“I am a 29 year old woman and I love the Sims”, Anna whispered to me. I was out in HMV the other day observing and chatting to female gamers, when Anna whispered this to me. As a fellow woman, also starting to break the cliches and get into gaming, I asked Anna why she was whispering. She told me that she was embarrassed.
Embarrassed because first and foremost, she was a girl gamer (it was like she was telling me she had a drug addiction or regularly beat her children) and secondly, the Sims- well that was for kids wasn’t it? This one sentence was so insightful. This is the way that many women I have spoken to feel about gaming. That its not their right to game. That it is something that should be discussed in corridors and whispered rather than actively debated and discussed.
This is astonishing when you consider that according to a Daily Telegraph survey, more women than men play games between the ages of 24-35 – that is if you include mobile and online gaming. And women aren’t just playing the Sims. World of Warcraft is now evenly split between men and women. And according to EA, even macho driving-games like “Burnout” are showing an increase in female players.
As a thirty something mum, I went into some games stores to see what the retail environment was like and whether it was appealing to women. With the exception of Hamley’s, it was quite an intimidating experience, mostly full of gothic-looking men in a fug of sweat.
I asked a few sales people what games I could play as a novice gamer for my DS Lite: Although, they were friendly enough, the choice they offered to me was Bratz or Brain Training. Surely there is more to games than having an imaginary pet or who wanted to train her brain, not according to London’s game store shopping assistants. I walked away feeling disillusioned.
When I spoke to Anna, her face lit up when she spoke about gaming. Contrary to recieved opinion, she told me she was a ‘basher and shooter,’ that is her favourite genres of games were not at all the ones that women are supposed to love. She had been playing games since she was a teenager. It was ‘her’ thing. It made her feel alive. It was her “me-time”.
Anna isn’t a one-off. There are thousands of wealthy working women who feel exactly the same as she does. These women want games to play on the way to a board–meeting, not just games intended for a pinked-up teen bedroom.
It occurs to me that this perception about the appropriateness of gaming is one of the biggest barriers that prevent women buying the games they secretly desire. I’m sure games companies have the resources to deal with it, but the question is do they have the will? The entire games sales and marketing channel is still focused around teenage to twenty-something men.
To shake-up this channel will require games producers, retailers and marketers to transform this dirty little secret into inspirational form of recreation.
Gender and gaming is a fascinating topic. I recently read an article in Psychological Science. The article reported on an experiment in which people had to spot the ‘odd one out’. Like previous research, this study showed a sex difference with men having a higher success rate (68%) than women (55%).
This seems to be pretty much in line with the belief about spatial tasks in which men are said to perform better than women. For instance women are slower and make more mistakes when mentally rotating objects. However this is not the case for women trained in the natural sciences who are as good as men in these areas. It is also notable that women and men use different strategies to navigate. Men prefer maps while women navigate based on landmarks, which means that it may be rather a question of how good navigation is assessed and which way of assessing this skill is accepted as norm.
Returning to this study, the researchers could have left it at this having confirmed a gender stereotype. What they did instead was to let them play video games. One group played a video game called ‘Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault’ while the other group played ‘Balance’, a non-action puzzle game. While the latter group did not improve their performance, the ones who played ‘Medal of Honor’ did much better in the spatial task test. What was staggering was that women improved their performance more than men and that the sex differences found earlier vanished altogether. These effects were the same when people were tested again after five months.
As biologists and neuroscientists point out our brains are shaped by genes but also by upbringing. The different games girls and boys play may have to do with different brain structures developing. The social construction that boys play violent games and girls non-action games might in conclusion lead to the expression of greater sex differences in spatial tasks. The fact that women are confined to have dirty little secrets when playing video games, is a way in which gender stereotypes are reiterated and re-enacted.
Its a really valid point that men and women use different strategies to navigate. This came out in my study. When men shop for technology/games, it is much more of a pre-determined purpose. They know what model and brand they want. Fifty per cent of women I spoke to had no brand or model or manufacturer in mind when buying technology (Saatchi/Jupiter study). This has massive implications for brands as women’s expectations when tech or gaming shopping are very different. Women want to browse, touch, feel and experiment. Its much more of a holistic experience for women. And its not currently being met by brands.
Stereotypes have been the cause of so many issues in industry today. I mean take this weekend for example. Someone I know bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3. And they also bought Viva Pignata, Lego Starwars and Kameo…. now the question I would ask is what assumption have you just made about what gender they are… Be honest.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
OK they were a guy… they bought Halo 3 for themselves and Lego Starwars for themselves and the other two games were for their girlfriend. The point is that certain things scream male or female. The one games console to me that screams female is the Wii, because of it’s unique interactivity. It’s so intuitive. Women I find in the tech industry tend to air towards well designed and interfaced games, applications and systems. They don’t like over complication and excess for the sake of it. This may be why some games appeal to one group over another.
Great post and definitely thought provoking.
I think Viva Piniata was released for the wrong platform – it might have done well as a family game on Wii, but Rare are Microsofts bee-atch now so I guess it’s going to be Xbox from now on.
Is anybody else getting very sick of the glut of mini-game compilations being marketed at all consoles. I’m talking about ‘Raving Rabbids’ and ‘Mario Party’ type games.
Why is it that games are either ’snack’ (i.e. the ones you can play for 5 minutes) or epic (the ones where game sessions last hours at a time and take weeks to copmplete). What about the middle-ground, a game that you can pick up and play for a couple of days and still get some kind of satisfaction for completing.
We have plenty of short stories, and a shelf-full of novels, but what about the much neglected Novella form – know what I mean?