That's not to say that Call of Duty players don't like a good Vin Diesel movie, but the likelihood of them liking Bridget Jones...

That's a false equivalence. How much do those Call of Duty players typically have in common with people who prefer to play dating sims?

Gaming emcompasses a spectrum similarly broad to that of film, and many of the problems in representation are present across all forms of media (for example, the blockbuster superhero films failing the Bechedel test, year after year, or the continuing underrepresentation of women and people of colour in hard science fiction).

However, gaming is somewhat unique in that it doesn't yet have a major genre written with the direct aim of attracting female viewers. There's no equivalent to the golden age of feminist SciFi, nor the current flood of female-led YA blockbusters, nor even the steady flow of RomComs...

There are genres that demonstrably attract a majority of female players: virtual pet sites and animal breeding sims, horse riding "vehicle" sims, "dollhouse" or "worker placement" type sims like The Sims series, RTS/time management games which lack combat and instead have the player farming or cooking, point and click adventure games with romance themes. Dating sims aren't really available to anyone in the English-speaking market, but the Japanese market definitely produces a separate category of Dating sims for female players. Are any of them "major genres" I dunno. RPGs are one of the few things I'm sure would count as a major genre, and they have been gender neutral (with some particular testosterony games as individual exceptions) since the 90s, though certainly specific features that appeal a lot to women, like costumes, pets, and housing, have become more widespread in RPGs and MMORPGs in the past 10 years. The average RPG or MMO has around 45% female players, and some have a majority of female players. Though on the other hand, puzzles are a feature which has always had a lot of appeal for women and puzzles have largely been dropped from RPGs, following the end of adventure games as an AAA genre. Actually now that I think about it, the recent 'disposable' single-A adventure games are probably the closest thing to YA novels. They often have a dark magic realism dangerous mystery thing going on, which a lot of YA fiction does.

I think it would be almost impossible to design a game that female players would love and male players would avoid; in events where a group of women have been asked to design games or submit existing game designs to a competition, the game designs that result might attract 60-70% female players but they aren't anything that would be unappealing to all male players.

I'd still like to reference that the controlling aspect/phase of sim games such as The Sims and Theme Hospital appeals mostly to female gamers. The male players for these games, at least locally, is near non-existent, and these games were hardly a staple, but for fellow female gamers, they are ageless classics it appears.

YA books tend to be targeted to adolescent and preadolescent women, because that's who reads them.

I don't think that's entirely accurate. YA fiction is only majority-female by a small margin - data's a bit scanty, but looks like about 65% of YA authors are female. And female protagonists are even less common, despite the outsize popularity of a handful of series in the last 5 years.

Science fiction as a whole is very heavily slanted in the other direction - most authors are male, and even female authors write majority-male protagonists, presumably to fit in.

When referring to YA fiction are you only talking about Fantasy and Science Fiction?

I frequent a lot of bookshops and the thing I've noticed over the past ten or so years is a newer section in between the horror sections and the Fantasy sections called "Dark Romance", these tend to be vampire, ghost, mutant or gothic horror based and the protagonist is nearly always a young female and the only people you will ever see in this section are teen girls.

Separate OECD reports from 2001, 2011 and 2014 have found that girls read more than boys full stop.

Also separate studies by the Guardian and the UK National Literacy Trust found exactly the same thing and further that girls liked to read books and novels whilst the boys who said they read tended to read newspapers and comics (note this is the UK version of comics like the Beano and not the US comic book or graphic novel).

Yes, the sexism and prejudice is strong in these comments. I think it's pretty clear from that that it's the people making the games or writing the books that are foisting their preconceived notions of what categories of people want onto the market and that's the determinant of what's available.

Since when is trying to define the difference in tastes and psychology between genders "sexism"? I do see that it can be understood as such, but when we cannot even have a polite discussion about what male and female players like to see in games without somebody throwing the S-word stone, it becomes clear why so few male developers are even TRYING to develop games for women. Its just a minefield, better left to female developers.

