AlanBarber.Org
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Women and Games
It seems about every 6 months or so a new "study" comes out dealing with games and females. Well Wired News published an article about the latest study.
Game makers are not making games for women, blah, blah, blah.
MMmmm, yummy chocolate cake...
Sorry there, it's just that my snack is more interesting than the article! It's always the same stuff being reported. You would think people would learn by now. Gaming is a predominantly male activity. It doesn't matter how many studies you do, you will always get the same results. Girls don't play games or the ones they do are usual simple puzzle based type. Boys play games and like ones full of violence and scantly clad women. It’s a rather sad circle but it starts at childhood. Boys get video game systems and have sleepovers to play. They move to computers as they grow for the more advanced games. They grow up and start game development companies. Since the developers are mostly males they make games they like and grew up on. Thus they make games with lots of violence, scantly clad women, and difficult to master controls.
As a result of all this games that draw women just aren’t made. Perhaps as more women come into technology and into the video game development things will change. However I really don’t think so. Women will always be a minority in games. It’s not like this is part of some secret origination to keep out women, males just have brains that get more pleasure out of playing a video game than women.
Women just don’t have the brains wired to compete like men. Gaming is all about competition. Between yourself and the computer or a group of friends, it doesn’t matter. It just satisfies that basic need to be the best. Women may say they want to play and compete but deep down I believe they’re doing it just to fulfill a subconscious desire to be equals to men.
I’ll end with a quote from the article:
“A contrasting view came from Caroline Trujillo, a producer and designer at Vivendi Universal Games who is currently working on the Spyro franchise. The game industry may be dominated by men, she said -- but she doesn't believe things would be much different if there were an equal number of men and women in production and development.
‘The reality is that boys do play games more than girls do and, at some point, boys are buying more games than girls are," Trujillo said. "It's not that we're failing to tap into that audience because there aren't enough women on our end. It's just the nature of the industry and the product we're developing. It's like saying men would buy more makeup if more men were working in that industry.’”
Anyways enough of my ranting. I have cake to finish eating.
