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HOW TO GET YOUR GIRLFRIEND INTO GAMES...

24/6/2019

9 Comments

 
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"Imagine - no more moans as you clock your fifth hour playing Half-Life instead of doing pointless stuff like going out or talking to people..." 

And thus begun an  article in the May 1999 issue of PC Zone, entitled How To Get Your Girlfriend Into Games. Written by one David McCandless, who, like a number of PC Zone writers - including a certain Charlie Brooker, a certain Rhianna Pratchett, and some bloke called Paul Rose - would go on to be better known for other things, it was typical of the era's attitude towards women and games.

In short: it was seen that girls rarely played video games, and certainly never played PC games. 

I'd love to say that times have changed, but while you would never seen an article published like this today, you don't need me to tell you that far too many awful men are still trying to ring-fence gaming as an exclusive boys' club. Tellingly, a 2018 US study found that 48% of gamers are women, and it's much the same story globally; in the UK it's 46%, 49% in Finland, 47% in Australia... 

However, somewhat tellingly, only 6% of women gamers identify as a "gamer", in comparison to 15% of men. Which is a whole bag of worms when it comes to men with a weak sense of identity making  "gamer" their entire sense of self, and feeling threatened by females encroaching on that, and whose dysfunctional sexuality means they get a weird dopamine hit when making aggressive sexual comments while shielded behind a veil of anonymity. 

​Anyhow. We know all about that, and I've not got the energy today to deal with a load of loveless limpdicks calling me a soyboy and a cuck.

Let's dive into the article.
AND SO IT BEGINS
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Oddly, McCandless begins his article by suggesting that games are awful:

"You've been playing games for years, but just imagine what they must look like from a non-gamer's point of view. They suck.

"The graphics are crap. Look out of your window - that's good graphics. These just look shoddy and blocky in comparison. And what's with all the violence? Why do you have to kill everybody? Why can't you just talk to them? And what are these locations? Cathedrals? Dungeons? Catacombs? God, it's all so dark and depressing. And why are there so many blokes in these games? And what the hell am I doing spending hours playing this when I could be out talking to people, reading books, watching films, living life...?

"This is how girls think. Girls and games rarely mix.

"They rarely mix because you - man, boy, bloke, fellow, chap, me lad - you designed them. Unlike most other examples of popular culture, computer games are predominantly designed and programmed by blokes and so inevitably appeal to men and the male tick-list of desirable experiences: being a superhero, being competitive, being murderous, and doing things fast."


McCandless is no idiot, though he was perhaps hamstrung by the nature of the brief he was working with. The very fact the article was printed in the first place is problematic, not least because he makes a huge, sweeping, assumption by stating "This is how girls think". 

Yeah, 'cos in my experience, "girls" really love it when men tell them what they're thinking. Heck, I'm barely a girl, and if anybody says to me something along the lines of "I know what you're like..." I'm liable to administer a sharp jab to the thorax.

McCandless at least identifies why "girlfriends" might not be interested in games, with the following: "Why are there so many blokes in these games?" and "Computer games are predominantly designed and programmed by blokes."

That has improved in the last 20 years; another 2018 study suggested that 23% of people working in games development in the US now identify as female. That's certainly better than in 1999, when the figure was in single digits, but there's still a long way to go. Besides, any female games developer or journalist who draws attention to themselves seems to become a target for the usual abuse. 
CHOOSE WISELY
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PC Zone offered a 12-part plan to get girlfriends into playing games - as written by the man David McCandless. He started by suggesting the sorts of games that girls would like. The following games, according to him, are guaranteed girlfriend-pleasers...

"Half-Life: The hazard course is a particularly good starting point. It takes a while to get going but once they're hooked, they'll never stop.

"Tomb Raider III: Despite what feminists say about her bosoms, girls like playing girls. Especially strong, agile ones.

"Motocross Madness: Great driving game set 'outside', with hyper-realistic graphics. Exhilarating and amusing.

"Creatures 2: Yeah, yeah, they 'get to raise babies'. Easy joke.

"Worms: Because you can name the worms and then blow them up.

