Slashdot Mirror
Women Remain the Ignored Audience In Gaming
donniebaseball23 writes "Research firm Interpret has released its new report, 'Games and Girls: Video Gaming's Ignored Audience,' which finds that while the female audience in gaming has grown, games tailored to their needs and preferences continue to go missing. Women represent 50% of the market and their usage of HD consoles like Xbox 360 and PS3 is rising. 'It remains to be seen whether developers and marketers will effectively invest in understanding and exploiting the undertapped female gaming market,' said Courtney Johnson, analyst for Interpret."
Unless, of course, 50% of the gamers (the women) flock to a medium which they don't like.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
In other news, it is discovered that male population is ignored in fashion industry. There is great inequallity if we look at fashion where vast majority of products is aimed at female population. You just have to look around your nearest shopping center to see that most shops are centered around fashion and most of this shops target women. No shit, really? Women aren't being targete by game developers? Guess what, maybe it's because most women don't give a flying fuck about games? Just like clothes shops don't target men cause most men don't give a flying fuck about fashion.
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
Just an educated guess, but I expect the vasty majority of game designers are men and it's not so much that they're trying to aim their games at men as that they're designing games that they would like to play.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Unless, of course, 50% of the gamers (the women) flock to a medium which they don't like.
Exactly. From TFA:
"Market representation for women has grown to 50 percent overall, with console use rising significantly in the past two years"
Apparently, we're supposed to think that somehow this demonstrates that female gamers are being ignored and not getting what they want.
Next they'll tell us that women are being forced to play games against their will.
Games are for fun, so that women are playing them says they are having fun with them.
To me it just sounds like whining. If there are specific things that need to be done differently to attract women to gaming, let's hear them. However just saying "Oh they aren't good for women," sounds like bitching without evidence to me.
The only thing they list in the article "For instance, they are much more likely to prefer to play solo than men, and play games for less competitive and more narrative- and character-driven reasons." is stupid. Why? Because we HAVE plenty of games like that, and there is no reason that ALL games should be like that.
To me what that says is "Women tend to like single player RPGs more than multi-player FPSes." Ok, wonderful. Turns out there are plenty of those. The market is being enough for both kinds of games, and in fact for more than that.
I also question that one since story driven, single player games have been around for much longer. While competitive multi-player games are popular, they are new. For many a year single player was the big thing (because we lacked the Internet), yet fewer women were in to gaming.
I personally think any lack of women in gaming (which I've not observed, lots of women play games in my experience) is more cultural/mindset than anything else. Women feel like gaming is not something they should do, so they don't. That isn't the sort of thing different kinds of games really can fix.
So if things really need to be done different, well let's hear it then. However all I see here is bitching that amounts to "Girls don't like online FPSes." To that I say:
1) So what? There are plenty of other kinds of games. We can have games for all kinds of people, not every game need to be targeted to every person (as such a thing would fail).
2) Says who? Though far less common then men, there are women who enjoy shooties plenty well.
I think the biggest barrier for entry for women gamers isn't the games themselves, but the gaming community. We all know of The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but women get presented an even uglier side of online gaming. This site has some good examples: http://fatuglyorslutty.com/
It seems the moment a female gamer reveals her gender she's automatically the target of the most vile and despicable comments the online community has to offer. Granted, most gamers are thick skinned and can brush this stuff off. But it makes me wonder how many women have tried playing a game, had an experience similar to the ones at the site above, and gave up entirely. It would be nice if the online community were a little friendlier. We would all have more fun that way, regardless of gender.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
There's a trick here that's creating the illusion that women aren't interested, and that trick is that the goalposts for what makes a "girl-friendly" game are moving. When Pong came out, there was a very extreme gender bias in anything related to technology or computers, and as such, the average woman didn't feel comfortable stepping into something so clandestinely electronic. It wasn't that there was a major stigma associated with it, but merely that the subconscious sensation of being a fish out of water became extremely unpleasant. In gaming today, this is still a problem for a large portion of women, though fortunately more and more are being raised on excellent titles like the Portal series (which has, of course, been discussed to death) that not only fail to propagate the chauvinism (which the eternally popular puzzle games also do), but present women in a variety of roles with meaningful emotions.
Still, the proximity in genre and cultural context to some of the worst offenders (Duke Nukem and Lara Croft come to mind, but even military games like MW2's single-player campaign are so Saxton-Hale-grade manly it makes me physically ill) has a powerful dampening effect: the prolonged success and influence of such games still underscore the message "you are an outsider here," and that's something that today's teenagers are really the first to make a stand against, en masse. Every Zoey (L4D) and Samus helps push against this... but Valve, why do you still only have one girl per L4D game? All it takes is equal representation. We figured this out in academia; heck, the engineering department at my university now has a 20% female undergraduate population. It's not as hard as it may seem at first.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!