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Needs More Pink
By Corvus | May 27, 2005
I have actually heard people suggest that in an effort to make games that appeal to young girls, we need to make games that a) have no conflict, b) are about ‘girl’ things like playing house and dating boys, c) use ‘girl friendly’ colors, and d) are completely uninteresting to anyone with half a brain. All right, I have to confess that I have never actually heard someone advocate d), but that’s because by the time they reach c), I’ve started seeing red, hearing that high pitched, test pattern, squeal and begun looking for a large object with which to bludgeon them.
Seriously, it doesn’t seem that difficult to me. Make games where the characters aren’t complete tools, or in other words, get rid of the game design concept which dictates that hulking sexist brutes are cool and that large breasted, nearly naked women are automatically sexy. Neither of those things are true in real life. Hulking sexist brutes are an embarrassment to men everywhere and large breasted, nearly naked women are probably available (at least for ogling, and possibly a price), which is often confused with sexy, but isn’t, in actuality, the same thing at all.
That’s just the start of my rant about what we shouldn’t do if we really want to attract female gamers. I think it’s pretty obvious though that if we want to appeal to a broader audience, something needs to be done and it probably starts with examining the Boys Club mentality of the game design industry.
I was then going to go on to explore the games that have, in my experience, attracted women players and construct a list of some key elements that games need to gather a larger female demographic audience.* Before I started writing this; however, I Googled the phrase girls in gaming to see what came up. It led me, by way of Teacher Librarian site, to the GirlsTech site at Rutgers. Allow me to pull a bit of text here, as it’ll take far less time to deconstruct a well researched list of elements than to spend several paragraphs building the list myself:
A number of studies have examined girls’ and young women’s preferences in computer game content (Agosto 2002; De Jean, Upitis, Koch, & Young, 1999; Inkpen et al., 1994; Kafai, 1996, 1998; Lawry et al., 1994; Miller, Chaika, & Groppe, 1996; Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 1998). An analysis of these studies indicates that girls and women tend to favor the following characteristics in computer game content:
- Games that avoid the conflict between good and evil;
- Games that center on storylines and character development;
- Games that are not competitive in nature;
- Games that use real-life locales;
- Games that feature strong female characters who are in charge of decisions and actions;
- Games that enable users to play the role of main character, either through self-identification or through the power to make decisions;
- Games that focus on human relationships;
- Games with some educational value, as opposed to those designed purely for entertainment;
- Games containing nonviolent action;
- Games that reflect girls’ common play patterns.
So, these impressions are based on gauging interest in existing games, so any of the flaws in the logic of these conclusions shouldn’t automatically be put on the researchers, but investigated to see if it’s an issue with the current standards of game design. Let’s do that now, shall we?
“Games that avoid the conflict between good and evil.” How many times have you read a DRPG review that began with a statement along the lines of, “Once again, you’re a chosen hero without a past, destined to save the world from evil.” The review then typically goes on to describe the graphics, or attribute system, or combat, or something that the game designers (hopefully) paid more attention to than the plot. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I think many designers pay a lot of attention to the plots of their games. I just don’t think all of them are terribly good, or at least original, storytellers and they focus more on gameplay, with plot playing second fiddle. I think this point could be better phrased, “Games that center on storylines and character development.” And look! That just happens to be their second conclusion.
“Games that are not competitive in nature.” Heh. Some of the most competitive game players I’ve met are women. I remember a particularly intense game of Star Wars Monopoly (of all things) where the Divine Ms. J— S—— and I were faced off across the board, eyes locked, ready to rent the other into submission. The Lovely Village Knittiot and I routinely have to check ourselves while playing Scrabble, lest it get ugly. I had an interesting experience in WoW, which I can only chalk up to severely anti-social competitive behavior. The other player in that episode? A woman. Women, in my experience, are not afraid of a little competition. However, the majority of competitive games, provide very little compulsion to compete for individuals looking for more from their games than adrenaline hazed slaughter.
“Games that use real-life locales.” I’m not sure what to make of this one. Could it be that the fantasy locales features scantily clad women with large breasts, beasts of men with nothing to attract a thoughtful player? I’m trying to think of the games that use real-life locales that they could be referencing. Perhaps the Carmen Sandiego games? Perhaps Gabriel Knight counts? I’m just not sure what to make of this.
The next three items feel like refinements of, “Games that center on storylines and character development,” and I don’t disagree or have any compelling bits to add.
“Games with some educational value, as opposed to those designed purely for entertainment,” I believe, is the flip side of, “Games that are not competitive in nature.” It is quite likely that the games with educational value more met the other requirement of enjoyment. It seems silly to suggest that games need to be “educational” to attract women when I know plenty of women who enjoy escapism in the form of Sci-Fi and Fantasy literature, romance novels, soap operas, movies, etc. ‘Character driven’ seems to be far more key than ‘educational.’
“Games containing nonviolent action,” which also underscores ‘character driven’ I think. The ability to make non-violent choices requires more thought from the player and indicates more thought put into the design. These games tend to be more plot/character driven.
