Girls and Games: Some Statitsics

[Salka]

Did you like the 'typo' in the thread subject? Thought you might. Subtle joke there. Anyway.

Last week, I went to that EA-sponsored event in London. One of the people on the panel tackled the subject of girls and video games.

"It's a problem that has baffled us for a decade, so one day we thought, okay, let's get together and brainstorm over this one. So me and the guys went into a room and brainstormed. We came up with THIS!"

Cue a powerpoint presentation with the following information:

GIRLS WANT GAMES with more relationships, more emotion... that are easier to play and less intimidating.

Erm nice.

He also stated some stastics... 39% of gamers are apparently female. However, these females don't 'buy' games. "By expanding this demographic," he claimed, "we can increase our revenue nearly twofold"

Right.

My reaction to this is... well. Firstly, I think they got that percentage wrong. This sounds a bit harsh, bit 39% of females may have played a game in their life, but they're not gamers. A far smaller percentage of females are actually 'gamers'. This is proven by the fact that the majority of that 39% don't buy games.

Secondly, if that 39% don't buy games, how is increasing that number going to increase revenue significantly, let alone 'twofold'?

Thirdly, I think it's really insulting to suggest that girls want less challenging games. I also think that to say most female gamers want games with less violence and more relationships shows how useless their research is. Most girls I know who are 'casual' gamers, love beat-em-ups and old-style side-scrolling platformers.

Fourthly, if you want to find out what girls want, for christssake, don't get a group of MEN in a room to find out. JESUS.

I'm interested in hearing all your opinions on this subject. My own personal opinion is that it may be due to the fact that games aren't as 'socially acceptable' amongst women as men. I mean, I would never bother talking about games to my female friends, because they'd say, "Oh Rusalka, you're so geeky!" and laugh a bit. But they have never actually played a game. I think if it was as normal for girls to take an interest in games as boys, from an early age, then it might be more socially acceptable and so you'd have more female gamers. I think it's just not something that's as available to women.

[brkl]

This sounds a bit harsh, bit 39% of females may have played a game in their life, but they're not gamers.

"39% of gamers are girls" != "39% of girls are gamers"

[adfegg]

GIRLS WANT GAMES with more relationships, more emotion... that are easier to play and less intimidating.

I'm male, and most of the time, that's what I look for in a game.

[MrChlorophyll]

I'm 39% female?

That doesn't seem physically possible.

[Salka]

"39% of gamers are girls" != "39% of girls are gamers"

Yes don't mind me, I'm not making any sense.

I meant, that 39% of 'gamers' who are female, have probably only picked up a game once in their life.

It's a popular sport, when you are female, to pretend to like games so that you're popular with the boys.

[loonyboi]

This is such a strange topic. There's so much data out there on it, and yet nobody seems to have any idea what they're talking about.

Here's what is generally accepted as true:

- The majority of players of casual (hearts, bejeweled, etc) games are women

- A significant portion of players of The Sims are women

- A notable percentage of players of MMOs are women

- A small, but vocal portion of "hardcore" games (FPS, RTS, single player RPG) are women.

It's so hard to talk about this subject, because that small portion of hardcore female gamers is so vocal that it throws everything off. The same thing goes for male gamers, by the way...I'm not trying to be sexist.

If you ask a group of very vocal gamers anything, regardless of subject, you'll walk away thinking that this is a widely held opinion. But that doesn't make it so. It just means you're hearing from the most vocal people.

I say this as someone who is A) a hardcore gamer, married to someone who plays The Sims for many, many hours a week, and C) related to a once-prominent (female) member of the hardcore FPS community, so I do have some experience in this area.

I'd like to say that designing games specifically for women is a bad idea, but I don't think it necessarily is. I don't think the world needs an FPS designed for women, but gender inclusive game design isn't a terrible idea (and I can't believe I just wrote that sentence).

[SpiderMonkey]

Oh god, Yufster, if you think that was bad, did you see the MCV issue from some point this summer that tackled the topic? One columnist rejoiced that "so many people thought the idea was so complex but all this time the answer was right under our noses". The 'answer' he was referring to?

Releasing a pink PS2.

For reals. Problem solved. End of thread.

Oh what, you're all still here? Hmm. The 39% statistic is a pretty clear case of being overly broad: My mum plays Spider Solitaire nightly for hours at a time. Whenever I read the small print on these surveys, they always say that that counts as being a gamer. Which is clearly bullshit.