It is one thing asking for evidence to back up a statement that could be understood as sexism. I can make up "facts" about what women like all day long, that doesn't make them necessarily true. Not even a woman can call herself an expert on "what female players like in general"... without a scientific study to back it up, this is all hearsay and guessing.

But, calling something prejudice and sexism without really exploring the intentions and the source of the claims is also not helpful. Maybe there is a study that shows "fact X was shown as true in an empirical study among Y% of Z" even though it does sound rather sexistic?

Of course, the "I only see women in the YA section, therefore YA = only for women" statement is kinda.... ridicolous. It might be true, but that statement does not back up anything. Its just an anecdote, not a fact.

In the end, its a hen and eggs problem. As long as the game dev biz is male dominated, and the biz is so risk averse, there will be little room for games for women. As long as there are not more games for women, women in general will not be as interested in game development as men.

Didn't even know that Young Adults is actually a defined genre... huh, guess I am too old and not enough into books to know that.

In the end, its a hen and eggs problem. As long as the game dev biz is male dominated, and the biz is so risk averse, there will be little room for games for women. As long as there are not more games for women, women in general will not be as interested in game development as men.

At least there is starting to be some change there:
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/percentage-of-female-developers-has-more-than-doubled-since-2009/1100-6420680/

I think you guys might be reading a bit too deeply into the gender disparity here. There are tons of guys who read YA books, the split is closer to 70/30 than the 'only girls' anecdote seems to imply. And tons of male game developers (and publishers!) who would love to make a game based on properties such as Divergent, Hunger Games and the like. Female developers too (and some female developers who wouldn't touch that stuff with a ten foot pole). Still, it's a bit pedantic to demand scientific proof that men and women tend to prefer different things, imho.

The actual challenge, I think is game mechanics, and the way violence is deeply entrenched as the go-to expression of choice for the visual interactive medium, at least when it comes to moving characters around vs puzzle pieces. Not only is the physical conflict that typifies a Batman more popular to do in video games vs the social conflict of a Divergent, it's vastly easier, both because it's been tried and tested a billion ways and because the satisfaction comes in the visuals and tactile feel, what video games are built around. To get the feel of a YA novel into a video game, you don't just need enemy combatants you believe in, but you need fully immersive characters, programs that feel like people. Not only do you need to fill your game with these rich characters that are rare as hen's teeth in the video game industry, but you need to give them a game's worth of content. If we look at a story like Hunger Games, it doesn't work because of the combat. It works because Katniss develops bonds with Peetah, Rue, Gale, Primrose, Haymitch and Cinna that are every bit as compelling as your relationship with Alyx from Half Life 2.

So to that end, we're looking for a game full of Icos, we're looking at Ellie from the Last of Us and asking for a cast full of that kind of connection. Telltale's games, if game'd out more would be able to handle that kind of tension, but maintaining the illusion of choice under the duress of constant decision making isn't a practical solution. To really get the feel you want, you basically need Telltale's Gameplay at The Witchter III's density. Yeesh. Sixty hours of combat is tough, but sixty hours of dialogue is simply not possible right now.

I think the closest I've come to playing a game like this Life is Strange. Teenager girl, super powers, small town, conspiracy storyline. I haven't finished it, but it really does feel like she can stand alongside Katniss, Tris and Bella... well, not really, they all become incredible badarses, and this girl doesn't seem to be on that track.

And that's the rub about these theoretical games and this genre. The stars of these YA Novels absolutely can kick as much butt as their male counterparts. They just don't spend their time focusing on that. The social aspect of their lives is more compelling and that, more than any other, is the challenge of a YA novel-styled video game. Not only do you need Telltale Gameplay with the frequency that people will stop questioning if its a game, but you need the girl from Ico, Ellie, Clementine and Companion Cube all in the same game in terms of number and magnitude of meaningful relationships. Love triangles can break down very quickly when you introduce player choice, and the Mass Effect mantra of three meaningful conversations over the course of a 40 hour game won't cut it. And you need to do it so well, that people don't want to use their fists to solve their problems anymore.

