jhkimrpg (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jhkimrpg) wrote,@ 2006-02-03 14:45:00 |
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| Entry tags: | feminism |
Evolutionary Stupidity...
WTF?!?
So via ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
feminist_gamers, I found an old Escapist article "Women in Games" by Chris Crawford (from last November). His article is an analysis of what women want in their games, and he decides to use evolutionary psychology. I am dumbfounded... Words do not express... Well, just read:
In spelling, arithmetic, cooking or any of a thousand other skills, women and men are closely matched, but when it comes to social reasoning, the advantage women enjoy is greater than any other advantage they possess. Thus, women are highly motivated to exercise and develop their social reasoning skills.I think stupidities here are pretty fucking obvious, but let me rip into his logic for a bit.
We should therefore expect that modern women might well want to exploit this talent in their entertainment. And in fact that turns out to be the case. The classic female mass entertainments are the soap opera and the bodice-ripper.
...
All this leads to a suggestion for what might work for women in games: social reasoning. The ideal game for women, according to this simplified model, would be some sort of interactive soap opera or bodice ripper, presenting the player with complex social problems as she seeks the ideal mate. Contrast this with the kind of software currently being offered to women and you can see why so little progress has been made with this group.
1) The problem he addresses is largely false. Women do play computer games in large quantities -- perhaps under 50%, but over 40%. The latest data is BBC Report on UK gamers, but that confirms other findings such as the Interactive Digital Software Association surveys.
2) Evolutionary psychology is a particularly stupid field for his purposes. If you want to market computer games to women, you should take modern culture into account rather than trying to design games to appeal to the innate genetics of paleolithic gatherers. In other words, use real psychology. There is no need to delve into what is genetically essential versus culturally-determined, and doing so simply muddles the point. I might suggest he look at real modern data, as well as actually talking to some women who aren't grunting and gathering nuts while they nurse their babies.
3) The evolutionary logic for Crawford's claims is extremely thin. Like many, he postulates that men's brains are evolved as hunters while women's are evolved as mothers and gatherers. However, hominids in general are not evolved as hunters. We are primarily gatherers. Hunting for our branch came late in the game, well after our development of tool use. Homo Habilis did not hunt at all -- they used tools for digging, gathering, and hacking at carrion. So it is only for a period between Paleolithic and Neolithic that hunting is an important issue at all. While there was some evolution during that time, the division not nearly as primal as he makes it out to be.
Even after the advent of hunting, hunted meat is not generally the dominant food source. Estimates of meat in the paleolithic diet vary from 35% to 65% -- but that is including more gathered sources such as fishing as well as hunted meat. Say I put it at roughly 50%. This means that gatherers are just as much the providers as hunters. Note that the size ratio of males to females decreases with the evolution from the earlier australopithecines and Homo Habilis to meat-eating Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens. That is, men and women became more alike in size as we shifted to meat-eating. So rather than increasing the difference between the sexes, the shift to hunting appears to have made them more similar.
In short, I think his picture of evolution owes more to Fred Flintstone than real anthropology. Now, I'm willing to buy some issues of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionarily, females have a high investment for reproduction -- this is true across nearly all mammals. So male reproduction is limited more by their access to fertile females, whereas female reproduction is limited more by access to the resources to nourish their offspring. Testosterone levels do seem to correspond to greater muscle, aggressiveness, and violence. However, his claims about hunting and first-person shooters are based on preconceptions and vague rambling rather than reality.
4) Even given the evolutionary claims, the jump he makes to bodice-rippers and soap operas is ridiculous. Both men and women are social animals and depend strongly on developed relationships. What's interesting to me is that absent his moronic preconceptions, actual evolutionary logic makes one good prediction here. If we accept that post-Homo-Erectus, males have developed as hunters and women as gatherers -- then the obvious idea for women is to make a gathering game. And indeed, last time I was over at a friend's house, I found both her daughters competing away at playing Katamari, a gathering game that is now enormously popular.
5) The proposed solution assumes it as if marketing to women requires a fundamental shift in game play and activities. This is largely ignoring an elephant in the room. If you want adventure computer games that appeal to women, then don't design them with only a handful the female characters, all of whom are heaving-bosomed and bikini-clad. I don't play computer games much, but whenever I look at it, I find them filled with culturally-male content. It doesn't surprise me much that women don't go for that.
Argh. Next up, the less over-the-top stupid but still frustrating article from the most recent issue of the Escapist, Chris Dahlen's "I enjoy playing a Girl".
