The Entertainment Software Association has affirmed what we already know. Unsurprisingly, an awful lot of women play video games, and that women are well-represented among frequent game purchasers:

According to a report released this week by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), 45% of the entire game playing population are women and they comprise 46% of the most frequent video game purchasers. The study, 2013 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry, found that women 18 and older make up 31% of the video game-playing population, while boys 17 and under represent only 19% of today’s gamers. Another study released by Magid Advisors found that 70% of women between the ages of 12 and 24 play video games. The study also found 61% of women between the ages of 45 and 64 also play games, compared to 57% of men in the same age group.

Those numbers come the day after Anita Sarkeesian pointed out that at the E3 conference, there were no games teased for the XBox One that featured female characters (and, predictably, got harassed for it). And it’s that confluence of figures that explain why it’s so hard to convince the branches of the entertainment industry that they ought to try harder to offer up female characters and characters of color.

Being underserved by media doesn’t mean that people stop consuming it. Latinos go to the movies at a higher rate than members of any other racial or ethnic group, seeing 5.3 movies a year to the 3.7 movies in theaters attended each year by African-American consumers, and the 3.5 movies per year for white moviegoers. In every age group except 2-11, women are more frequent moviegoers than men. Women lag behind in gaming, but they’re awfully close to parity, even if the characters on screen aren’t. With women and people of color participating significantly in the entertainment market, what financial incentives do movie studios or video game companies have to try to cater more audiences whose business they’re already getting?

The best answer is that those margins could always be bigger. Because Hollywood wants to capture international audiences, particularly in China, where movie theaters are coming online at an astonishing rate, we’re seeing more Asian actors, at least in minor roles, in studio productions, and seeing them portrayed more positively. If 31 percent of women who are 18 or older play video games, that’s great, but why wouldn’t you want that number to get higher, and to see if you can move women into more expensive and time-intensive forms of gaming, rather than convincing yourself that the market of female gamers is well-served by casual offerings, one of the excuses we often hear for why there aren’t video game characters. If Latinos are seeing 5.3 movies a year, that’s great, but why are the numbers for African-Americans lower, and why can’t the ceiling on both be higher? And if it seems rational to spend $237 million on the first installment of a potential franchise about peacenik, enviro-aliens that’s not based on a Disney ride, why is it so terribly difficult to imagine spending some of the resulting Avatar money on building a generation of directors like Nancy Meyers, a woman who spends between $65 million and $85 million making her movies, a bunch of that going to salary, and makes back her budgets comfortably?

For some reason, rationality and the profit motive don’t seem to apply to women and people of color when it comes to the entertainment industry. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to squeeze more profits out of international audiences, and out of young men, who seem pretty comfortably served themselves by blockbusters’ takeover of Hollywood. But apparently when it comes to women and non-white people, once again, we’re the tapped-out exception, rather than a potentially profitable rule.

Yesterday, my colleague Rebecca Leber reported that “Seven days after Women Action and the Media, the Everyday Sexism Project and activist Soraya Chemaly called on Facebook to remove content that condones hate speech and violence against women, Facebook responded that it will update its policies that add a new emphasis to taking domestic violence seriously.” Promising to work closely with the coalition of groups that organized the campaign that got 15 companies to drop their advertising from Facebook as long as the social media service continued to treat memes encouraging or praising domestic violence as if they didn’t qualify as gender-based hate speech, Facebook pledged to “review and update” the guidelines for what constitutes such speech, retrain the teams that respond to flagged items, tie users verified identity more closely to some content that qualifies as “cruel or insensitive,” and to establish more formal working relationships with women’s organizations. This is a significant victory for Women Action and the Media, Everyday Sexism, and Soraya Chemaly. But the same day, an event happened that illustrated how far technology and social media companies have to go in accommodating themselves to the realities–and limitations–of the communities that make them valuable.

