The Citizen Soapbox is an area where we throw out topics to the users of Citizen Game. When we record a podcast we take the soapbox comments and use them in our own discussions. We think it’s a great way of involving you guys in our stupid arguments!
The Setup:
So today I was caught in a lengthy discussion about Bioware’s amazing Mass Effect 3 trailer (check it out here). No conclusion was made, so I’m throwing this one out to the intelligent (and beautiful) Citizen Game community at the hope that you guys can give us a definitive answer. Or at least your two cents!
A point was made that Bioware had missed out on the opportunity to market the game to women by having the subtly silhouetted “Shepard” at the end of the trailer, be a version of a female Shepard instead. That women are an untapped market and that girls would play action games if marketing company’s didn’t constantly reinforce the idea that they were for men.
My point was that it didn’t matter as not only was the game (an action RPG) largely directed towards the male demographic, but that the majority of women enjoy games for specific game mechanics, and a female lead at the end of a trailer consisting of should do little to change this. I made the point that ME2 sold well, but could do much better and marketing this to new male gamers would be more productive.
The Question:
Should Mass Effect have had a female character at the end of the trailer or not?
Should this guy have been a woman too?
he wasnt silloutt
Yeah, I’m more into tentacles myself. It’s all about the alien sex!
Nah Deno, when he uses his feelers he basically looks like a testicle. Girl gamers would hate that.
They should of just put in a silhoutte of Gish, nobody really knows anything of Gish.
@Barry Nobody feels that it should have been a female Shepard on the screen. That’s entirely Danny’s strawman, which I suspect was an honest misinterpretation.
@Danny At least we agree that the game itself isn’t exclusive. I was seriously wondering who you thought the female character was aimed at. I am not delusional – I don’t think different marketing for Mass Effect will suddenly destroy barriers of casual gaming and give it mass-market appeal. Thanks to Nintendo, all three platforms are working on that – I don’t think there’s anything more that needs to be done.
I do think there’s a reasonable proportion of younger female gamers who would be attracted to science fiction and more traditional video games if they were allowed to be. Katie has her mom to quell that gendered bullshit. A lot of kids don’t.
I would be surprised if you disagree that the media and marketing have a huge role to play in both reinforcing and breaking down gender stereotypes at the societal level.
@MatthewWooley
Not that much in the teaser – I think a simple N7 logo on pretty much anything would be just as evocative to the existing fans.
Trailer-wise, I quoted this on my own site:
“Trailer editors take it upon themselves to summarize and sell the most commercial possible product, whether it bears even a fuzzy resemblance to the film it’s ostensibly promoting. Oftentimes, that means cutting different trailers for different demographics. Consequently, the same film can be marketed as a raunchy teen sex comedy, a heartfelt romance, or an earnest coming-of-age drama.”
With the number of trailers for ME2, would it have been be so expensive to do one or two that covered the choice of John vs Jane? (is there one? Wasn’t paying attention) Would it have put off the core male demog? I doubt it.
Game packaging is important.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/97170-Game-Packaging-More-Important-Than-You-Realize
Fact is, prominent male on the front cover is off-putting to women. How many women’s magazines have a man on the front? Societal cues. Had I known Borderlands was an RPG I would have bought it last year but I didn’t like the dude on the front. [I actually don't like it but that's beside the point]
Oblivion is neutral. So is Morrowind. So is Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. I acknowledge that ME is already heavily branded with John but the logo is still a significant part of things – I’m not sure you’d really lose that many male gamers without him.
@Debbie Timmins
If you could market Mass Effect 3 as a game for women, and you couldn’t change the gameplay how would you do it?
Does EA’s current market actually unappeal to you?
Just some questions to throw some spanners in the the works. I’m quite interested in this debate as I want to go into the games industry once I’ve finished my schooling and I think it will be one of the future hot topics as Kinect starts to sell and the 3DS is released. The casual gamer (I am putting female gamers into the category because that’s where I think the majority lies) has been targeted more and more since the release of the Wii. There does not seen the be a ‘niche’ if you will for female gamers.
Will this change?
This is the most interesting soapboxes ever. You should send the link to a newspaper of magazine or something. Or see what other websites think.
I don’t really think a different sex Shepard at the end would have changed much.
Since according to the statistics they have shown, much more people play the male Shepard , it seems to be the logical thing to do
Debbie: We are playing the same game, I’m just explaining how video games are designed. I enjoy the story as much as the next person (in fact it was my favorite aspect of the game), but the difference between each gender liking / disliking a certain game is weighted heavily on how it operates at a mechanical level. As I already said (twice now) the gameplay has been designed, predominantly, for male audiences. It has nothing to do with the guns per-sé, it has to do with how the game is controlled and structured. That isn’t to say, like in any other media, it is exclusive.
But as I said, it’s really irrelevant as the issues with female games has nothing to do with how they are marketed, and all to do with industry wide misconceptions about where the needs of female gamers lie.
