Slashdot Mirror
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."
No Pikiman or Pikiman 2? My girlfriend who HATES games with a passion(or maybe just hates me playing rather then spending time with her) loved both of these games so much I actually had to give them to her little sister to get them out of the house and away from her.
Please do not let scientific accuracy interfere with the intended humourous/interesting/insightful value of this comment
And SSX3. My girlfriend (never a gamer at 27 years old) was hooked. Then Soul Caliber 2 (dont challenge her if shes playing as ivy). Shes not as hardcore as me, but she does obsess over whatever game she is currently playing. Right now its the buffy sequel. She calls me up, "how do i get past this one part". No hi or nothing. Ive created a monster.
she didnt know hardcore gaming till gt4 came out though... heh heh.
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
My wife is not really into video games. (Except Tetris with a passion, and webboggle.) But she loves to watch me play RE4. So much so that we only play it together. She makes popcorn and watches it like a movie, I blast away shambling villagefolk.
It's actually one of the more watchable games that I've come across. It's a pretty decent horror movie. Actually given the length its more like a horror series in one package.
Previously she watched me play through Grim Fandango (after I knew all the puzzles of course, otherwise it'd be boring as hell while I do the throw the inventory at the puzzle and wander around trying to figure things out). That game is hands down the best game/movie I've seen.
A good portion of the Wing Commander games are good too, but the space battles get repetitive for the view unless they are a player as well.
She also likes watching parts of Splinter Cell, but the sneaking around is less fun to watch.
It's slightly at a tangent to the discussion here, but I remember an incident last year regarding women and gaming which really made me laugh at the time.
I moved away from where the parents live about 6 years ago, after my student days came to a close and I got a job at the other end of the country. I'd never been much of a gamer before then. I mean, I guess I've been playing games on and off since I was about 10, but computers and games were never my "main" hobby, until a couple of years ago. Therefore, gaming was never actually something I'd particularly talked to my parents about. Sure, I'd done the usual tech-support-over-the-phone-and-at-holidays thing that most slashdotters seem to get roped into, but that was usually just with stuff like printing documents in Word.
Then one evening last year, around September or so, I get a phone call from my mother. She wants to pick my brains over a puzzle. This isn't particularly unusual; she's called me before when stuck on a crossword or something. Anyway, she describes this puzzle to me; it's basically a number-puzzle, based around finding a combination on a keypad from a series of clues. As I listen to the description, I get this weird sense of deja vu. I cut her off half-way through the description and say "The answer's 8631" (or whatever the answer really was; I can't remember now). There's a pause and she says "oh, you're right. How did you know that?" "You're playing a computer game, aren't you?", I say. "More specifically, you're playing Silent Hill 3." Cue an embarrassed pause and a very quiet "erm... yes". (For those who know the game, it was the "hard" difficulty puzzle to find the combination on the hospital door).
To be honest, this was a real shock to me. I guess I'd always shared a lot of the preconceptions demonstrated in this article; that if women played games, it was likely to be "simple" games, like Tetris, played for relatively short periods. Big-budget, high-profile survival horror games would not have been my pick for a "Gateway" game. To be honest, I find the idea of "Gateway" games a bit naff and artificial anyway. Either people like playing games or they don't.
Anyway, it turned out that my mother had already played Silent Hill 2, after being loaned it by a friend and fellow horror-movie buff at work. To tell you the truth, knowing her general level of IT literacy, I was pretty amazed she'd even managed to install and run a PC game. It did, however, get me thinking. Perhaps people outside the normal "gamer" demographic (which I probably just about fall into), are more likely to play a game if it's connected to other interests. My mother is a huge horror movie buff, so the Silent Hill games would have an obvious appeal that something "simple" like Tetris probably wouldn't. Moreover, the extremely realistic graphical style of the games helps to break down the barrier between games and movies. I'm pretty sure the original Silent Hill wouldn't have had the same effect; to somebody who isn't aware of or interested in the context for that generation of games, all that matters is that it doesn't "look" real.
My girlfriend lovesSuper Monkey Ball Deluxe! We had a party a few weeks back and most of the women gravitated to the basement to play that game on xbox. Fine by the guys, the fridge with the beer was upstairs.
If you don't have the game, rent it, buy it, download it, whatever it. It's a blast.
Trolling is a art,
We play Dr. Mario on an XBOX NES emulator. It's probably the game we play together the most.
Trolling is a art,
One thing you to which you have to give women credit is that they are not easily swayed by video images and the "kill! kill! kill!" mentality. Most, but not all, women tend to like a game that gives them their money's worth. That means a lot of depth with a simple concept, usually.
Although I disagree with Centipede and Suikoden, I think I can sum up with a brief history of games that accidentally or on purpose were of general interest to women:
1) Pong. It's just not fun anymore, though.
2) Breakout, Super Breakout, Arkanoid, and all those other block busting games (many currently released). Very little actual violence.
3) Pac Man/Ms Pac Man. The first one was a hit with women because it was the first game with a personality and a lot of soft colors. The second one was just an all around better game and it had Pac Man in drag!
4) Dig Dug/Mr. Do! I'm not sure why. I saw more women playing Mr. Do! than Dig Dug back in the day. Dig Dug should replace Centipede on the list IMHO.
5) Galaga and Moon Cresta. Colorful and varied was the key here, I think.
6) The Legend of Zelda. Only the first one had the simplicity and depth ratio right.
7) The Adventures of Lolo. The graphics were particularly hard on the eyes, but the trilogy of Lolo was some of the hardest ever. The key to this puzzle game was in failure--it gave you a clue as to what went wrong.
8) Puzzle games. Bust-a-move/Puzzle Bobble, Tetris, and even Lolo counts. The appeal is a simple concept/difficult play combination and the "pick up game" quality.
9) Solitaire. After all, PC solitaire is the most popular PC game. I suggest Solitaire Antics Ultimate and Hardwood Solitaire (PC and Xbox Arcade).
10) Pitfall/Jungle Hunt/Safari Hunt. Something about vine-swinging. I don't know why, except they're all about survival in a jungle.
11) Megatouch/touchscreen games. These are popular with the ladies.
12) Multi-game arcade cabinets. Probably the smartest move if you have to sate your Soul Calibur urge while on a date.
I should end my list by saying it is not scientific in the slightest. My qualifications to these observations is playing Pong when it was first released.
I'm a girl gamer, and one of the biggest draws for me is having a female avatar. I'll play GTA and Zelda and other games that have only male avatars, and enjoy them, but there's something special knowing that your character is also a woman and she's kicking some ass. That's why I love the Buffy games and No One Lives Forever...
Also, not one adventure game listed on that page? From King's Quest to Loom to Myst, those were the first games that drew me. Since they're all story-oriented and tend to have no violence, surely those would be a hit with most non-gamer women.
I'll give you Centipede is no fun without proper controls. Women love that game though. Me too.
Pac-Man on the other hand can be played with simple controls on just about anything. Women love that game also. It's simple.
I enjoy simple games. I hate things that suck all my time away with no pupose. I like games that don't pretend to be anything other than a distraction (eg. most 80's arcade games and most of the games in that list; also simple online deathmatch like Q3/UT).
If anything should not be on the list it would be The Sims. Meh, I thought that game sucked. It's just a time stealer designed to trick people into thinking they are accomplishing something when in the end your are left with nothing (see Everquest et al).
The ratio of people to cake is too big