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-Iccy

The article makes the common mistake of assuming women aren't playing video games. They are. They're just not playing the games that video game journalists like to write about. They tend to be playing casual games, for which they make up the majority of the market. There seems to be some sort of bias that leads to people just ignoring the massive casual game market.

--matt

They tend to be playing casual games, for which they make up the majority of the market. There seems to be some sort of bias that leads to people just ignoring the massive casual game market.

What do you mean by casual games? Stuff like the Sims? or Civilization?

The article makes the common mistake of assuming women aren't playing video games

I agree. I think they miss an entire demographic by ignoring the pre-teens. My daughter and her friends are intense gamers and she buys most of her own games.

I am also not sure where they collect the statistics because the numbers never seem to match up with the reality. (Even my -mom- plays Tetris and Civilization.)

I still think if the designers are that puzzled maybe they should be asking women what they want in a game instead of bemoaning the lack of female gamers.

Kitkat -

Actually, I think it more comes down to the sales end of marketing. Women don't generally go to stores that sell games. Sure, they use the internet, but how many of us got into MU*s by going to the local gaming store? Women just don't generally, on the whole, shop in these places.

This is partly because of the appearance of stores, partly because of the culture of video-gaming being a 'man's' entertainment, and partly because the products aren't, as indicated, geared towards women.

I do, however, agree that I (as a woman) highly dislike that many of the games that look interesting have a male as the dominant character. Though it generally gives me an ambiguous feeling of disgust, it's frequently not enough to stop me from playing a game. The fact that I know that I'll be wasting my time going into a game store sifting through games that are 95% of this nature, however, is enough to stop me from even bothering to try.

I think most women find their games through simply being exposed online, using their computer, and finally word of mouth. I think a study on the networks women use to purchase games would yield as much as changing the 'type' of games, if not more, for marketers trying to sell to women.

After reading this, I had an idea or two, and came up with this
hypothesis:

http://skwirl.net/index.php?/archives/27-Girls-
and-Gaming.html

I've been discussing it with Mr. Lenton, and he thought it
sounded about right.
Feel free to tell me what you think.

skwirl42

(Comment added by skwirl42 on Fri May 6 20:07:38 2005)

It seems the link is getting broken by line-wrap, so if you want to go directly to
the story, you'll have to copy-paste the link.

Not that I mind people looking at the rest of my blog. ;)

That idea seems good enough to me, like if a men playing a game try to kill every adversary, find the final device, kill every boss he finds etc. (even if the boss is a little bunny, that ask you to forgive him, and in exchange he will let you take that especial key he has)(let to one side the case when the boss is your brother (or sister) that tells you that he (she) retractes, and will help you for the rest of the game)

While a women enjoys taking part in the process (the game) and likes the diferent situations that arise around her, she does not kill every little and inofensive creature that pass her way. She will usually try to make a diference in the game, for little it can be, no try to archive the 'Final Domination' .

I do, however, agree that I (as a woman) highly dislike that many of the games that look interesting have a male as the dominant character.

What about those that also feature large breasted female characters? Are you suggesting that they are not designed to appeal to women gamers???

Glad you agree. :) It's an interesting thing to think about, and it helps to
underscore the differences between the way men and women interact with the
world. I find myself attracted to both types of games, which is interesting.

What do you mean by casual games? Stuff like the Sims? or Civilization?

Maybe he means the Popcap stuff and its ilk - you know, that massive massive massive part of the gaming market. How massive? Casual gaming like Bejeweled and poker and online Monopoly and so forth makes up MOST of the gaming market!

Click here for more details.

So, basically, yeah, people greatly underestimate the effect of casual gaming as a whole, especially when they tabulate numbers for "women gamers". To be honest, that's a huge mistake.

Just my 2 cents.

skwirl,

Your hypothesis seems on target to me, and may explain why I became a Builder/Coder. :)


Keri

That's right. Casual games are a term generally used to refer to games that require no retail (boxed game) purchase (though some of the big casual games like Bejeweled have gone on to have retail releases), and require minimum time commitments in terms of individual playing sessions. Calling them 'casual' IS a bit of a misnomer sometimes, as there are some awfully obsessive Bejeweled/Zuma/Insaniquarium/Diner Dash/etc fans out there.

