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A Perspective From a Pro Female Gamer
Via Kotaku, an article at the SF Gate website about the game industry's interest in female gamers, and said gamers' proficiency with aforementioned games. The Swedish 'Girlz of Destruction' pro gaming group is mentioned (much more legit than, say, calender models with console controllers), as is the 'Couples, Computers and Gaming' event at Ruby Skye in San Francisco. From the article: "Lee compares the rush she gets playing video games to her high school soccer matches, and said some women who don't play unfairly equate games with crime and violence. Lee added she's never fired a real gun in her life. She will return this winter to her student life at UC Berkeley, where she is studying environmental policy. Enderle said game developers are still male-dominated, and if game companies want to get serious about recruiting women to play games, they need to recruit women to help make the games as well."
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Life is a Game. Play to Win.
That's all well and good in theory and probably should be followed. But I'm willing to make a little wager that there are FAR more guys interested in game development than women. It's just how it is.
Kind of reminds me of the whole "women and engineering" thing. They want more there too, but many women just don't want to be engineers.
I wish we could see some real hardcore female gamers, I've spoke to several frag dolls on Livejournal and most of them come across as your average girl with very little intrest in anything non-mainstream. It's Final fantasy this and Halo that, which basicly makes them seem all the more gimmicky.
On the other hand I used to know the most awesome sniper on Team fortress classic and we had some fantastic duels on (what was) my home server.
But seriously, who cares if someone has a penis or a vagina? You shut up and you play, that way everyones happy and men and women are on equal footing.
I like muppets.
Well it is a bit of a catch 22. The industry is male dominated because the games aren't designed with female interests and sensibilities in mind, games aren't designed with female interests and sensibilities because it's male dominated.
The only way to break the cycle is for someone to go out of their way to break it. Meaning some company somewhere and some females are going to have to place gender above skill and interest to work as a catalyst for change.
It's not that these female gamers aren't out there and it's not that there aren't female programmers out there. But if they want to start making these changes they're going to have to pick female developers even if they don't fit exact into the position you're trying to fill, they'll have to make the deal sweet enough that female developers who would normally go into a non-gaming industry would be enticed into joining the gaming industry. And most importantly (and this might be hard for some to grasp) they have to actually listen to their ideas once they've become part of the team.
My girlfriend is an avid gamer, I've heard her criticisms of modern games and to be quite honest it doesn't seem like it would be all that difficult for game developers to make today's games more attractive to female gamers. In fact most of it is quite simple and painfully obvious once you realize it. I have to believe these companies either aren't listening, or aren't really trying.
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As a current CS major... the crop is there, but the skills may be lacking for the next few years while public schooling catches women up with their male peers.
Going through public school, I was one of the few women who kept pushing the highest-level math classes at school (even if I didn't always have the best grades in Calculus), and I think that a lot of interested female gamers might be thinking that math and other science-y type courses correlates directly to computer science, whereas most of the early CS work deals more in patterns and syntax than anything worth the stress of the other courses.
Making computer science more appealing in general would do oodles more for getting more women in the system than anything else.
I think most gamers are pro-female. The more the merrier :-)
Though I'm sure there's a few woman-haters out there...
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What the hell is this world coming to? Professional gaming? You've GOT to be kidding me. It used to be that at one point in time, the things that were professional implied some kind of useful skill. Things like, oh... being a doctor, a scientist, an engineer. Those sorts of things. Then the term got extended a bit to recreational activities, but they still needed useful skills. Things like, oh... chess and various REAL sports (I exclude golf) which required mental and physical accumen. But now we have "professional gaming"? And this likely applies to first person shooters and MMORPGs... So let's see... what skills do these games entail?
FPS: The ability to click fast and move a mouse on a surface or worse, utilize a joypad controller. Other than excelling in clerical work thanks to the mouse skills, how is this useful?
MMORPG: This is like "professional breathing competitions". Only lamer. The only things that MMORPGs seem to encourage are greed and isolation. REALLY useful there. I suppose if you're a eTrade jockey it just makes you feel better or something.