I think the way forward for what I would call the Social Genres of gaming is the same as it was for the Combat Genres. Put together games that focus on different aspects that need to work. Ico/Shadow/etc do great with having a brilliantly functional companion, work on having more of those at once, a game where your principal weapons are your relationships. Telltale has a brilliant storytelling mechanism. Someone (probably them) should figure out how to weave that rollercoaster into a sandbox in a way that is still immensely satisfying. Bioware has a great sort of trigger-based companion control/customization system baked into their Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. Expanding on that, making the triggers more and more dense could really make the game shine. There are innumerable ways to abstract social dynamics into gameplay puzzles that are analogous to things we've already done, because we've done so, so many puzzles... and girls tend to favor puzzle games, so there's that bonus for the marketing team. As more of those games come and more mechanics get tried and tested, we may happen upon some really incredible rich gameplay-packed third person adventures that simply don't rely on combat, and don't need to. We may even be able to craft experiences where people choose to avoid combat as a preferable playstyle choice, like some kind of weird stealth game.

And then you just have to solve the dialogue problem. You can do this by making the game silent, like Ico. You can abstract the dialogue ala the Sims. You can plunk down 50 million dollars like Star Wars the Old Republic. You can make your game short and small like Life Is Strange, or very linear like The Walking Dead. You can go text like the old RPGs. Some combination? Sims generated gibberish for emotive color overtop of text sounds interesting to me at first blush. It would also sound like a step backwards for some. The marketing team wouldn't like it, that's for sure.

What do you all think?

The actual challenge, I think is game mechanics, and the way violence is deeply entrenched as the go-to expression of choice for the visual interactive medium, at least when it comes to moving characters around vs puzzle pieces. Not only is the physical conflict that typifies a Batman more popular to do in video games vs the social conflict of a Divergent, it's vastly easier, both because it's been tried and tested a billion ways and because the satisfaction comes in the visuals and tactile feel, what video games are built around. To get the feel of a YA novel into a video game, you don't just need enemy combatants you believe in, but you need fully immersive characters, programs that feel like people. Not only do you need to fill your game with these rich characters that are rare as hen's teeth in the video game industry, but you need to give them a game's worth of content. If we look at a story like Hunger Games, it doesn't work because of the combat. It works because Katniss develops bonds with Peetah, Rue, Gale, Primrose, Haymitch and Cinna that are every bit as compelling as your relationship with Alyx from Half Life 2.



So to that end, we're looking for a game full of Icos, we're looking at Ellie from the Last of Us and asking for a cast full of that kind of connection. Telltale's games, if game'd out more would be able to handle that kind of tension, but maintaining the illusion of choice under the duress of constant decision making isn't a practical solution. To really get the feel you want, you basically need Telltale's Gameplay at The Witchter III's density. Yeesh. Sixty hours of combat is tough, but sixty hours of dialogue is simply not possible right now.

Well, I think you blow the challenge a little bit out of proportion.

To be fair, from what you call the "combat games" genre only a tiny part of them is able to match the spectacle and excitement of the best hollywood (and all the other, international places where movies are made) can produce. Most of these games are not coming close to matching their cinematic counterparts... yet some still do fine without matching what people THINK makes a violent combat game tick.

Some scrape by with actually pretty deep gameplay systems that betray their dudebro looks, some give you a story that is way better than you think.

I think even without all the cleverness and deep AI that you are asking for up there, YA games COULD do fine, as long as there would be an audience (I certainly don't know if there is one, and I will not guess one way or the other).

Do you really need more than one Ellie? Just because you don't want cookie cutter enemies without any ties to your hero(ine) doesn't mean you have to fill your level to the brim with them. Is it really about the length of the dialogue? Do the stories need to be so overly complex and baroque to fill 60+ hours of dialogue?

