10 Gateway Games

The title of 1up.com's feature is Top-Ten Girlfriend Friendly games, but the titles they suggest are generally intended to get a non-gamer interested in the gaming passtime. From the article: "...it is possible to bring non-gaming significant others over to the dark side, through a number of games designed to grab those who couldn't care less how many frags you got in Counter-Strike last week."

Comments

Why are old arcade games considered good?

[Hast]

IMHO if it weren't for sentimental reasons games like Centipide and Ms Pac-Man wouldn't be on that list. Personally I'm not too fond of Tetris (Dr Mario) either, but Centipede?

That game almost killed the mobile phone gaming market. Too boring to even play on the toilet!

Re:Why are old arcade games considered good?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people would rather have simple games, whether they be a 1980s arcade game, or a modern dopey flash game. My sister for one seems to prefer simpler games (with the notable exception of Tekken Tag Tournament)

Re:Why are old arcade games considered good?

[frikazoyd]

I have to say, my significant other loves Ms. Pac-Man and Centipede, and Animal Crossing, and The Sims. She loves DDR, and she plays so many Pop-Cap games it's a wonder she gets work done.

Thing is, these aren't necessarily good games to introduce people to. You are absolutely right about the Atari games. She loves those games because they are old, and she remembers playing them when she was little. Same with Dr. Mario, it was an accessible classic (certainly an easier concept than Tetris). And the Pop-Cap games are mostly variations on the theme.

Now, I can see where they get the Sims kind of, as well as Animal Crossing. My SO (much like many of her age) are big into the Trading Spaces type of show, and so the Sims is a nice little escape to design a really awesome house, or just play with design ideas. And on top of that, she liked to get the people involved in complicated relationships with the whole neighborhood, to see the social repercussions. I can see many other women of her age group getting into it for similar reasons, but other than that I think the whole "girl gamer" (or intro gamer) analogy stops there.

You see, there is such a variety out there, there is no set way to introduce any set of people to games. You're not going to lure the sports nut dad to video games with Ninja Gaiden (unless he is an armchair martial artist as well), and at the same time you're not going to lure most women in with a lot of the current popular games. This is because a lot of these games are aimed at men specifically, games like Grand Theft Auto and the afore-mentioned Counter-Strike. All this article did was pick a handful of pretty good games that weren't particularly aimed at the 13-34 male demographic. This list could have included any number of old Atari games, or a plethora of NES games. Nothing particularly insightful, they inductively deduced that many women who don't play games now probably don't because they consider them "boy toys". And lets face it, some women just aren't going to like your typical modern game fare that uses sex to sell. Video games are competitive by nature, and there are people who don't like competing, even with themselves or a computer. Video Games are not for everyone.

She likes to spend time together

[Dr.Opveter]

My wife likes playing games like the ones on orisinal
What she doesn't like is me playing endless hours of FPS on my own. So to spend time together we play team deathmatch games.
Good enough for me.

Missed one

[cgenman]

Karaoke Revolution

Not that I'm partial or anything :).

P.S. I agree with the sentiment that the article, while trying to be inclusive, comes off a bit like a bunch of sexist men who are trying to be inclusive. Most of the female gamers I know are Everquest players, Counterstrike addicts, Katamari Damacy lovers, die-hard Ninja Gaiden fans, Sims players, Castlevania afficianadoes... Basically players with tastes as varied as any others, who like good games and maybe not so into the grossly overt sexualization thing. While there are some things you can do to make a female audience walk away, the only thing you can do to really attract them is to make a great game.

Missing Genre

[tprime]

It was curious that there were no COOPERATIVE games on there. My wife really enjoys playing the cooperative action/RPG games with me. Baldur's Gate:Dark Alliance and the like have eaten MANY hours of our time.

While that genre of games is pretty saturated, it provides a good scenario where I can help her learn the game and pick up the slack with killing the enemies until she gets the hang of it.


Rather than just giving her the controller, try plugging in controller 2.

No monkey ball?

[antifoidulus]

While the article is sexist, you can just think of it as, "games for non-gamers", but still, no Monkey Ball? I'm not really a huge video game fan, I like toying with them a bit, but I quickly lose interest. However, when I have a couple of friends over, there is nothing quite like some monkey ball and "pre-gaming" before we go out. It has no learning curve, fun as hell, and it can be put down wherever without having to worry about your "progress".

