> Despite the fact that there has been a huge industry push in the last 10-15 years to make a game that draws in tons of female players

Ultimately its poor marketing. They want to make Call of Duty and get that audience, but also get girls to play Call of Duty. Instead of making a game with mass appear to both boys and girls.

Or admitting that there's just no such thing as universal mass appeal

Universal implies more than just 50-50 split between sexes, imo. It's an impossible standard to reach for any consumer product

I.e. the FPS players could embody the military forces in a complex society where more RPG players are doing the diplomacy and strategy, others are playing in engaging "home front" social environments, someone is off doing city-planner/factory logistics stuff, etc. There could be some deep-diving, dungeon-crawling sub-games within all these realms, but also more casual modes too.

But, crucially, it is all tied together in a unified simulation so that these different player groups are actually steering a coherent story and state space for the shared world. The outcomes of diplomacy, warfare, industry, trade, local social groups, etc. should all have impact on each other.

A good strategist makes the outcomes of individual battles predictable. That makes it terrible for unit players.

I used to play Planetside 2 with a very organized group. Winning was fun at first but you were ultimately a cog in a well oiled machine so it got old fast. It probably got old even faster for the other players who were just trying to play a regular fps.

To be honest, I'm mostly a solo FPS player. The immersive feedback loop is pretty much the whole draw. I would be open to a broader range of story/plot genres if they could provide this satisfaction. I don't need the "shoot" part of FPS, just the first-person part where my real-time, 3D movement and perspective gives me agency, objectives, and entertaining experience.

I naively imagined some game universe that could integrate multi-user input to adjust or build the story in a shared fashion. Like some kind of crowd-sourcing variant of a procedural generator. So your high level strategy would go through the filter of people like me trying to enact it.

But, I didn't really thinking about the real-time aspect of coupling user interactions. I wonder if there is some kind of statistical simulation model that could bridge these worlds with latency masking. I don't need a continuous 24x7 real-time simulation. I just need a coherent state model during my session and preferably some coherent story for how the sessions connect together...

I might have been thinking too literal with my examples. One could possibly make it work with some sort of averaging of people's play. I can't say what that might be like. I've not played online since Battlefield 2 except a bit of friendly Stellaris (which didn't go well).

At the same time, it's not realistic to aim for that level of appeal with every game. Most games are going to aim for some sort of niche, just like any other media.

But there is probably no way to release an Assassin's Creed or Call Of Duty that is going to appeal to women as much as men. That's just not a realistic product goal imo.

Games need to know their audience, and franky they have been very successful targeting young men for decades. My take is that most times they try to target "both men and women" they flop. There are rare exceptions like Baldur's Gate 3 that seem to reach everyone. But it's rare

Modded Minecraft is really cool these days.

This idea is trotted out but is really blatantly false when you think of it. Jayne Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility. These books have all withstood the test of time and are considered fine literature but are absolutely feminine. Romance novels are considered less than because they are not good books, just in the sense that Conan the Barbarian is also considered not fine literature despite being dripping in masculinity.

Manhattan, Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally. There are tons of "chick flicks" that are considered great films. Some directors like Catherine Breillat are extremely feminist in their works and well regarded directors with well regarded films in cinephile circles.

And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.

... and actually, wasn't it the case that before the discovery of the "whale" brain-hack to crack open a few (mostly) men's bank accounts, most of the gaming market was women, for broad definitions of "a game", both by player count and revenue?

Even comic books, I'm pretty sure it's only the American superhero-type comics that're mainly "for guys"—if we expand it to include stuff like manga and Euro comics, then the overall audience leans female, right?

Books are overwhelmingly dominated by women.

> And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.

Romance is a poor term because it's used to launder literal werewolf "dubcon" porn under the same label as something like Jane Austen novels. That's probably useful to marketers and for sales, but it makes it impossible to make productive use of the label without further qualifiers for anyone who's trying to actually communicate using the term.

(Meanwhile, yeah, much of what actually sells in that genre [and, again, the term is terrible and overloaded] leans pretty hard into being trash. So does pornhub, or Mr Beast videos, or whatever. So what? It's fine to enjoy them, but it's also fine for folks looking for excellent works of art to mostly avoid them in that search. Meanwhile tons of the modern "literary fiction" and poetry market is by and tuned for an audience of women, in fact I'd be surprised if most of those two categories weren't that, but of course few people actually read lit-fic and especially poetry these days)

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BUT, the post is actually less about all that than about how older "girl games" are missing from game history and ignored in things like game-making tutorials and instruction. I'd venture that "boy games" that are similarly low-narrative and/or lean toward being more of an activity than a game (bear with me on the terminology, I'm not interested in turning this post into gatekeeping "what is a game" but I think you understand what I mean, yes? The distinction is here useful) also get left out (I can think of a few[0]), plus the factor where a lot of these were licensed games, which doesn't usually help. I'm not so sure this is as much sexism as that narrative games and clear, tight, goal-oriented game loops are both major factors in games having artistic "staying power" or influence, and in lending themselves to "baby's first video game" tutorials (the latter, especially, for that), and are both really, really hard to accomplish in a video game without resorting to a lot of the usual stuff (violence, largely). This is fundamental to how games are built which is that...