Is every YA novel really so similar that all these elements need to be there for the game to be recognized as a YA game?

I guess not. From the Movies I have seen (Yes, I watched them, and didn't like them, that is why I never went above episode one for both Hunger Games and Twilight), it seems you pick the biggest and loudest, and are trying to make them the threshold for YA games to reach. Like making Apocalypse Now the threshold for a movie to be able to deserve the monicker "Antiwar Movie"... yes, its a big spectacle and one of the few movies that can still wow an audience with the effects and shocks even 40 years later... but its also the Masterpiece of a very famous Director, a 3,5h Movie in its Directors Cute edition, and must have been extremly expensive to shoot back then.

There are many smaller, quieter Antiwar movies that still do a very good job at showing the harsh thruth beyond the hero stories... some of the best actually being not really meant as antiwar movies, some not showing war itself, but just the soldiers life when war isn't happening.

I guess the same is true for YA Novels, its just that the interest of a bigger audience in these stories as movies is so new that hollywood hasn't moved past the grand spectacles and to the smaller, quieter expieriences that would most probably fit non-AAA games way better. And as often with a new audience, a new style, technology or genre, its not AAA games that can and will spearhead... its smaller games where less is at risk.

Reduce your cast to the minimum, cut the story runtime in half, and invest that money into upping the quality. You might not get a story that rivals the full Twilight Series or all Hunger Game books in length. But then, no game today can manage that...

I don't think there is any reason why there are not more YA games or YA-like games made other than the question if there is an audience for it. You might have a point that to reach that audience, games need to shift their focus... but then, there are more than enough games made with a different focus, just maybe not AAA blockbusters. So clearly, once somebody happens to land a big hit in the YA area with a game, the AAA studios will look more closely and start to evaluate the market.

And if they like what they see, prepare for so many YA inspired games that even the biggest YA novel fan will tire of it in the end

hypester, are you familiar with The Longest Journey and Dreamfall? They are actually pretty close to having a Dialogue-rich adventure game (with a female character, even). Despite having quite high-scoring reviews this series fell into the same pit as the Myst/Uru series, of just not being able to produce the profits to keep producing the series.

I am not! I haven't really played many Adventure games, because attempting to do one when I was very young kinda put me off them. It's good to know there's one highly recommended, I'll have to check that out. I must admit though, that's not quite what I had in mind when I said adventure, I suppose I was thinking of Action/Adventure games without the action. Drama/Adventure? Not sure, it'd be a new-ish genre, I think.

hypester nails a lot of points I was thinking of as well. Though the popular YA series still do include physical combat, so I wouldn't see a reason to exclude it entirely. The production cost of choices and branching storylines vs. the expected sales could be a big hurdle, until there's some major evolutionary step in storytelling technology

If a game is heavily focused on interpersonal relationships, and these tie into the game mechanics, they could become somewhat cheapened once players manage to dig up the formulas used to guide the story / relationships (compare to the Mass Effect 2 Suicide Mission flowchart). Though that's just my gut feeling.

Yeah, that's a good point, they include combat, but I think a lot of these heroines turn out to be Faux-Action Girls (for the TV Tropes savvy). That is, we see Katniss lace a room full of holo-dummies with ease, but in the games she shoots *maybe* three people. Combat may always be available to her, but it isn't an effective 'playstyle' for her. That's what I was trying to get at with that thought. Tris trains to fight as well, and does well, but outside of running and gunning with her mother's help, it seems her greatest challenges were platforming in virtual reality. I understand Bella becomes a badarse vampire warrioress by the end of Twilight, but I watched that last big fight scene, and I don't remember her really doing anything, either. It's a weird thing, the capability of fighting, without the incentive. Of course, one could argue this is more realistic because these women live in a world where bad guys don't wait their turn to attack and villains don't make dumb decisions and leave themselves open. President Snow, Claire Danes' character and the Voluturri all seem to follow the List of 100 Rules for Supervillains that prevent there from being a 'one special object' to overthrow them... usually. There's enough room to fudge things a bit, in terms of including combat, but if you fudge too much you get a little backlash like from the Tomb Raider game where the emotional gravity makes the mass murder more off putting than in the average video game where we aren't meant to see the protagonist as human in that way. Not much backlash, but enough that you may want to avoid it.

