the game is cool but it would be so sick if we could leave this gendered language behind in gaming. as a nonbinary person this is so fucking stupid.
Why ever would we do that? Binary people make games.
Non-binary people make games, and they use gendered language, too.
It has never been left behind, and it never will be.
I know, right? And “combat” reminds me too much of actual violence. I prefer “kerfuffle” or “spot of unpleasantness”.
Oh we can’t say “kerfluffle.” Reminds me too much of feathers and I’m a mammal.
I’ve always been mystified by the expression “from the get-go” - from the wat-huh?
There’s some irony here that a dress-up game appeals to women. I mean, considering the political climate where certain elements try to deny there are inherent differences between male and female humans, and what sorts of activities they gravitate towards.
I saw a woman streaming this game. I knew there was a nice love to detail in it, when she started talking about “bias cutting” the fabric (apparently that’s what it’s called when you take the weave on diagonally), and it showed up in the game a few minutes later.
I also heard later that the developers added different colors of thread to the sewing machine, just to answer a player demand, even though the thread isn’t a criterion in scoring the dress anyway. Very nice move, to enable the more accurate role-play despite it being unnecessary for the gameplay mechanics.
I’m kind of a fan, despite not wanting to play it myself.
Only person I know who plays this game is a dude lol
I applaud that they’ve made a game many women (and, delightfully given it is a typically “girly” craft, men) are enjoying, and I am glad they chose to (mostly) respectfully portray a craft which has historically been almost exclusively practiced by women. I’d love if they’d change “journeyman” in the game to “journeywoman” since that is what they were called historically, and the term is absolutely gendered.
There are plenty of video games which require exactly zero dick interactions to play. There are also plenty of games which target things like dress making and hair styling.
What they are getting at is traditional gender role-based play where women should only make dresses and cook and clean, and that thinking can get entirely in the bin.
My little girl loves playing Party Animals. It’s technically a fighting game where fuzzy animals bonk each other with stuff around them.
Little boy loves brushing unicorns hair. Go figure, such games actually already exist in huge abundance.
Also: would love to hear a take from Dodger, Felicia Day, WGG etc. to get their opinion on these games.
I remember teaching a young lady, many years ago(30?), to play Killer Instinct and Mortal Kombat, took her a week to beat everyone but me, took her a month to be a toss up who would win between us, no one would fight either of us at that point. Had another friend, woman my age, that loved Warcraft 2, Star Craft, and I think it was an isometric Fall out or some other tactical game from 30 years ago. Hell, my gf plays Minecraft and Elder Scrolls Online. She runs 3 or 4 ESO guilds that are mostly capped on players. To me, a “girls” game is any game “girls” enjoy playing period. Personally I enjoy zombie type and extraction/horror games
Less gender stereotypes, more women game directors
Man, fuck this.
“Targetting women from the get go” by doing what? Women hate patronising. Just make games not be sexist. Options to customise the character and treat each sex as equal.
I know plenty of women that love games like Witcher or elder scrolls. MMOs got huge population of women. Hell, even fallout is very popular.
Why? Because they weren’t trying to “target women” they just weren’t shitty about them.
Make good game, people will come, people, not men or women. This is bad message to send.
(And yeah, game is cool)
I truly and seriously believe women just like being mad about things.
Make a dress-making game and say it’s for women, they’ll bitch about gender roles. Market a half-diet soda that’s got some sugar, some artifical sweetener in it with action movie cliches and a tagline “It’s not for women” and they’ll bitch about exclusion. What’s it like to have never been happy?
I think it’s fine to target primary women or primarily men, it’s tangential to being sexist or being shitty, you can do both, do neither, or do only one.
It’s just that a lot of niches targeting men are already occupied and enjoyed by the players (probably of all genders), because men tended to be considered the main audience, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy as women felt left-out and rightfully.
On the other hand, I’m not a woman and may be completely wrong in my opinion, and would be glad to hear from someone who knows how things are, not how they seem to be
I can only give examples i came across, but considering she’s my wife and we’ve been gaming for +20 years togeter, she loves games like CoD zombies or even recently gears of war. Famously “male targetted” but even MW2 (the og CoD mw2) had a lot of popularity with women.