"Quake II: Multiplayer especially. They'll hate it at first but try and try again. They'll get it.

"Grim Fandango: Interactive, movie-like, funny, with a plethora of locations and mysteries. How much more girly can a game get?"


I admit that I'm not sure I entirely understand the rationale behind any of those, which seem to have been chosen entirely at random. Lara Croft may have been marketed as a feminist icon, but she was still designed by men, wore hot pants and a tight top which accentuated her impossible breasts. Certainly, however, she seems to have appealed to female gamers simply by virtue of there being so few female protagonists in games at that point. 

Last year, eSports presented Elle Osili-Wood told i-D magazine: "I watched my cousin play the first game and I just fell in love with this kickass woman -- all I wanted to do was run around exploring and fighting and being ridiculously cool.”

So, in that respect, maybe McCandless was onto something with that one.
MEN ARE PIGS
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The plan's first rule was to tidy your room (because all men, apparently, are filthy pigs, and females all want cleanliness). 

"No-one wants their first introduction to games to happen in the midst of a smeg pit. Clear the mugs away. Wipe all those shavings and toenails off your desk. Clear the cigarette butts, bits of paper, Blu-tack and Coke cans out of the way. Get a nice clean mouse - not one clogged up with three months' worth of dried skin.

"Clean all those manky half-moons of crap off the keys on your keyboard, too. Use Stanislavski's Circles Of Attention technique to minimise her distraction. Turn off the main light in your room and erect a side light which creates a pool of illumination around your computer.

​"This makes the computer screen the centre of focus and mutes any peripheral distractions. In short, she has nowhere to look if she gets bored."
SELL HER THE GAME
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Your girlfriend "Is a proper person who cares about things like emotions and novels," says 1999 McCandless, an emotionless man who has never read a novel. With the revelation that your girlfriend is a proper person rather than, I dunno, a cypher, McCandless reveals that she doesn't understand - or doesn't have any interest - in jargon (which, frankly, makes me question my own gender identity).

He recommends the following: 

"Don't use jargon. Ramp up any 'interactive' elements (talking, speaking, puzzle-solving). Play down hyper-violent aspects (flying globules of gibbage, explosions with true particles, realistic death throes). Once she's over her initial reluctance, she'll be as bloodthirsty as anyone, but you have to get her there first."

To get her playing your recommended games, McCandless wants you to downplay anything which might scare her off.

For Half-Life, he recommends you avoid saying: "Next-generation first-person shoot 'em up with strong narrative elements" and should try: "Oh, it's an amazing unfolding story with you playing the central character."

For Worms Armageddon he suggests that instead of describing it as being like "That tank game you used to play in school where you'd enter the trajectory and balance it against wind speed" and tell her "It's like Tetris."
REASSURE HER
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The young David McCandless believed women to be an enormous amount of work, who needed "constant reassurance" while playing games.

"She says: 'I'm crap.'"

You say: 'No, you're not just schooled in the conventions of this medium.'

She says: 'Oh, I can't do it.'

You say: 'It took me a while to get the hang of it, too.'

She says: 'What's the point? I don't get it. I'm not doing it anymore.'

You say: 'There's a really brilliant bit coming up. Just stick at it.'

She says: 'I'm bored.'

You say: 'There's a bit like Tetris coming up in a sec.'

She says: 'Where's the bit like Tetris.'

You say: 'It's coming in a minute, okay?'


Women really like Tetris, apparently. Though, let's face it, if it had been made by the same people as Tomb Raider the blocks would be falling breasts, and it'd be called Titres, and be held up as a stirringl example of Girl Power. 
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT
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David McCandless wanted PC Zone's readers to train their girlfriends, like dogs.

"It is a psychological fact that people will do things they don't want to if there's a reward for them at the end. You may have to trade. Say you'll go to see a film with subtitles with her if she spends an hour playing games. Or that you'll cook something other than corned beef curry. Or that you will finally pull out those dirty socks that are stuck like cardboard behind the radiator.

"There has to be a trade. You don't get something for nothing.