The cheapness of discovery you talk about is very real though, especially in social situations. It's where Walking Dead and Mass Effect really break down in the social department. The main way I think of getting around that is from games like Skyrim or Witcher III, that have so many decisions, you really can't trace them all, or at least the flowchart you'd have to create would be too intricate to be understood by anyone other than you and the folks who helped you put it together. Not that it's the greatest game ever

Well, I think you blow the challenge a little bit out of proportion.

To be fair, from what you call the "combat games" genre only a tiny part of them is able to match the spectacle and excitement of the best hollywood (and all the other, international places where movies are made) can produce. Most of these games are not coming close to matching their cinematic counterparts... yet some still do fine without matching what people THINK makes a violent combat game tick.

Some scrape by with actually pretty deep gameplay systems that betray their dudebro looks, some give you a story that is way better than you think.

I think even without all the cleverness and deep AI that you are asking for up there, YA games COULD do fine, as long as there would be an audience (I certainly don't know if there is one, and I will not guess one way or the other).

Do you really need more than one Ellie? Just because you don't want cookie cutter enemies without any ties to your hero(ine) doesn't mean you have to fill your level to the brim with them. Is it really about the length of the dialogue? Do the stories need to be so overly complex and baroque to fill 60+ hours of dialogue?

Is every YA novel really so similar that all these elements need to be there for the game to be recognized as a YA game?

I guess not. From the Movies I have seen (Yes, I watched them, and didn't like them, that is why I never went above episode one for both Hunger Games and Twilight), it seems you pick the biggest and loudest, and are trying to make them the threshold for YA games to reach. Like making Apocalypse Now the threshold for a movie to be able to deserve the monicker "Antiwar Movie"... yes, its a big spectacle and one of the few movies that can still wow an audience with the effects and shocks even 40 years later... but its also the Masterpiece of a very famous Director, a 3,5h Movie in its Directors Cute edition, and must have been extremly expensive to shoot back then.

There are many smaller, quieter Antiwar movies that still do a very good job at showing the harsh thruth beyond the hero stories... some of the best actually being not really meant as antiwar movies, some not showing war itself, but just the soldiers life when war isn't happening.

I guess the same is true for YA Novels, its just that the interest of a bigger audience in these stories as movies is so new that hollywood hasn't moved past the grand spectacles and to the smaller, quieter expieriences that would most probably fit non-AAA games way better. And as often with a new audience, a new style, technology or genre, its not AAA games that can and will spearhead... its smaller games where less is at risk.

Reduce your cast to the minimum, cut the story runtime in half, and invest that money into upping the quality. You might not get a story that rivals the full Twilight Series or all Hunger Game books in length. But then, no game today can manage that...

I don't think there is any reason why there are not more YA games or YA-like games made other than the question if there is an audience for it. You might have a point that to reach that audience, games need to shift their focus... but then, there are more than enough games made with a different focus, just maybe not AAA blockbusters. So clearly, once somebody happens to land a big hit in the YA area with a game, the AAA studios will look more closely and start to evaluate the market.

And if they like what they see, prepare for so many YA inspired games that even the biggest YA novel fan will tire of it in the end

Well, I have been known to blow things out of proportion, I won't argue that. Certainly there are no games I know of with 60+ hours of combat OR dialogue. Even really grindy RPGs are only half combat. But it sounds like you're comfortable with a bit of hyperbole yourself, so I don't feel to bad. I think you brought up a great question when you asked "Why two Ellies?" That's because the logical necessity of social conflict, at any scale, is having difficult social choices, and that's only possible when two different and conflicting relationships have real weight. When you de-emphasize combat, and center on social conflict, then the social conflict has to be as engaging as the combat. Just like fighting the same foe over and over doesn't hold enough conflict for a mid-tier game, neither will a single relationship.

