Appealing to women

So I'm working on a script for a game... Its kinda cyb and trying to add in a few hacking refs/clues... so far so good... But the (sub) objective here is to try and make hacking appeal to women more and encourage females to try stuff out. Any suggestions as to what references, visuals, tasks or ideas that might help achieve my goal? Just to give some context: Game is fixed rooms VR kind of thing (can move around a bit - HTC vive) - so can pick up objects and do simple things with them... moving from room to room with a kinda teleporter device. Any idea no matter how far out welcome!

The key here is to stop thinking of women as some mythical seperate species. Women are people too. Just people. Such a sweeping generalization about "appealing to women" won't work because each has different tastes, preferences, etc. just like everyone else does. To make it appeal to women, just make it appeal to people in general. As long as your game isn't overtly bashing the female gender or something it should be fine.

Are women from Venus or something? Why do you need to do something special to appeal to them, do they just not like cool soykaf? You can appeal to two things to attempt to gain people who wouldn't normally be interested, male or female, realism or escapism. You can either make it so that the game peels away the layers on the real world and effectively explain how it "works" with a few layers of abstraction or you make everything how they wish it to be. Think about why people are going to play your game and try to appeal to that, women as a social group are not going to play your game not because of anything you do but rather because it doesn't appeal to them enough, and much of the times it is the concept of video games that don't appeal enough rather than anything you can do.

The most important thing is the screenwriting. For sure. People want to be put in a journey, they want to feel that he/she is the protagonist (it's called parasocial relationship). You should do a good screenwriting, so you can achieve your goal. First of all, "build the world": - What is the place it will be? - It's on present time or on past/future? - What is the conditions (some catastrophe happened, what's the government, what is changed from our present time)? After you did it, build the characters: - You should make not only their characteristics (such as personality - you can use MBTI to help with it), but all their past and traumatic experiences. Also, build an antagonist that has a good backstory, with real motivations After these two steps, you have to concentrate in your "thesis"/ The thesis is the central point of your screenwriting. People should, at the end of your game, understand some point: - What you want to talk to your public? - What the underlying message you want to pass through the journey? After you established an thesis, it's time to actually build an script. You have to first learn the correct terms, like what is an plot, what is an pinch point, what is the monomyth, 3 acts and the 8 sequence method. Check the image embedded (it works not only to hollywood, it's basically a universal way to tell a story, since the greeks). If you don't want to create a complex story, at least use the 3 acts structure. It works. A good example of a game that does this very well is The Last of Us. Check about the "pathetic fallacy" idea. Try to construct your game using synestesia, the sound and image should match. And, remember, you're creating an experience to the player. It's not just entertainment. It should have a meaning. That's what the good games have in common, they are not just games, they make you pass through a journey and back to normal life with a different mindset and different state of consciousness.

>>3249 >>3248 Except until recently most girls were raised to be interested in certain things and behave differently and female and male marketing is different, and thats a proven fact companies exploit everyday. So stop pretending to be fuarrrking mongoloids who don't know what OP is talking about and either answer his question or shut your mouth. And i'm not even OP. Just hate it when people act like things aren't the way they are.

>Appealing to women Stopped reading here. Seriously though stop trying to force women into these jobs because you have some ideal utopian society built in your head where everything is 50/50 and all men and women have an equal amount of jobs in all fields. Focus on just making a good game. Listen to >>3248 and >>3249. If you make a game plastered with femininity trying to lure women into liking hacking you're only gonna attract posers. The women that would actually be interested in hacking don't need your game to do it for them.

>>3256 >>3248 OP speaking.... As described to me by the female who initiated this project: Women don't feel they can just do things in the same way men can - its like they feel they need permission. This is of course not anything to do with their capabilities or interests, and I guess this feeling will be present in varying amounts for different females and upbringings - just a social balance we have ended up with. So I guess I'm asking what would help make females feel enabled to start hacking/ coding/ moooowaa PC within the confines of this game environment being constructed? Again any comments and ideas at all welcome... Many thanks in advance Lains. N.B. That said maybe Serial Experiments Lain is kinda on this path? Any females* here been inspired by Lain or anything else to start being more Lain? * in b4 there are no females on the Internet.

Vidya designer here. If you're making a VR project, maybe the best representation for the hacking theme would be exploration and feeding the curiosity of the player, which is exactly why most people turn into hackers- the feeling that there must be something more, a whole new world to explore, a galaxy of things that are restricted to certain persons, but you're there anyway. For me, the best way to reproduce that feeling would be to make maze like maps and places. Think of the hacking parts from the original System Shock, for example. In Lain's case, she was introduced because of pure curiosity, and seeing her how much her "father" enjoyed himself surrounded by technology. Also Lain is pretty much a God in the series, so you might be onto something there, tho I wouldn't rely too much into it. As i said before, feeding the player the curiosity to keep on going till the end should be enough to get someone into something. It depends on how much of propaganda for hacking culture you want the game to be.