To much less notice on Tuesday, Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist culture critic who was relentlessly harassed and threatened for the simple act of Kickstarting a project to examine the representation of women in video gaming, posted the latest video in that series, Tropes vs. Women. What followed was predictable. “Looks like my harassers abused YouTube’s flag function to get my new Tropes vs Women video removed. Not the first time it’s happened,” Sarkeesian wrote on Twitter. “An hour after our video went live I got an email saying ‘The YouTube Community has flagged one or more of your videos as inappropriate.’ Here’s the “community flagged” removal notice from YouTube. I appealed and 45 mins later my video was restored: pic.twitter.com/wilya1PHsF.”

In other words, the YouTub system worked exactly like the women’s coalition would like Facebook’s system to work. The content was reported as offensive was taken down quickly and preemptively, and the person who created it was required to go through an appeals process to get it back online, but after an adjudication, Sarkeesian’s video did get back in front of the audience who wanted to see it. The problem was, it worked to the detriment not of content that advocated or minimized the impact of violence against women, but to the harm of content that is explicitly aimed at the opposite.
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Earlier this month, Travis Waldron wrote about the lawsuit against EA Sports, which creates avatars of college athletes that closely match their physical appearance and performances in games, but changes their names so they don’t have to pay up the way they normally would if they were benefiting from their use of a real person’s image. Now, Rutgers quarterback Ryan Hart has won an appeal against EA, after a 2011 ruling sided with the video game company’s claim that they had First Amendment rights to create a replica of Hart for use in NCAA Football. The judges’ reasoning for siding with Hart in the appeal? EA’s reinterpretation of Hart wasn’t “transformative.”

Judge Joseph Greenaway wrote in the Third Circuit decision that “The digital Ryan Hart does what the actual Ryan Hart did while at Rutgers: He plays college football, in digital recreations of college football stadiums, filled with all the trappings of a college football game. This is not transformative; the various digitized sights and sounds in the video game do not alter or transform the appellant’s identity in a significant way.” The standard he’s talking about is called the Transformative Use Test, a weighting system meant to prevent economic harm to individuals by preventing other people from simply reproducing their images for profit, but to guarantee free speech rights by protecting work that, as the Supreme Court ruled in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., “adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message.” The Third Circuit compared the use of Hart’s image by EA to Activision’s reproduction of No Doubt for its Band Hero game, arguing that Hart’s claim was even stronger than No Doubt’s, because while in Band Hero, players contribute their own singing, NCAA Football is designed to let players reproduce Hart’s actions closely.

I’m all for the broad movement to rationalize the treatment of NCAA athletes, and to acknowledge the truth, that they exist in a space between the true amateurs playing ultimate frisbee in college leagues, and professional athletes who are employed by the teams in the major leagues. And the way the Third Circuit ruled, even if it was in Hart’s favor, illustrates how far we have to go to achieve those changes. The bigger fight over whether the NCAA can license current and former players’ images without compensating them is still pending, and is scheduled for a 2014 jury trial. Hart may end up winning the debate over whether EA needs to license the images of college players it’s including in its games. But precisely who EA pays that money to is a problem that we’re at least a year away from solving.

EA Sports designed virtual players in college sports video games to look and play like their real life counterparts, according to testimony from a former company executive obtained by AL.com. The games didn’t, and couldn’t, use the names of those players under NCAA rules, the same rules that let EA Sports and other companies profit off of those athletes without paying them a dime.

Former EA producer Jeremy Strauser and EA executive vice president Joel Linzner both testified in December as part of former University of California-Los Angeles basketball star Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against EA Sports and the NCAA. The suit claims that both violated antitrust law by using the images and likenesses of former college athletes without compensation. Both Strauser and Linzner testified that EA Sports, which is trying to get out of the case, designed players to resemble the actual players they were meant to depict, AL.com reports:

Jeremy Strauser, who worked at EA from 1995 until 2011, testified last December that computer-game avatars were linked to specific player identifying numbers and biographical information, such as team depth charts, was used to make the game realistic.

“We generally tried to make the players perform as their real life counterparts, short of their name and likeness,” Strauser testified. [...]

Linzner said the video game’s purpose is to “evoke or create the impression that these are the real life counterparts, and the heights and weights are sometimes accurate and sometimes not.”

