I’m a big fan of Mike Abbott’s blog The Brainy Gamer, and yesterday he posted an interesting story about Happy Meals at McDonald’s.

So I’m at the counter, I order Zoe a Happy Meal, and the woman says to me “Would you like a girl or a boy toy?” I didn’t know we had a choice. I look at Zoe who’s wearing a hat and jacket, and I realize this woman can’t make out Zoe’s sex, so I ask her “What’s the difference?” She tells me that girls get an iCarly Happy Meal and boys get a Star Wars Happy Meal. I ask Zoe, “Would you like Star Wars or iCarly?” She stares at me clueless and then says “Carly,” and I immediately kick myself for listing it second. Zoe always chooses the last item offered if she doesn’t know what you’re talking about.

When we opened the box we found an iCarly “Lip Gloss Phone,” a purple and silver flip phone that opens to a makeup mirror and container of lip gloss.

There are obviously huge implications about the gendering of these toys, but they’re so huge they’re beyond the scope of this post. People have literally written books about that, so I’m going to focus just on what Happy Meals are really about: marketing.

Let’s look at it from a business perspective. McDonald’s is so big that seemingly small decisions can have huge monetary ramifications. Why separate the Happy Meal’s packaging into two separate production processes, when keeping one box and one toy set would be cheaper?

Airborne clowns and children, lovin' it.

Well, because then you can target your marketing more specifically. It’s the same thing we see in Facebook and Project Wonderful ads: the ability to use IP locating and Facebook profile searches enables companies to choose exactly who gets sold what. Both advertisers and McDonalds benefit from their partnership and involvement in Happy Meals; as this New York Times article reports,

Brad Ball, the president of theatrical marketing for Warner Brothers and a former senior vice president for marketing for McDonald’s, said children could influence a family’s choice of movies and restaurants, so both fast-food companies and studios count on toys to create what he called a ”nag factor.”

Sometimes the makers of a television show or a toy pay a restaurant for the right to promote their product through a giveaway. At other times, restaurants will pay a licensing fee of $250,000 to $1 million to movie studios for the rights to make a toy. Restaurants will spend as much as $25 million on advertisements for a film and the fast-food tie-in, according to some movie studio officials.

Clearly, it’s worth it to McDonald’s to invest that much capital in ads and toys. Some sources (note: again, anecdotal calculations) think that the cost of making and marketing a toy is more than half of the total cost of the Happy Meal to the corporation, a pretty significant bite into the profits of the company. It’s a tradeoff that’s clearly worth it.

Now that we’ve got a grasp on the economic basics, what can the game industry learn from Happy Meals?

At their heart, the boy/girl split of McDonald’s Happy Meals is about marketing share. The Happy Meal as a concept was introduced in the 70s, to boost flagging revenue, and has evolved from there. Although some say it’s unethical, marketers’ exploitation of ‘the nag factor’ – telling kids to direct their parents’ spending habits – certainly seems to have worked. It only makes sense to double the effectiveness of Happy Meals by splitting their toys by gender. This way, the fast food chain can court two different properties at once, but still ensure that marketers can target them properly.

Abbott’s post is just an observation with some anecdotal evidence – he acknowledges that his experiment is far from conclusive. However, after thinking about it, there are some strong economic motivations behind the gender split.

How can we apply this to games?

One of the major assumptions underlying McDonalds’ marketing decision is that of a gender-neutral audience. Eating isn’t exactly a gendered activity; sure, there are different concerns about societal attitudes towards food, but fast food doesn’t seem to be something that you associate with boys or girls. Let’s take a look at this quote from GDC via Brainy Gamer again, What Colour is Your Hero?

Heir noted that the video game industry faces structural issues of its own. “Gender creates a huge asset pipeline nightmare. Switching race is much easier than building new features and animations.” Resistance to incorporating more female characters can sometimes be about resource allocation. Consalvo added that indie developers face far fewer constraints in this regard than big studios, “but they’re not doing any better.” This, according to Consalvo, suggests the absence of diversity in games is less about resources and more about unexamined self-imposed constraints.

Clearly, the video game industry is different, which is no real surprise to anyone who’s been to a GameStop or EB lately. Games have unquestionably been harmed by the North American view of games as a medium primarily for teenage boys over the last twenty years. Like most attitudes towards games, as a generation has grown up with them, those underlying assumptions have been questioned, but the GDC talk quoted in Abbott’s post is a clear indicator that the spectre of sexism is still around.

The production models are different, as mentioned in the quote above; the Happy Meals toys are still basically hunks of coloured plastic with the occasional LCD, sticker set, or notepad included. Because of the mass-production process of making these toys, making one set for boys and another for girls is a relatively simple matter: not that I’m trivializing the work involved, but once you’ve ironed out the process, you can make millions of them without breaking a sweat.

The only games less advanced than these come from the bargain bin at Wal-Mart.

By contrast, games are a strange chimera of specialized labour, a collaboration that is unique every time. Realizing a digital character requires acres of talent and effort from modelers, animators, texturers, voice actors, mocap actors, writers, designers, cinematographers… the list goes on. Deciding whether or not to make a given character male instead of female is the difference between using existing male-skeleton assets or to generate an entirely new set at great expense. (Note: the above is taken from my relatively limited experience as a participant in various mods. I’m not a professional, and if I’m wrong or misleading please let me know.)

Implementing characters is certainly just as difficult, if not more, than making these Happy Meal toys. Designers and developers have to take into account player interactions that are far more complicated than those expected of a child with a Happy Meal. You know what, fair enough.

But of all the characters who appeared in the games Consalvo studied, only ~10% were female. Why is the games industry missing a strategy so commonplace that it can be seen every time you go out for lunch? As Consalvo herself says, the prevalence of male characters is not about resources. It’s a self-imposed limit. It’s not about the development atmosphere being mostly guys, since, as Consalvo notes again, it’s entirely possible for men to write about women. It’s not even about economics, since McDonalds’ example shows that there’s a clear incentive to include women in product design.

Fast food is seen as a gender-neutral industry. The gaming industry is slanted towards men, but it’s not because of any external factors. They contribute, but at its heart, the lack of positive female depictions in games is a matter of blindness. Although McDonalds splits its gendered toys between male and female, and its own depictions are manipulative in intent, at least they acknowledge that there’s more to the world than men.

When McDonalds is beating out the games industry in gender issues, there’s something seriously wrong.