I honestly didn't think it was necessary, but let's take a step back and look at the report with an objective mind:
- Small focus group (2200 polled households is not enough to extrapolate trends for a nation of 310 million people spread over an area of almost 10 million km²) selected by the ESA from "nationally representative households" - whatever that is.
It's not unheard of for your average political poll to sample only 1,500-2,000 voters out of the hundreds of millions of individual voters in the US, much less households (of which there are only about 117 million or so). The better question would be how they chose their samples, as that can have a much bigger effect on the accuracy of a poll. For example, during the 2012 presidential election (and my memory of this is rusty, so forgive me if I get something wrong),
PPP (Just checked, it was Rasmussen, not PPP) results leaned more republican than the other polls. This was because they were doing their polling only through land line phones in a time when the younger (and way more left leaning) generations almost exclusively use cell phones, and not because they didn't have a big enough sample size. (There were a lot of other reasons for the inaccuracies too, but this was one of them.)
Of course, they don't divulge how their samples were chosen, but I doubt that if they did choose their samples poorly that it would be on purpose. The ESA is funded by the video game industry for the purpose of guiding their marketing teams, so fudging the numbers wouldn't benefit anyone.
For the rest of your points, I won't really argue with just because the report
is rather vague, but that's just kind of what you get with these fact sheets that are made for wide consumption, things need to be condensed. I kind of wish the full study was available too just so I can get in on the details and make sure everything's accurate, but for now this is all we really have to go by. This isn't to say that it's inaccurate, though.
Look, i'm not going to go through the entire thing point by point and explain how bad it is as a whole, if you want to base your arguments around this one study then go ahead, just don't get mad when people like Null dismiss them because the report is deliberately vague and/or misleading self-fellating marketing blerb from the ESA.
How's this: I'll only get mad if someone dismisses it without a good reason.
Ironically the report also shows that the genres traditionally dominated by male gamers, action, adventure, shooters, sport and racing totally dominated VIDEO GAME sales in 2013 where as the top two genres in COMPUTER GAME sales (which i presume is a category split between PCs, tablets and smart phones, i could be wrong with that presumption but it shows how damn vague this report is) are Strategy and "Casual".
You're probably right about them lumping PC, tablets, and mobile devices into "Computer games", as the line between them is getting blurred all the time, especially with Microsoft's attempt to unify PC and touch screen operating systems into one. This is one thing that doesn't make me terribly happy. As convenient as tablets and smart phones are, I can't stand working with touch screens. I need tactile feedback.
You're strawmanning again, stop it. Casual games are marketed at casual gamers, hence the name and if anything casual is a genre with the smallest gender gap between players.
I think you might be misunderstanding what I was responding to, or mistaking what my argument was. I was referring to your snide— and frankly insulting— remark about the words "male power fantasy" appearing soon in your previous post. My reply had nothing to do with casual games or who casual games are marketed to. The idea of a "male power fantasy" is the response to an argument which (in the context of video games, at least) claims that the bulked up males in "core" games are also objectified because their features are just as exaggerated as the female features. This argument implies that the male physiques portrayed are for the enjoyment of the women, and therefore there is no problem, but your enthusiastic agreement with Null and his points (which included his point that core games were marketed toward males) contradicts this completely.
And now you're using ad hominem attacks in lieu of rational fact based counter arguments, besides the report you're defending shows that the games and genres you're attacking in this sentence actually sell the most units and a huge percentage of said sales are almost certainly to weens and college fratboys.
I'll agree that the "gatekeeper" bit was insulting, and I probably should've worded it differently, but I didn't use it in lieu of a counter-argument, I used it in conjunction with one. There's a difference.
The fact that games popular with teens and college frat boys sell a lot of units is beside the point. The contention against counting "casual" gamers as real gamers isn't about how much money they shell out for games or how many there are, the contention is that they only have a casual interest in video games as a medium and therefore don't count as gamers. If anything, the fact that these games sell well supports my case, as including them inflates the demographic drastically toward a group that barely participate in the medium.
For the record i never said that games need a story (btw CoD does have a story, it's just a stupid story), but what core point of Null was saying before it got all twisted is that mobile games and console/ pc gaming are different beasts and honestly i don't understand why anyone would argue otherwise.
Of course mobile games and console/PC games are different, basically all games are different from each other, the question is whether or not they're different in a way that's meaningful to the discussion at hand, especially in a time where games you would usually see on a PC like Deus Ex and Shadowgun getting releases on Android and iOS.
I hate the word gamer, it's an awful divisive word that promotes snobbery and snowflake-ism, however gamers have no more sway on the developers than movie buffs have on directors or actors, and that's where your analogy falls down. Developers react to the market, always have always will and what's selling right now are male centric games and genres.
I'm not sure how that makes my analogy fall down though. Movie producers don't listen exclusively to film buffs, and game developers don't listen exclusively to the insular "gamer" group. Wouldn't that mean my analogy still fits?
Of course this line of thought was covered in my last post and was covered before even that but you've never directly addressed it, i'm a bit confused why we're returning to the exact same argument if you don't have a counterpoint.
Funny thing, that, actually... It's not that I didn't have a counterpoint to your arguments, it's that you mentioned in that post that you didn't appreciate my tone. At the time, I had a lot going on, and it didn't seem at first glance that I had said anything outright insulting. I decided to wait until everything calmed down again before trying to concentrate on whether or not your accusation had merit, but then you jumped back into the thread with your "male power fantasy" line, and I figured that even if I had been mean to you, that made us more or less even. I'm sorry if it seemed like I was ignoring you.
This is a fantastic point, FANTASTIC.
Everyone is so busy shouting for or against female videogame characters but gender should not be an issue, well written believable characterization should be. People talk as if having more female characters will raise the quality of the writing in games and elevate the whole medium to an art-form like film making but it won't.
Similarly whenever a female character is given the lead in a game god forbid that she be sexually attractive, because obviously women don't want to play as an attractive, intelligent and powerful female because female power fantasies aren't a thing right? I asked my partner about this but she told me that she way playing Demon Gaze on her vita (which we simply refer to as "the booby game") so i should piss off, i promptly obliged and edited this post.
I agree with his point too, but I think you may be jumping the gun a little in assuming that means he also believes the gender of the protagonist shouldn't matter. I'd like to see more female protagonists, but that doesn't mean I don't care about whether or not they're well made characters.
