Lookspring » Balancing Act

The conversation I most dread is the one that starts: ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but it’s quite…unusual that you’re a woman.’ My smartypants answer is that is perfectly usual for me, thank you very much, but I’m sympathetic to the point being made. Women are still a minority amongst conventional gamers, and it’s rarer still for those women to make gaming their job. But while I agree it’s a fair point that I’m in an unusual position, I still dread the questions that follow it. I have no good explanation for what it is that drew me to gaming. I still don’t know if I saw something in gaming that most women don’t notice but would like if they did, or if games found something in me that most women don’t have and wouldn’t want if they could. I’m profoundly uncomfortable being asked to be a spokesman for 51% of the world’s population, especially since the only thing we know about me for sure is that I’m an oddity.

But the commercial necessity behind better exploiting that 51% remains, so the question is going to keep coming up. And from now on, I’m going to answer it by referring people to ‘Is There Anything Good About Men?’, a paper given at the American Psychological Association’s annual conference by Dr Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University. In it, he suggests that most cultures are equally, but differently, exploitative of men and women, leading to a situation where men are more attuned to wide, distributed networks that reward competition and specialisation, and women prize small, intimate social networks which thrive on co-operation and generalisation. You’re bound to disagree with some or all of his points, but it’s well worth a read – it’s long, but light – and got me thinking in some new ways about game design.

What’s particularly interesting to me is that the gender imbalance he describes is evident even in the way that very conversation tends to go: women who ask me about how I got started in games follow up with small-scale social questions – how have I been treated, do I encounter prejudice, am I self-conscious when playing in front of a male audience. The men get very rapidly side-tracked on to specialist, general-scale questions. If I mention Dungeon Master as being the first moment when games took over my life, women ask me how my parents felt about my new hobby, or if it brought me greater acceptance among male friends. Men, on hearing this news, are more likely to move on to wondering whatever happened to FTL, or whether or not I’d ever tried completing it with only one character.

So allowing that I find the root of Baumeister’s argument plausible, what does it mean for the great Girls In Games debate? In asking why more women don’t play games, we worried a lot, initially, about surface things – boy-games were too violent, too lasers-and-robots. What we needed was girl-games about shopping, horses and make-up! Now, thankfully, we’ve moved a little past that (despite the fact that games about shopping, horses and make-up do seem to be proving particularly successful with young female consumers, particularly on the DS), and are looking at important external factors. So we’ve noted that for games to be attractive to women they need to be available on hardware they feel comfortable with, and offer play-patterns that are compatible with busy, often fragmented lives.

But what Baumeister’s paper makes me think about is whether or not we’re neglecting an examination of more basic gameplay issues. Does his thesis suggest that women would be more comfortable with a game which had a small cast of characters than either none or many? Does his theory that women see less advantage in specialisation mean that they’ll be alienated by the common RPG mechanic where levelling-up in one field disables your potential in another? Should risk-reward ratios be normalised – smaller risks for smaller rewards – for games aimed at girls rather than boys? By which I mean, could you produce a functionally identical game – same visuals, same interface, same goals, same structures – but tune it to appeal more to one gender or another?

And, actually, Dungeon Master might not be a bad place to start. Would women prefer it if the initial character choice was smaller? Would they enjoy exploring more if the mazes were more compact, but contained more hidden detail? Would they warm more to a levelling-up system that was fuelled by the characters’ interactions (rather like Disgaea 2′s spell-learning system, where characters can learn magic by osmosis, simply by standing near their spell-casting father-figures). Would they (oh, the hate-mail) like it better if it was easier?

Actually, in a transparent attempt to divert you from your poison pen, I’m going to point you to Return To Chaos, a Windows port of Dungeon Master, for those too impatient to find it for Steem, or those too lazy to unearth their ST from the attic. Don’t hesitiate to play it if you haven’t before, and if you have, don’t worry about whether your fond memories of it will survive having their rose-tinted spectacles ripped off. It hasn’t aged a button.

8 Comments so far

I fully agree with your comment that games possibly need to allow for women’s busy, fragmented lives. I’ve had to give up on games I’ve enjoyed because they don’t have regular opportunities to save. I lost an hour or more Genji DotB because I couldn’t find a save point I could get to and the children needed feedung (pesky kids lol). Games like Oblivion are the best as I can save when and where I want. Designers take note – pretty please

Perhaps it’s not the types of games or hardware we should be looking at, but the reasons for wanting to play a videogame in the first place.

