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Games Entertainment

ARGs And The Female Gamer 26

Posted by Zonk from the reality-gaming-for-both-genders dept.
Gamasutra has a feature up by Andrea Phillips examining the world of Alternate Reality Gaming, musing that finally designers seem to have found something that works for both genders. From the article: "At the end of this road, you don't find an exclusively female audience and a disenfranchised male ex-playerbase. Instead, you find a gaming audience that looks a lot like the world we live in every day. Welcome to the gender-balanced world of Alternate Reality Gaming ... In the most successful ARGs, the game and the story are inextricable from one another. In an ARG, there simply isn't a way to devise a game without simultaneously devising the story, and the quality of the game lives and dies based on the quality of the writing. In every ARG team I'm aware of, the lead writer is a crucial part of the dev team. Poor characterization, bad pacing, or lack of plausibility are showstoppers just as much as a blue-screen would be. The action item here for conventional gaming: Make the writing an integral part of the development process, and not an afterthought. "
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ARGs And The Female Gamer More

ARGs And The Female Gamer

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  • A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, here we come (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Yokaze ( 70883 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2005 @07:00PM (#14151727)
    So, how long will it take, until we get away from leveling/looting RPG games, to more story based online-games, where there are semi-professional players/actors, which will drive indiviual storylines in MMORPGs?

    Putting Diamond Age and the current article together, it seems the logical step.
    • CRPGs are in an interesting position, because as a game genre they tend to be very literate/sophisticated - CRPGS typically include more written text than other game genres - but at the same time genre convention demands a level of violence and slaying that's equivalent to (if not exceeding) the amount of violence in FPS's. I think a lot of modern computer RPG games are at least subconsciously expressing a dissatisfaction with the tired kill/level/loot progression that is genre convention. KoToR 2, for exa
    • There are already hired actors in The Matrix Online (though it's a shitty game).

      I don't care if they enhance games with some real people for some of the interaction, but I want the game to remain the same STYLE. I don't want to play pretend and play act like I'm a pretty pretty princess or any other crap. However, if you want to replace NPCs and pivotal characters with real people - cool.
    • AFAIK there is much more to do in most MMOG than leveling/looting. Yes, that is a significant part of it, but not all of it. If it were just leveling and looting then why not play not-so-online game instead? MMOG, especially MMORPGS are all, on least some level, a social experience.

      To many gamers, that social experience tends to orbit around the idea of leveling/looting as a matter of puffery as they climb to the top of their network of friends, but the act itself is not what is fun at all. If the only on

  • Who would've thought? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jclast ( 888957 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2005 @07:03PM (#14151754) Homepage
    Who would've thought that if you make an accessible game with a good story that develops an active community that other people (women included) will want to play it!

    I am truly astounded at GamaSutra's grasp of the obvious.
    • There's one big flaw here. "Alternate Reality Gaming" apparently means, essentially, role playing. The SIMS - for example - where you can kind of play "soap opera" or have control of minute life-related details. These are things GIRLS typically like. Nintendogs, Tamagotchi, The SIMS, There. Meanwhile, guys like games like Battlefield 2 and racing games. While some of us like the whole raising a family playing a soap opera controlling when your little family takes a piss kind of thing - most don't. That is a
      • The article called out games like "The Legend of Zelda." People looking for a good story and good gameplay aren't asking a whole lot out of the games industry.

        Zelda sells because it's easy to learn. KotOR sells because it's got a good story, and it's not too hard to learn. The Sims succeeded because it's easy to learn, and you write the story. Morrowind and Fable succeeded because you wrote the story you wanted.

        Yeah, boys and girls are different, but wanting a decent story and an intuitive interface aren't
      • Actually The Sims (original version) became one of the best ever selling games thanks mainly to males buying the game. Most articles on the matter (do a google search) state that only after this initial male uptake when sisters & girlfriends started seeing brothers & boyfriends playing the game did The Sims become one of the first games played mainly by girls. Only then also did EA realise quite how much money they could make from the female market for the game and start advertising it in woman's ma
      • Seumas, you apparently have no clue what an Alternate Reality Game [wikipedia.org]is.
    • Who would've thought that Zonk would on today?

  • Hmm (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Graham1982 ( 933841 )
    This world needs more female gamers. All of us guys need to stop goggling over them and give them more chances to prove their skills.

    I saw a special on MTV entitled something like "True life: professional gamers" (I probably got the title wrong) recently. There was an American all female team that played Counter Strike against many other female teams from around the world. They made it to the finals, playing against a team from Brazil, and proceeded to kick tail left and right. Whether of not they would h

  • I speculate that there are probably an equal number of women masquerading as men in online games (to avoid all the comeons and crap) as there are men masquerading as women (for odd kicks, I guess).
    • Studies show that only 5% of male characters are played by women. Yet 60% of female characters are played by men... The ELSPA white paper "Chicks and Joysticks" has more on that.
      • Studies show a lot of things.

        I bet the actual percentages of such things and the percentage of female players in general are very different for each game and it's genre. A recent article on some large media organisation's website (I really can't remeber which one) stated that for most online puzzle games (thoose annoying Java based ones on various websites) were predominantly played by woman. ...for example my girlfriend is currently (and has been for atleast 5 hours now ) playing some stupid tetris-style g

      • Studies show that only 5% of male characters are played by women. Yet 60% of female characters are played by men... The ELSPA white paper "Chicks and Joysticks" has more on that.

        Those numbers are utterly meaningless. Let's assume that there are 90% males playing a game and 10% females. Let's further assume that a given person is equally likely to play with a character of the other gender as with a character of his or her own gender. That gives us 5% females playing females, 5% females playing males, 45%

    • I suppose there is some weirdness to the guy who makes all of his online characters female, but I think a fair number of guys make female characters just because after a while, you want to try something different. On City of Heroes, I have 6 characters, and I made my 6th female just because I had already made 3 male types and 2 "huge" types, so I wanted to go for the body type I hadn't used yet. It was one of the more interesting character designs I had to come up with, because I tried to be reasonable fo
  • The backstory is core in World of WarCraft. Hell, it out dates the game by more than a decade. BUT, WoW is dominated by men and men playing women. Sure, I know a few actual, real females that play but they're in a pretty darn small minority.

    Also, you still power leveling and loot envy going on. I think it's more the adolecent male behavior that keeps women away from games.

    • The backstory is core in World of WarCraft. Hell, it out dates the game by more than a decade. BUT, WoW is dominated by men and men playing women. Sure, I know a few actual, real females that play but they're in a pretty darn small minority.

      I know two females you play or played WoW, and about four males (all of whom are disgusting). Not such a bad ratio. Also, you still power leveling and loot envy going on. I think it's more the adolecent male behavior that keeps women away from games.

      Not just fem

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