...games necessarily objectify the shit out of literally everything in them. This makes satisfactorily modeling things like realistic relationships extremely hard, and even the games that do it remarkably well are prone to feeling kinda weird as a result (see also: Action Button's rightly-famous Tokimeki Memorial review on Youtube). This is why a lot of relationship-focused games end up as visual novels, where they can be contained to basically a choose-your-own-adventure book format. It's incredibly difficult to build a game-loop around relationship mechanics, and have it be any good at all. This is how you end up with so many "girl games" on the "wrong" side of the "what actually is a video game?" discourse (ugh): it's really hard to build "proper" game mechanics around a lot of the aspects of those "girl games" that appeal to girls in the first place.

Take a dress-up "game": in the most-minimal form (and a form which does exist in the wild!) you're not looking at something that's much more game-like, apparently, than MSPaint. Try to add a dress-up mechanic to a "traditional" game and you end up with something that's a pretty superficial veneer over bog-standard mechanics (stat-boosting item equipping, or something like the FFX-2 "dress sphere" system) or is purely aesthetic and has no "actual" "game" effects. It might be fine to include those anyway! But they're never going to feel especially integral to the game. How do you make dress-up itself a video game? You kinda... don't. You attach it to a sandbox, maybe, and let the player develop their own game (goals, narrative) with it, just like toys in a toybox. Like The Sims... which was a smash-hit among women. Go figure.

Is a toy box a game? Kinda no. Do the contents become vital components of a game when a child plays with them? Often, yes! What is a game? Do we call what kids do with toys, often, "games"? Yep. Is soccer a game? Is chess? Yes and yes. What do soccer and chess have in common with a girl developing stories around her real, actual dolls and such, and dressing them up different ways? Not a fucking lot, but we may use "game" for all of them.

... and so we've come full circle from "romance is a shitty term for a genre of books, and often not very useful for communication": "video game" is a shitty term and often not very useful for communication. The game can be what the player brings to a "toy box" that lets them dress up characters and move them around. Maybe it's fair to call a program "a game" if its main intent is to facilitate that, even if it lacks things like a traditional "game loop" or strong extrinsic goals or motivations (which would let us get away with saying that MSPaint could, situationally, be a toy in service of a game, but doesn't belong in even a very-generously-defined category of "video games" itself, should such distinctions matter for whatever purpose we have in employing the term in the first place).

But a video game can also be an "e-sport", on (kinda) the complete opposite end of a certain spectrum. These things have almost nothing to do with one another aside from that they happen on a computer and are supposed to be some variety of entertaining or fun. "Video games" are both those things, and everything in between, it seems. Not sure how useful it is to lump all that stuff under the one term, but so far efforts to carve out distinctions have been poorly-received, so we're stuck with "all these things are video games even though they're so wildly different that very often their fandoms have no overlap whatsoever, on substantial grounds, not just surface appearance or marketing".

[0] Long ago I had this DOS CAD program for kids called, as I recall, "KidCAD". It was entirely useless for any "serious" work, all it was, was effectively a rudimentary line-rendered digital lego set. Leaning into the kinds of distinctions the linked article uses, I think it's fair to call it a "boy game" in those terms, like a dress-up game is a "girl game". It also had zero built-in narrative and no "game loop" whatsoever. Guess how much attention it gets in game history, and how easy it is to find anything about it now? LOL.

This intro immediately tells me that whatever comes after will be horrible for users and developers. Surprise surprise, I was right. Software to "verify" side loaded apps is a bad, anti user idea.

What they call "apps" are "apps that we like and we distribute to you under our control of both yourself as a registered user and the developers".

Well, I guess I'll need to install a non-Android distribution then. I hope one would be available for my phone by the end of the year :-(

Instead of people "hacking" university education to make them purely fotm job training centers. The real hack would be something that really drills down at the fundamentals. CS, Math, Physics, and Philosophy to get an all around education in approaching problems from fundamentals I think would be the optimal school experience.

The reality is that as a scripted environment, there are provisions to override dependencies for testability.... so unless you literally need multiple implementations of a given adapter, you don't need a DI/IoC framework and adding one only detracts from your overall solution. I'm a strong believer in that abstractions should mostly serve to hide relative complexity to make the rest of the application easier to reason with.

I'm also a big fan of the first version of anything being done in a scripted language with an emphasis on correct behavior. JS/TS and Python are more adaptable earlier on without committing to Java/C# or even Rust or Go. I understand a desire for homogeny, but that often can hold you back from creating something functional and easy to replace first.