"Hopefully, to use an unfortunate comparison, like Pavlov's dog, every time she hears the ping of the SimCity 3000 menu options or the splattery fine red mist of giblets hitting cobblestones in Quake, she'll start salivating."
ACTUAL WOMEN ALLOWED TO HAVE OPINIONS
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Several actual women - proper people, remember - were interviewed for PC Zone's feature, in an attempt to convert them into gamers. Among them were Paula and Mandy (real women, potentially).

NAME: Paula
AGE: 27 JOB: Make-up artist
STANCE ON COMPUTER GAMES BEFORE: "Boring waste of time. A typically mindless male pursuit"
STANCE AFTER: "No different The kind of thing you do in the absence of any other stimulation or activity. When you're trapped in the house and there's no alternative It makes me want to go and read a book."
VERDICT: Thoroughly resisted conversion to the Dark Side.

​NAME: Mandy
AGE: 27 JOB: Hairdresser
STANCE BEFORE: "I've played puzzley games like Tetris. I get quite addicted, but how blokes can play them for hours or weeks strikes me as strange."
STANCE AFTER: "It's tempting once I get started."
​VERDICT: Not much change.


DON'T GET TECHNICAL WITH ME
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Of course PC Zone's predominantly male readers were also invited to share their own experience of trying to get their girlfriends to play games. Two of them had this to say:

"I showed her Quake without the 3Dfx and then with, and she said ttiey were both the same and the 3Dfx card was a waste of money. I caught her playing on my eldest daughter's PC once and guess what she was doing - typing in WingDings and then changing the size and colour." - Stuart Lawrence

"My girlfriend detests pretty much all games, though she'll happily play Puzzle Bobble 2 for ages. I showed her Quake II once and she thought it was crap. 'That's really unrealistic - how can you possibly spend hours playing it? What's the attraction?' I tried to explain about it being fun, skilful and pleasurable (short-range shotgun blasts to the head), but she just doesn't get it. I'm in marketing and she's in accountancy. Is this an explanation?" - Anon

However, probably no doubt surprising PC Zone's editorial team, they also got some responses from female readers:

​"I'm a girl. I really enjoy shooting all the idiots with my rocket launcher in Quake IT. I also like Half-Life Carmageddon Grand Theft Auto However, I also Little Big Adventure Tomb Raider Diablo "It does surprise me that more girls don't seem to enjoy killing things with big weapons. When I first entered the PC Zone chatsite, I was asked (insultingly) if the games I liked were Solitaire and Barbie Hall Designer Well, l have news for you blokes - come over here and suck on my BFG," - Pianoforte 98

Pianoforte 98 there, demonstrating that not much has changed in the intervening 20 years.
SCIENCE BIT
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McCandless - who later carved out a careers as a "data journalist" - used real science to back up his article's assertion that gamers simply don't like computer games as much as men do. And also, why women are worse drivers than men (don't worry, misogynists - science has your back):

​"Blokes don't like talking about their emotions and girls can't park. Crass sweeping generalisations or statistically proven sweeping generalisations? A variety of behavioural differences have been reported for men and women, and researchers have zoned in on 'parallel parking' as an example of the differences between male and female thought processes. Men can often 'see' the space, in 3D, in their brains.

"Women can perceive the gap, but need to talk about it in order to understand its relationship with the length of their car. They ask themselves questions and come to a conclusion, which takes longer than the male approach, which is just to pile in there and use the alarms of the vehicles in front and behind to judge distances. This car-parking phenomenon also has an influence on the way women perceive computer games.

"For some women, the 3D space and layout of an area in a game like Quake is not immediately obvious to them. Tunnels which lead off from a room, or even the entire architecture of the room itself, may be 'invisible'.

"This Is not, as your grandfather no doubt maintains, because 'women are stupid' but simply because they have a tendency to perceive 'negative space', the gaps between objects rather than the objects themselves.

"The widely-held belief that women only like adventure games can be explained by recent studies, which found that women spend 43 minutes a day making personal calls and men only 22. Women speak, on average, 9,000 words a day, while men utter a mere 2,000.