I spend a lot of time putting games in front of my girlfriend and asking her to tell me what she thinks about them, to try and better understand the issue. Things I've discovered so far:

- She really really hates obvious polygons and bad animation. It's an instant turn off for her. She finds it very hard to make the leap from "that polygon has a rock texture stretched across it" to "that is a cliff face over there". By constrast, the first time I showed her HL2's first menu screen, she was gobsmacked that she'd finally found something that she could accept as real. (That's actually been a gender-neutral reaction - I've shown HL2's first few minutes to other non-gamer friends and they've immediately asked to play it.) She winces when I shoot the hostages in CS:S and tells me to stop it.

- She is turned off by the perception that you have to put in big chunks of time to get anything out of a gaming experience. She can't understand why people would want to play a game for hours for the story. Further questioning reveals that it's specifically the teenage-male appeal of the narratives that turn her off. I played some Monkey Island with her once and she loved the story and laughed her head off at all the jokes.

- She hates having to learn controls. She's got about a three sentence tolerance for being told the controls for a game. She loves Super Monkey Ball for its control simplicity (and the pick-up-and-play nature of it). Some female friends won't even touch that game through perception that they could never learn to control it successfully.

- Even when it comes to things like Monkey Ball, she has loads of fun with it, asks to play it when people are round, but then readily admits that she'd never buy it. I think that outside the gamer-bubble, you have to be incredibly keen into games to want to spend £100/£200+ just to start playing and then pay £30-40 per game. Look at DVDs - most people only became interested when they could get a player in Asda for £40 and a few titles for £5-10.

(Which incidentally, makes me really angry that this week's MCV has YET ANOTHER story about how aggressive retail practices are reducing the perceived value of games in consumers' eyes, and how it will be a disaster for the industry if people start expecting to pay only £20-30 for their games. Fuckers.)

Oh btw (edit),

GIRLS WANT GAMES with more relationships, more emotion... that are easier to play and less intimidating.

That ties quite well with the conclusions I drew from talking to my girlfriend and seeing the appeal of things like Nintendogs and The Sims to other girls, e.g. my sister. I think it's always dangerous to draw strong lines in the sand on these kinds of things, but even if that did come from a bunch of males in a meeting room, I can't say I disagree with that particular line.

[Marek]

The whole issue of "how can we design games for girls???" pisses me off a bit. Maybe because the game industry is approaching it as if it's some kind of engineering challenge. "If we put enough brilliant minds on this, and we tweak the gameplay variables long enough, we might just find the secret answer! It's gonna be a tough nut to crack but we'll get there one day!"

First of all, female research/focus groups seem of little use, given the huge scope of a target audience that is based merely on gender. Suppose for the sake of argument that someone were to interview me about making a guy game. Clearly the questions would already be biased towards discussing masculine activities. What's the conclusion of such research supposed to be? "Guys like competitive games with lots of combat"? Or, "Guys like beer and titties?". It's too broad.

Women themselves are divided on what makes games more interesting to them. Good for them, because they're not the Borg. Some tell me (yeah, I broach the topic sometimes) more games should have strong female protagonists, "like Lara Croft". Someone else, who even wrote a PhD thesis on this topic, tells me there should be more beautiful men in them (ya rly). Others tell me to stop bothering them with questions because they're too busy playing a game, which often happens to be the same kind of game that I really like.

So, who knows. I don't claim to know What Women Want In Games. But I do feel that a lot of common assumptions are utterly wrong.

The biggest mistake is to think that girls don't like hard or competitive games. As a guy I can say with complete confidence that this is categorically not true. Here's why the idea is being perpetuated though: a lot of girls simply don't play video games (mainly because of cultural factors), hence they are noobs, hence they will want something easy. That's why "easier to play and less intimidating" shows up in this "research". But in reality, girls love complexity and competition. They love it! I don't know a single woman, gamer/geek or otherwise, who doesn't like challenge, or competition, or oneupmanship. I must admit I'm thinking mostly of social situations here (since I only know a limited number of girl gamers) but I'm going out on a limb here and say that this sense of competition translates to many types of games.

I know even from my own experiences that it's hard to design games for a target demographic you are not part of. But given the right skills and mindset, men should be perfectly capable of making games that appeal to women, or women and men. Of course, it still wouldn't hurt to have more female lead designers. By which I mean there really really ought to be more. We used to have people like Roberta Williams, Christy Marx or Jane Jensen. I think it's unlikely Gabriel Knight would have been written the way it was by a man -- not impossible, but unlikely. Right now we have... let's see... Jade Raymond, who doesn't actually count because she's a producer. I can't think of anyone else in a lead position, even though there's a fair amount of women in the industry in general.

