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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
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.
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?