“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.
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