On Gaming, Girls, And Germane Genres

Posted by simoniker on Sunday November 9, 2003 @06:52PM from the round-and-round dept.

Thanks to GameGirlAdvance for their article discussing how the female videogamer may present the future of gaming. The writer suggests that "This is an insanely large, untapped market just waiting to be satiated with games (and girls to buy them)", and attempts an amusingly broad overview of relevant game features: "Women... in essence are more of a gatherer/collector more than they are a visceral hunter-killer. They tend to be more detail oriented, preferring subtlety and complexity over overt skull-crushing over-the-top carnage and mayhem." Elsewhere, a SeattlePI.com article also talks about the much-vaunted broadening of the game market, pointing out that, for Microsoft's Xbox, "For the first time ever, the company is also including female gamers in its television commercials. (Three of the four Xbox ads shown this holiday will feature women or girls in them.)"

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Because Games Are New by SpamJunkie · 2003-11-10 08:01 · Score: 1, Troll

I'd bet that the reason most women have such different tastes in games isn't because they're female and think all that much different but because they haven't been the target of gaming promotions and thus haven't done as much videogaming.

When I was a kid that's all my friends and I wanted to do. My sister, on the other hand, wasn't interested. So now I've got a decade or so general gaming experience and she has relatively none. If she decides to start playing games now she'll want games that are more simple and easy. For one thing she hasn't developed the hand coordination that I have and thus most games will be beyond her abilities.

When you watch an experienced player do something complex such as advanced tricks in ssx or tony hawk the hand control they need is equivelent to playing chords on a guitar. I should know, I also play guitar. This isn't the sort of thing you can pick up in a single afternoon, or even a few days.

Once more girls do some serious gaming they'll quickly become acclimated to more complex games. This means that young girls of today will become advanced gamers soon. The real question is will they also become desensitized to violence as their male equivelents have?