Originally Posted by Jaedon Rivers:
My bet is that he was just trying to make a fun and interesting tool for himself, and the whole appealing to both males + females thing was totally accidental
There's possibly some truth to that.
On the one hand, the primary use for creatures in SWG was as minions in combat. Although they could do a couple of tricks, the designers felt compelled to add gameplay functionality to tricks by making them restore "mind pool" points (back when there was such a thing and it mattered). That extreme focus on gameplay utility, not to mention the emphasis on combat, definitely suggests there was a guy behind the wheel when the Creature Handler profession skills were being designed.
On the other hand, you didn't have to use creatures in combat. As I think the original designers of SWG wanted us to do, people made up their own games with creatures. One of them was finding and taming babies of the rarest species -- they weren't necessarily the best in combat, but they were special. You could also name well-developed pets, and that went a long way toward making them desirable to players who wanted to tell stories with the pets they'd tamed and carried with them for many months.
In a fascinating article for The Escapist on the consequences of the NGE, Allan Varney (a designer of the classic RPG Paranoia) reminds us of how one player of Star Wars Galaxies (as quoted in the great "Order 66" thread over at Terra Nova) observed Creature Handlers the night before the NGE completely eliminated their ability to have pets:
The saddest thing I ever saw in SWG was the night before the NGE on the Euro servers... Creature Handlers taking out their favourite pets one last time, petting and playing with them. Perhaps they thought they'd still be able to pull them out, maybe they knew. I am not joking when I say that the conversations I overheard between them then brought a lump to my throat. ... These were people who'd stuck with broken professions - proving that a 'break' doesn't need to mean you can't play or enjoy it - and made their own content and connections.
Creature Handler may have been designed by a man, but to create gameplay rules that are capable of generating such strong feelings of attachment... is that evidence that one doesn't have to be female to design games that women in particular can enjoy?
Is explicitly hiring women as designers necessary to reach this goal? Or just likely to be more effective? Why?
Will women designers be likely to create gameplay that men can enjoy, too? Should that be a goal, or is gender-specific game design acceptable or even desirable?
Lots of questions yet to be answered (or asked) in this area....
Originally Posted by Or'ab Ibo:
The thing that intrigued me about SWG was a lot of women Played the entertainer profession. It didn't require fighting to level up! Image designing was a big hit too. Clothing crafters ...
Don't forget about Creature Handlers (back when SWG had Creature Handlers). For some reason, professions or classes that allow characters to own and play with pets (and I mean animals, not undead) are extremely popular with women. It'll be interesting to see whether the return of some of the Creature Handler abilities in their new "Beast Master" guise will increase SWG's subscriber numbers by attracting women to the game.
And to try desperately to remain on the topic I hoped to promote, I'm pretty sure that the original Creature Handler profession of SWG was designed by a man.
Does that tell us anything interesting?
The "nature vs. nurture" debate shows no signs of being resolved any time soon. Even if incontrovertible physical evidence were provided, some people would simply ignore it because it conflicts with the sociopolitical belief system in which they are invested.
Without going too deeply into my views on the subject, a minor comment:
Originally Posted by Aiten:
Our brain stories memories and regulates the body through chemical releases. The communication is done in a similar way to binary (just electrical pulses on varying levels of strength), but the actual storing and running is all chemicals.
And what's particularly important about this is that it starts while our brains are forming. Estrogen and testosterone levels begin varying based on sex differences while we're still in the womb, and while the fundamental forms and connections of our brains are taking shape. Among other things, this is responsible for the greater size of the corpus callosum -- the part of the brain in between the two hemispheres that connects them to each other -- in women than in men.
Even if we're unable to put our fingers precisely on the mechanism, this in-utero biochemical differentiation suggests that it's not unreasonable to believe that men and women in the aggregate really do think differently.
...
That said, I'd like to steer us back to what I hinted at in my (deliberately) chosen thread title: What, if anything, does this imply for women in the game development industry?
Is Smedley right to give preference to women for certain game design opportunities because, as Paglia and Sommers suggest, men are different enough mentally from women that they find it hard to figure out what women (or girls) like?
Or is he wrong to do so because that contradicts the position of feminists of the Friedan/Steinem school, which is that even to imply that men and women might think differently is sexist and discriminatory?
If men and women should be treated as though they're the same mentally, then what rationale is there for outreach efforts to hire more women in game development?
In an interview with the New York Times, SOE's John Smedley said the following concerning the design of one of SOE's newly-announced games:
Mr. Smedley said he wanted to diversify his customer base, which is 85 percent male and 32 years old, on average. Women have become the major driver of the casual games business (games like Bejeweled and Bookworm), and Mr. Smedley wants a piece of that action.
"We want to get our average age lower, probably into the low 20s, and I'd really like to see the gender breakdown go to 50-50 or even slightly more women than men, to reflect real life," he said.
Sony Online's new direction can perhaps be seen most clearly in a game the company intends to announce today called Free Realms.
...
While the company's traditional fantasy and science-fiction games have been aimed at a hard-core male audience, Free Realms is basically aimed at children, especially girls. ... To reach out to girls, Mr. Smedley realized he had to hire more women. The creative director and art director on the game are now women.
"I just can't explain to a 30-year-old single male why 10-year-old girls like horses," he said. "We were trying to figure out what pets to put into Free Realms and before, the lead designer was a guy and he definitely wanted things that could fight. And when we got more women on the team, it was like 'No, no, no. We need puppies and horses in there.'"
So how about this? Is it a gesture of respect that someone is trying to open doors to other ways of seeing the world, and thus helping to promote fresh new ways of thinking about game design?
Or is it impermissible to imagine that men and women think differently in any way, in which case the "puppies and horses" comment must grate like fingernails on a chalkboard?
Or is the whole discussion sort of insultingly paternalistic, and as a guy I shouldn't even be asking these questions?
