Girls and computer games
Youtube: How to make video games more appealing to the female audience.
(I'd embed the video, because it's interesting and fun to watch, but it's not giving me the option for livejournal, for some reason.)
I watched this yesterday, and found it very interesting. But the thing about the video, I think, is that it's still written from a male perspective. The unstated assumption is that if girls would just try games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto they would like them as much as the guys do. Now, I'm no gaming expert, but I do like a bit of computer gaming on occasion. The games I have played and enjoyed have been the Lego games, wii fit, Super Mario, Sing star, Lost Wind, Diablo 2, Neverwinter Nights, Rock Band/Guitar Hero...
On the other hand, I don't enjoy first person shooters, I don't generally like driving games, and to be honest I got a bit bored with Portal. Games like Grand Theft Auto and even Fallout just don't appeal to me at all. But guys like them. Logically speaking there must be something about them that is capable of making men feel excited and challenged by them that's passing me by. I don't know what it is -- I genuinely can't see the appeal of virtually running people over or walking through a landscape continually shooting mutants. So it seems to me that what women want is a completely different kind of game. And we're starting to see that emerging.
What I want in a game is the feeling that it's doing something for me. That might be helping me gain skills like Guitar Hero or Wii Fit. It might be helping me socially, like multiplayer role-play based games do. It might be challenging me to think in a new way. Or it might have a story, a feeling of progression, like the Mario games. What I don't want is blood, guts, flashing lights and repetitive gameplay. Neither do I want a post-apocalyptic or cyberpunk setting: generally speaking I find both to be either bland and boring or emptily-melodramatic, so to speak.
The same issue could be said to apply to teenage boys and English. You often hear boys saying "I don't like reading", which is, generally speaking, nonsense. You might just as well say that you don't like looking at things, or walking, or breathing. Reading is an abstract, and there are a multitude of things that you can read which different people will get different amounts of pleasure and challenge from. Me, I like reading novels. Over time, I've learned a lot about the different sort of novels that might appeal to me. Luckily for me, school English focussed almost exclusively on reading fiction -- novels, plays and poems. Had they focussed instead on a weekly analysis of the sports headlines I would likely have struggled. English teacher after English teacher has pulled their hair out thinking that they've tried the boys on disaster novels, romance novels and mystery novels and they haven't liked any of them, so that's it, there's nothing more to be done for them. The idea of getting them to read textbooks, newspapers, biographies or similar simply isn't considered. If they don't like classic novels, they conclude, they'll never read anything.
At the moment there seems to be a hierarchy of games, with casual and social gaming firmly on the bottom such that they barely count as proper games: just as English teachers have formed a hierarchy of the written word that places non-fiction on the bottom. But the hierarchy in both cases is clearly imaginary. Getting enjoyment out of celebrity biography isn't somehow less worthy than sitting down to some Jane Austen, and neither is spending hours playing Pokemon or the Sims less worthy than Fallout. They're just different ways to spend leisure time.
It comes back to something I've said in the past, which is that it's telling that there are far more male winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature than female. Women have been underrepresented in science historically, so just by statistics you'd expect prizes for science to go overwhelmingly to men. But women have been quite likely to be writers historically speaking. So statistically they have a far higher chance of getting a Nobel prize for literature. But mostly the prizes go to men. But is this because the men write better literature or is it simply that over the years of the male-dominated society we've been conditioned into thinking that men do literature and women do novels and children's fiction? Or do men write for the men, and the judging panel tends to be male dominated?
Even through all this, though, I still think far too few games have a two-player option. Want me to play more games? Then let me share my gaming time with friends and family.
(I'd embed the video, because it's interesting and fun to watch, but it's not giving me the option for livejournal, for some reason.)
I watched this yesterday, and found it very interesting. But the thing about the video, I think, is that it's still written from a male perspective. The unstated assumption is that if girls would just try games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto they would like them as much as the guys do. Now, I'm no gaming expert, but I do like a bit of computer gaming on occasion. The games I have played and enjoyed have been the Lego games, wii fit, Super Mario, Sing star, Lost Wind, Diablo 2, Neverwinter Nights, Rock Band/Guitar Hero...
On the other hand, I don't enjoy first person shooters, I don't generally like driving games, and to be honest I got a bit bored with Portal. Games like Grand Theft Auto and even Fallout just don't appeal to me at all. But guys like them. Logically speaking there must be something about them that is capable of making men feel excited and challenged by them that's passing me by. I don't know what it is -- I genuinely can't see the appeal of virtually running people over or walking through a landscape continually shooting mutants. So it seems to me that what women want is a completely different kind of game. And we're starting to see that emerging.
What I want in a game is the feeling that it's doing something for me. That might be helping me gain skills like Guitar Hero or Wii Fit. It might be helping me socially, like multiplayer role-play based games do. It might be challenging me to think in a new way. Or it might have a story, a feeling of progression, like the Mario games. What I don't want is blood, guts, flashing lights and repetitive gameplay. Neither do I want a post-apocalyptic or cyberpunk setting: generally speaking I find both to be either bland and boring or emptily-melodramatic, so to speak.
The same issue could be said to apply to teenage boys and English. You often hear boys saying "I don't like reading", which is, generally speaking, nonsense. You might just as well say that you don't like looking at things, or walking, or breathing. Reading is an abstract, and there are a multitude of things that you can read which different people will get different amounts of pleasure and challenge from. Me, I like reading novels. Over time, I've learned a lot about the different sort of novels that might appeal to me. Luckily for me, school English focussed almost exclusively on reading fiction -- novels, plays and poems. Had they focussed instead on a weekly analysis of the sports headlines I would likely have struggled. English teacher after English teacher has pulled their hair out thinking that they've tried the boys on disaster novels, romance novels and mystery novels and they haven't liked any of them, so that's it, there's nothing more to be done for them. The idea of getting them to read textbooks, newspapers, biographies or similar simply isn't considered. If they don't like classic novels, they conclude, they'll never read anything.
At the moment there seems to be a hierarchy of games, with casual and social gaming firmly on the bottom such that they barely count as proper games: just as English teachers have formed a hierarchy of the written word that places non-fiction on the bottom. But the hierarchy in both cases is clearly imaginary. Getting enjoyment out of celebrity biography isn't somehow less worthy than sitting down to some Jane Austen, and neither is spending hours playing Pokemon or the Sims less worthy than Fallout. They're just different ways to spend leisure time.
It comes back to something I've said in the past, which is that it's telling that there are far more male winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature than female. Women have been underrepresented in science historically, so just by statistics you'd expect prizes for science to go overwhelmingly to men. But women have been quite likely to be writers historically speaking. So statistically they have a far higher chance of getting a Nobel prize for literature. But mostly the prizes go to men. But is this because the men write better literature or is it simply that over the years of the male-dominated society we've been conditioned into thinking that men do literature and women do novels and children's fiction? Or do men write for the men, and the judging panel tends to be male dominated?
Even through all this, though, I still think far too few games have a two-player option. Want me to play more games? Then let me share my gaming time with friends and family.