I think the main reason we had so few female gamers when the industry first started up was because the technology wasn’t there to allow them to socialise so gaming was mostly a solitary affair. Now that we have online capabilities, instant messaging, comms, even cross-platform capabilities there are a whole spectrum of socialising opportunities, World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI might be good examples to cite.

I think we can thank Nintendo for going a long way to improving things, they’ve tapped into something but I’m still not sure what that something is. I have a sneaky suspicion it’s along the lines of ‘Get ‘em while they’re young’ but there’s something else going on too; perhaps it’s just clever marketing and I’m reading too much into it, or perhaps the Wii and WiFi capablities have really kicked off the social aspects of gaming this generation.

I think the main factor nowadays is the ability to communicate and socialise. As this feature is further enabled by technology the current ratio of male gamers to female gamers might sort itself out.

Whatever the outcome I think male gamers will continue to be just as diverse in what games they choose to play as female gamers will, so trying to nail the problem is always going to be tricky. Even worse, I think we’re also going to continue to be just as diverse in our reasons for playing games in the first place, which makes the problem a nightmare.

On a side note:

There’s a short article floating about on the internet entitled “The Mystery of Girls and Horses” by Caterina Tadlock, highly recommended if you’re looking for more obscure reasons why games like Pippa Funnell series get such a disproportionate girls to boys following. I found the article fascinating because it was written from a horse lover’s perspective, not a gamer’s. (I was reading it because I’m a horse lover and found it when trying to help someone with a Pippa Funnell walkthrough because I’m a gamer).

And on a further sidenote: Great blog, keep up the good work!

This is a really interesting post. I tend to get treated by work colleagues as though I have something wrong with me mentally, as a woman in her thirties who is also a gamer, whereas male gamers of the same age do not raise an eyebrow. I don’t fit the usual stereotype for women gamers, though, as, liking my games violent and bloody, I’m currently spitting feathers that Manhunt II has not been given a certificate and am the most anti-social player on WoW, which perhaps goes to show that gamemakers should beware of making too many assumptions about gender differences between gamers.

I own a small Gaming Centre, where people who don’t own the latest and greatest games, or don’t have the latest must-have hardware, and I find that although I have a mostly-male clientele for the games I provide, I do have a significant proportion of women gamers.
I prefer a light touch in dealing with my customers – a word here or there in dealing with the over-noisy or offensive, and I find that my customers like it.
I do not judge what games people like, instead telling every one when a new game comes into the store – even if they don’t play that genre.
I find the women to be quite bloodthirsty once they realise we males don’t mind!
I find the women to be very competitive when you find the right prize, and they have a great time socialising with games.
I think the divide over games can be down to marketing – think of how many Lara’s and Samus Aran’s there are on posters wearing next to nothing – and only when you get down to what a game is (an interactive medium that allows you to explore it in a way that book and film can’t) that the distinctions of gender fade away and become personal preference.

>>Does his theory that women see less advantage in specialisation mean that they’ll be alienated by the common RPG mechanic where levelling-up in one field disables your potential in another?

YES!!!!

OK, maybe that’s just me, but I’ve been hacking pen-and-paper D&D for decades now to get away from this.

It used to be said that men “compartmentalized;” now it’s said that women “multi-task.” Whatever. I know that during 48-hour Civ3 or Civ4 marathons, I was the only one constantly shelling out to check my email, read my boards, play FreeCell. All the guys stayed on focus (and I always came in 2nd out of 5).

And I second the request to let players save at any time. It’s crucial.

[...] games for women, they ask your opinion. [Former EDGE editor-in-chief] Margaret Robertson mentioned on her blog that she’s uncomfortable with being the spokesperson for 51% of the world’s population. [...]

FantasyMeister, I am the author of the article you mentioned. If you could tell me where you have seen my article “floating around” I would greately appreciate it. It should not be published anywhere other thant http://www.ultimatehorsesite.com. thank you.

You write very well.

TrackBack

Leave a comment
Your email address will never be displayed. Basic HTML allowed.