Oh man. This topic reminds me, I actually tried Sprung a few weeks ago. It's a dating simulator that's clearly meant to appeal to women as much as men. You have to engage in conversations with characters of the opposite sex and try to get them to "fall in love with you". I gave up after 15 minutes when it became clear that whoever wrote it couldn't flirt his way out of a barn, and most likely has never looked a woman straight in the eyes. It's a depressing example of "worst case scenario".

I think there's a deeper issue here, and that's how to design games in such a way that specific groups of people will like it. It's always a topic worth looking at because, yes, there's a lot of potential money in getting people who don't play games to play them.

It's partially an issue of tricking non-gamers into trying games by changing superficial things (presentation, story, marketing), and partially an issue of changing the inner mechanics of games to appeal to their tastes. With "games for girls (who aren't already gamers)", I think it's mostly about the former, and much less about the latter.

Anyway, 'my 2 cents' etc. etc.

[SpiderMonkey]

That's why "easier to play and less intimidating" shows up in this "research". But in reality, girls love complexity and competition. They love it!

"Easier to play" is kinda ambigious because it can mean "simpler" or "same level of complexity, but more accessible". Reading your comment, I noticed I didn't note the difference first time around. So I feel obliged to point out that I am a strong believer in the latter meaning and would disagree with the original line if it's read with the former meaning.

[loonyboi]

The biggest mistake is to think that girls don't like hard or competitive games. As a guy I can say with complete confidence that this is categorically not true.

No, a more accurate statement would be "among the women I know, this is categorically not true."

But again, this gets back to my point: there is a very vocal minority for whom this is true, and that's why this research is skewed. The majority of potential women gamers probably do prefer non-hardcore games, tough as that is to believe for some of us.

The problem is that those of us who know women who are exceptions naturally take offense at this gross generalization, when in actuality there is probably some, if not a great deal, of truth to it.

[Wrestlevania]

No, no, no!

The way forward, you idiots, is celebrity all-girl development teams!

I mean, there’s that ex-porno bird that was involved in the production of FAKK2. John Carmack’s wife, who can animate and stuff. And I’m sure at least one of the Frag Dolls must be able to type – just give the rest some crayons and a flip chart. Lock them all in a nice sunny room full of kittens for a morning, then market the shit out of whatever they come up with.

Problem solved (as any room full of all-male brainstormers will soon be telling you).

----------------------------------------------------------------------

On a somewhat more serious note, I’m finding this continued “female gamer (assumption-based) problem solving” really fucking offensive. My 3 year old daughter and I sometimes play Ecco the Dolphin on Dreamcast, and the reason she likes that is because she finds it interesting. Quite a revelation, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Now, whilst I appreciate one 3 year old is no yardstick for the female demographic, by any stretch of the imagination, it still proves one simple fact; it’s about engagement above everything else. Not what a bunch of blokes locked in a room might simply guess at (however close they might be).

[SpiderMonkey]

the reason she likes that is because she finds it interesting.

it’s about engagement above everything else.

Erm, could you be a bit more specific? I don't understand where the information content is in a statement like "she likes it because she finds it interesting". How does that guide a game developer who is trying make a game more likely to appeal to some female demographic? What do you mean by "engagement"?

[Salka]

'Cause girls like engagement cause it's romantic and stuff, they love to be engaged.

I'm sorry this was a really pointless point, I'll come back and maybe make it worthwhile after I have a bath maybe.

[Wrestlevania]

What I mean is that I don’t believe there’s any precise formula to solving this supposed problem, beyond simply making games much more varied and accessible. Both aspects will benefit the games market in general, because they will inherently attract new players from both sexes.

Of the two I think accessibility is the biggest barrier to entry – whether that be thematic, the prerequisite skill set or genre experience, the control system, whatever – which is what, as we all know, Nintendo has banked the farm on. It’s also why people from far wider spheres than gaming (i.e. University professors) are going justifiably ape-shit over Spore. And I also believe that’s why The Sims sold by the truckload.

[SpiderMonkey]

i.e. University professors

It's a bit off-piste, but I think the reason university professors are interested in Spore is not to do with accessibility. It's everything to do with how major art forms and movements can reshape how people perceive the world around them, and how Spore looks to have massive potential to have that kind of impact.