You're a bit incorrect about one thing though. Casual games like that don't make up a majority (or even close) of the market in a way that matters to the industry (revenue). They have a ton of players, but many of those players never pay them anything and only play for short periods of time. A single AAA game like Halo 2 or WoW will make more in one year than Popcap (currently valued at about $50 million) is even worth, for instance. But anyway, yeah, women gamers are out there in force.

--matt

Yes, they're not the majority of the revenue. However, they are the majority of the market in terms of players, especially women, which is what the article is discussing. :D

i agree with ephera's reply that historically, gaming has been traditionally created for males by males. it may be hard to break into the bi-gender gaming era when faced with this fact.

but i offer another alternative viewpoint, hinging on your concept of females being built different than males, mentally. you said that women prefer interpersonal relationships to an 'imaginary' relationship with the computer - there's no real human interaction.

i would like to point out the possibility that that's because the female brain (on the majority) doesn't handle abstract concepts as well as or in the same way as the male brain. the concept of interacting with someone's code structure versus an actual person may not be as readily grasped by the female mind, because they're just built differently in that mental capacity.

now, i am NOT hating here or declaring the male mind superior to that of the female. females, for example, are known to be generally MUCH more capable of multi-tasking, if that's the right word for it. it's been researched that while the majority of women are capable of hearing and comprehending multiple conversations at once, the majority of males can only concentrate on one at a time. (of course there will always be exceptions.)

so perhaps the reason gaming doesn't appeal to many females is the fact that they don't relate as well to the abstract concept of relating to an 'artificial intelligence' that powers games. maybe even 'abstract' in general.

it's just an idea.

I think some of you are over-analysing this. I certainly don't believe that the lower percentage of women playing video games has anything to do with brain structure, or inherant differences between men and women. I don't think it has to do with interacting with others, either. I'm a woman, and I prefer to play single player games. I've just ignored the multi-player aspects of the games I've owned that had them. Muds are really the only games I've ever played where I interact with other players, and while I certainly enjoy that, I'm just as happy with a single player game.

I'd say the biggest factor preventing women from getting into video games is the fact that the entire culture so far has been male-oriented. I don't mean this in the sense that it's full of violence and sex and the like, because plenty of women can and do enjoy these games every bit as much as men do. What I mean is that the vast majority of games are made with a young male audience in mind, and as a result, developers add aspects to the game to attract these players that may turn women away. The most obvious example that comes would be the abundance of scantily clad, large busted women in these games.

Think Tomb Raider. I played and enjoyed the first one, and it really had a ton of potential to attract female players by providing good gameplay combined with a strong, competant female heroine, but unfortunately Lara was really designed with men in mind. It might not seem like a big deal to a lot of you, but the design of this character and the way she was turned into a sexual object for men is just a huge turn off to women. It's great that the makers switched things up a little by finally making a strong female character, but by ultimately portraying her in the way they did it just showed how macho the entire industry is, and how men thus far have been the top priority.

I don't think this is something that can easily be changed, and it won't change overnight. But the fact that games are targetted to men (except for whatever homemaker/barbie type games they come up with which I have never seen and never want to) and men are the ones who are always assumed to be playing is something that keeps a lot of women away.

To try and understand our point of view a little better, just think of it like this: Think of your favorite game, be it a sports game, rpg, or whatever, and replace all the male characters with female ones in your mind. Rather than being busty babes, they're just ordinary looking, or even better, scarred and heavily muscled. If it's a sports game, a lot of the men among you would probably already have lost interest in it. For an rpg, the idea of women rescuing men in distress, playing strong lead roles without the help of men to guide them along, and just overall kicking ass is fairly unfamiliar. You find plenty of strong women in games (especially recently), but for the most part they're still designed to appeal to men, not women, and they don't tend to be completely independant from the men around them, at least not in the same way that the men are independant from the women. And that makes a difference. What would bother a lot of people about the games above is not necessarily that they're sexist pigs who can't stand to see strong women, but more that for many men it's just not something they can relate to. They don't want to play a sports game full of women because they have no heroes they can relate to.

