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."

Comments

I can see it now...

[WildBlue]

138,385,532 replies with: "Got Pics?"

Interested Parties?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Interested Parties?

[mdarksbane]

Agreed.

The problem isn't that engineers don't like women, it's that women don't like engineers.

Or as the few girls in my freshman engineering classes used to put it, "The odds are good... but the goods are odd."

Re:Interested Parties?

[HappySqurriel]

Personally, I think that the goal should not to be to try to recruit more women into making videogames but to encourage more non-gamers into making videogames; I know that for some people this may seem to be equilivant but it is not.

The fact is that the Gaming industry is not dominated by men but is dominated by hard-core gamers who happen to be men. As long as the main focus of development (and press) are games that appeal only to hard-core gamers the market will not expand into demographics that currently do not play videogames. A women who doesn't play videogames because they're overly violent and believes that they're childish will likely not pick up Gears of War II: Geardom even if it is designed by a woman; that same woman might pick up The Sims 3: More Expansions even though it is produced by a man.

gimmicks?

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

Re:Might as well ask

[twistedsymphony]

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.

Re:Might as well ask

[Rachel Lucid]

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.