Well, of course they did. Anyone who has ever played any of the EA Sports games based on college athletics knows that the players in the game, from position to number to height and weight to skin color to skill level, are based off their real-life counterparts (notice how much this guy looks like this guy?). That’s why EA Sports comes out with a new game each year, because nobody wants to play with USC or Alabama’s rosters from last year when they can have a more realistic experience by playing with their rosters from this year. If it wasn’t (some dude who looks like) Matt Barkley throwing the football to (two dudes who look like) Robert Woods and Marqise Lee, well, EA Sports would almost surely sell a lot fewer games. At the least, they’d have to market the games as far less realistic experiences.

It isn’t just video games: Nike and the University of Kentucky didn’t spend all of 2012 selling #23 basketball jerseys at random. They sold #23 jerseys because UK’s star player, Anthony Davis, wore #23. College bookstores around the country, and retailers who sell college merchandise, do the exact same thing, and they do it because nobody wants the walk-on’s jersey.

The NCAA argues that none of this matters because they aren’t using the players’ names or images, and thus they aren’t exploiting actual people. But of course they are, and everyone knows it. Because if they weren’t using the likenesses of actual people, they wouldn’t be making nearly as much money by using them in broadcasts, selling merchandise based off of them, or selling their rights to video game manufacturers. That’s precisely what makes the entire system such a sham, and precisely what makes the O’Bannon case so promising: it has a chance to bring the entire sham to light, one admission of the obvious at a time.

None of that means that O’Bannon is going to win the lawsuit, which is still far from over. The next step is a hearing in June that will determine if the case can be certified as a class-action complaint, which would allow current college athletes to join the case. If that happens, the O’Bannon case won’t just serve as a valuable exposé of the absurdity of college athletics. Rather, it would have the chance to bring the entire system crumbling down.

By Tony Palumbi

“Can’t change the past? Why, of course you can!”-Jay Gatsby

“What if you woke up and realized you didn’t like what you chose?” – Booker DeWitt

Bioshock Infinite starts and ends with water—the player pushed and held under water in two starkly different baptisms. One is a symbolic birth and the other a fairly literal death, but they bracket this phenomenal game with what I see as its overriding theme: changing the past. Whether we’re talking about fact or fiction, there’s nothing more distinctly American than a troubled relationship with your own history. Infinite is one of the most-discussed titles in years, but I’ve yet to see anyone tackle its approach to hagiography and classic American fiction.

Every culture paves over some terrible events, but the United States occupies a privileged position. We’re the land of second chances, our own immigrant history so close and personal we can’t help but embellish it. Ta-Nehisi Coates (among others) has written great pieces about our relationship to the Civil War: the convenience of believing that there were Black Confederates, or that the Confederacy was defending democratic principles rather than fighting to keep slaves. Believing in America’s fundamental goodness requires that we find a way around the always-messy Present. So we create a golden, perfect Past that’s always just past the western horizon, whether before Lincoln’s tyranny or before a pill divorced pregnancy from sex.

So when Bioshock Infinite’s protagonist is introduced in the year 1912 with a box inscribed “Booker DeWitt, 7th Cavalry, Wounded Knee,” we associate him first with one of America’s great crimes. Within minutes he’s rocketing into the air and being “reborn” in baptism as a condition to enter the sky-city of Columbia. He emerges from the water into a chapel garden built to honor Columbia’s religious idols: Jefferson, Franklin and Washington. Columbia isn’t so much a living city as a museum through which Booker makes his way, taking time out between effervescent gunfights to admire distant statuary through public coin-op binoculars. There’s even a lengthy sequence in a history museum, where Booker is fed “revised” accounts of Wounded Knee along with the Boxer Rebellion.
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Over at NPR, Sami Yenigun has a story that points out while the debate over whether popular culture inspires real-world violent actions is far from settled, there is one concrete link between the entertainment industry and the gun industry: product placement in films and licensing of gun images in video games:

Last year, Call of Duty earned half a billion dollars in a day. That same game features the long barrel and angled cartridge of a .50-caliber sniper rifle that’s a virtual copy of a real Barrett gun. According to Vejay Lalla, a lawyer who works with clients to clear brands in video games, that’s very much intentional. “Game developers essentially want to make sure that games are as realistic as possible,” he says.