"Generally speaking, women communicate more and enjoy the act of talking and interacting more than men. Anyway, before you start moaning about crap girl gamers or bad parking arguments, remember this: until six weeks Into your mother's pregnancy, you were a girl. Then your defective X chromosome kicked in. Everything went haywire and for some reason your nipples weren't absorbed. Your clitoris, however, remained and grew and grew into your penis. Just remember that."


Not sure what he's trying to say at the end there, given most of the article has gone to lengths to highlight the differences McCandless perceives between males and females, but there you go.

​Science!
IN CONCLUSION
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I want to make clear that I'm not singling out David McCandless or PC Zone here; this sort of thing was rife back in the 80s and 90s. I can't think of any specific examples, but I'm sure Digitiser made plenty of references to girls not liking games.

Primarily, I suspect, because our readership was very clearly made up of teenage boys and young men, and we were all part of an institutionalised problem, where gaming simply didn't invite girls in. Not because games as an idea didn't appeal to them, but because they were told in problematic articles such as this one that they didn't like games, and were written by men. 

PC Zone was by no means the only publication to perpetuate the myth - and at least one other British games magazine had a regular feature, where readers were invited to send in photos of their girlfriends. Which should tell you all you need to know.

Plus, as McCandless points out in his introduction, the sorts of games that were made back then - and predominantly still are today, let's face it - were the product of men, and from a male perspective.
9 Comments
Wapojif
24/6/2019 10:48:29 am

Common stuff for lad's mags and many gaming ones, too, from the 1990s era. A lot were trying to be edgy and tow the FHM line, making gaming out to be cool after the Nintendo/Sega era. Where apparently is was only for kids, but the PC brigade often had a superiort complex on the go.

I don't remember Digitiser being like that at all, it was just the lunacy of the humour. Plus the maniacs in the letters pages that brought everyone back down to Earth.

I had a period off gaming between 2009-2011 where I just played WOW in a drunken stupour. When I returned to the wider industry and started paying attention to the online gaming community I found everything as toxic as ever.

Apparently the Wii wasn't a proper games console (mainly for women), the Xbox 360 and PS3 were for real, mature men who like juvenile violence and digital breasts.

There's still a lot of gamers out there (mainly those with right-wing ideologies, dare I state it?!) with a major issues with women in the industry. Someone highlighted One Angry Gamer on here recently and it's full of oddballs convinced feminism is ruining the world as games are being "censored" (Tifa in FFVII being a major concern).

It really makes me marvel - an egalitarian outlook isn't at all difficult. And I'm delighted so many more women have taken up gaming in every aspect of the industry.

Reply
Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
24/6/2019 01:50:54 pm

Even Cyber-X, Britain’s 274th foremost lad games joints, would have found that a bit excessive.

One can’t help but wonder what they’d have made of 2019 games sites fighting over who can be the most “woke”.

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Uncle Albert's labia
24/6/2019 08:50:14 pm

Yeah I dunno. I don't see the point in getting ones knickers in a twist over a crappy article some wank-pig wrote over 20 years ago

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Robobob
24/6/2019 09:41:44 pm

Yeah I kind of agree. It is an interesting run through what looks now like a fairly hideous article. But it's also sort of the equivalent of reading some Victorian novel or newspaper article and going "oh they didn't half have some strange attitudes about women in those days".

It wasn't the right attitude but it's just what was the prevailing wind of the time, gaming was seen as a predominantly spotty geeky boy thing. The good thing is we can all look at it now and see why it was shite. The even better thing is we can dispel terrible stereotypes on both sides of the gender divide seeing as gaming is now so mainstream.

I suppose the really interesting thing is what stuff is getting written today that in 20, 30 years time people will be looking at and cringing.

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wariospeedwagon
26/6/2019 03:19:36 am

It's usually pretty humorous reading anitquated articles, seeing shocking opinions put out there like it's no big deal. And reassuring, knowing that while a lot of things aren't great nowadays, the often were far worse. We're getting better!

