As part of this lecture Rob gave us text on how gender effects the game design industry. To be a successful games designer we will need to understand our audience which includes gender as the audience is either male or female (in most cases). Knowing your target audience is so important for example if you design a children's educational game but then release it at the target audience of 18-25 year old males then the game is likely to fail. Knowing the audience allows you to design the game around their interests and their ambitions as well as the themes and even advertising.
The first text we received was Segregation in a Male-Dominated industry: Women Working in the Computer Games Industry. This was based on how gender can effect the games design industry and the products from them. We are shown thought that a game which is developed with the audience of equal gender, both male and female, that the game will predominantly played by the male gender.
We also received an info-graphic showing data from 2009 based in the UK. The data show the population who play games, the percentage of people who play on consoles, what platform they use and many more. Some of the graphs show male and female others show age. From this we can see a good audience to target our game at.
For example, if we were to make a console game aimed at over 50 year old the audience is only 16% (both male and female) yet if we aimed the same game at 8-12 year old then the audience is significantly higher at 94% for males and 81% females.
Now I will go more into the readings and info-graphic.
Segregation in a Male-Dominated industry: Women Working in the Computer Games Industry (link)
This text primarily focuses on the segregation of occupations inside the games design industry based around gender and the female attitude toward working in a predominantly male industry and attitude toward the female career barriers, progression through the industry and promotion in the industry. People tend to choose occupations in which their gender is best represented, this is called segregation.
The EOC stated that occupation segregation has a negative effect on individuals, businesses and the economy which seems to be an ever grown problem not only in the UK. They also stated that the government need to address the situation in order to improve productivity, competitiveness and prosperity.
Women that are segregated into specific jobs tend to have less pay, fewer opportunities in their occupation, less job autonomy and less authority within their occupation. The higher salary jobs are believed to be more masculine rather than feminine even where duties are similar.
Segregation in the Games Design Industry
The games design industry is built up of a number of different specialties including development, production, design, level design, audio design, art and testing (Green et.al.,2007). In the 2008 Oxford Economics report figures suggested that the games design industry has over 9000 (yes over 9000) employees. A report by the online games magazine, MCV (2008) suggests that the percentage of women within the games design industry in core creation or development roles is around just 6.9%. More recent figures provided by Skillset (2009) suggest that women represent only 4% of the games design industry's workforce, a decrease from the 2006 report in which suggested 12% of the workforce was female (Skillset, 2006). The figure includes the non-developmental as well as the developmental roles women occupy in the games design industry. Developmental roles with the industry are those roles that are involved in the creative and developmental aspect of game development. These roles create everything within the games from the content, the style of play, the reward systems and ultimately influence who the target audience of the game will be.
Table Above: The percentage of men and women in each job description within the gaming industry.
UK National Gamers Survey 2009 (link)
This was the survey data we revived, you can check it out yourself on the link above. From the data we can easily see that the younger are groups play more games than the older age groups, but that's expected most people would assume this anyway. We also see that slightly more males play than females, this goes back into the segregation of gender but in the games design audience.
Companies will use this data to aim their game at a wider target audience, on top of other methods too for getting a more specific target audience.
Wrapping up
So from this lecture we have been informed just how important audience is when it comes to designing a game even before you plan a game. Audience is a main part in designing a game as it is in any type of media. I'm going to take his lecture and use it in my own games a lot more from now on, with my individual game being aimed at both genders and our group game based much more upon the male gender we can see how it has already affected my work.
That is all for this part, part 5 coming soon.
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