So if the makers of Madden NFL want to use, say, the New England Patriots in their video game, they have to strike a deal with the NFL; and if the makers of Need For Speed want a bright orange Camaro in their game, they’re going to have to talk to Chevrolet.

Lalla hasn’t personally brokered any deals between gun companies and video game companies, but he says product placement for guns works the same way. Video game makers use realistic, brand-name weapons, and then depending on how the brand is portrayed, they decide whether to license the name. “If the gun is instrumental in the game or visible or used often, then typically there is a clearance process involved,” Lalla says

Obviously, the use of guns in video games, movies, and television, and the use of other implements of mayhem, including fists, have their own distinct appeal. Hand-to-hand fighting lets a character in film or television demonstrate their toughness in myriad ways, from their ability to take a punch to their willingness to inflict damage on someone else in a direct way—The Americans has done an excellent job of this with Elizabeth Jennings character, whether she’s fighting back against an attacker in training or beating Claudia, her handler, and an older woman, in retaliation for Claudia ordering Elizabeth and her husband interrogated. Similarly, fighting games let players step into someone else’s body and take on someone else’s capacities. And fist fights can be a way of making entertainment violence more visceral and more personal, closing the physical gap between combatants, or between assailant and victim. Or it can abstract, showing characters who have the capacity to take inhuman amounts of damage and keep going. But whatever they do, they can’t really burnish the image of or encourage the purchase of a particular product. We all have fists already.

If the entertainment industry wants to distance itself from the gun industry and from real-world violence, there are a couple of things they could do that would improve their range of storytelling as well as cleaning up their consciences. They could stop licensing images of specific weapons and, in products that aren’t live action, design their own weapons. Directors could change the way they shoot weapons as aesthetic objects. Writers and directors could vary the ways that guns are used and cause harm, including incidents where they’re brandished but not discharged, their use in suicides, and accidental gun deaths, rather than portraying them as objects that are only associated with heroic competence. The Good Wife‘s first-season episode “Bad,” for example, did a nice job of exploring a range of feelings about gun possession ranging from Kalinda’s ease to Diane’s discomfort—the episode didn’t deny that guns can be used effectively in self-defense, but it acknowledged that Diane wasn’t comfortable using a gun that way and that she had a perfect right to stay as far away from guns as she wanted to. And Lord of War, one of the more underrated elements of Nicolas Cage’s ouvre, did an extremely effective job of parsing both our fascination with guns and our revulsion with what they can actually do to human bodies and human beings. Like any story-telling element, guns can get monotonous if they’re used the same way every time. Acknowledging their power and mixing up their use could be a path to creative revitalization, and to giving Hollywood a stronger position than pulling episodes of television shows in the wake of disaster does.

Over the past year or so, the discussion about the portrayal of female characters in video games, and the employment of women in the industry that produces those images has been particularly heated. But for all the challenges this industry faces, a new survey of video game producers suggests that gaming companies may actually be outflanking television when it comes to improving the representation of women in certain positions, and in making pay equitable for male and female producers.

According to the latest edition of Game Developer Magazine’s annual salary survey, in 2012, 23 percent of video game producers are women, a year-on-year increase of 7 percent over 2011, when women represented 16 percent of producers. That’s a significant shift in a single year, and it’s a kind of progress that would be striking in the television industry, where progress in shifting the composition of the writing workforce has been notably slow. Between the 1999-2000 television season and the 2011-2012 television season, the percentage of female television writers rose from 25.5 percent to 30.5 percent—as the Writers Guild Of America, West pointed out “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.”

And the gap between the 2012 average salaries for male and female producers in video games was $6,602—$78,989 for women versus $85,591 for men. That’s a smaller gap than the one between male and female television writers, which in 2009 was almost $10,000, with an average salary of $98,600 for female writers, compared to an average of $108,000 for men. And women actually make more than their male counterparts in one area of the industry, programming and engineering, even though they hold only 4 percent of those positions.

