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ARGs And The Female Gamer
Gamasutra has a feature up by Andrea Phillips examining the world of Alternate Reality Gaming, musing that finally designers seem to have found something that works for both genders. From the article: "At the end of this road, you don't find an exclusively female audience and a disenfranchised male ex-playerbase. Instead, you find a gaming audience that looks a lot like the world we live in every day. Welcome to the gender-balanced world of Alternate Reality Gaming ... In the most successful ARGs, the game and the story are inextricable from one another. In an ARG, there simply isn't a way to devise a game without simultaneously devising the story, and the quality of the game lives and dies based on the quality of the writing. In every ARG team I'm aware of, the lead writer is a crucial part of the dev team. Poor characterization, bad pacing, or lack of plausibility are showstoppers just as much as a blue-screen would be. The action item here for conventional gaming: Make the writing an integral part of the development process, and not an afterthought. "
Actually The Sims (original version) became one of the best ever selling games thanks mainly to males buying the game. Most articles on the matter (do a google search) state that only after this initial male uptake when sisters & girlfriends started seeing brothers & boyfriends playing the game did The Sims become one of the first games played mainly by girls. Only then also did EA realise quite how much money they could make from the female market for the game and start advertising it in woman's magazines and other female orientated media - making it the "girly" game it is today.