What I'm trying to get at is this. If you made a game targetted to women, with great gameplay, violence and all those neat things that make men love their games so much, they still wouldn't be as popular as games made for men, regardless of how good they are. The reason why is that a lot of men would find that it threatens their masculinity, and they wouldn't want to be seen enjoying a product whose main audience was meant to be women. It's like ballet. There are probably a ton of guys out there who could enjoy it, but only a few would ever admit it to themselves, let alone to anyone else.

For women, we're used to participating in the male world. Women aren't embarassed to admit that they like 'male' things such as hockey and football and the like. Society is far more accepting of women participating in traditionally male-dominated activities than they are of men participating in traditionally female-dominated activities. So while some women might get turned off by the macho video game culture, a lot of others can still find something they like there. That's why it's just more profitable for game developers to target their games with a male audience in mind, or at the very best, neutral.

Now that I've said all that, though, I'd just like to point out that it seems to me that women's participation is video games is really underestimated. I'm curious to find out where all of you are getting your statistics from, and how these statistics were acquired in the first place. Of my male and female friends, about the same percentage in either sex seem to enjoy playing videogames. My female friends like a wide range of games, too, from first person shooters to rpgs to sports games. I'm just curious to know if there really is such a huge gap between the amount of women and men playing videogames, or if it's just assumed that there's a gap.

but i offer another alternative viewpoint, hinging on your concept of females being built different than males, mentally. you said that women prefer interpersonal relationships to an 'imaginary' relationship with the computer - there's no real human interaction.

i would like to point out the possibility that that's because the female brain (on the majority) doesn't handle abstract concepts as well as or in the same way as the male brain. the concept of interacting with someone's code structure versus an actual person may not be as readily grasped by the female mind, because they're just built differently in that mental capacity.

I kind of agree, but I think you have it slightly backwards. The reason why (some) women aren't too keen on (some) video games is (IMO) not that they are 'unable to grasp the concept' of interacting with computer code, it's that interacting with computer code is too simple and trivial to bother with. A man playing Doom would say 'look, I've shot an imp, cool!'. A woman might say 'no, you've simply turned some brown pixels red - what's the point of that?' or 'oh, gee, again? How many more times do you have to do that before something interesting happens?'

So the key (IMO) to making games interesting to women is simply to make them interesting. Too many games are just too simple to hold a woman's attention.

I think this is why games like Civilisation III or Black and White appeal to women - there's just so much more going on that they don't instantly get bored. By contrast men, having far less mental processing capacity and multi-tasking ability, can have their entire brains engaged by something as simple as Doom.

Well... I will give my opinion, being as I am a gal.

There are a few reasons I can think of right off hand why women wouldn't play a Mud. First of all... lack of knowledge. I had no idea what in the world a Mud was 2 years ago. Thanks to a very helpful friend of mine, and also an Immortal on Addictmud, I stepped into a world I'd never even imagined. When I talk to my friends about a Mud.. they get this perplexed look on their face and assume I have a fetish for pigs and dirtpies.

Another reason being, well, no offense men, but Women take care of the home (in most cases). Who has time to sit and watch a screen of words when a child is decorating the kitchen floor in Maple syrup.

Those are my reasons... like I said, Since I'm a mother, and well of age of understanding, I'd say those are two very good ones. :)

Mystikk Addictmud.org

I feel that you have made many gross generalizations and some just plain insulting implications. Lets go in order shall we?


#1 'A man playing Doom would say 'look, I've shot an imp, cool!'.'

The man in your example is an idiot, nothing more to say on this point.



#2 'So the key (IMO) to making games interesting to women is simply to make them interesting. Too many games are just too simple to hold a woman's attention. '

Did it occur to you that the vast majority of games may be too simple to hold a halfway intelligent man's attention as well?



#3 'By contrast men, having far less mental processing capacity and multi-tasking ability, can have their entire brains engaged by something as simple as Doom.'

