like oh wow ur game about exploring an untouched world where the punchline of every "joke" is that you're being exploited by an unfeeling corporation? man that's so unique that nobody who read that sentence realized I was talking about Journey To The Savage Planet because there's so fucking many of them
You know what I want? Universal jail time for all gamers
But if I'm not gonna get that, I want games that take place in a world we'd want to live in where the objective is to help it remain as such.
If someone pitched to me a GTA game set in a horrible word not worth living in the way they all are, I wouldn't care what city it's set in. It's been done. If someone said, "hey we're gonna make a GTA game except it's set in a nearly post-capitalism world and your objective is to try to protect your city from incursion by the forces of reaction" I'd buy that shit up so fast.
TLDR; why doesn't an inherently reactionary industry just pander to me? :/
There was no mentionable gaming industry in 1980, what are you on about? Around that time you had, Atari, Activision, a couple of Arcade vendors, and a bunch of bedroom coders selling their wares to distributors. I'd love th be proven wrong, but if you look at the credits for games released between 1960-1980 (realistically 1970-1980, save for 'spacewar' even arcade games were not a thing in the 60's) you will not find 50% women, not even close. There's plenty to write about sexism in the industry, no need to spin a narrative that is just plain inaccurate.
If we talk about computing in general, as someone else already pointed out in the thread, the women employed during the early days were mostly operators in the same vein as they were employed at telephone switches, and their employment as such was a result of prevailing sexism, not of emancipation that was later reversed. Their jobs disappeared as time sharing systems with terminal input became a thing. You underestimate how deeply sexist society was in terms of gender roles and employment until deep in the 1980s. Feminism had bigger axes to grind than the number of women in these glamourless jobs that turned even the male workers into social outcasts.
I was born in 1974. And I said there was no significant industry. Games were already being made, but you greatly overestimate how big the 'gaming industry' was back then. The biggest publisher during the 1970s, Atari, was literally 80 people in a small office. Nintendo had only 4 games in its catalog by 1980 (arcade titles, the NES wasn't a thing yet). The Commodore 64, by far the most popular home computer, had a grand total of 36 commercial releases that year, and, well, just look.
Also, no, that was the pong arcade. The home pong systems started selling in 1975. And time didn't move quite so quickly, it remained a novelty into the late 70's, and it had a grand total of 6 variations of 1 game on it, none of which were written by women. The VCS2600 was released in 1978 and had less than 50 titles by 1980, see here.