Now, there are differences between these industries: video games are produced on a project basis, while television shows can either run in an open-ended way, or end after a discrete amount of time, though both of those possibilities are open-ended. But the ends of television seasons often provide opportunities for shows to bring in new writers—Aaron Sorkin, for example, famously has a tendency to clean out his entire writers’ room at the end of each season—and would provide opportunities to shift the demographics of writers’ rooms. In either industry, changing the ratios are largely a matter of will. And it’s great to see an industry like video games, which has a shorter history than television, demonstrate that even in a culture that’s known for male fans and male characters, if you want more women working on projects, you can find it. Maybe if the video game industry continues to make progress, everyone else will feel pressure to catch up.

Golf’s most iconic tournament, The Masters, begins Thursday at Augusta National Golf Club, which has traditionally faced scrutiny this time of year because of its male-only membership policy. Last fall, though, the club relented and extended memberships to two women, former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice and private investment executive Darla Moore. Ahead of The Masters, Rice walked the grounds at Augusta last week clad in one of the famous green jackets donned by Augusta members and Masters champions.

Augusta’s first female members aren’t the only milestone for women in golf this spring, though. On March 26, EA Sports released Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14, the latest in its line of video games named after golf’s biggest star. And for the first time ever, the game features the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association (LGPA) Tour alongside the men’s tour.

Gamers have long had the option to play the game as female professionals like Natalie Gulbis. The new version, however, gives them the option to play not just as women but to create female players and play a career mode that takes them up the amateur ladder to the LPGA Tour. It even includes the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the biggest tournament on the LPGA Tour schedule. And in a nice touch of gender equality, the game also allows female players to compete against the men on the PGA Tour, which isn’t unrealistic: LPGA players Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie have both competed in men’s events before.

This isn’t entirely new territory for EA, which included international female stars in NHL 13, its hockey line, and plans to add female players and teams to its line of soccer games in the coming years. Still, it’s a welcome step to include not just a handful of recognizable female athletes but the entire league in which they compete, particularly given that some versions of the game are branded with the Masters logo and that it was released in time for this week’s tournament.

There are more than 6 million female golfers in the U.S., according to the National Golf Foundation. Plenty of them are LGPA Tour fans, and plenty of them also play video games. As I wrote when EA announced it was including women in NHL 13, its great that the company is acknowledging that women deserve to be able to identify directly with avatars when they play these games in the same way men do. More importantly, video games can have a major positive experience on young people like the girl whose father hacked Donkey Kong to make the princess the hero. So in a sports world where women still face sexism and questions about their legitimacy as athletes, something as simple as equality in virtual reality can go a long way in planting the seeds of equality in actual reality too.

After launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund a long-term project that would examine the roles women play—or are consigned to—in video games, Feminist Frequency video blogger Anita Sarkeesian was subject to a vicious, violence-saturated campaign of harassment. While it was awful to watch Sarkeesian be threatened and slandered for the sin of wanting to do her job well and comprehensively, the utter inability of her harassers to shut her work down has been wonderful to watch.

And I’m cheering Sarkeesian’s perseverance even harder now that the first installment of her project, titled Tropes Vs. Women, is out—and it’s terrific. Examining both the depiction and gameplay of characters like Pauline, Princess Peach and Zelda, Sarkeesian goes back to the origins of the Damsels In Distress trope art and literature, explores how the trope migrated into video games after the rights to Popeye characters couldn’t be secured for a video game, and examines how the trope became valuable to the video game industry:

At the beginning of the video, Sarkeesian, explaining that “This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters,” says something that everyone who loves a piece of culture ought to be required to recite five times every morning while looking in the mirror: “Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.” If that ability to hold two ideas in your head at the same time, to enjoy something while recognizing that it might have problems, is what the people who tried to harass Sarkeesian into silence are so afraid of, it only reinforces how intellectually cowardly and inept they are. The need for something to be immune from criticism isn’t a sign that it’s perfect and everyone else is wrong: it’s a sign you can’t defend the things you love. That’s a position any self-aware person ought to be embarrassed to defend.