Almost like target demographic has always been more of a suggestion.
Dont you think giving examples that are 10+ years old reinforces the point that not many games seem to appeal to women?
Most games that aren’t at least 10 years old are unappealing to anyone, not just women.
Most games at least 10 years old are appealing to at least someone
Most games are unappealing to almost all people
There are a lot of people and a lot of games
They were anecdotal examples, not an exhaustive list. We could add Baldur’s Gate 3, Hades II, Grounded 2, and Farming Simulator if you want more recent ones (again, anecdotal).
I have been hearing about this game and I think it’s worth celebrating because:
A) It was made as a labor of love, spearheaded by a dev who wanted his wife with health issues to be able to make dresses again
B) it was made on a shoestring budget by a small team of devs (non-corpo)
C) It is staunchly anti-AI in its assets and code
D) Its assets are hand drawn with original foley and music composed for the gameHonestly the fact that its geared towards women is one of the less interesting things about it. I’m so happy for them and wish them every success.
As a woman who sews, it’s interesting to me that it was made to appeal to women because it touched my soul in a way that no other game had.
I’ve played all manners of games with vastly different gender compositions of player bases from Tarkov and Wardogs to Stardew Valley and Infinity Nikki. Dressmaker is the first game that I feel is both made with feminine aesthetics and skill expression that isn’t gated by preconceptions of what women are capable of. If you go to the dressmaker discord, the dresses there literally have the Mona Lisa painstakingly painted on it using piping.
Most games made primarily with women in mind tend to be simpler because of a circular assumption that women don’t play games with high skill expression and so game devs (who are majority male) will make simpler games. Dressmaker proved that skill expression and complexity is possible and desired even for a playerbase that statistically plays more mobile games.
Some of best things I’ve heard about this game really show how much point A is behind the success of this game: from helping elderly ladies in a nursing home to enjoy the creative process once again to letting someone experience their parent’s craft. It made the creative field of dressmaking accessible to those that wouldn’t have considered it otherwise, and made it accessible once again to those that could no longer access it.
women are such an underserved market in video games
I don’t think this statement deserves all the critical comments. It may be a little simplistic but I do think values and characteristics traditionally associated with femininity are underrepresented in plenty of games markets, even when the protagonist is a woman. Dressmaker’s a breath of fresh air. I may not be a woman but it caters to me feminine side for sure.
The problem has never been that women don’t like games, it is that men have made women feel unwelcome in many ways in gaming culture.
Yep, it fucking sucks playing shooters online as a woman, you get so much harassment, which sucks because me and my all female friend group really enjoyed valorant.
Like, I’m here for more femme games. And I do think that games need to not treat women as an afterthought, giving us good character options, styles, and romance options for example. But for that, a lot of the industry has accepted that. RPGs for example understand that their audience is largely to majority women. We’re past the era of “I suppose you can play as a woman in some games if you want…”
But ultimately what we still see is that “girly games” are much less respected and women are harassed in online and competitive games, as well as we’re less respected when we speak on topics of gaming than men. This is especially the case in “gamer” spheres which still maintain a pretty hard-core misogyny problem.
But ultimately what we still see is that “girly games” are much less respected and women are harassed in online and competitive games, as well as we’re less respected when we speak on topics of gaming than men. This is especially the case in “gamer” spheres which still maintain a pretty hard-core misogyny problem.
This exactly. As if clicking heads for 100 hours makes you more of a gamer than playing the Sims for 100 hours. As if having guns and gore effects makes a game a “real” game, and no other type of game “counts”.
No matter what people say about it too, “girly games” don’t get the same investment, creative vision and hype that “masculine games” do, even when the “girly games” sell a ton.
This is both a problem with sexism and our conception of what sells, people are constantly telling stories about what kind of games people actually want and it is almost never corresponds to the breadth and depth of reality and not just in smaller indie games.
