Activision’s all-male games are quite okay, really
Evil publisher Activision has grown eviler in the eyes of many a gamer by denying claims by unnamed sources that it deliberately commissions only male-led games for commercial reasons. People from the industry, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Gamasutra‘s Leigh Alexander that the company was so obsessed with focus testing proving male leads were the best option for sales that it actually skewed the results from some tests that contradicted that notion.
As always with unnamed sources, we only have L Alexander‘s word for what she’s claiming. I, for one, believe her because what her sources are telling her makes perfect sense.
For all its dismissal, Activision is very probably putting enormous pressure on its studios to produce the same games over and over again, down to the male protagonist. I want to tell you why that is okay. Hit the jump if you want to hear me out.
Media can be incredibly powerful. The world’s leading country now has a black president, even though it remains a society divided by a great racial rift. This is in no small part thanks to film and TV, which over the past decades have continuously reinforced in the public mind the notion that black people can be the protagonists of great, sweepingly relevant stories. They are now moving to do the same for gays, by sporting homosexuals in roles heterosexual male viewers are supposed to identify with. I have no doubt that eventually they will succeed.
Games too can do a lot to facilitate the decay of unhealthy stereotypes about racial, sexual, religious and other minorities. Only they’re not doing anything like that. As the example of Activision‘s strategy demonstrates, some games are actively reinforcing those stereotypes, because they fit in with their publisher’s commercial interests.
I can see why people would be upset by that. Here’s the thing though: Activision Blizzard, Inc is a publicly traded business. It is owned by its shareholders. The chief responsibility of people like Bobby Kotick is to those shareholders and to other stakeholders in the business, such as creditors and staff.
When people buy shares in a company, they usually do it for profit, not to help society overcome its weaknesses. When banks extend loans, they usually do it for profit, not because they care for gay rights. When people lose their jobs, the usually miss the associated income, not the opportunity their job gave them to change the world for better.
There is nothing more natural for a company in the position of Activision than to try, sometimes desperately, to generate the largest profit possible so that it can pay salaries, pay back credits and distribute dividends. In a way, it would be bad if Activision were to jeopardise the welfare of so many people that depend on it being in good financial shape.
And, mind you, it is not on its best form right now. On Thursday the publisher reported its financial results for the fiscal quarter to June. Its shares took a dive because enough of its owners were so unhappy with its performance that they sold their shares.
A company in that position can very rarely do anything else than stick to the old and tried formulas that have delivered in the past. It is almost impossible to imagine management taking on any risks. No amount of us getting angry about it will change that.
Yet hope remains. Market logic dictates that if there is enough demand for something (female-led games, gay-led games, you name it), there will be supply. It doesn’t have to be demanded by the majority, either. There are myriad examples of niche markets that have formed around very specific needs. In the end it may even be Activision that will supply, either by turning around and changing its in-house policies or by simply acquiring a smaller firm that has sniffed out the emerging niche.
The games we want will come and that is a fact. We may not be around when they do, but they will show up eventually. You may find it unfair that those evil times, when the biggest publishers are mostly not interested in making the games you want, should be yours. But on the bright side: think of how many wonderful things you have access to precisely because you live now and not sometime else.
Sun | 08.08.10
[...] attention on the article in question was drawn by Dilyan, who wrote a post about it earlier this [...]
Sun | 15.08.10
[...] analysing her problem with indie videogame storytelling. In short: the prose. Ben also links to a couple of pieces defending Activision’s apparent all-boy-leads policy and asks “Are They [...]
Mon | 16.08.10
“Market logic dictates that if there is enough demand for something… there will be supply.”
The problem is, this hasn’t actually happened in the game industry’s case. The game industry (especially the “AAA” portion of it, i.e the part where they spend all the money) has always been very self-selecting. Self-selecting workers just like the ones that were in it previously (i.e. very few women, etc.) and self-selecting an audience that was the same as their workforce by making games intended to appeal to only their own demographic. The industry also managed to convince people that these specific types of games constituted the whole of “gaming” and anyone who didn’t like them was “not a gamer.” Every time there was evidence that women did, indeed, play video-games in substantial numbers, the industry response was always, “well, they only like to play X type games,” and that therefore the industry could largely ignore them, as “their company made Y type games” or even that “X type games weren’t ‘real’ games.” That the women gamers were (mostly) playing X type games rather than AAA offerings because X type games hadn’t been made explicitly for teenage boys, while the AAA games had been, was never considered.
As more X type games have been successful (e.g. Farmville), and the industry has finally taken notice, their response has not been, “oh, there is a female market that we can include as a target for our games.” Instead it’s been variously: “See, we were right, women only like those type X games,” or “it’s the end of the industry as we know it; everyone will be forced to make cheap, terrible type X games now instead of the games we actually want to make.”
Mon | 16.08.10
This is the kind of argument one expects to see in a three-sentence forum post – to produce it like a rabbit from a hat and with this amount of elaboration is fairly silly.
Everyone’s quite aware what Activision are. But (presuming the reports are true) if the moral and artistic turpitude of their strategy can be balanced against the demands of their shareholders, their poor business plan can’t. Videogames are a creative industry and responding to it mechanically is not a viable strategy. Activision is doing well because it has grown rich enough to snap up such valuable IPs, but their scorched-earth ‘exploitation’ is not helping them or their vassal studios come up with new ideas – and with the rate at which they exploit their current properties, they are GOING to need new ideas. Companies like Valve or even Blizzard (who while unoriginal have always maintained a commitment to making good games, rather than working backwards from sales figures) show that integrity can actually be a selling point.