[miffy495]

(i.e. University professors)

Careful, man. I know many University professors who are gamers. Hell, when I have dinner with my mom, I always end up playing Xbox with her boyfriend, a tenured professor of economics. Profs game too.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Back on topic, I spent quite a bit of time trying to get my sister into gaming. To some degree, I've been quite successful. When the first thing that she told me about her new boyfriend was that she can totally kick his ass at Super Smash Brothers, I was amazingly proud. For the most part though, it is really about the presentation. Shooters bore her to death, same for fighting games. Monkey Ball, (as many have said) Animal Crossing, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the old LucasArts adventure games, and others of the like are what she really got into. There is one shooter she likes. Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath. Why? Well, it's different. No aliens, no army guys, none of that crap. Honestly, it's the same reason I really liked that game. When all you see from shooters are the same things over and over, you get damn sick of those things. When those things don't really appeal to you in the first place (how many 16 year old girls does a WWII game draw in to begin with?) you just don't care about the genre at all.

We need more cute games. I say this not just for my sister but for myself as well. I'm completely willing to admit that I love cute games and want to play a lot more of them, and if we want to bring in new people, we can't expect do do it by dressing the same subject matter up in different ways. Xtreme (tm? Possibly?) is what keeps casual gamers (not just girls) from the hardcore gamer demographic, and will eventually kill games unless we really do something about it soon. Problem is, until we can shut up the very, VERY vocal Xtreme minority, we won't change.

[Kenty]

my girlfriend pwns me at WoW.. she actually has become the guild mistress of our relatively successful and reputable guild on Draenor-EU

She also likes Advance Wars, Zelda, Civ4, Animal Crossing and Sonic the Hedgehog amongst others, and she's not really a 'gamer'. She has her own DS lite, and looks forward to when i buy a Wii, yet unlike me she didn't spend most of her life reading/living/obsessing about such things!

I don't really have a point to make, just maybe that some things can't be explained/summarised/pigeon holed ¬

[twmac]

By contrast my girlfriend hates all things computer game related, won't touch them on principle. Whatever principle that is.

Maybe it is the games I play, but I tried Sonic, Fahrenheit, Psychonauts, Puzzle Bobble, Stranger's Wrath, Streetfighter 3rd strike, The Punisher (I didn't actually try and get her interested in that one I just happened to be playing it)amongst others.

The most enthusiastic response I got was Punisher: 'That's f***ed up' and the rest merited sighs, eye rolling, patronising laughs and a few 'whatevers'.

Some people just don't want to play games, simple as that. And no amount of marketing will ever change that.

[Marek]

No, a more accurate statement would be "among the women I know, this is categorically not true."

I know what you mean, but it's not what I meant. I was going for a grand universal statement there, not something anecdotal.

However, I did get something else wrong. What I can say with complete confidence is that women, generally speaking (as in: not specific to games), like challenge and complexity. (I am comfortable making large generalizations about that.) However, it's manifested mainly in social situations, and making the connection to games might not be so straightforward. And that's where the evidence does become anecdotal, and might indeed be part of that vocal minority.

[Wrestlevania]

Careful, man. I know many University professors who are gamers. Hell, when I have dinner with my mom, I always end up playing Xbox with her boyfriend, a tenured professor of economics. Profs game too.

My point was about engagement of larger audiences. I can’t recall the article right now, but I remember reading about how Spore is an exciting prospect for educators, because its content and themes cover diverse subjects such as Geography, Cosmology and the core Sciences (Biology, Physics & Maths). The University professor reference was not meant to be, “Hey, even stuffy old farts want to play it!” It was that many people are looking at games to improve teaching:

“The panel determined that there are, in fact, skills learned by video games that are of value to today’s employers, including ‘strategic and analytical thinking, problem solving, planning and execution, decision-making, and adaptation to rapid change’.” Additionally, [researchers] found that video games foster goal-setting, practice in patience, and even team building. Carefully noting that there is a difference between video games developed for entertainment versus education, the FAS’ report says that an emphasis in learning in video games could greatly benefit future generations of workers.

In my opinion you can only achieve this through the engagement of broader audiences – which includes girls, obviously.

Remember how Furbies and Tamagotchi sold like crazy, irrespective of the sex of the owner? It’s because they both had mass appeal and a very strong endearment factor. But they also focussed on themes that everyone can universally identify with; learning to speak, caring for a pet, play in general.

[SpiderMonkey]

Problem is, until we can shut up the very, VERY vocal Xtreme minority, we won't change.

But, but Gears of War is totally the kind of system seller you need for your system's second Christmas when you are trying to start a push beyond early adopters!

[Aussie Ben]

I believe that may be why this game exists.

blue sky in games for the win

[gfoot]

Accessibility doesn't mean there's a lack of challenge, it just means there's a smooth difficulty ramp-up. I don't think it should be seen as patronizing - doesn't everybody like games that break them in gently? A number of FPS games have come out recently without giving you a weapon for the first level, to give you a chance to learn the controls in a safe environment.