We constantly repeat that mindless sex, violence and other types of cartoonishly masculine games are what people want to buy while ignoring the massive, astronomical success of games like Stardew Valley, Slay The Spire, Balatro, Terraria, Eurotruck Simulator 2, Factorio, Subnautica etc… I really hate this forced sense of cynicism about what we desire and why.
Which… I love FPS games, I like lots of “masculine” games but we have a very narrow vision culturally of why people play video games and it pisses me off.
I also to be honest as a man feel really lonely most of the time talking about my semi-competitive FPS hobbies to people in real life, a big reason for this is women are culturally assumed to not be included in the experience so most women don’t bother pushing through the toxicity to find out if they like that type of game (why would they?)… so naturally it isn’t an easy topic to connect with not men on… and then the men who don’t play these games tend to see that as an indicator that video games are childish. How is this good for anyone?
As a man I want to live in a universe where video games can be a more common topic because who plays them and why isn’t so narrowly defined. I just want it to be a normal conversation. I want to be able to casually have conversations with women about the video games they like, and to get wrecked by women in multiplayer FPS games on the regular. Things are just better when women are included, any time men get together and exclude women it gets disgusting, smelly, toxic and weird and this has held video gaming back for decades.
Yeah, I think this failure to equally invest in girly games comes in large part from the fact that women are expected to be comfortable partaking in things considered masculine, and men are expected to be uncomfortable partaking in things considered feminine. Feminist theorist Julia Serrano talked about parts of this where because masculinity is regarded more positively violations of gendered expectations are seen as less bad when it’s women embracing masculinity. This of course is also because of many years of hard fighting for women to be permitted these things, but as she notes things associated with femininity are seen as frivolous, tainted by their association with women. Thus she posited that a necessary step towards gender equality is the fight for feminine things to be seen as valuable and acceptable for men to want without a status hit. Sorry for bringing theory into this, but your comment really drew to mind her ideas.
And yeah I was in college during gamergate, where being a woman who games on console/pc went from bad but seemingly improving to so much worse. It led to me and my friends regardless of gender generally stopping using the term gamer to describe ourselves and avoiding “gaming” spaces for the most part.
And yeah I love some fpses. Me and my then gf used to play overwatch together, it was toxic but overwatch was popular enough with women and moderated enough it didn’t get that bad (unlike valorant). Personally I prefer them to be campaigny and story focused: Halo (the good ones) of course remains a classic, ths Borderlands series has consumed far too much of my life, and I bonded with my sister as I played bioshock as a teenager. Make something like mass effect but an fps and most of the women I know that game will be all over that shit.
And yeah, I mostly play indies, I’m loving Fields of Mistria (it’s kinda like stardew), I’ve sank a concerning number of hours into Binding of Isaac, anything by Supergiant (Bastion, Transistor, Hades, etc) is an insta buy for me, Rogue Legacy 2 is criminally underrated, Gris was the perfect game to play by candlelight… Really I just like my games having art in their design and writing as well as roguelikes. And I know a lot of women with similar tastes to me.
In general though I avoid competitive gaming unless playing with friends, because I’m not very good and the toxicity is so horrendous.
Awesome response!
To add a wrinkle here I am not that competitive emotionally, I appreciate competitive multiplayer games because of the magic that happens when two humans (or even more fun two teams of humans) are interacting through a dynamic system.
Singleplayer and co-op games are awesome, my mind just loves the loop of pulling a clever trick on someone and then being forced to react to the response they choose to catch me off guard…and seeing how that evolves and continually challenges my mind to reframe things, that is the addictive part to me and NPCs/AI doesn’t really bring that to the table without a ton of human artistry in the game design (one of the reasons Halo 1-3 or Half Life 2 are considered some of the best singleplayer fps games, it ain’t easy to make that…).
What I want from a competitive FPS is not to be the best player, it is to play an FPS where when I lose I feel like it is because my awareness wasn’t correctly oriented or that I made an incorrect choice and when I win it was because I genuinely out played the other team not just found a narrow exploit I could repeat over and over again. This is really the same reason people like really good singleplayer games like Slay The Spire or Monster Train in a way right?