Eye Toy

[Xian97]

The Eye Toy for the Playstation 2 has been what I have seen grab the interest of more non-gamers than anything else. I have seen many people that wouldn't touch a game controller waving their hands and moving around having a blast with the Eye Toy mini games.

My wife only plays one on the article list - Bejeweled. Her favorites are the Hoyles series, mostly the Card and Board games.

"Girly" subject matter is not the answer

[sense_net]

This article implies that the single biggest hurdle to involving more women in gaming entertainment is the subject matter of games. This is incorrect. I have found that the reason women are reluctant to play games is because culture pressures women not to play.

-Male gamers create an enviornment hostile to female gamers, both actively and passively. Examples: telling women that they wont like Doom 3 but they will certainly like DDR (AHEM!); Asking a women who's gaming if she actually likes games (of course she does you dope, she's playing one now!)

-Game creators and especially marketers create disincentives for women to play through sexist or oversexualized portrayals of females. Examples: Hijacking Lara Croft's image from female Indy to Drips-With-Sex-Balloon-Boobs; Bloodrayne; too many to list.

-Women in positions of influence tell young women not to game because it is "not a girl thing to do." I still see (younger and older) mothers tell their daughters not to game (in whatever form) and to play with Barbie. And at the risk of getting shot, I tell them off every time.

To be honest I'm getting sick of the way women are treated and portrayed by the gaming community. From a social standpoint, I want to see games exoand into a major culture-spanning entertainment, and that can't happen without the other half of the species; from a business standpoint, the game industry is ignoring signifigant potential sales on the games they make by being sexist; and from an equality standpoint, what we as gamers and game industry professionals are doing to women is morally objectionable.

Drew Nolosco
Chief Game Designer
Riot Media, Inc.

Re:So yeah.

[brsmith4]

ALL WOMEN ARE THE SAME.

Well, they are.

When one is making an effort to attract another demographic, in this case women, one tends to be a little "sexist". You cannot make 50,000,000 products that are appealing to 50,000,000 women. You must make one product that would be appealing to some expected percentage based on some generalization that "most women, because of 'X', will enjoy this game".

And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no, not ALL women are the same, but a very large majority of them are. Women in general have not given sufficient feedback to be fully included in a number of areas (esp. gaming). It is a known fact that chicas tend to avoid the hard sciences and mathematics. Is it because big, bad men wont let them in? Or are there broader reasons (for instance, lack of interest in subjects that aren't perceived as "emotionally relevant")?

As such, these trends do not indicate a "defect" in females, but another feature of innate behavior or perhaps an artifact that results from the differences between men and women as they are being raised as children. There are big differences between men and women and it is obvious, that so far, most game companies have done little to encourage women to play. Now that they are, you claim they are sexist fucks for finally making an attempt to be inclusive and you bemoan the site's statistics because they don't include your tastes as favorites in the list. That's the problem with polling, the odd man (or woman) out is always the odd man out. If you have more escoteric tastes that do not follow the trends of your peers, it will appear that you are being left out. But this is not the case.

Re:a shiny new xbox

[Anonymous Coward]

How is a list of games frequently liked by non-gaming women sexist?

Does it claim that these are the only games that women will like?
No.

Does it claim that all women like these games?
No.

Does it supply games in a single or small number of genres?
No.

Does it claim that women who already are gamers will want to play only these games?
No.

Does it in any way claim that all women are the same?
No.

The most this article says is that most women share a cluster of personality traits--which, if you've ever gotten to know any women, is true. Even if in many other ways they're all different.

What, then, is your problem?

second that

[mckwant]

My wife's the same way. One big (HUGE) key for her is that she be able to pick up the controller and go. Hack and slashers are fine, but if (as in Return of the King, which you can play coop) you start getting into combos like Square-Triangle-L2-Triangle, you lost her at Triangle.

She LOVES the Diablo series, at least on the PC, and has a decided weakness for the Civ family of games (even relatively crappy ones like Pharoh). She doesn't play from the strategy, "kill your enemies" standpoint, but she really enjoys building the civilization. I think she's actually completed one game in untold hours of play, and never plays at any level above "super-wuss."

It's also important that you can have sessions that last a couple of hours. She gets lost in those 80 hour RPGs. Cutscenes are not your friend.

Vantage from an EB-er

[superultra]

I saw an interesting side of this when working at EB.

