Eve Blog Banter: The Girls Who Fly Spaceships

April 19, 2010 in Internet Spaceships by Nikita Alterana

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for a while, but I’ve rather lacked in the ideas category, fortunately, Crazy Kinux has given me both a topic to be passionate about, and a cash incentive to not be lazy and actually do it in his recent contest. The issue at hand:

What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game. Will Incarna do the trick? Can anything else be done in the mean time? Can we the players do our part to share the game we love with our counterparts, with our sisters or daughters, with the Ladies in our lives? What could be added to the game to make it more attractive to them? Should anything be changed? Is the game at fault, or its player base to blame?

Female Gamers in Eve, or more accurately, the lack there of, is something that has been talked about a lot, and I think the best way to answer the question, of how to bring girls to eve, is to first answer the question, why aren’t there any girls here in the first place?

The current statistics for male/female players is roughly 95% male to 5% female. I happen to have the dubious honor of belonging to that 5%, which gives me an interesting insight. In my opinion, eve is a great game, and one that anyone should be able to enjoy, so why, out of 350,000 active players are there only 7,000 women? From my perspective, its a number of things, but I think the big thing thats driving female players away, is the lack of casual social interaction, and the lack of non make or break gameplay. Before I go into the specifics, I’d like to state that I think in no way should eve be changed or dumbed down to let girls in, because I don’t think it needs to be. A lot of people have said that in order to make eve more accessible to that demographic, you’d need to simplify since ‘girls couldn’t understand it and like it because its so complicated.’ I don’t think that’s true, I’m a girl I like eve the way it is, and I don’t want CCP to sell out their game to the lowest common denominator any more then the rest of the community. However, I don’t think they need to. I think quite a few things could be done to make eve more fun without driving away the people who like it now, and most of the changes I suggest should not only help attract more women, but more people in general to eve.

Now it might seem like, as a girl who does play eve, that I might have a better opinion on this then some people, and while on one hand I agree that it gives me a different perspective, I don’t agree that it really changes my perceptions. I like eve, I might be slightly more apt to know why other girls don’t, but its more a factor of my playing other games, games that girls do play, more then most of the players. Honestly, any girls, myself included, that play eve are likely to think in a much less ‘feminine’ way then the majority. I doubt most of my female friends would have too terribly much fun in eve,  So lets look at what is keeping the female gamers away.

Before coming to eve, I played Ragnarok Online, that game where everyone and their dog played on a private server? Yeah that one. It had a population which was 50/50 maybe even tipping further into the female then male demographic. Now since I played it for a year, I think I have the right to say that as a game, RO was a pile of poo. Imagine World of Warcraft, but remove all the pvp except for the very endgame, remove all the quests, and make the only way to get good to go out and grind for literally days on end; and I played it and enjoyed it, in fact, a lot of people did; why? Because it did something that eve has really failed to do, which is create fun, entertaining things about the game, beside the game itself. Yes RO was grind-tastic, the crafting system was basically non-existent, and the gameplay was about as punishing as a wet noodle, but that’s not why people played it, they played it to collect cool outfits, hang out in towns, and mess around in dungeons. Out of the 20 or so people I knew who played RO, I think only 3 of them actually played the game for the game. The rest of us were using it as a form of social interaction, it was a bit like logging in to some online anime convention. And therein lies the heart of the problem eve has. You can get more social interaction out of the forums then you can out of eve itself. You see, WoW, and Star Wars Galaxies, and RO, are experiences, you immerse yourself in them. Eve is a game first and foremost, with the immersion taking a backseat. The UI is confusing and non-immersive, the gameplay is harsh enough that you really can’t go out and get involved in the game world, the only way to identify someone is by a little nametag and picture, and the game overall doesn’t so much pull you into the world as distance you from it.

The other issue is the lack of individualism in eve. Everyone flies the same ships with the same color schemes and the same fits. There is no room to be yourself, there is no way to make yourself stand out. Your just another pilot in another ship. You can make a name for yourself, but its hard, and you have to work to make yourself stand out from the crowd, eve is in a lot of ways, the least individualistic MMO in existence.

The final factor is the cultural precedent, Eve is a game about Spaceships, and spaceships are for men! It’d be like trying to market a game about nascar to women. The playerbase certainly does nothing to help this, but I don’t think they do too much to hurt it either, I know a few people who’ve asked me why I’m not seriously offended by the macho-tastic e-peen waving that goes on in eve, and the answer that I, and I think a lot of other women have said, is that we really don’t care. I see the actions of the community  more as a symptom of the deeper social condition. If eve had more girls, the community wouldn’t be like that. Saying that its the male dominated community that is driving women off is an incorrect diagnosis of the problem.   So to recap:

  • No Individuality among players
  • Non-imersive and bulky UI
  • No way to stand out as a person
  • No ways to use Eve as a social tool
  • No fun casual experiences
  • Little interaction between players.
  • Cultural Precedent of Sci-fi games in general.

