Penny Arcade

I used to read Penny Arcade. I liked that the comic was about games and it was generally funny. Then they posted a strip that made me realize that I was not their audience. I went a year or so without reading it, and then I decided to give it another try. I love webcomics and I know that a few bad posts don’t make a theme, so I decided to start reading again. A few weeks into this new adventure and they decided to post this.

When judging wet t-shirt contests and beer bongs is celebrated in a comic with an image of a woman in a wet t-shirt I am yet again, informed ever-so-gently by the creators that this is not a club for girls, so again I will remove Penny Arcade from my list of must-reads. I don’t think I will go back again.

This is just the way of the game industry in miniature. Many women who game will read the strip because they are used to looking past the sexist crap. The men usually don’t even notice. It is the women like me who they miss and they figure they are doing just fine without expanding their base, why are we needed. I think that blindly insulting a group of people to set clear “boys-only” barriers is short sighted.

Unless you make a product that only one sex can use, like after shave, it is short-sighted for a company or an industry to intentionally insult a possible market segment. This was discovered by the makers of TVs when they realized that women have an equal, if not dominant voice in the decisions on household purchases.

With the dominance of women in the casual games space I think it is ludicrous for the games industry in general to continue to assume that their audience is all male. And with their strong ties to the games industry I am putting Penny Arcade in the same boat.