Not wanting to spend every waking hour playing games is also a contentious issue, but it's not limited to girls either. Since getting a job, and especially since getting a wife and child, I haven't been able to spend nearly as much time playing games as I used to. I still enjoy playing Enemy Territory, but mostly when my brother visits, as it's a great game to play cooperatively with two PCs in the same room. But it's hard to orchestrate when you have a baby, and it's not fair on the wife either - she used to get utterly fed up with the audio ("I need a medic! I am an engineer!").

These days I'm much more in search of simple games which you can play for half an hour at a time, without any penalty for saving. I still like the idea of games that require you to perform a long task without errors, or rather, games that don't let you constantly restart a task in order to do every single thing perfectly - there's something old-school about it, from back when games just didn't have save features, and it feels like more of an achievement. But I rarely get the opportunity to fit this kind of play into my daily life. I suspect there are a lot of people out there like me, who are much better off playing smaller-scoped handheld games at whatever opportunity arises.

Regarding the price of games, I'd love to see these smaller games made available at a lower price point, but that doesn't seem to be the way it works. When Nintendo released a few old classics for the GBA, the price they were changing was ridiculous - I don't think it was quite as high as a "new" game, but it was well above what I'd be prepared to pay for Pacman.

The price point is also set partly by the amount of development the game needs (which is rising fast), and of course it includes the console manufacturer's stealth tax. But justifying the price point in this way does raise the same issues as justifying the price point of the PS3 by the fact that it includes a Blu-ray player.

--

gfoot - SDTV4EVA

[edweird]

I think a large part of the reason for a male majority in gaming is that developers have very actively pushed in that direction.

I suppose in the early days of gaming there would likely have been more male interest in developing games, because culturally, males were more commonly interested in electronics and engineering. So as gaming developed, it was primarily male developers leading the way, making the games that they wanted to play, trying to make the "coolest" thing possible, pushing boundaries and having the biggest impact on gaming (ie ID's games, wolfenstein and quake). With the success of those games came explosions of interest in gaming... but primarily from males, due to the content of the games.

When those explosions occured, all sorts of people were realising the money making potential of the industry, and as the majority of the existing audience was male, developers deliberately and repeatedly targeted that male audience, and still do to this day. No doubt their focus on that male audience, and obsessions with guns, blood, cars, girls, etc, that have saturated the market, is what turns a great many females off gaming. It's not that girls don't have as much potential to be interested in (or good at) games as guys do, it's simply that developers\publishers have focused so intensely on the male audience that they have, in general, actively worked against having a large female fanbase.

Obviously I'm speaking very very generally here.

My sister and I used to play various console platformers as kids, and we later got into king's quest and monkey island and so on, but interestingly her interest in games waned when 3D became the next big thing, and games started obsessing over their technology and graphics more than their creativity or fun. Early 3D gaming also tended towards shooting and blowing stuff up, probably because, as I mentioned, the biggest leaps forward in 3D gaming happened to come from those male-oriented games. Recently though, my sister thoroughly appreciated CMI, what she saw of ICO, and she nearly died of happiness when she saw a video of Loco Roco.

See, there's no great secret to making games that appeal to girls. It's just that since there are so many uncreative developers out there to make money, they keep retreading the same themes, over and over again. There are just so many successful male-oriented games to copy. Creative developers such as Will Wright, who have original ideas and aren't making quake clones or racing clones or whatever other clones, have shown gaming's capacity to attract female attention quite successfully.

Unfortunately, the corporate nature of the gaming industry suffers the same problem as the corporate film and music industries - publishers are too afraid to deviate from already successful formulas... hence the constant re-treading of the same material. And hence my gradual loss of interest in gaming. As a hardcore gamer, and someone who has worked in the industry (and hopes to do a lot more of that), that's pretty sad. Gaming's potential as an artistic medium sets my imagination on fire, yet lately it just seems like hard work to find a game that raises my interest. But that's another rant for another time I guess

[DanJW]

So, the consus seems to be that the secret is:

Subject Matter and Theme.

Which should be easy to change in theory, but it is probably very difficult to get a game made that deals with uncommon subject matter. Because of the "risk".

The risk adverse suits really do my head in. On one hand they want the money from the female market, on the other they're too scared to take it. They're like that kid at the water park who holds up the queue of the highest flume because they have suddenly chickened out and wet themselves when it's their turn, and just stand there sobbing.

Also, this should be obvious and has been kind of said already, but I'd like to point out that there will never be a game that appeals to the whole of the female market. The female market is just as divided, if not more so, as the male one. So any game makers hoping to make a female friendly game will have to be much MUCH more specific on which female sector they are aiming for.