The State of the Industry at Edinburgh Interactive Fest

Next Generation is reporting on the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival, with several interesting articles dealing with talks and events. Margaret Robertson (editor of Edge Magazine) discussed the reality of emotion in games, saying that emotion comes from players and not developers. Brain Training was honored with the Edge Award, beating out some tough competition. Finally, EA's worldwide studios executive VP and COO David Gardner had a keynote with seven predictions for the future, discussing the lack of female gamers and the possibilities that user-created content offer.

Comments

Re:Why, why, why

[twistedsymphony]

I think they could easily open the market to appeal more to female gamers if they just TALKED TO SOME... My girlfriend plays games all the time, it's pretty simple why some games appeal to her and why some don't. There are lots of basic and simple things you could do to win over female gamers. For instance when I bought Tony Hawk American Wasteland she was anxious to play it because skateboarding interests her... she became uninterested with it about 5 minutes after starting simply because she couldn't play through the story mode with a female character. Even the create-a-character for single player mode offered garbage for customization options so attempting to make a character that looked like her was almost impossible, I on the other hand was able to create a character that looked EXACTLY like me (you'd think that they'd offer more customization options for the females then the males).

Most recently she played through Oblivion and has started on Ninety-Nine Nights. She's also a fan of games like the Sims, the Final Fantasy Series and even Soul Calibur.

There are three elements I've found that most appeal to females when it comes to games:

• 1. Allow the player to play as a female character, character customization is also beneficial and if you do add customization make it deep enough that you can make exact replicas of people in-game, including clothes. Your stereotypical female likes to do herself up, shop for clothes and make a statement that represents her... why not incorporate this into a game, no female will identify with a hulking ex-marine or some sword wielding alpha-male in a loin cloth.
• 2. Make sure the game has a well written plot/storyline/back-story but more importantly CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. Your stereotypical female strives on social interaction, cheesy soap-operas and TV dramas, IRL they gossip about people usually centering around social interactions and relationships. I don't care how good your graphics and physics are most popular video game genres are missing this element, sports games, racing games, fighting games, shooters etc. Why do you think the most popular games with females are games like WoW, Final Fantasy and the Sims? I'd be willing to bet games like GTA would even sell well with women if they allowed you to play as a female protagonist and added some social/relationship drama to the plot.
• 3. Make the games easy to play, most females aren't the "twitch" gamers that gravitate towards Shooters and fighting games. Your stereotypical female isn't even a gamer so most haven't developed the dexterity to even play those types of games without a lot of time spent learning how (and you certainly aren't going to attract any to make that kind of commitment if you only ever offer up male interest oriented stories). Simple gameplay, for now, if the female gamer becomes common place then you can start introducing more female oriented titles with complex gameplay but for now simple gameplay is key. While my girlfriend is a die-hard Final Fantasy fan she didn't care for Final Fantasy X-2 because they went from strategy oriented Turn-Based battles to more of a Real Time Battle system, she enjoyed the game but had trouble keeping up with the pace during battles and ultimatly put it down, she isn't even interested in the new FFVII DoC. While Oblivion had real time fights the fight system was quite simple. Move around, swing your weapon or cast a spell. The hardest part she had with that game was using the dual analogs for your basic move and look, but the game interested her enough that she was willing to get used to that kind of control.

It's not very difficult to appeal to female gamers, Most games that we have today could incorporate minimal changes to open up the market to a whole new demographic. The problem is that most of these industry types will bark about how we need to do something yet seemingly haven't even taken the time to sit down with existing female games and find out why they like the games they do. Your stereotypical female gamer