>>3264 >its like they feel they need permission. Ah but lain, you aren't the one who can give them permission. They can only get permission from their social group. Not many women are going to find it acceptable to drop money on a vive just as not many men are going to either. Remember that you are dealing with a much smaller section of the population than women in general and act accordingly, you aren't aiming to appeal to women but rather women who have access to an HTC Vive, who are inevitably going to be a different section of the population than women as a whole. See what games already appeal to them and why, just have fun figuring out who is a girl on steam. >>3255 But then again Lainanon, we aren't talking about women as a group are we? I am >>3249 and am still pushing the idea that OP is barking up the wrong tree. Furthermore you have expressed some special knowledge that the rest of up don't have. How do we get women to drop 5k on a vive Lainanon? What is the killer app for women here? Should we make the vive bubblegum pink and bejeweled? I mean it is just so obvious isn't it. If anything, I will admit there is something that appeals to women in some games over others, with drastic differences in playerbase even within genres. I suppose the real question for OP is what makes games like SW:TOR and DA:I better in this manner, I suppose it comes down to different motivations and again it comes back to my original point in >>3249 where I told OP to know who he is appealing to.

> I produce escapism material to encourage rich lazy people to "try stuff out". > And by "try stuff out" I mean "hack". > Any suggestions as to what references, visuals, tasks or ideas that might help achieve my goal? Wat Can you show me anyone who got interested in hacking by playing a computer game? Every single one I know got interested in hacking by actually trying hacking. Doesn't need $1200 worth of hardware too. The only way to archive your stated goal with VR I can see is to develop free software and hardware VR tools that allow others to hack their own VR games for cheap. Something like LICO-12 or PX8 for VR and hardware designs for dirt cheap DK2s that can be made from old mobile phone panels with a $5 controller you solder on the back and attach to HDMI-out and USB-in of any PC. But, guess what, you won't make a buck doing it. Your stated goal is an honorable socialist endeavor, but your method can work for at most 50% (women) of 1% (rich) of 50% (with a hackable PC) of maybe 10% (gamers) of maybe 5% (with a VR headset). Multiply that yourself.

>>3267 yeah this is pretty much it. No game will ever get someone interested in hacking, except maybe ones that involve computer puzzle-solving like that TIS-100 game.

>>3267 >Can you show me anyone who got interested in hacking by playing a computer game? Me. I got into hacking first via an old free game called Hack The Game and because I watched The Matrix one too many times. Obviously I tried real stuff after but in the beginning I just played that game non stop.

>>3247 I'm gonna go ahead and say: copy a trend that already works. Or, you could pretend something is about to become a huge trend. Meaning, pretend that hacking the gibson in VR is normal for a certain group of women, or that it's about to become popular. You could point out that women in China know how to hack because they've been forced into it by those soykafty internet restrictions. You could even suggest that Trump might decide to implement the same kind of bullsoykaf. You need to pull some kind of trendsetting stunt, because the women won't follow unless there's something fun going on that's already spreading. It's either already a trend, or just about to become one. Because your target audience is sensitive to this social context. This is not a "subcategory" of how things are. Rather, this social context sensitivity thing is "normal". It's the engineers and hackers who ignore social context that are the subcategory. For a guy to become obsessed with tools and technology just for its own sake, not to immediately gain something from it in a social context... That's a trap that mostly us boys on image boards keep falling into, apparently. I'm too lazy to draw a venn diagram so just so picture one in your head where the hardcore techies are a marble rolling off a globe. Allow me to present some anecdotal evidence to make my pompous post even longer. Last time I went to a convention, do you know how many harley quin cosplayers were walking around? They were goddamn everywhere. But, get this, there were almost just as many joker cosplayers. Mostly these were couples, you see. They had decided it would be extremely entertaining to dress up like the characters from a certain movie, and this movie was fresh! And fun! It was catching on!

>>3267 uplink, i loved the aesthetic of it. Though it got me interested by showing me that "a thing" exists, not because it did something realistic.

>>3270 Holy soykaf, I remember playing this game and making custom mission packs with it. IT WAS AMAZING

>>3255 >We have to figure out how to pander to women born 40+ years ago because things were different back then in order to cater to teenage and 20 something year old girls. Imagine trying to appeal to young Russians by assuming they are still living like things were the 1980s.

>>3266 Thats for OP to figure out and he is barking up the wrong tree because its a fuarrrking sausage fest here. >>3350 What im saying applies to girls now. Companies market to girls right now, where you are getting this years ago thing is beyond me. Right now and probably the next generation still girls are raised quite a bit different from guys, and the media still portrays that the things guys and girls want out of life are drastically different. The only thing I agree on is that this is a lost cause. VR is already a niche market. I can count on my fingers the people I know with some kind of VR device not including their phone or whatever and that feature some of them have that ive never seen anybody use except maybe once. Your best bet OP is to I dont know go talk to girls or something about what they want in a video game, rather than relying on an imageboard where a majority of the users are dudes and probably a fair percent haven't even had a girlfriend (in all definitons of that phrase). I had a math teacher once who had the idea that girls are less interested in math, science and engineering fields due to the toys they play with growing up. While boys are marketed a wide array of diy things and construction type toys girls are mostly marketed dolls and play houses. I dont know if thats true, its an interesting idea. Its got almost nothing to do with what you are asking OP.