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. "

Comments

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, here we come

[Yokaze]

So, how long will it take, until we get away from leveling/looting RPG games, to more story based online-games, where there are semi-professional players/actors, which will drive indiviual storylines in MMORPGs?

Putting Diamond Age and the current article together, it seems the logical step.

Who would've thought?

[jclast]

Who would've thought that if you make an accessible game with a good story that develops an active community that other people (women included) will want to play it!

I am truly astounded at GamaSutra's grasp of the obvious.

Re:Who would've thought?

[jclast]

The article called out games like "The Legend of Zelda." People looking for a good story and good gameplay aren't asking a whole lot out of the games industry.

Zelda sells because it's easy to learn. KotOR sells because it's got a good story, and it's not too hard to learn. The Sims succeeded because it's easy to learn, and you write the story. Morrowind and Fable succeeded because you wrote the story you wanted.

Yeah, boys and girls are different, but wanting a decent story and an intuitive interface aren't reserved to one gender. I don't care how pretty the game is and fun it _looks_, if I can't figure out how to control the thing, I'm going to set it down. Boys don't inherently like complicated things.

Anybody in games for the story (which some guys are, myself included) is going to prefer games with a good story. Hell, I was addicted to The Sims for a while, too. It was fun. But I'll sit down to a game of Civ III, as well. You can't help but have not only a story, but the history of an entire planet there.

The article isn't listing things that makes gaming better for females. It's listing things that make gaming better for people in general.

Hmm

[Graham1982]

This world needs more female gamers. All of us guys need to stop goggling over them and give them more chances to prove their skills.

I saw a special on MTV entitled something like "True life: professional gamers" (I probably got the title wrong) recently. There was an American all female team that played Counter Strike against many other female teams from around the world. They made it to the finals, playing against a team from Brazil, and proceeded to kick tail left and right. Whether of not they would have won (which they did), they earned a lot of my respect for putting forth their effort. They trained for four years, had printouts of various maps and tactics to best acheive victory over their opponents. I think that female gamers are often over-criticized or under-estimated. Yes, if my nickname did not imply, let me state for the record that I am a male.

ARG and the Shemale Gamer

[Halfbaked Plan]

I speculate that there are probably an equal number of women masquerading as men in online games (to avoid all the comeons and crap) as there are men masquerading as women (for odd kicks, I guess).

Story Isn't Everything

[Bellum Aeternus]

The backstory is core in World of WarCraft. Hell, it out dates the game by more than a decade. BUT, WoW is dominated by men and men playing women. Sure, I know a few actual, real females that play but they're in a pretty darn small minority.

Also, you still power leveling and loot envy going on. I think it's more the adolecent male behavior that keeps women away from games.