you hep-cats should be able to pick up what I'm layin' down).

Every week, we'll be bringing you another topic of discussion. Please feel free to join in a forum link provided below for further discussion of the topic.

Topic #1:
I think it's safe to say that outside of Nursing or the Library sciences, you'll be hard pressed to find an technical industry niche that's female dominated (hold back the wisecracks, if possible). So, given that most technology fields are already a majority of men, we arrive at the MMOG development community. MMOG developers, after a cursory survey to just fill the ranks of this discussion group, are nearly all male.

A more cynical mind would maintain that the reason so many MMOGs follow the same paths, make the same decisions, and cater to the same public is that they were designed, built, and maintained by men, for the most part. How much truth is there to that idea, do you figure?

If your position and/or company stocked more female employees, how do you think the development efforts would differ?

Ophelea from WarCry:

I find that while 90% of the readers of WarCry are male, about 35% of the staff are female.

And what I find is (here we go, being sexist) the women simply have more time because they're generally stay-at-home moms. They're able to help and want to...it comes naturally.

But, when I picture an MMP developer getting pregnant, taking 10 weeks maternity leave MINIMUM (assuming no breastfeeding), I picture that person not keeping their job very long or at least not in a lead position. And imagine if they wanted multiple children.

Julia from Cyberwarrior:

Our company had at one point 50% female developers. Now we're down to 30% (marriage, pregnancy, they leave the industry entirely) but you see.. there are also a lot of women that would rather not say when something is bothering them and just leave quietly rather than draw negative attention to oneself and suffer being socially outcast.

The real women that have the internal fortitude to bring ideas up to the great-fraternity (the "star" male developers) will not make it because, there are men out there who just don't want to listen to women... no matter how sound the idea is. (..unless she's hot)

Srand at Turbine

A really cynical mind would maintain that the reason so many MMOGs follow the same paths, make the same decisions, and cater to the same public is that they were designed, built, and maintained by *people*. And people, as the mantra goes, are stupid.

But a practical mind would probably point towards the influence of economics and technology. Modern MMOGs have grown out of a particular technological matrix, and are currently growing in a particular economic niche, and no matter how many women you employ at your company you aren't going to magically change those factors.

I would also argue that before I agree or disagree with any statement about MMOGs following the same path, I want a better definition of MMOG and an outline of that path. Even within the 'classic' MMORPG market -- the commercially successful games with the standard MUD feature set -- I think we are seeing some significant diversity (given that MUD-style games have a fairly narrow focus), and outside that market the diversity is coming along quite nicely. There, The Sims Online, Uru, Majestic, Motor City Online, A Tale in the Desert -- these games may not be fantastically successful, but they are diverse. No, no 'diverse' game has matched the EQ behemoth yet, but then neither has any 'clone'.

Anyway, my point is that the lack of diversity is not an unarguable side-effect of a male-dominated industry. Shoot, I was browsing some old company documents last night and I came across several game proposals that were .. well, diverse is a nice way to put it. *grin* And they were all written by males.

Ophelea from Warcry

Could a truly "diverse" game match the EQ behemoth or anything even close? Doesn't what makes them diverse make them niche almost by definition? In that case, no, the gender of the creator wouldn't matter in the least.

The question really isn't what would adding more females do to a game, it's what would a WHOLLY female group design without male influence.

Julia from Cyberwarrior

Hmm.. I don't know Ophelea. Honestly, I feel that women will always be under male influence (just like men are under women's influence) and even if they've managed to somehow shield themselves in a convent and make this game, the game is still going to be judged .. by men.

In the end, the market is what will make or break the game. Presently, that market is owned by men but that doesn't mean there aren't different kinds of men that are draw to game X versus game Y. Perhaps we should be looking more into personality profiles (like Bartle types) for answers rather than biological demographics?

Judith from Turbine

Designers should be designing games for an audience, not for their own personal preferences. Personally, I think that's why there is a lot of boring crap in games: it probably sounded like a great idea to someone's roommate. It's the larger audience that matters. I'm going to bet a lot more games have failed by making assumptions about what the audience would like and where the audience could be found, than by what the majority gender was on the design team.

The gender of the designer probably is more important, as far as I'm concerned, in regard to how that person behaves in a group, what attitudes s/he brings to a job, how the group itself will behave, and what I need to do as a (female) manager of a (primarily male) design team. I've found it very interesting to listen to conversations here about how to present female characters in game, especially by male designers: it's pretty clear that they are thinking about how they would want to present themselves as the female, and no, hugely sexy characters aren't exactly what they're looking for. They want to be and feel as powerful and heroic in that role as any other that they might want to take on. So, assumptions like male designers = hugely endowed female avatars doesn't really make work for me. (Now, *immature* male designers = hugely endowed females, or even more to the point, an audience that skews towards immature males will very likely have exaggeratedly female avatars for them to play with.) I would fully expect an all-female design team to be as able to produce a wonderfully aggressive blood and gibs based combat experience as a male one, if that's what the game IP and audience required.