Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Looking For Xbox Moms
WillAffleckUW writes "In a New York Times article republished here in International Herald Tribune, Microsoft says it is desperately seeking moms to play XBox games, and has a marketing campaign for women gamers. Apparently not satisfied with its target audience of 17-24 yo males, they are even giving away thousands of free consoles on the radio. Most analysts doubt that the FPS and combat-heavy XBox gaming selection will sell well to women though." From the article: "This time, Microsoft is planning a wider attack. Brochures being sent to major retailers like Best Buy prominently describe the 360's ability to double as a DVD player, play music from an MP3 player through a television's speakers and even display digital photos on a TV. Its game functions, while impressive, are only part of the message."
Sure not the majority of women game but many do both in the younger and older sets. In World of Warcraft for example the average age of a female player is over 30. We have a 38 year old mom in my WoW guild (and no her kids don't play).
A lot of younger women play games as well. Genres that attract women in general tend to be different (i.e. RPGs and puzzle games) but plenty of women even enjoy FPS (see www.pmsclan.com for example).
Gaming can replace TV watching as family entertainment and can provide a more rewarding experience. Sure you would rather be out with your office mates, but that's where you are in life. Plenty of husband/wife teams play together - you see it in MMOs all the time.
You seem to dismiss gaming as an entertainment form, but consider that plenty of people opt out of watching TV, movies, books whatever and choose interactive entertainment instead.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
And it sounds like an advertising message.
We've been inundated recently with Xbox stories and they're suspicious. For a start, the spelling and grammar has been too good. Look at that sentence above: the word "its" doesn't have the customary (yet incorrect) Slashdot apostrophe. The paragraph cuts to the point and is coherent. It is entirely unlikely anything I normally read on Slashdot.
Only 24 hours ago was another story where Allard was saying there would be shortages. The very unsubtle message from Allard was "Buy your Xbox 360(tm) immediately because otherwise you'll miss out". Another uncharacteristic story that reeked like a hidden advertisment.
24 hours before that, another Xbox story. I don't even recall what it was about, I just know that each day I open Slashdot and there's another fucking Xbox story. This looks to me like an astroturfing campaign. Microsoft has done this before and I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing it again.
To be fair, all of game development involves firing buckshot in hopes that something will stick. You whip up 50 ideas, and throw them at publishers. Publishers twitch a finger when you describe 10 of them, so you go off and develop those ideas. You come back, and they're interested in 3. You make 3 full fledged demos, and 1 gets picked up for a full build. They shotgun blast you with features they're thinking about, and you pick the dozen that sound the least painful. You run off to make your E3 Demo. Your E3 Demo is proof that your minimum gameplay is all you need, but while you're out there your publisher promises the press that your game will have every feature imaginable and some that aren't. Any features that seem to stick get begrudgingly implemented amongst much cursing. You polish up whatever hydra you've created, and you put it in a box. The publisher's marketing people then forget about it and bury it in a list somewhere, or maybe it sticks to them and they advertise it in everything from Home and Garden to Time Magazine... maybe the game magazines if you're really lucky. And after all that, the gamer will look at the cover of your box in a store and go "eh."
I agree, though, that if they want to attract female gamers they need to drop the girls jumping on trampolines and deliver more quality content that isn't about having the most blood or the biggest linebackers. The Xbox isn't even particularly bad in this department, but you would never know it by their marketing.
I don't know if it is still there, but I've heard that Microsoft's head game development studio has a grand staircase leading up to a giant topless female bust. Getting rid of THAT, and making a major concerted effort to hire female developers would help. That's not to say that women necessarily make games better suited for women, but three or four woman on a development team is usually enough to end a lot of the unprofessional stupidly masculine stuff that happens on all-male teams and pushes women out of gaming. Could you imagine a woman sitting in on the decision to have a BloodRayne "extra bouncy juggies" cheat? If you can't say it to a fellow female developer with a straight face, you shouldn't put it in the game.