A group you appear to be part of.
This is turning into quite the… hmm, I’m not sure how best to describe it.
To drag it back to the question in the soapbox, should the end of the trailer for ME3 have featured a clearly female Shepard over a male Shepard?
Well, I’d say no, simply because it would have been inconsistent with all of the marketing ever done for the ME series of games. And I say that as someone who is convinced that the game is just better when you play as a female Shepard.
If they’d been a bit clever, they could have manipulated the silhouette to be a bit more androgynous, perhaps. But for better or worse John Shepard has always been the central face of the ME franchise, not Jen Shepard. From a publisher’s point of view, suddenly changing the face of your franchise is a bad idea.
If anyone feels it should’ve been a female Shepard up on the screen, then I’m afraid that train sailed with ME1.
@Danny I thought this was the the soapbox category where you threw topics out to the users for discussion…
YOU may be playing Mass Effect as an objective-based shooter. That’s only one facet of the game. I fight primarily with biotics. Shooting and skill are totally optional – this is practically the USP of the RPG genre, action or otherwise.
You see the character interactions as “only story triggers”, whereas I see the unveiling of Shepard’s relationships with her squad and the alignment system as the the main thrust of the game. God knows the combat isn’t particularly challenging on normal difficulty. You can pause the combat at any time to size up the room for heaven’s sake. You can choose to hunker down behind a container and let your team take out half the mobs. Hardly an action thrill-ride.
We are playing different games. Mass Effect can be so much more than a dumb shooter, but listening to you and watching any of the trailers, nobody would ever know. You’ve bought so wholly into the marketed experience, you can’t even see the other options, or maybe you just don’t enjoy playing those options. Either way, are you saying that my experience is less valid than yours?
Tamoor said there aren’t enough vocal female gamers – I was providing some starting points for those who are interested. Never claimed they were a scalable slice of female gamers. At least we agree that the DS is making gaming acceptable to a demographic that has historically been excluded through societal means. No idea why you assert that I wouldn’t like that. My very point is that the DS and 360 markets can be brought together but it will take more than slapping a woman in a trailer.
If only someone would design a science fiction game with a strong inspiring female role-model, along with gender-specific dialogue options, romance options… Let that image permeate into popular culture and maybe little Katie Goldman wouldn’t have taken the crap she did at school. http://bit.ly/h270SU
But she’s a special snowflake as well, right? Science fiction is for men!
Also never said that ALL games designed for men should be marketed to women. Just the ones that are generally lauded by gaming women as inclusive and already have a solid fan base of ~2m. The developers have already done their job *sigh* I don’t even know who you’re arguing with any more but it sure as hell isn’t me.
@Barry, I haven’t made the distinction explicit here but yes, I am aware that marketing is probably handled exclusively by EA and not BioWare. Was that edit aimed at Danny?
Yeah, I remember the ME player stats when they came out :S The female fan base does seem to be large enough to justify female-cut t-shirts and merch though. Always encouraging
Not sure how much I want to get involved here, but I’ll just leave the following factoid here:
Regardless of the sex of the gamer, 80% of players played as a male Shepard in Mass Effect 2. That’s Bioware’s official number, based on the stat gathering tech they built into the game.
So, you know, the majority of people (male and female) played as a man, even though they had the option to play as a woman.
You could argue that this was due to how the game was marketed (ie, male Shepard in all the ads) but it could just as well be that the marketing uses a male Shepard because most of ME2′s player base chose to play as a male Shepard.
Source here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/07/mass-effect-2-statistics-are-properly-batshit/
EDIT 1: Also, your comments all seem to imply that Bioware are in full control of the marketing efforts for Mass Effect. Which is probably not the case, seeing as how the publisher is EA. They’re probably primarily concerned with a consistent branding and message for what they see as a product, and are probably oblivious to other considerations. Even if Bioware aren’t.
@Debbie: The first line in that response is the reason your argument is ridiculous. The game is marketed to men because it has been mechanically made for a male audience (objective based gameplay, shooting, skill). No offense, but the list of people who mentioned there are not representative of the global female marketplace. You guys are the tiny exception to most women who want games with mechanics that encourage creations, design and human interaction. There are a millions of gamer women on this planet, and most of them aren’t tom-boys or cosplayers.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the real people pushing women’s games forward are those who develop games that resonate with women. Games that allow women into the gaming space and break down walls instead of trying to blindly market games to girls by sticking a female protagonist on the box. Weather you like it or not, the DS has done more for women gamers than the 360 ever will (though there is scope to bring these markets together).
The argument started in relation to this single trailer (and that of ES5) and has no spilled into a fucking white paper on how male targeted games should be marketed to women to solve all the industry’s problems.
Personally I believe that not only would marketing this game to women be a waste of everybody’s time (haven’t even bothered to reiterate how it would be wasted on themale audience EA and Bioware are attempting to corral with this trailer – look at the imagery!), but that the mere concept of marketing an action-RPG being able to open doors to women is laughable. The power is with developers.