“Games that reflect girls’ common play patterns,” is a potential problem for me. This item right here is why publishers and designers are making Barbie games, Olsen Twins games (Ew), and other such drek. I think a computer game that merely tries to replicate the “stay in your place” mentality of girls’ ‘happy homemaker’ toys is doing girls, women, boys, men, society, and the game design industry a grave injustice. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider how girls and young women approach problem solving and social interaction. We should. But we shouldn’t do it so we can make games just for them. We should do it so we can make our games better. Who knows? Maybe the boys who play (and make) games can learn something too?
To wrap up (finally!), the idea that making games for girls is as simple as “adding more pink” obviously hasn’t been working for us and as long as it doesn’t work, the publishers won’t be willing to fund “girl friendly” games (unless they are Sims clones). You see, the ugly truth is that the Game Publishing side of the industry (you know them, they’re the ones making all the money we hear about) is quite content with their current demographic. They, by and large, see no need to branch out to the ‘over 36′ crowd, or the ‘under 13′ crowd, or even to the ‘non-drooling male’ crowd. They are making plenty of money as it is, so why should they take risks? And that complaint of mine, my friends, is a topic for another post, another time, another day… soon.
*I really do not care for the word ‘demographic’ as it turns a group of actual people into an abstract number, which is dangerous, in my not-so-humble opinion. The fact that a majority of our media, not to mention the products we use, are a result of the study of demographics frightens me. We wonder where our values went? Ask Nike, I’m pretty sure we traded them in for a pair of shoes.
May 27th, 2005 at 12:17 pm
Forgive me if my thoughts are unstructured.
I don’t consider myself as typically interested in what the average woman is interested in (e.g. I’m not a girly girl, although I do have my rare moments), therefore many of my gaming choices are more in line with what gamers play these days (most gamers being male). Having said that, as a woman, I do have opinions on this gender angle.
Rather than make games more girly (adding pink so to speak) people should focus on games in a more gender-conscious way. Think about the roles, characterisation, and just the image of women in games and in the marketing. Adding more female characters is a superficial step at best, but visibility does help. Creating strong, central, non-objectified female characters is something that people might look into more.
If a game would be the same with a male lead, why not think about making the lead character a woman? It worked for Metroid. Women like women characters who are strong, interesting, can kick ass, are good-looking (but not hyper-sexualised), are not objectified, but can also maintain their femininity.
In games where you have a party of adventurers, you often see that there’s only one female character, and she’s usually the healer. Gender stereoptypes anyone? Why not make an even number of male and female characters? Why not make the woman the warrior class, and make the male the cleric?
Just more awareness of the presentation and image of the female characters in video games is a step in the right direction. Maybe asking a woman’s opinion on the characters? Marketing surveys perhaps? Pretty obvious, I would think.
Most of the games out there will not appeal to the non-gamer woman just on the basis of most of the marketing (which is possibly the first impression they may be getting), much less the game itself.
When you see even innocuous (e.g. not particularly offensive) adverts on television and in magazines, whom do you generally see playing the game? Men/boys. Women aren’t visibly enjoying video games in the media, so they may assume that it’s a male past time. Vicious circle.
Society does need to change its view of video games and who plays them, no doubt, but it’s not like the industry or even the players are helping to bring about this change. Whenever gamers encounter women, like in MMORPGs, they’re quite often sexually harassed — other gamers hit on them, they get cussed out if they turn down the other gamer, no one believes they are a woman (denying the existence of a gamer is not very welcoming), etc. Of course, that’s assuming that the woman gamer will even let the ‘secret’ out that she’s female. I know of a lot of women who will say that they are male just to avoid the harassment.
Men are subject to harassment in MMORPGs, no doubt, and you could argue that women gamers just need to suck it up, however I think it just discourages women from wanting to experience online gaming if they have bad experiences. And the last time I checked, guys want more women playing games — the reaction one gets in real life when they find out one is a gamer is generally twofold: 1) They don’t believe it at first (which is annoying, because they would never disbelieve that a guy played video games), 2) they think it’s “cool” and your “hotness” level increases because of your hobby, but also sometimes 3) they underestimate and patronise the girl gamer.
And marketing to women is possibly a risk that publishers are not willing to take, nevermind creating women-friendly games. Why put adverts for video games in women’s magazines, when they can have a better return from ad placement in men’s magazines? I would argue that if they had to think about placing video game ads in a woman’s magazine, they sure as hell would increase their sensitivity to what that market looks for in an advertisement and in a game. If you want more women to play games, you need to place marketing where women will see it.
There is a market for girly/pink games and we can’t ignore that some girls do like that sort of stuff. However, girls grow up. And maybe the industry should, too…
May 27th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
Sorry for the long reply. I started and I couldn’t stop.
May 27th, 2005 at 2:48 pm
You must never, ever, apologize for having so much to say on this Blog again! Especially since I agree with everything you have to say. *nirg*
May 27th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
My roommates are both female, I am male (obviously). They’re not avid gamers, but I’ll often catch one of them online playing webgames, or borrowing my SNES to play Super Mario World. The other has been hooked on The Sims and Civilization.