/Most/ men may have less multi-tasking ability than the average woman, not all.
Men have less mental processing capacity? Men are in general no more intelligent than women and vice versa, there are exceptionally smart and exceptionally dumb people in both genders.
As for your implication that the male mind is so simple that Doom fully taxes its abilities I think thats ridiculous enough to not require a full dissection.

You also seem to have ignored the fact that games like Black & White, Civilization 3 and other such games that actually require brainpower certainly were worked on by men, how is it possible that 'simple minded' men could be their creators?

It's true that, as a male in American culture, I likely get a visceral thrill from emptying a clip into a pixelated face that I might not have had were I female or raised as a female, take your pick. Biology has a little bit to do with it, but not to the extent that females are in anyway incapable of learning to enjoy the same thing or become an expert playerkiller. It's all about design and advertising ultimately (how many chick flicks try to appeal to the teenage boy market?). The demographics have started to shift now with the success of the Sims and Myst and stuff like that, which have a gender neutral appeal. Ultimately there need to be games for women by women that have the things most games today lack (take romance...if it's there at all, it's usually from a male James-Bondish perspective), with more of an emphasis on exploring a virtual world rather than hyper competitive gameplay, which in my mind turns many female gamers off (for example, the learning curve in multiplayer Counter-Strike or Diablo II...after being killed over and over again, most women I think will simply stop playing this type of game rather than try to defend their virtual honor). I think this is why insanely hard games, like fighters, racers, and shooters (where the appeal has to be in the challenge) have fewer female players than say like RPGs. Not to say that games like Civilization or the Sims (or Myst, what am I thinking) aren't hard, but it's more of a cerebral hard rather than quick reflexes/memorization hard.

Ultimately there need to be games for women by women...

Well if there's a market then someone will build it. At that point they exist in significant quantity some of us will be more careful and suspicious in our game selection and steer away from 'chick games' in much the same way we steer away from 'chick flicks'.

Quote: "Maybe he means the Popcap stuff and its ilk..."

If he meant those games (Yahoo, Popcap, MSN games), then he is exactly right. Women outnumber men for those games. I learned that info from some interesting job interviews I recently had, plus my wife plays those games, exclusively.

When people mention "casual games", forget about "buy at store, bring home and install it" games. They mean Flash/browser-based games, because that's where the true casual gamers live and it's the format to which they get attached.

Note, the revenue stream is different for this game format, which is premium-upgrades, sponsors, and ads.

I agree with Matt. The statement "girls don't play video games" seems silly when half of our MUD staff are female and recruited from our pbase. We have lots of female players (no, not she-males, though we have some of those too) and let me tell you, it makes the get-togethers at Dragon*Con a lot more fun! I'd post the MUD address, because I'm not above getting in a shameless plug *dark risings*cough*, but I don't want people coming in and recruiting all our women since apparently they're scarce in other places! *tongue in cheek*

I agree with Matt there are plenty of female gamers

I work for an indie web game called Gumshoe Online (www.gumshoe-online.com) and about 70% of ours players are women. Now Gumshoe is a point and click adventure game that hasn't been designed for specifically for women and we haven't targeted female users.

So perhaps it's easier for causal gamers and non gamers to get into a game where you play a 1930's Private Eye rather than a complex RPG where the came world isn't as recognizable.

OT: How did you gather your statistics?

Facinating.
Well, I'm female, and 50 and played my first computer game in a college computer lab when I was 17... So 33 years ago or so, give or take.
Back then I was already involved in Science Fiction Fandom, and one of the big questions was.. why are so few females attending cons. Many women did not understand it, especially the hard science parts. As writing styles changed and society 'loosened' more did. Why? Because more of what was written and what was done there attracted women.
Then it was said about games, DnD, MTG, and computer games. Oh, and gaming cons. They always complain about it there too.
Does the big boobed avatar turn off a lot of women ? yes? I think if you sorted Bartle quotients on women who mud, you would see a different pattern than men. Bet it would be similar in other oline games and in other computer games as well.
But until then, I and my 26 year old daughter will tend to stand out from the crowd.

did you know last year's E3 pick as best overall game, Fate, a 3d roguelike, by Wildgames, was most popular among 35 year old women?