Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Game developers have been scratching their heads over the woman-gamer question for several years now. Freud's somewhat flippant question just won't go away: "What do women want?"
There are in fact a lot of women playing Web-based games online, on sites like Electronic Arts' pogo.com or Microsoft's zone.com. Virtual world community There.com also claims that over 60 percent of its player base is female -- and comparable numbers are cited for "Arkadium" and "The Sims Online" -- all online games requiring fairly high levels of social skills.
But the wave of high-profile, massively multiplayer role-playing games that debuted this year was supposed to bring in unprecedented numbers of female gamers, and that just didn't happen. Neither of the most-anticipated online games, "The Sims Online" and "Star Wars Galaxies," did anywhere near as well as expected. People signed on and quit when the games didn't fulfill their expectations. Did they launch too early, with not enough features? Did people just run out of time or money? Were women uninterested?
Some observers think too much is being made of the supposedly bad showing by the marquee games. "I think any perceived failure is probably just hype fatigue," says Julian Dibbell, author of "My Tiny Life," an account of Dibbell's adventures in an early online role-playing game. "True, massively multiplayer online games don't seem to have taken over the world's leisure life the way the approach of TSO and SWG led some people to expect, and I guess that's a sort of a failure. [But] the total number just keeps growing -- Final Fantasy XI just added 300K to the mix with no appreciable drop-off in other games' numbers."
It's possible that as the multiplayer online space slowly grows, it will be populated by more and more women. But mainstream console games -- the big moneymakers in the business -- fail again and again to attract significant numbers of female players. One obvious factor is the lack of female influence in the highest echelons of game development and design. There are a handful, but they are not yet enough to balance out the boy culture that still rules nearly every aspect of video game design, development, publishing and promoting.
Girls do want to play games. Lifelong gamer Souris Hong-Porretta says she has simple requirements for what she wants to play: "Good game play, something that can be picked up by either sex and is fun to play is good enough for me."
But the advertisers aren't looking for her. Robin Hunicke, a gamer-geek-girl getting her Ph.D. in computer science at Northwestern University has been studying video games -- formally and casually -- for most of her life. "Most advertised games tend to fall into the shooter and sports categories," she noted. "I think it's a marketing problem. It certainly promotes the conventional-wisdom stereotypes about games and gamers."
It's an image problem that we run into again and again -- games are for geeks, games are for boys, games are violent. Games are not advertised in magazines that women might read, nor placed in areas where women might come across them. Games are not for women. It's less a development failure than a P.R. and promotions failure.
And as far as games that directly target women go, many girl gamers and gaming women express outright horror at the idea of the Barbified games.
"It's tricky because if the developers think about games for women, most are tied to a publisher who would have some heavy market research saying we needed things like pink and ponies," explained Hong-Porretta.
She knows what she's talking about: Hong-Porretta recently co-founded the independent game development studio Invasiv in New York. She personally doesn't care much for ponies and pink. She would rather play "Counter-Strike" than "Lizzy McGuire: On the Go!"
But that's the problem with market research -- it's great at telling you what has been successful, less good at telling you what could be. Has true innovation ever come out of any focus-group session?
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