When I first met her my girlfriend would never touch gaming. She thought it was entirely degrading to women. That's all that had ever been shown to her through advertising and media... Sex object girls jumping up and down while fast cars drive by (I'm looking at YOU, Namco). Or huge sweaty linebackers smashing into eachother. Or even Mario rescuing the princess. That's all she knew, because that's how the industry on average chooses to portray itself. That's not, thankfully, all the industry provides. We have games like Nintendogs, Virtua Tennis, Hot Shots Golf, The Sims, and tons of others. Heck, Quake 3 managed to be an action dream without being demeaning to women. Eventually I got my girlfriend hooked on DDR, Katamari, and Karaoke Revolution, but it was quite the uphill battle to change her perceptions. And whenever I see the doom trailer, I can feel things slipping back down.
It's not that we have to start attracting women to gaming. We just need to stop repelling them.
The ______ Agenda
Buffy - great story, familiar characters, easy controls, logical puzzles.
Lego Star Wars - great story, familiar characters, easy controls, logical puzzels.
Puyo Puyo - pretty graphics, easy controls, logical puzzels.
Make games that are fun - not a chore. Games that can be picked up again after a week or month without having to releasrn the ABAXYA button combo. Games that *gasp* are fun.
TR
*Who is not my mother - you sicko!
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
I'll aggree wholeheartedly with you, but I think the big picture is even more baffling than that.
See, the full "story" is that in the beginning, a.k.a., in the days of Pong and PacMan, the industry had a pretty good 50-50 gender distribution and they knew it. Then somewhere along the road they somehow decided that "chicks don't play games", making games only for horny 16 year old males is all that's needed, and using women as sex objects to sell to games to those males is perfectly ok.
What's fascinating is that it's the exact opposite road than what, say, the car industry took. The car industry started by promoting its cars as things for Real Men (and we're still stuck with a generation or two who still think that their penis size _depends_ on their car and on driving like a homicidal psycho) and presenting women as the prize you'll get for having that car. Then it finally dawned upon them that "hey, you know what? we could have twice the market if we dropped that silly notion that cars are only for men." So nowadays you have not only cars marketted to women, or named to sound like the women's version (e.g., Fiat "Bravo", masculine, and Fiat "Brava", feminine), but recently we even have cars _designed_ for women.
The gaming industry did the exact same road in reverse. They started by selling games to both, then decided they'd rather alienate half the market. It fascinates me. How and why does a whole industry get that kind of an idiotic idea?
And I can't even pin the blame on immature male programmers. Most of these decisions go through a publisher anyway. We're taling business people there, not immature nerds. I can see how a horny male nerd would go "but I really wanna see tits and ass" when making a game, but how do you get a bunch of businessmen to cheerfully give up half the market?
In fact, here's a very recent such screw-up that happened at the publisher, or at least with the publisher's blessing.
You've mentioned The Sims yourself, and yes, it was _the_ game that appealed to more women than any others, as well as to a lot of adult casual gamers. It was a game that, as released, didn't even have any sex or violence. And it appealed to a lot of people _because_ of that. (I'm sure you know that already, but bear with me.)
So then EA publishes The Sims 2. How do they market it? Well, I can tell you that at least here, I ran into pages after pages of ads in magazines, all hammering on the same aspect: sex. Sex in bed, sex on the sofa, sex in the kitchen, sex with the neighbour lady while the wife is away, threesome sex with the neighbour lady _and_ the wife, sex, sex, sex. Add to that the trailer clip with the woman ripping off her clothes and jumping on the guy... I think about half a dozen times in a fairly a short clip.
It's fascinating, really. Some idiot marketroid at EA basically ran an ad campaign that just didn't match the target demographic for it. In fact, one which was outright offensive to a large part of the target demographic. Someone at EA just couldn't get his head out of his ass, and out of the mentality that games are made for, and marketted to, horny 16 year old males.
And then come such stories in which everyone wonders how they can bring women back to gaming, and how much they'd like to get their money too. And it _still_ doesn't occur to them what the problem is? It makes me wonder WTF are these people smoking, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.