I say that though to underline that I don’t have the mental profile of a stereotypical “competitive gamer” and that the toxicity of competitive gaming environments turns me off, both when people lose sight they are doing something joyful together and when they are just plain mean to other people about trivial things such as making a noob mistake or they are sexist, racist or hateful in another way. I don’t play virtually any “popular” competitive video games for these reasons, I stick to smaller indie games with fanbases that are very good at playing competitively but are generally excited about new players no matter how much they fumble around.
The narrowness of environments dominated by manifestations of toxic masculinity bring us all down and it results in warped pictures of even the people that supposedly “fit in”.
Overwatch tangent. There are several flanking characters who though a mix of stealth or mobility take detours around the main traffic of the stage in order to initiate from a less expected angle.
Sometimes this means two characters from opposing teams unexpectedly run into each other off the beaten path. Often times they duke it out. Others…they will silently crouch at each other from a distance to negotiate armistice, slowly approach each other, squat and jump a few times to be silly, then continue on their merry way. From that moment on there is established understanding that you only kill each other when protecting someone else on your team.
The real awkward moment is when you have negotiated a truce and then someone from your team crashes the back room party only to waste your new secret friend. Rude.
So true! The number of times Gamers™ act like apes when a woman is discovered to exist in a gaming environment… Sigh
As a guy, other guys acting misogynistic infuriates me. The label incel is also very cringe, almost as cringe as the incels themselves. It is alright to be single okay? Its actually fucking awesome sometimes. Furthermore, some people are not meant for relationships. And guys blaming all women for some unspecified grievance when they themselves won’t look three seconds at themselves and their behavior, or somehow deludes themselves into thinking “supermodels should be throwing themselves at me the second I climb out of my basement, and if they don’t, it’s obviously because of trans/LGBTQ/woke and I just need to double down on being s toxic piece of shit. That surely will make me attractive!”. /rant
Even 4chan liked Dressmaker. A good game’s a good game.
I do not usually ask basement dwelling neckbeards what their opinion is. It is not really important.
Same reason I didn’t ask you.
The real lesson here is make a good game and people will play it.
Women do love games. The market share before the toy stores made it a choice of who to cater to were about even. Women made some of the best games early on, and the female gamer demographic never went away, it just got shoved to the side for fanservice.
There are plenty of games for women, and im not saying this dismissively. It depends what these women like. They just aren’t hardcore soulslikes. Most women arent into that. They prefer casual or social games they can fit onto their existing life, like candy crush or farmville.
I’m a woman gamer, most of my ladyfriends are gamers. I definitely play a different subset of games than most of them, but there’s no real lack…
We even have big franchise games that are aimed toward women like horizon. I fucking loved those games, and we need more like that! They made me better at shooters in general, a genre I have never been good at or spent time with due in part to how male-focused it was.
They prefer casual or social games they can fit onto their existing life, like candy crush or farmville.
what even is this take
People gave up reading halfway through his comment…
I’m a woman gamer, most of my ladyfriends are gamers.
Obviously hehe
They just aren’t hardcore soulslikes. Most women arent into that. They prefer casual or social games they can fit onto their existing life, like candy crush or farmville.
I think this is a symptom of how women are ostracised/marketed to in the gaming sphere rather than an actual predisposition. The split of women and men (and everyone in between) in my life who enjoy more action oriented games, vs cozy games, vs strategy games, vs etc, is pretty much even, but the women (and non women who were Arab) had a harder time getting to the point where they felt they were “allowed” to try the games that are typically heavily marketed toward men, and typically associated with men.
I can speak to it from the opposite side as well, having grown up assigned male, I spent a great deal of time feeling like I wasn’t allowed to play, or should feel shame for enjoying, cozy games, farming games, games with a more “typically feminine” aesthetic. And that shame came from other gamers, and from the wider conversation around games by media and marketing. But I do like cozy games and farming games! (And I’m a woman, but that discovery came later xP)
What I can agree with, which I think is slightly buried in the subtext of your comment, is that it’s far more socially accepted for a man to base his life around games. For (some) women who enjoy soulslikes, they might play for shorter times, or less frequently, as lapsing on other facets of life or responsibilities is more heavily frowned upon (by wider society) in women. But (many) men can happily spend 3, 4, 5, 8 hours a day playing video games without all that much judgement (which is fine! I don’t think people should be judged for doing what they enjoy as long as it doesn’t cause harm - the same “social leniency” is simply not offered to women).
