Gaming and the Role of Women
Gaming has been synonymous with male-dominated behavior in recent years (Dickey, 2017). However, this appeared to undermine the role of women in gaming. The role of women in gaming can be traced to many forms of study carried out by individual authors. The researchers have been able to present their views on the role of women in gaming, and a brief history of the same has been made. The fact that most women and girls did not have a chance to play games would ultimately lead to illiteracy, particularly when it comes to technology and the opportunity to be employed in the future. Lacking the chance to participate in games made them lose interest and therefore, development of girls' games was done so as to ensure that the ladies were also involved in gaming.
Involvement of Women in Gaming
Involvement by girls in gaming was stemmed by Felicia Day (Tomkinson, & Harper, 2015) who developed as a female gamer. Having taken this action, she was able to face very many negative challenges but was able to stand still strong. Among these challenges was misogyny whereby there was a dissent from the males concerning her involvement in the video gaming. Also, she faced strong opposition a journalist named Perez who questioned her capability to the game. Reactions were different concerning the "Day and Perez drama." In the end, Perez was fired from his job. In my opinion, this was a great step taken so as to minimize the male dominance practice. The women gamers were also seen to face online bullying that entailed getting very nasty comments on social media, exclusion and even at times misrecognition. Despite all these challenges of misogyny and gender-based discrimination, women still stood strong and still engaged in gaming practices.
Changing Landscape and Increased Participation
In the current world, the male stereotype is not practiced since the men and women are seen to be all able in the society's practices. Therefore, there is no room for criticism of women's involvement in video gaming as it used to be long ago. More women are getting involved in the gaming industry. The rate of women's participation has been increased by a certain rate. This massive increase has been seen in countries such as Australia.
Reduction of Discrimination and Bullying
Also, the rate of death threats and rape threats to the women involved in gaming has also declined due to the much respect women have now been given. In the end, the criticizers were able to acknowledge that gaming is just but an art or rather something to be done for fun and that anyone can get involved in. Therefore, reduced discrimination, bullying and trolling activities have been done so as to reduce gender inequality in society.
Communities in the Video Game Industry
In the video game industry, there are several communities that participate (Burger-Helmchen, & Cohendet, 2011). These communities include the tester, the player, and the developer communities. The different communities all need to adopt some specific strategies so as to ensure its success. The player community will mainly create new products as long as the resources are readily available. Firms can adopt this type of community when they want to exhaust their resources. An advantage of this community is that copying is minimized, thus lower cases of suing. This community would not be preferred as it shows the rigidity of the producer to be capable of change. However, in this kind of community, not all tasks such as branding and marketing may be done, and that in most cases, the resultant product may have features that are too common to the consumer.
Building Successful Communities
The tester community, on the other hand, has resources thus lead to the obtaining of new capabilities. These firms increase the market shares due to their uniqueness. However, they are more risky to participate in since they have many legal requirements that need to be enforced. This is especially seen when the culture of the firm differs from that of the community. Thirdly, the developer community entails the working together of a firm and communities which adopt resources from one firm and are greatly linked to the product. The linking together of the two will rise the chances of higher capabilities by the firm and therefore good financial performance.
Collaboration and Value Creation
Firms should, therefore, seek more help from the communities so as to increase their success in the communities possess unique strategies. To be able to understand and adopt the strategies of the communities, firms should carefully examine the scale, scope and resource-based view of the firm (RBV). Therefore the combination of factors of the firm and those from the communities will greatly positively impact the financial performance of the firm. Firms should endeavor to adopt strategies from the communities as this will create a lot of value and satisfaction to consumers and customers.
Works Cited
Dickey, M. (2017). Girl gamers: the controversy of girl games and the relevance of female-oriented game design for instructional design. Retrieved 21 March 2017, from
Tomkinson, S., & Harper, T. (2015). The position of women in video game culture: Perez and Day's Twitter Incident. Continuum, 29(4), 617-634. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1025362
Burger-Helmchen, T., & Cohendet, P. (2011). User Communities and Social Software in the Video Game Industry. Long Range Planning, 44(5-6), 317-343. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2011.09.003
