More development into "ass physics" for those women gamers who like to see some nice ass movement. Unfortunately, I think those qualities of what makes a nice male behind are a little more subtle than unrealistic breast jiggle as often portrayed.

The computer gaming industry is infused through and through with a structurally sexist mentality that rationalizes itself through circular reasoning. Only boys buy video games, boys want to see large breasts, so therefore anything that increases the prominent of breasts in a video game is just good, solid, bottom-line thinking.

If girls want to see something different, they should make themselves a valued market and then the industry will take them seriously — is the implication.

It's nice that Gardner can admit that the industry is "failing women," but the "what can you do, boobs sell" mentality doesn't appear to have received much examination.

What appears to make the difference is simply when more women are involved in game design, especially at the production level. Fortunately the number of women in the game business is increasing. Unfortunately it still isn't changing much in the executive production and business management tiers, which reflects a larger social trend.

It's probably not the case that more women in business would change the face of business, overall. But specifically in computer game design, it's probably true.

...that if the "gaming population" is now 39% women, there should be plenty of girls motivated to become game-designers when they think about careers.

This should basically correct itself within 7 years at most. The video game market changes/adapts as quickly as any software market can.

It is, of course, disappointing that smart, creative people are sinking huge amounts of mental bandwidth into video game "breast physics," but perhaps we'll see valuable spinoff technology in porn.

speaking as a female game designer..

The DoA games are hardly representative of mainstream games - and breast physics aren't really the feature they're being made out to be (in fact, none of the mainstream games I've worked on, despite having realistic female avatars, have had boned breasts).

While yes, the industry can be immature and sexist, it's failing women for economic reasons. Women tend to not play games where they have to play a male avatar, and most games don't allow you to choose between male and female avatars because female avatars make a game far more expensive, especially games with voice acting and sophisticated art and animations (not because of boob physics).

There are notable exceptions, like Bioware - whose wildly successful games have fully supported both male and female players - but most companies just can't justify that expense.

I recently attended a gaming program open house at Austin Community College where gaming industry leaders and veterans were there to field questions from the audience. When the question was raised why there weren't more women in the industry, one industry leader (one of the chief executives for a large gaming corporation) responded by saying that women want too much work life balance and weren't as willing to work long hours. Another person who said he would love to see more women get into the industry because they would be all the better for it retracted his opinion after a peer disclosed that they didn't really spend to much time trying to recruit women, saying "They aren't as willing to drop everything and come work with us today," like their male counterparts. These people work for prominent gaming companies and they weren't afraid to stand up in a room full of parents, potential students, community members and hopeful young women and behave like this. If you replace the gender in these remarks and insert a race or ethnicity, everyone would have been offended and probably would have spoken out. Instead, the local community college defended the actions of these people.

when describing gaming conventions do authors like this one feel compelled to ascribe geeky, awkward, and nerdy to describe the attendees. I have been to a few of these conventions, and girls and guys alike tend to cover a broad spectrum in appearance. Then again, maybe i am not aware that i am a nerdy awkward girl who likes halo versus a normal girl who likes halo... thanks for clarifying.

E3 no longer exists in its "huge media event" form. It's now a small trade show. This article was written 4 years ago. In computer years, that's, like... two generations.

I just looked at the "04" and read it wrong. So... how come someone who feels qualified to write such an article as this doesn't know that E3 hasn't existed for the past 3 years?

I prefer female avatars, but play male ones when that's the only option. I adored Thief I and II (III was definitely meh, sparkley treasure just ripped half the fun out of it); but mostly I don't care for shooters, I like the role playing stuff (Ultima 7 was near perfect IMO despite the male only avatar, baking bread was awesome) and I like Arx Fatalis and UU too. I also enjoy the City builders by Sierra, I'm playing through Emperor again now. They do allow female names, but as you never see the character and gender references are avoided, it really costs them very little.

Oblivion had female avatars too, as did the other Elder Scroll games. I've liked all of Bethesdas games so far, even if they do tend to be a bit buggy.

I have little I can say about the big houses, but my specific area of interest is pretty evenly gendered. I play a pair of old (98 and 2000) games from Bioware, Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights, also Bioware. Part of the reason I like those games enough to play them over and over again is they're content-heavy -- strong on plot, character dev, setting. The other reason I still play them is because the gaming community develops their own modules to play with. the BG bending community has released a couple score of Non Player Characters, additional quests, items, et cetera; in fact, one of the earliest NPCs was released specifically because the romance options for women were so very poor. (BGII)

Neverwinter took bending to a new level and pretty much any player can develop games for the NWN (and NWNII) framework. And if you check the stats, men and women develop about evenly.

Bioware's figured it out.