As Brinstar notes, I think female gamers are rare because society says they are. Games aren’t cool. As a result, I think you find that this casual gaming is a lot more common across genders than the industry would like to think.
But in the meantime, it would also help if we recognized that the games with the best chance to hook ANYONE, male or female, and the widest appeal are usually the ones that have a lot of pick-up-and-playability combined with a constant stream of rewards. Games that require you to learn to build long combos, master bizarre button combinations, or figure out obscure logic don’t appeal to females because they don’t apply to most people–and the stereotype (albeit a justified one) is that most games fit that category.
Interesting to me, increasingly as I get older, I also fall into that camp. I don’t have 200 hours to spend to learn how to run a game anymore. I just want to sit down and play.
June 9th, 2005 at 6:08 am
If you’re here from the Carnival, welcome! If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in reading my follow up post, Demographically Incorrect.
June 9th, 2005 at 10:08 am
My wife once said she didn’t like playing games where it boiled down to one army smashing another. Her off-the-cuff serious statement after that was “they should make it so you could just assassinate the other leader if it had to break down to violence.”
I chuckled as I remember a PJ O’Rourke quote that said “If women ruled the world there would be no war–but assassinations would be an all time high.”
My wife and daughter (my rather small example of female game players) prefer “mystery” style games. One of my wife’s favorites was a murder mystery game where the main character was a female police detective. My wife liked it because it required your brain to put the clues together and solve the crime, but at the same time, in the back of her mind she felt if the character HAD to get violent to take care of business she could. It just wasn’t necessary to do so…
June 9th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
Ooh! I love Civilization. And one of the things I love about it is that I don’t have to go to war if I don’t want to. I can set up the game so that there is tons of land and only a handful of civs to compete for it. My personal preference is to win by ways other than domination. Why? I’m not squeamish nor do I have some moral opposition to war. I just think that, in Civ, going to war hurts the efficiency of my cultural progression. I can’t pour my resources into city building and science if I keep having to divert them to kill a pesky neighbor. I prefer to bottle my neighbor up on a tiny piece of land and let him stagnate.
That said, if another civ starts too close to me, I will clobber them. If another civ keeps encroaching on my territory and won’t quit trying to walk through my land, I will destroy them. It’s just that I prefer to build up large numbers of troops and then launch an attack once I have the technological advantage. I quickly (and efficiently) decimate my opponent, then go back to building my cities and infrastructure.
In games, I can fight and I will fight, but it isn’t always my primary interest. If a game involves building, I’d rather build than fight, because I think building is more interesting.
Speaking of MMORPGs and other online activities… I often disguise myself as a male, just to avoid the pests. Being told that I’m really some creepy old man pretending to be a girl is annoying. Endless sexual propositions get old too. On game-related message boards I choose my screen names to mask my gender. I want to talk and be part of the community; I don’t want to spend my time being the novelty. Once people get to know me and respect me, then I’ll sometimes reveal that I’m really a girl. By then they’ve already gotten into the habit of treating me like a fellow gamer. It cuts down on the freakouts and the perverted responses to handle my identity that way.
Of course, pretending to be a guy means that the other guys aren’t holding back on their sexual conversations. Sex talk doesn’t bug me. It’s the pests that keep asking me to cyber that get tiresome. I can completely understand how a girl who isn’t accustomed to rude suggestions from strangers could find the openly-female online experience to be unpleasant.
I have lately been playing World of Warcraft. Out of the habit of masking my gender, my first character was male. Once I’d been playing for awhile I realized that there were a lot of female characters in the game, and that the majority were controlled by guys. I’ve found that, regardless of the gender of a character, most people assume the gamer is a guy. It’s only the new players who think a girl character indicates a real girl. My little brother plays WoW and he made a female character recently, then was horrified when a newb hit on him, thinking he was really a girl. I laughed.
Interestingly, I have found when grouping with other WoW players that the girl gamers are often pretty easy to pick out – they’re the ones who talk more. They tend to make more comments and observations and ask more questions about how the group plans to proceed on a quest. I’m not sure what, if anything, that implies. But I think it’s interesting.
June 10th, 2005 at 4:41 am
I have been a gamer for as long as I can remember, I will play any game I can get my hands on, board, card, or video… The fact that I’m a girl never really seemed to be a big deal until I went to my first convention and saw the sea of boys.
The GM’s at the tables did not know how to deal with me, I had a style different from the males, more….flamboyent, perhaps? Roleplaying with new people became a challenge, but had it’s rewards.
I too, play WoW, and have never hidden the fact that I am a girl, in fact, the guys in my guild all know and treat me no different than any other member, the jerks are easily dealt with by a /ignore command. I stick to the RP servers, PvP is not my style. I will defend the newb areas when some high-lvl jerk is messing with the low-lvls, but for the most part I just want to play my game and not be bothered by the PvP aspect of the game. That is, perhaps, an oddity of mine that springs from being tent-staked in Neverwinter Nights on the PvP persistent worlds, dunno….
January 30th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
[...] There was an excellent post on Man Bytes Blog talking about women and video games the other day. Go read it. [...]