So How do we Fix it? I’ll go down the list and see what can be done:

No Individuality Among Players

This could be fixed by giving players more choices in how they fight and fit, but realistically needs Incarna in order to fully fix. Even with Incarna some other changes could be made to further fix it. First off, loosen the bonuses. Currently, on a given ship, you fit modules X Y and Z and if you don’t then you look like an idiot, if the bonuses across the board were loosened, so you actually had some choices when fitting a ship, it would go a long way to reducing this. Next, allowing different paint schemes for ships, this is something that really, really ought to be done, and on its own could swing the playerbase. and Finally, if Incarna is done right, and gives lots of options for different outfits and costumes, then it will definitely help immensely.

Non-Imersive and Bulky UI

In this one, its not even that female gamers are being effected, its everyone. I figure that CCP looses 1/3 of the customers they might get to the pile of steaming crap calling itself a user interface. It does nothing to make you think your piloting a huge spaceship and does everything to make you think your piloting a top of the line windows 95 computer. The blame here is squarely on CCP’s shoulders, yes eve is a complex game but thats just a copout so they don’t actually have to fix it. Anarchy online is complicated, and that game doesn’t stop you from seeing where you’re going, CCP has had multiple chances to remake the UI and each time they’ve done so, they failed to address the core problems with it, and as they pile on feature after feature, the issues get more and more compounded. They need to radically rethink their user interface and completely redesign it from the ground up so that its imersive, user friendly, and slimmer. No, making it flatter and squarer did nothing to make it look nice.

No Way to Stand out as a Person

Again, more color options and different outfits with Incarna are the obvious solution to this, but the problem is deeper then that, it deals with the nameless, faceless way that everything is done in eve. You don’t see people, you see enemies, targets, opponents. There are a couple of ways to fix this. The first is Incarna, which will let players hang out and do something other then compete with each other. The other thing that would be a decent solution would be to revamp the contracts page into little ’shops’ you could set up in Incarna, letting you stand out and selling your wares. Also things like places to hang out and fun little min events in stations would help. Letting people invite others to hang out in their hanger, visit bars, and other things would do a lot.

No Ways to Use Eve as a social tool

In Wow you can meet people in places and hang out and talk, you can’t really hang out and talk and have fun in eve at the same time. “Yeah sure I’ll talk to you while spinning my ship.” There is nothing to explore, no ways to hang out and chill with people, its very much, you play the game or you don’t, and if your not going to play, there is no reason to log on. In a lot of other games I’ve played, I’ve logged on just to hang out with friends. You really can’t do that in eve. This problem, I’m really not sure how to fix, but Incarna should at least help to patch it.

No Fun Casual Experiences

In my example of RO, you didn’t have to run the dungeons to win, you can run them to goof off and have fun. In eve, you really, really can’t just fool around. Since the game is so make or break, you don’t just fool around, you can’t. And the stuff marketed to fill that casual category is boring. Missions are repetitive and uninteresting, and no amount of tweaks to the mission system will change it, I sort of think they need to completely scrap it and start from scratch. Mining is boring enough that people have to find something else to do while mining; they actually have to find something fun to do while playing a GAME. If mining and mission running were fixed so they A)can be run cooperatively and competitively, and B) provide an entertaining game experience, instead of just as fluff to support your actual goals, then I think it would help immensely. But Eve really needs to expand its boundaries if it wants to fix this. We need places to explore, actually investigate, things that require players to work together instead of tearing them apart. Currently, eve is all about the competition, CCP needs to work to make it a bit more about the cooperation and the fun, they need to make the non-pvp activities actually fun.

Limited Interaction Between Players

When I joined a corp, a flew with them and I talked to them, and I could go for days and days without so much as saying hi to someone not in the corp. Space is big and empty, local is either too empty to talk in, or too full of spam to talk in, incarna will help, but it won’t solve the problem that everything you do in eve is focused on individuals and on their corps. The only things that encourage talking to people outside of their social bubble is factional warfare and novice corps. Those are the only places people can really see the wider world. I’m not sure how CCP would fix this, but I think changing faction warfare so it’s more broad, and more total, would help a lot.

Cultural Precendent of Scifi Games

This is going to be the biggest hurdle and the hardest one to overcome. Incarna will help a bit, but it won’t solve it, Dust 514 will hurt it since it reinforces that eve, as a setting, is all about the violence and combat and e-peen waving. Can it be fixed? Yes. Will it be easy? Not remotely. In order to fix it, CCP will basically need to completely rethink their marketing strategy, to paint eve as a game thats not all about violence, but that its something everyone can enjoy a part of. But I do stress that this should be done lastly, since even if this does work, if the above problems aren’t fixed then most of the girls who would join based on that marketing, will leave shortly afterward. This will be hard, its much, much easier to market a fantasy game to girls, and most people in general, then it is to market Scifi games to them, and without a big name franchise like Star Wars or Star Trek to associate with it, this will be really difficult to do, and require a very concerted effort on the part of CCP’s marketing division.

In closing, yes, Incarna will help a lot to pull in more female gamers and more people in general, but there are a number of things that, even with incarna, will keep eve tied down and mostly male. I don’t think eve will ever hit 50/50, but it can certainly do better then 5% girls to the 95% boys.

As is required for standard Blog banter here are some links to other contestants:

Afterward:

Thanks for liking my post Crazy Kinux, and to everyone else who supported me. Woot, blog banter victory

And yes, I am Nikita Alterana, and yes, my email is Tsakara@live.com

^^

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