God, I hate what the world has become. I had so much hope that people would get smarter and that technology would augment that increase in intelligence to the point where we would eventually become the perfect hybrids of humans and machines. Instead, the majority of the populace are a bunch of preening idiots worried about how "phat" they are. I think we'd be better off if the majority of the less mentally equipped would just fade away.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Okay, so we've got the perspective of a couple female gamers that like... eh... the same games guys play? So if they like the same games as everyone else, how does their perspective actually tell us much of anything about targeting the females that don't like these kinds of games? Personally, I don't think the problem really is coming up with games that target females. From what I've seen, the situation is that most females simply don't care to play video games in general, and the games available won't really change that a whole lot. However, if there IS a key to getting females more involved with video games, it has to be interaction with other real people in-game. I seriously doubt you'll ever get most them to play single-player games, no matter how 'girly' they are. Machines just don't hold nearly as much interest for females as they do for males. As far as I know, there's only one 'real' (as opposed to simple online games on websites, or similar fare) video game that's ever had mass-appeal for both sexes, and that's World of Warcraft. And look at the huge amount of interaction in that game.
Personally, I'll be extremely amazed if the Desperate Housewives game ever shows itself to be more than yet another Desperate Attempt At Making Money Off A Popular TV Show.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
No self-respecting female plays the sex card when she's losing. The majority of people who claim to be girls are guys who are looking for the competetion to ease off.
Lame but true.
You probably play with girls more often than you realize. On the internet, no one knows if you're a dog (or a bitch).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Stories like this I think are what perpetuates the divide between genders, race, religion, etc
Continually reminding people of their differences, whether in a negative or supposedly positive manner, is what keeps people focused on being different. Just let people be. This isn't rocket science.
If companies are worried the game they're making isn't appealing to females, take a look at it. You don't need to make a public spectacle out of it. Take a look at what kind of games DO appeal to the masses. The Sims and World of Warcraft seem to be the two games with the biggest draw. We don't need another mmorpg and the Sims pretty much has its legions of loyal fans that don't play anything else outside of arcade/parlour type games.
Whats this mean? You're out of luck. Just make the game you want to make and move on. Try to keep the thong platemail to a minimum.
Why don't most women want to play games involving shooting/ hunting/ fighting? Simple: they don't need them to express their inner feelings, desires and predilections. But a lot of men do.
In a bit more detail, and please forgive the generalisations for the sake of argument...
* Our brains are the same as they were 10,000 years ago, when most humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies, where (as is the case with such societies today, on the whole) men tended to do hunting, jobs requiring bursts of strength and a bit of fighting, and women tended to do gathering and child raising. The brains of males and females were to some extent hard-coded to allow individuals to do their respective jobs more effectively.
* Cut, like the 2001 bone/spaceship shot, to the present day. We still have the same brains with the same hard coding.
- In modern Western culture, women can still do the things for which nature predisposes them: gathering, child raising, working co-operatively in groups.
- But men, by contrast, find many of their innate predispositions largely useless. You can hunt for fun, (provided you avoid the Vice President); you can go to the gym and do your feats of strength; you can get into fights in the street and end up in jail; and you can join the army and fight -- but these are choices with many obvious drawbacks.
- Normal life for most of us is the life of Dilbert. Many of those instinctive aptitudes of men which relate to hunting and fighting are pretty much useless; but the traditional skills of women are as relevant as they ever were, and now carry much greater rewards in the co-operation based modern office.
* This is why men play games: to enter in the imagination a world where their natural hunting and fighting skills are vital.
* This is why most women don't play typical console games: they don't need a game to experience childbirth, or child raising, or socialising, or co-operative working. They get that from real life.
* Lastly: some exceptions that prove the rule...
- The Sims works as a game for women because, as dolls have done since the year dot, it's a game which dramatises socialising.
- There are of course huge differences between different individuals of all genders; but I think the generalisations above are valid for most males and most females.
- Of course men have aptitudes other than hunting and fighting, such as problem solving -- a skill still very useful today in the real world, and of course there are many puzzles that involve solving puzzles. But there are few games where you can play at being, say, a software developer or a chip designer -- because if that's what turns you on, and you're good enough at it, you can just go and do it for real...
Or a lack of themes other than sex or violence? There are a lot of males in fashion design and film, and they make a lot of products that appeal to women. They manage to come up with shows, products, plot lines, and characters that appeal to women, and yet somehow its impossible to do for games because there aren't enough women engineers? I think the main problem is that a lot of game designers grew up on a particular diet of certain themes in games, and that's what they know and like. It takes a lot of creativity and ingenuity to break the mold, and maybe that's what's really missing.