@Tamoor The majority of the audience is male because the majority of the marketing has historically been historically male. I haven’t the numbers nor the inclination to open up a full can of business analyst whoop-ass on this but here’s the general gist of why it would be good to try something new when the opportunity is there:
* Is it really a dichotomy? Does games marketing spend really have to be only for men, or only for women in order to succeed? Of course not.
* Mass Effect is a 12 rated game. Girls these days are growing up with at least a DS, probably a Wii and maybe some other consoles already in the house. They already play games and they have the time to invest in learning new genres.
* You could spend a hojillion pounds targetting the same market that everyone else is going for. Or you could spend 70% of a hojillion pounds on them and 30% on attracting a new market that could be open to your advances and has very little real competition. If 30% is too threatening to your way of life, how about just 10% to expand the RPG market? 5%? Looks to me like the genre is probably topping out at around 3 million sales (conjecture based on fable 2 + mass effect 2 sales and a probably-too-low overlap estimate). People think the best business decision is to spend ALL your money gunning for a heavily-contested demographic? Really?
“There just aren’t enough vocal female gamers” We’re working on that. http://www.ggsgamer.com/
http://zaxy.com/
http://hellmode.com/
You already know Jen from http://biggerjuicebox.wordpress.com/
http://borderhouseblog.com/
http://www.deirdrakiai.com/
http://geekfeminism.org/
http://lesbiangamers.com/
http://massively.joystiq.com/bloggers/seraphina-brennan/
As to why you don’t often see us? Try http://bit.ly/fnv0A7 This article’s second paragraph rings particularly true for me today. Can’t get enough of those sammich (or kitchen) comments. They’re right up there with having your views twisted into straw men and being told that girls don’t game (except for you, ofc).
Nope. That is one load of bullsh*t. You need to keep some consistency with the trailers. You can’t just swap between the sex of the characters when you want to. If it swapped between trailers in Mass Effect 1 and 2 then fine, maybe it should be a female character in this trailer. But now Mass Effect has a traditional manly Shepard. Also I don’t think a female lead would appeal to girl gamers much more that a male lead. There are loads of male movie stars that are just as popular, if not more, than female leads.
By the way I’m not sexist.
I don’t care where in the kitchen the woman is kept.
I’m kidding by the way.
The majority of the audience is male, marketing towards an audience which is – in sales terms at least – close to non-existent isn’t a smart use of budget and is something that execs will fight tooth and nail against, regardless of how forward thinking and inclusive BioWare’s, or any other developer’s games are.
With that in mind, using an avatar that the majority of the audience won’t be able to relate to either on a personal level, as someone who played as that character, or on a brand recognition level isn’t a smart decision either.
Therein lies the problem, hate to say it but its a game of numbers, and it sucks that it has to be that way.
Marketing needs to hit certain key points to be effective, whether it’s something as simple as a particular jingle (Superman), a particular sound effect (Lightsaber), or in this case a certain character. I’ll gladly admit that although I’m all for putting female Shepard in there, it wouldn’t have had the impact it did on me.
Using male Shepard also markets the game to those that haven’t played a ME game before, they might not have a connection to him but they’ll certainly know him as ‘The Mass Effect Guy’, then it’s up to the trailer to sell it to those gamers too.
There just aren’t enough vocal female gamers, I think the people in the suites with the cash in their pockets would argue that to dilute the marketing for an extremely small player base would do the product a disservice, and potentially adversely affect its chances of performing well.
I say this as someone who played as default male Shepard, but really enjoyed Jennifer Hale’s performance in Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid and Cowboy Bebop.
*bangs head against the wall*
Anyway. Who else has money on this slipping into 2012?
LOL. Yeah, would have saved time if you’d ever actually made that point instead of responding to something I didn’t say.
Never mind, I finally got kick up the ass to push out a post that I’ve been meaning to write for over a year now. All is good.
Not played the bad ending yet. Too much time on the internets and not enough gaming. I was going to play Fallout: New Vegas today :S
Nope, that was in fact the focal point of the entire discussion. Wow, that could saved us all a lot of time.
On a more interesting note, can’t wait to see how they deal with the “bad” ending for Mass Effect 2.
We both agree that blindly replacing John Shepard with a female avatar in the game advertising isn’t going to change much
This is my actual point: http://www.theaveragegamer.com/2010/12/13/its-not-for-you-gender-based-marketing/
johnny66: Eh, he is silhouetted, obviously they didn’t want to show too many features as each characters face can be different. The argument was that instead they character should have been one of the female Shepard characters instead.
Im sure the trailer wouldnt look half as good if shepard was silhouetted.
I’ve played as both sexes, and as far as I’m concerned Fem-Shepard is best Shepard. Actress Jennifer Hale just puts in a better performance than her male counterpart, I think. And that makes such a difference.