FarmVille
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article7137288.ece What is interesting is who is playing FarmVille. The average age of a FarmVille user is 43 and more likely to be a woman. According to CNN, the ratio of women to men is 60:40. Women are embracing gaming in droves and the success of FarmVille is a reflection of a bigger trend of ‘social or casual gaming’ where you can dip in and out of games as and when you like.
That more or less is in line with my experiences - most of the people I know playing Farmville are women in their late 30s or above. (My mum turns 60 soon.)
I'm interested as to why there's an unusual gender balance here - generally, computer gamers are mostly men. I've tended to find in the past that open-ended games without obvious goals didn't tend to go down well with the women gamers I knew anyway. My mum and sister were both huge fans of the Dizzy games, which involve an egg who wears boxing gloves solving puzzles. It's sort of a pre-cursor to Tomb Raider. Yes. These days, my mum loves Tomb Raider games, but also likes story-led RPGs, like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
Now, obviously, lots of games have flexibility and open-endedness, but Elite and Sim City (two pretty open-ended games) didn't go down well with the female gamers I knew. I don't think I knew any who really got into Roller Coaster Tycoon. On the flip side, The Sims did. You get to build a whole neighbourhood of people if you want, but there's no specific goal, no win condition, no points to score that prove you've done better than last time.
FarmVille feels, to me, more like Sim City, in that at least part of the game can be purely aesthetic - as well as getting a bigger bank-balance so that you can build the sports stadium or buy a combine harvester, there's also some satisfaction in having a nicely laid out city or farm filled with attractive things.
The video-gaming industry is often utterly opaque to me. I have no idea why some things take off and others don't. If I did, I'd be Shigeru Miyamoto, I guess.
That more or less is in line with my experiences - most of the people I know playing Farmville are women in their late 30s or above. (My mum turns 60 soon.)
I'm interested as to why there's an unusual gender balance here - generally, computer gamers are mostly men. I've tended to find in the past that open-ended games without obvious goals didn't tend to go down well with the women gamers I knew anyway. My mum and sister were both huge fans of the Dizzy games, which involve an egg who wears boxing gloves solving puzzles. It's sort of a pre-cursor to Tomb Raider. Yes. These days, my mum loves Tomb Raider games, but also likes story-led RPGs, like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
Now, obviously, lots of games have flexibility and open-endedness, but Elite and Sim City (two pretty open-ended games) didn't go down well with the female gamers I knew. I don't think I knew any who really got into Roller Coaster Tycoon. On the flip side, The Sims did. You get to build a whole neighbourhood of people if you want, but there's no specific goal, no win condition, no points to score that prove you've done better than last time.
FarmVille feels, to me, more like Sim City, in that at least part of the game can be purely aesthetic - as well as getting a bigger bank-balance so that you can build the sports stadium or buy a combine harvester, there's also some satisfaction in having a nicely laid out city or farm filled with attractive things.
The video-gaming industry is often utterly opaque to me. I have no idea why some things take off and others don't. If I did, I'd be Shigeru Miyamoto, I guess.