Cerise Magazine

May 2007 Issue

Features

• From the Editors
• Craft Check: Make Your Own Miniatures

Articles

• 5 Steps to Attract Girl Gamers
  Author: Latoya Peterson

Latoya gives game designers five simple suggestions for tapping into a greater share of the potential female video gamer market.

• Playing With Patriarchy
  Author: Natalie Hill

Is video gaming a "boys' club"? Natalie looks at what casual misogyny can do to girl and women gamers.

• Lagging Behind
  Author: Lindsey Galloway

What games do girls want to play? Lindsey takes a look at the "Girls' Games Movement" and the future of gender in games.

• Girls Don't Play Video Games
  Author: Nick Cummings

Do girls play video games? Nick revisits this myth and talks about why it may be more damaging than it first appears.

Reviews

• Final Fantasy III
  by Ariel Wetzel

 

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There has been much ado in the gaming industry about the state of gaming, particularly in reference to how to attract girl gamers. Designers are racking their brains on how to expand the market to include women without realizing that women are already in the gaming market – and have been for quite some time. The ideas disconnect between designers and players once a company gets the misguided idea that they need to create a “girl-friendly” game to attract female players. Glitter-strewn chaos ensues. So how is a game designer supposed to know what girls want to play? The answers are simple: girls just want to have games. Good games. The 5 steps below will put you on the path to designing a game that is well received by the X-chromosome crowd.

1. Make a Good Game

This step seems so basic, and yet it is often overlooked by game designers. With the increased emphasis on cute characters, pink packaging, and marketing, it is no wonder that the actual content of a game gets lost. Girl gamers are exactly that – gamers. Many of us cut our teeth playing as male characters in games like Contra, Tekken, and Final Fantasy, but it was not the design of the character that drew us to the game – it was the quality of game-play. Does your game have a good story, a well developed plotline, characters that inspire empathy and enough game-play hours to make sitting down at my console an enjoyable experience? If not, take it back to the drawing board.

Playing to stereotypical female interests like shopping, fashion, and singing will net a small section of the women who like to play video games – but most women gamers look for quality of game play before plunking down $50 for the latest releases.

2. Give the Characters a Personality

For far too long, women characters in video games have been narrowly developed side characters – sexual conquests, damsels in distress, or treacherous femme fatales. These three basic archetypes are manifested again and again in popular games, leading to dissatisfied female players who are either turned off by the characters outright or who find that they cannot relate to the rigid definition of femininity these characters portray. The solution to this one is simple – your girl characters need another dimension to their personality. Think outside of the basic stereotypes featured in games. What types of women do you admire? Can a character be vulnerable and strong at the same time?

One of the first games I remember playing to the very end was the original Tekken. I picked up as recreation, something that my cousins and I did over long weekends. However, I was quickly driven to fight through the entire game as every character and spent the greater part of a weekend glued to the sofa in the basement. What drove me to commit that amount of time to conquering a fighting game?

It was the storyline – each character was given an individual back-story and reasons for participating in the competition, and the only way to discover the ending to the story was to keep playing. I felt so much empathy with the characters that I went on to purchase the next three installments of the Tekken franchise – after all, how could I abandon the characters I had invested in? Their stories became as real to me as characters in my favorite novels. A cool decade later, I can still remember with eerie clarity exactly how the graveyard scene between Nina and Anna played out as they both visited their deceased father.

3. Realize that Girl Gamers Are Not All Alike

Browsing through video game recommendations, I came across a list created by John Grover, the Software and Video Games Editor for Amazon.com. He created an entire list entitled “Games for Girls.” Unfortunately, the list was a mere six items long and included the following: The Sims 2 (Mac), The Sims 2 (PC), The Sims 2 University Expansion Pack, Katamari Damacy, Animal Crossing, and Zoo Tychoon 2.

Notice anything?

While many girls enjoy playing the games indicated, Grover omitted just about everything that was not a character-driven or puzzle-driven game. Women do play violent video games – the Grand Theft Auto series, for example, boasts quite a few female fans. Girl gamers also like first person shooters – the Halo, Tomb Raider, and Perfect Dark series are well-represented in my friends’ collections.

Where are the Massive Multiplayer Online Games? I suppose to men like Grover, girls just aren’t interested in World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy Online, or any of the myriad other online worlds that are quickly becoming the future of interactive gaming.

And where are the RPGs?

The entire Final Fantasy series has fans of both genders, and routinely features an entire cast of complex and playable characters. Particularly considering the popularity of Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2 (a game in which the three primary characters were all women), it is odd that the list omits this series. The omission is even stranger when you consider the date of the list – last updated in 2005, the list was created after the documented popularity of Final Fantasy X and X-2 (Final Fantasy X-2 was released in 2003).

The list is also conspicuously devoid of driving games (think Burnout, Midnight Club, and MarioKart: Double Dash), fantasy games (like BloodRayne and Devil May Cry), fighting games (Tekken, Dead or Alive, Smash Bros.) and action-horror games (like Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness, Fatal Frame, and Resident Evil).

The conclusion? Like many male gamers, Grover created a list of games he thought women would like without actually considering what women are playing.

Note to male gamers: We play the same games that you do. No pink displays needed.

4. Create (Physically) Strong Female Characters

There is no reason to keep disadvantaging female characters in video games. Across genres, female characters are consistently weaker than their male counterparts. We are restricted to working around strength and employing other tactics for survival – female characters tend to have more developed magic ability, feminized weapons, healing prowess, or increased agility and speed. Quite often, this leads to male players of video games eschewing female fighting characters outright – and mocking female players who choose to do battle with a character who is obviously inferior.

Take a lesson from Samus, Laura Croft, and Joanna Dark. Women can hold their own in battle – provided they aren’t impaired by high heels and miniskirts.

5. Start Preparing Now

A recent study by the Canada-based Media Awareness Network states that 70% of video game players for console systems are male. This means that 30% of gamers are female – and that number continues to grow every day. So start doing the research now. What games are girls playing? What kind of characters do they like to see? Finding the answers to these questions is much easier than it seems, particularly with the popularity of websites like www.1up.com, www.gamegirladvance.com, and www.ign.com. An intrepid game designer could easily check the message boards and user profiles to find out what games women are playing, why they enjoy them, and what they are looking for in a game.

To conclude, the great “girl gamer mystery” is anything but – the “mystery” can be chalked up to the male-dominated industry assuming they know what women want to play, and pandering to tired female stereotypes which attract the wrong types of players. Industry members need to wake up – you already have a loyal, invested group of game aficionados right in front of you. We are in the arcades, at anime conventions, sucking up our bandwidth, and planning our next rentals on Gamefly. We want to buy your games – all we need you to do is listen.