Surveys suggest that women make up around 10% of the workforce in most studios, and a report by research company EEDAR in 2012 found that out of the 669 action and role-playing games studied, only 24 had exclusively female protagonists. It's no secret that game development is dominated by men, and that the demographic courted by the marketers of Triple A titles is young males. But they are reflecting it through a very particular prism. Our sense of certainty has been decimated over the last five years – the world is once again a weird, unpredictable and violent place. Our current obsession with zombies and failed utopias is arguably driven by the gristly meat of 24-hour news coverage: fears of pan-global diseases like avian flu, the over-population of the Earth, the financial collapse of 2008 and mass uprisings like the Arab Spring. The rush of '50s sci-fi flicks about mutated insects and invading aliens came out of post-war fears about the atom bomb and communist revolution and the slasher films of the seventies processed the global economic downturn, the collapse of the patriarchal nuclear family and the rise of feminism's second wave. We've seen these spikes before and they usually reflect and explore wider sociopolitical fears. And how, although narrative themes have progressed, the games industry is still heavily reliant on the old themes of power, authority and physical force.įirst of all, there's no coincidence in the sudden onslaught of dystopian fiction, which has affected movies and literature as well as games. 308 pages, full color interior.The fact that these two titles have emerged almost contemporaneously, alongside other highly masculinised post-apocalyptic fantasies such as The Walking Dead and State of Decay says some interesting things about where games are right now. This includes both the Hardcover AND the PDF for Uprising (PDF at no additional charge). The Dystopian Universe RPG: Vive La Résistance! A streamlined modular system for creating missions, along with sample missions to get you started.New prep scenes and equipment rules designed to help make downtime active.
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