I know a lot of women who actually deeply appreciate soulsbornes and i dont like this “women arent hardcore” narrative.
Bloodborne, for easy example, has a deep maternal-horror throughline. Disconnecting the female experience from bloodborne leaves you with… British people?
My wife loved god of war 2016 (not a soulsborne, but you get it) and it helped her to fix a part of her relationship with her father. She also defeated the last valkyrie hitless on Give Me God of War.
Damsels in distress arent off the table, but dont be misogynistic about it. Fanservice can be done tastefully (and there are plenty of female gooners who appreciate the female form as well).
What women dont like, is being objectified or forced to look at their struggles as fetish content.
Male power fantasies are often hit or miss too. My wife loves doom but cant stand the call of duty campaigns.
British people?
Oh the horrors!
Sorry, but you cannot honestly think that most women are into soulslikes when not even most men are into them. Idk about the other references you are making because I’m one of the vast majority of women who have no interest in soulslike. (Actually that’s not structly true, I despeately want to like them, but don’t, but I still have no clue what you are on about)
I never said women aren’t hardcore, we give birth and raise kids. That’s hardcore. We do whatever the fuck we want against society, that’s hardcore. We can like anything across a broad range, but it would be silly to think that most women give a fuck about being represented in wwe, for example. This is similar.
What I’ve been saying is that women are more into social games, overall as a statistic, because that is factually correct.
I didn’t say most, i said “a lot”. I also covered much of the second paragraph here so im not sure what the argument is. I agree that ~50% of the population is also capable of greatness, mainly because i also belong to it :3
Theres definitely a stigma against women in gaming spaces, but believing thats the fault of the games’ content is 1/8th of the story; the majority of it is just regular ol’ misogyny and systematically-instilled self-doubt.
Im not mad at you or trying to downplay your opinion, i just disagree with the notion that women are for some reason repelled from “difficult” games by the content itself, primarily soulsborne games, because they have intricate feminist views on occasion. I think its far more likely they are drawn to unpopular games because male audiences are absent, allowing a female space to flourish.
just disagree with the notion that women are for some reason repelled from “difficult” games by the content itself,
Which I never said and in fact have disgreed with, so that’s probably why.
If you don’t make up my position, you might get it :)
Sorry, but you cannot honestly think that most women are into soulslikes when not even most men are into them.
What you just said amounts to ‘nobody likes soulslikes’ which is just fucking insane, soulslikes are obviously popular.
What they said is literally ‘less than 50% men like soulslikes, and less than 50% women like soulslikes’ which would be a statistical miracle to be an incorrect statement because it’s hard to make something to appeal to majority including those that never come close to PC or a console. Even if you only count gamers that would probably be hard to achieve, as that is not the same as positive reviews because reviewers are a subset of population that is already not against the genre
What they said is true, its not a jab at the genre.
A woman I work with only plays one game: Call of Duty.
Cool, I’m glad she’s into it.
Why is this being treated a a refutation to my personal opinion?
It isn’t.
Then why does it matter?
It was another example about the variety of games that women play, intended to be positive but you seem to think it was somehow negative.
Sorry for agreeing with your point that women have made and played a wide variety of games.
Well said! I think it’s a matter of identity too. My mom plays bejeweled and Farmville, and used to play SNES. She didn’t like 64, but played Myst and Riven and lots of PC games.
But if you ask her if she’s a gamer she’ll say no without hesitation.
I think “gamer” has been pretty tainted and is mostly used pejoratively nowadays. I play a lot of games but do not want to be associated with capital G Gamers and all the toxicity
I would argue that all games are for whoever wants to play them. Shitty take from a dev trying to market their game.
