You’ve probably not heard about the FragDolls, a team of women gamers who were formed by a video game publisher to promote their games amongst women. Not content with being just another bunch of marketing girls, the FragDolls have actually made their stake in multiplayer games and have a record to boot. Today there are a lot of website that are run by and for women gamers (womengamers.com, gamergirlz.com to name a few)
Another bit of trivia may also shock you; according to a Nielsen Entertainment report, 64% of the online gamers in the US are women.
So are video games losing its image as a male dominated activity? If yes, then why is it that most girlfriends and wives secretly wish that your console or PC caught fire? There exists a very large disconnect between women and video games. Perhaps it is best to critically analyze what makes or breaks a video game experience for women.
Video games by nature are interactive and provide immediate feedback to the actions that the player performs. With the incorporation of online modes, games are now trying to weave a social web around the game experiences, thereby adding elements of social interaction, character building and more importantly, bragging rights.
A research paper on women and video gaming (one amongst the many on the subject) written by a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, speaks about the fact that most girls have an inherent ‘disadvantage’ of not having access to gaming in their youth, as the console was always in the boys room. The broad theory about psychological based gender difference also plays a huge part as it is generally considered that most women abhor combative or what may be construed as violence in video games. A girl is more likely to negotiate her way through a stand off rather than pull off a M4 Carbine and go trigger happy.
A lot of games today also tend to focus more on the ‘alpha male’ premise for their games; after all these are specifically marketed towards a typical guy gamer who’d like nothing more than to get at the bad guys. While there are some hardcore women gamers who may enjoy gratuitous and wanton killing sprees, more complex games that require a series of quests, actions and puzzles are what one would call ‘unisex games’.
Role playing games and real time strategy games may be more suited to women due its multiplicity of actions. That being said a single player game like MGS4, is the perfect example of an action game that can covert a non-gamer into a fan. I know from personal experience that my better half was teary eyed in a scene which portrayed a guy proposing marriage between a massive firefight involving what seemed to be a barrage of soldiers out to get them!
Women gamers would like to make an impact in the way the characters in the game are linked with each other. On one extreme we have a game like GTAIV, for which after a going on a date, the game gives an option to ‘Try your luck”!, possibly the most stupid way to depict taking a relationship forward. Contrast this with Mass Effect, which successfully executes a love-triangle-maneuvering love affair between the protagonist and a female or male friend, depending on what gender you chose in the beginning.
Women may be from venus and men from mars but they sure seem to be in the same galaxy when it comes to their love for games!