So while I don’t want to make any prophecies of doom – that never turns out well – I’m skeptical of Activision’s long-term strategy. They don’t seem to understand that a consumer is not an expert system but a person capable of enchantment. Yeah, that sounds wispy, but warehousing a hundred focus groups with loaded questions and working back towards a product from the numbers makes about as much sense as trying to understand rap music by studying the underlying chemistry. Granted, they’re doing so well that your citation of their falling shares can only be dishonest, but I’ll accept that the tactic is ‘working’ when they make money on anything that isn’t recycled from before the New Regime took hold.
What’s commonly glossed over about this story is that their company line knocked down the collaborative intellectual efforts of a whole studio. This is what ‘exploiting brands’ and ‘taking the fun out of games’ means: a reductionist approach to development that hurts developers, the medium, and, eventually, players. Working backwards from what’s sold in the past means you’re only ever selling something everyone’s already bought. Just so, deciding only to sell male characters because only male characters sell is terrible logic by which to maintain an unjust status quo. And “but it’s business” is a stupid reason for blue-sky quietism.
Mon | 16.08.10
bob d, indeed, we’re not there yet. And it may take us quite a while to get there. It is already taking long enough to be frustrating and, as you say, the people who could best help us to get there faster are infuriatingly slow to grasp what is going on.
However, as JBrindle points out, their slowness in this regard is to their peril. I agree that applying process thinking to creativity does not seem particularly wise. It is being done in other creative industries, such as literature and film, to terrible effect.
If it is profitable, I do not expect Activision to quit doing all-male games anytime soon. Nor do I have the right to demand it from them. They do not owe me the games I want to play. They owe to their stakeholders the games that will safeguard their interests. Time will tell whether their strategy to stick to old and tried solutions has been in the best interest of the stakeholders. I’m not as skeptical about it as JBrindle is. Will it lead to awful games? Most certainly. Will it make money? I reckon, yes, for quite some time yet. Does that mean that we are doomed to play the same old white male protagonist? No! If Activision doesn’t, someone else will notice that people want something different and will deliver it.
Let’s also not forget that Blizzard, with all its integrity and dedication to making good games, is part of Activision. It is entirely possible for a large corporation to have different, even contradicting, strategies for its various divisions. This diversifies the risk and means that the company can go on even if one or more of those strategies turned out wrong. As I said in my original post, in the end, it may be Activision — most likely through one of its subsidiaries — that spearheads the move toward less sexist games; while continuing to shit out lucrative male-dominated trite through another division.
Tue | 17.08.10
Your argument assumes that they are doing their homework correctly. If that was the case, there wouldn’t be such a commotion about the whole situation. Their actions would be evil, yes, but understandable. The problem is that they are accused of bending statistics which contradict their definition of a good (which in this case will refer to a marketable) game. This would mean that they are actually hurting their remaining stockholders by continuing to make inferior games as suggested by market research. In conclusion, the argument is not that they stand accused of loving money, but that they are ignoring money and ingenuity in favor of familiarity.
Tue | 17.08.10
Matthew, I’m not saying that the people at Activision who misrepresent market-research data in order to bend decisions in the way they want them to go are correct. But I refuse to believe they do it out of evilness. I reckon they are worried about their jobs and so seek security in the familiar, in stuff that has previously worked for them. And I believe quite a lot of them are really convinced that what they are doing is for the best.
I’m not saying this by way of apology but of explanation.
I think if Activision were a filmmaker, it would be J Bruckheimer. You can, and frankly should, get mad about the shit he churns out; but you should not expect him to do anything else.
Tue | 17.08.10
I’ll leave aside for the moment the economic hand-waving required to convince ourselves that “the market” will self-correct. I’m a researcher, so I’ll comment on the bit about research.
If Leigh Alexander’s sources are correct, Activision isn’t just doing what it needs to do to ensure profit: It’s going out of the way to justify sameness. When researchers nudge (or outright falsify) data to fit with their preconceived notions of what it should say, they don’t end up with data that will make them more money, but with data that will excuse whatever decision they’ve already decided to do. That serves neither shareholders nor audiences.
Tue | 17.08.10
Jason T, this is a very good point! Nudging data one way or the other, like Activision reportedly does, is primarily self-serving. I see now that in my initial post I did not make it clear that I do not believe that practice is in the best interest of stakeholders. It may or may not be. To claim one or the other on the basis of such thin evidence does not seem serious.
However, Activision’s management has to convince its stakeholders that it is defending their best interest. And selecting solutions that have worked well in the past seems the least risky thing to do. In the current climate, the less risk you take on, the more trust you gain.
Again, I am not saying that this behaviour is excusable. But it is understandable. We should be angry about it but we cannot expect otherwise.
The market always self-corrects. Unfortunately, some of the corrections may take longer than the average human is willing to tolerate.
Sat | 21.08.10
[...] the Split/Screen Co-Op blog writes in defence of the much maligned company, in a post titled ‘Activision’s all-male games are quite okay, really‘. And Dilyan’s blogger-mate Vanya Damyanova concurs, in a follow-on post about [...]
Sat | 21.08.10
“The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games”.
March 2-4, 2010: A bunch of security people raid the Infinity Ward offices, both studio heads/CEOs Jason West and Vince Zampella get fired, they were replaced by internal Activision Publishing employees
WSJ: If you could snap your fingers, and instantly make one change in your company, what would it be, and why?
Mr. Kotick: I would have Call of Duty be an online subscription service tomorrow.
All there is to say to not support Activision.
Thu | 26.08.10
[...] Critical Distance, has highlighted these blogs during the week of August the 15th, under the blogs Activision’s all-male games are quite okay, really and Evil game makers and women’s [...]