More on gamer stereotypes
By way of follow-up on my post from Wednesday, here are some interesting tidbits from a recent LA Times article (via):
- Women spend more time playing online role-playing games than men.
- Women “play more intensely” than men and “are happier playing.”
- Women play “less aggressively” than men, especially when gaming with a male romantic partner.
- Women prefer in general to play games with others, while men prefer to play alone.
Reporter Alex Pham sums it up in a nutshell, saying
Why does this matter? In part, because developers have puzzled for years to figure out ways to get women to buy and play more games. Figuring out what motivates them to play is a key step.
I think this study sounds right in line with what commenters Chris Guin and Emily K were saying on Wednesday’s post. Gaming on the Wii, “dancing” to DDR, games with complex and inclusive storylines… all these things attract more people to video games one one level simply because they increase the diversity of available games, and thus the probability that there’s a game out there someone will find interesting. But it seems that the particular aspects of group gameplay or more engaging storylines are especially appealing to women, in the aggregate.
Oh, and happy new year, everyone!
Video games for girls
Here is a TED talk from 1998 by Brenda Laurel, software designer and researcher who founded Purple Moon, in which she discusses her philosophy about making video games for young female gamers (via Sociological Images).
I actually owned and played one of Purple Moon’s games, Rockett’s New School, on our old Power Mac back in middle school. Honestly, I found it mildly entertaining while it lasted, but ultimately not worth playing again. It has a plot that you could only deviate from slightly (disappointing given the box’s promise that you’ll “make choices that change what happens”). I never really felt like I did anything — mostly just watched things happen. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t seem like much more than a primitively interactive sitcom.
I may not be a typical female computer user, and it’s possible that other girls loved it. It certainly sounds like Laurel and her company did plenty of research to back up their design. But this video got me thinking: what should video games designed for girls look like?
Now hold on for a second before you jump all over that sentence. Yes, we’re dealing with stereotypes here. Obviously not every girl would like a “video game for girls” just like not every boy would like a “video game for boys” — and this is true of all the other gendered toys out there as well. (To say nothing of the glaringly false binaries!) But, but, but. Let’s accept for a moment that in order to develop and market a product and ideally keep one’s business afloat, one has to think of the big picture, find a large enough target group, and so on. Some level of generalization is necessary.
The Rockett model of girl’s games hasn’t exactly made it to the big time over the past decade, yet female gamers are a substantial demographic. In 2005, a Nielsen study counted nearly 40% of gamers were female, and I’d expect the numbers are even closer to even now. Perhaps the barely-interactive, storybook-type game wasn’t really what girls were looking for after all, and perhaps that “certain flavor of feminist” was right to point out that the premise is kind of demeaning. Sure, girls do think a lot about the social choices they make daily, and do enjoy narrative play, but must their games be so tightly restricted to those stipulations that the ideal game for them consists of helping an eighth-grader navigate middle school cliques? I doubt it.
Look at the most popular games of this year — it’s stuff like Call of Duty, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, Left 4 Dead. We’re on the edge of our seats waiting for the next StarCraft game to come out. Arguably these are all male-targeted games, though females play them too. Regardless, I don’t think that this screenshot (from StarCraft 2) is intended to remind guys of their daily lives:
Most people don’t want to play games that closely mirror their everyday thoughts and actions. Most people, I think, wouldn’t even call such a thing a game. Most of the games we play — board games, computer games, pretend games we made up for ourselves as children — are based on the fantastic, the unfamiliar, the surprising and new. They incorporate elements of the familiar but give us a new context in which to experience it. If they didn’t, why would we play the game? We’d just go out and live our lives, and it’d be equally fun.
I think the question that game developers should be asking themselves isn’t so much “What do girls think about?” as “What do girls want to think about?” And perhaps also: “How does that differ from what boys want to think about?” I suspect that these questions will lead girls’-game developers to reduce the number of huge-breasted heroines and probably also the extent to which games are centered around gruesome destruction of one’s opponent. Change the average level of testosterone in your target audience, and you’re pretty likely to change their demand for such things.
So what would developers replace those things with? I haven’t done the market research, so I can only offer my conjecture, based on my own gaming experience and conversations with friends. Although I enjoy real-time strategy games like Warcraft and StarCraft, and remember really liking some first-person shooter games like Heretic, the aspects of those games I most enjoy have always tended to be the “building” rather than the “battle” ones. I like the parts where you set up a base, get upgrades, or train for new skills. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also love games like SimCity and Civilization. (And hey, maybe it’s my girly nature, my interest in social interactions, that makes me appreciate the diplomacy and public relations aspects of games like these.) I’ve also heard of games more in the FPS mold where, instead of walking your character into another battle, you walk them into a puzzle challenge. That’s not typically my cup of tea but I know girls and women who enjoy it.
At the end of the day, I hope people remember that male-targeted games are currently enjoyed by girls and women, and female-targeted games can be enjoyed by boys and men. I doubt that when they began their long line of Sim games the developers at Maxis were even thinking of a female audience in particular, but I’m sure they had a sizable one even before The Sims. “Video games for girls” don’t have to be all about fashion and parties and make-up in order to be appealing; simply by having a premise other than wreaking testosterone-fueled havoc they are making a major step in the direction of inclusivity.
-
Recent Comments
sandeep on Thoughts on religious tolerance
bruce on Alternative medicine: worth a try?
Mike on Think before you speak
Zychan on What is Acts 29?
Emily on Grad students, 1…