As far as EB sales, I can't deny that the Sims and Animal Crossing did very well with women. But many of the the women that actually walked into our store (and it was admittedly rare for one to walk in save Christmas and Valentine's Day) tended to like - surprise - fighting games. Not sure why they liked fighting games, but it definitely goes at odds with the traditional viewpoint that games that sell to women are non-violent and don't advertise big bouncy breasts.

Among PC owners, adventures games did very well. I remember having several female customers that we would see every few months who would come in and lament the decline of the genre, poke around the shelves, pick up a few of those subpar European adventure games, put them down and then sadly leave. Longest Journey would whet their appetite once, but it raised the bar for them and there was little more to offer.

Then there were the few women who were excited about games only because their man's enthusiasm was so infectious. Those were the most fun, because it was always weird to have one of those few come in and excitedly put preorder money down on Def Jam Vendetta or something like that.

It was surprising to me how many males came in wanting, so desperately, to find a game that their girlfriend would play. I wonder about this; why we work so hard to get the women who (kind of) love us to love our games. I've lost count of the number of times I've called my wife into the living room to try to get her to play. Maybe it's a form of validation?

Games girls like

[RogueyWon]

It seems there are some pretty fundamental misunderstandings going on, looking at the comments so far in this thread. The answer to the question "what sort of games do girls like" is quite simply "good games".

Honestly, all this talk about "simple" games, "real" games and so on is just patronising and untrue. Two of the most commonly cited "popular with females games" are complex and menu driven (The Sims and Final Fantasy X). By and large, with variations for individual taste and genre preferences, female gaming preferences are basically along the same lines as male. A good game in any genre will be recognised as such by players of either gender. Final Fantasy X, Resident Evil 4, Half-Life 2, Halo 2 and The Sims are good games; their appeal is fairly universal, although there are always a few fanboys (and it's almost always boys), who define themselves as "real gamers" and consider it somehow obscene to profess a liking for those games.

Indeed, if there's one big difference between male and female gaming habits, this is where it lies. By and large (and yes, I'm going to stereotype here, even though I don't like doing so), girls are brought up in an environment in which it's less acceptable for them to play games. They're less likely to have spent their childhoods talking about them with friends and they'll generally come to them later in life. For this reason, I've generally found women games less likely to be involved in, or impressed by, the willy-waving that characterises so much of the "male" gaming discussion. There's a trend among male gamers, particularly noticable here on slashdot, to attempt to accumulate Kudos by professing deliberately archaic tastes ("What, you like Final Fantasy X? Disgusting. They've not made a good installment since 2, when everything was in text and you controlled the game by throwing rocks at the screen!") or claiming to be a "real gamer" ("I only play Nintendo games because only Nintendo make REAL GAMES for REAL GAMERS").

By and large, if you exclude the small but unfortunately noisy demographic that think like this, male and female gaming tastes are the same. The same considerations of gameplay, graphics, sound and story all come into force, with the specific balance varying between individuals

Nintendo = girl friendly

[identity0]

If they'd done a list of only current games, I think Nintendo would have come out on top in terms of consoles. Probobly the best system to get any new gamer, male or female, would be a GBA. In my opinion, it has a better game library than the Game Cube or any other console.

A lot of guys make fun of Nintendo for being "kiddy", but they aren't really childish. It's just that they lack the uber-macho posturing stuff you see in a lot of other consoles/games. Some guys are put off by that, but obviously girls are not. In fact, most of the people saying "Nint3nd0 iz k1dd3" are probobly pimply teenagers, not men.

IMHO, while girls can like blowing away people in GTA as much as any guy, they're not as swayed by the macho feel of those games so much as by the gameplay.

Re:a shiny new xbox

[nb caffeine]

Thank you for validating my point. Im lucky (?) enough to be dating, well, not a feminist, per se, but a woman very involved/interested in diversity/opression/etc. Lets just say in a year ive learned a lot and my view on women has changed. And just looking through that list tells me few of the women i know would like playing those games (sims aside). She and I dont have the exact same taste in games (i like pretty much all 'good' games, but hardcore racing sims, FPS, and other misc action games are my fav, whereas she doesnt know whats really out there, and gets addicted to a random few of my games). however, i found the list to be pandering, and if i were a woman, id find it insulting. They could have listed the same 10 games, called it a list of "games for non gamers" and it would have been OK. now, they did say "boyfriends too" but come on.

as an aside, i tried to find out if the person who wrote that was male (my guess is yes) because a female working at a place like that wouldnt write an article like that.

btw, female slashdotter who hate sexist stereotypes like me? wow, welcome to my friends list.