It's an odd feeling though, being old enough to have LIVED THROUGH a time when stuff like this was the norm. My brain won't let me believe I used to think like this too, but it was probably true!

Jim
25/6/2019 09:36:04 am

Thanks for all the advice, I tried it on my girlfriend and she ran off screaming 'me too, finally, me toooo'

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Starbuck
25/6/2019 06:04:31 pm

Fourth photo: I'd always wondered whether Huey from the Fun Lovin Criminals was a fan of early 3D PC LAN death match battles

Reply
Mr Bass
26/6/2019 10:13:39 am

"McCandless - who later carved out a careers as a "data journalist" - used real science to back up his article's assertion that gamers simply don't like computer games as much as men do."

Er...Wot? Not the only grammatical error in the article, but the one that howls out the loudest.

Yes I am fun at parties

No, I am, in fact, a normal person and not remotely affiliated with mythical bridge-blocking monsters.

Reply
Pete Davison link
4/7/2019 01:59:09 pm

The '80s and '90s were a funny time in this regard, and kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The stereotype was that gamers were spotty, nerdy boys, and the perpetuation of this stereotype both made said spotty nerdy boys feel like other people (such as girls) wouldn't want to be involved with their hobby because of the seeming stigma attached to it, and at the same time made said other people (such as girls) feel like they wouldn't be welcome in the hobby if they expressed an interest. Stalemate.

I was in sixth form when this issue of Zone was published. That year, some friends and I had launched a sixth form magazine because we were interested in writing, publishing and fanzines. Our aim was to provide something that everyone could enjoy; we made a specific effort to cover things like pop music, celebrity news and local events, but naturally, we also included video games in the mix, too.

We got a TON of complaints from the girls of sixth form that our first issue included a feature article about how much fun playing multiplayer games like Mario Kart was with your friends -- a celebration of gaming being a social activity rather than something that the stereotypical spotty, nerdy boy did alone in their bedroom; an attempt to reach out to people who weren't hardcore game fans, but enjoyed doing things together. The negative response we got despite our best efforts did not do much to convince any of us that girls were the slightest bit interested in games.

Growing up, I knew precisely three girls who were into games.

There was Laura, with whom ten year old me used to play Revs on the BBC Micro; we'd have a good laugh at calling a particularly sharp corner an offensive (and, in retrospect, probably racist) name, and if we were five years older at the time this was taking place I'd have probably fancied her.

There was Amanda, who was ten years my senior and a friend of my brother; she babysat pre-teen me a few times, and I was delighted on the several occasions where she wanted to play stuff like Spy vs. Spy on the Atari.

And there was Allie, my brother's first girlfriend, who was into tabletop roleplaying, HeroQuest, heavy metal and computer and console games. She helped me learn about a bunch of things that subsequently became lifelong interests.

No-one else ever made themselves known, however -- particularly in secondary school and sixth form, where image was everything for a lot of the population -- and my friends and I weren't exactly shy about our love of the medium; we would have happily welcomed anyone in who wanted to join us in our enthusiasm, regardless of gender.

No, wait, four; my mum liked Millipede and adventure games.

Anyway, this is why it was such a pleasant surprise when I was thrown into the melting pot that is university, and in my first couple of days I met a young lady (who remains a friend to this day) who enjoyed watching me play Final Fantasy VIII and playing Point Blank. And, when The Internet became more of a thing, I was able to "meet" and interact with a whole bunch of people who were into games and were not boys.

While this article seems laughably silly today, I can, to an extent, understand where it came from, given the culture of the time. I grew up conditioned by both my own experiences and the media to feel that "girls don't like games", and received little evidence to the contrary. And I'm sure I wasn't the only one!

This isn't the same as "I want to keep girls out of my games", mind. On the contrary, I would have been DELIGHTED to have a teenage girl friend that was into video games; as a teen, I always found that in terms of casual social situations, I got along better with my female peers, and was always a bit frustrated that none of them were interested in my favourite hobby.

I'm now married to someone with over 10,000 hours in Final Fantasy XIV. So times have changed. Thankfully. I think.

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