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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
I thought a non-competitive, abstract game like Marble Madness would be a nice introduction for my wife. So I fired up the NES and let her try. She got through several levels, eventually, and suppertime was nearing. So I went to the store to get some food, and when I returned she was angrily swearing at the screen and shaking her dainty fist at the NES itself. She glared at me, tossed the controller down, and said "Never ask me to play a videogame again."
Oh well. At least she lets me go fishing in Animal Crossing with our son.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
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.
Sample this!
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.
The ______ Agenda
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.
http://www.tomandemily.com
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
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".
Monstar L
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.
-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.
Firstly, it is, of course, hilariously sexist garbage.
Secondly, you don't want to introduce your s.o. to Animal Crossing if you ever want to get near your Gamecube again.
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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.
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.