No girls allowed
Or, how the mainstreaming of the video game industry reinforced gender stereotyping. First there was this: "Knowing that you have limited funding, you can't just market shotgun. You can't just go after anybody," says [marketing firm president] Rodger Roeser. "You need to have a very clearly differentiated and specific brand because that's going to play into where you're running your ads and what kind of ads you run. That niche-ing, that targeting makes it easier for marketers to have a very succinct conversation with their target without overspending and trying to reach everybody." That led to this: "The industry did the math. Companies like Nintendo aggressively sought out people who played their games ... Publishers traveled to cities, held tournaments and got to see firsthand who was playing their games ... The numbers were in: More boys were playing video games than girls. Video games were about to be reinvented." And somehow that got written in stone, and society at large has simply accepted it without question. Which says a lot about us, quite frankly. #link