That said, I would not only agree that YA Games could do good and go one further and say that YA games DO do well. Life is Strange is a great example. Small team. Decent quality. A million in sales. It proves that there's an audience here. DontNod seems to be furthering the idea of social conflicts as central gameplay in Vampyr, so I think they're going to continue to develop these gameplay types. Telltale's success and growing catalog of quality licensed games says a lot as well, it's just the gameplay is so sparse people question if they are "really" games. What I haven't seen yet is a AAA version in these young gaming genres, and that's what all the cleverness would be needed for, just like decades of cleverness goes into the combat games to produce the stories and deep gameplay in them we all appreciate. I don't think non-combat gameplay is any less complicated or difficult to create and master creation of. Do you?

I'm also a bit skeptical that an audience necessarily brings about a surge in games of that type. Rhythm games and motion control games certainly proved they had an audience, but there were very few companies capable of tapping into those audiences for lack of expertise in those very different gameplay styles. Style that contradict in some ways the game design experience of the bulk of the industry. So, I, personally don't believe a wildly successful YA-Novel-styled indie will lead to a AAA game by itself. The expertise must also be built so that a AAA YA Novel Game is still an affordable prospect for publishers within the same time and budget constraints as a AAA combat-centric game. A big hit will cause them to evaluate the market, yes, but if the barrier to entry into that market is too much higher than the barrier to entry for the combat-centric audience, then the evaluation will naturally be negative.

I also agree that only the best games can match the best movies. That's okay though, it sounds fair and even. I'd be surprised if there were a ton of games who could match the best movies in entertainment value. Interestingly enough though, almost every video game provides more content than YA Novel series, and while one game may not rival a whole book series, I think the best games can rival the best books, even now.

But overall, I can tell that we agree on the path to creating a AAA YA Novel-style Game, and that is lots of smaller games that build up to it. Do what you can do well and don't try to make the Pie in the Sky game "RITE NAO!" I think you're more focused on building the audience that I think is already there, and I'm more focused on building the skills and experience that you think are a given, but generally, yes, more mid-tier games that revolved around social mechanics is what we both want. I do think I think more highly of the socially-focused games that have come out, and their audiences. I feel as though the indie scene has done enough with Social conflict-centric game mechanics and audience for us to see a really solid AA effort that isn't combat-centric. I could be wrong, but to me, it looks like all the pieces are there for a really groundbreaking game that is focused on a single character's social conflicts, whether its the YA-styled Class Warfare As High School Cliques genre or something else.

----

Another thing I haven't really talked about is the idea of a combat-centric YA game. Hunger Games: Just-The-Arena-Part, basically. Ender's Game: Battle School (did that actually happen, I can't remember). That one Stephanie Meyer that flopped, The Host would be an awesome, awesome gameplay story set up, even if it was all about mowing down rows of mooks, some of these stories still work in that context. That would be another, separate way to approach this audience without having to develop expertise in non-combat gameplay. Those games, as AA efforts could be announced tomorrow with confidence, imho. I don't think it would take a huge push to get a AAA Maze Runner, or an original property that uses RPG features to emphasize the social aspect and relies on combat in the same way an RPG does. That could have a similar effect, and some would argue that these kinds of RPGs already do have the same audience as YA novels.

Also, Undertale gets a huge shoutout for really going into exploring recruiting enemies.

EDIT: Beyond Good and Evil! I forgot about that thing, and that game happily checks almost every single checkbox for the YA genre, including not really being combat focused for a character who is combat capable. I don't know if it qualifies as AAA, but it was awesome.