Women Remain the Ignored Audience In Gaming 432
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."
sounds like their needs are addressed quite well (Score:5, Insightful)
Men vs. Women (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Haven't gamed in a while, but,,, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sounds like their needs are addressed quite wel (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Pretty much my feeling (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The community (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:So... what ARE those needs and preferences? (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, I get tired of no eye candy for me, the eye candy always *is* me.
Would you play completely through a game that had half naked men and only men that were half naked in it?
But so many male characters ARE beefy hunky shirtless guys (In Western-made games at least). The God of War series has Kratos in nothing but a loincloth for the entire thing. Conan, same thing, just off the top of my head.
And if beefy dudes isn't your thing, there are plenty of shirtless feminine men in Asian-made games.
It seems that people generally play characters they want to look at, or characters they want to be. I've known a few women who won't play Chun-li in Street Fighter because of her "gross man thighs." Those same women liked Bayonetta.
That harem area of Diablo 2 was DESIGNED to make you(and everyone else) uncomfortable. It was a place where a bunch of women were slaughtered. Plus the guards! How many dead guards did you flip over looking for gold in that level? But oh, dead man so it's okay.
Re:The Sims (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:sounds like their needs are addressed quite wel (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that your premise is wrong.
from TFA:
"Market representation for women has grown to 50 percent overall, with console use rising significantly in the past two years"
Half the people who play games are girls, they're not forced to play them, since games are for fun they're playing them to have fun and given that as many women as men choose to play these games to have fun it would suggest that they're already catering to real women just as well as to men.
You've been conned just as the writer of the article intended.
you were convinced that there's some kind of need that isn't being fulfilled when it really is.
Interpret sells its services to game publishers so they have an interest in convincing you that their services are needed when they really aren't.
Re:The Sims (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah yes, we hear this same idiotic argument all the time with why all characters need to be black, jewish, muslim, etc. Do you hear guys sit around bitching when the main character in a game is a girl? No. But girls like you have been raised over the last few decades to think that the sun shines out of your ass and that the world should bend to your will because you have a pair of tits (quality of said tits being irrelevant to your belief that you are superior to anything with a penis).
You specifically bashed military games like MW2 - guess what? In the REAL FUCKING WORLD the people doing that stuff are *wait for it*..........MEN - hence why they use MEN as the main characters. If you want a game where the main character is a girl and she shoots all the "evil males" or whatever, make it your damn self instead of demanding that the rest of the world change to fit your delusional idea of reality.
As for L4D? Even 25% of survivors being female is probably pushing the bounds of reality pretty hard..........yes, some girls are badass and can take care of themselves in a life or death situation - however, most can't as they're too busy crying like a two year old because they saw a mouse. Do you really think a girl like that is going to have what it takes to cut apart people (even if they're technically already dead)?
I really don't give a fuck if I get modded down for this. You thinking that everything should be focused on what you want is so fucking narcissistic and stereotypical of the self-absorbed bitches running rampant these days that it makes me want to punch something (or someone).