The Games Girls Play

Dad stumbled across this article and sent it to me. Nothing overly new in it - people have been talking about how the game industry is failing women for years. But this one has some interesting - and at least from the perspective of this particular woman - ridiculous things in it.

This particular line of quotes by David Gardner COO for EA's Worldwide Studios really gets under my skin:

"The movie industry doesn't just make films for boys.

"Star wars was the biggest film of all time until Titanic came along; Titanic became the biggest because women went to see it and women went to see it multiple times.

"Just boys saw Star Wars multiple times."

Really? What a crock. First off, I've seen Star Wars more times than I can count - all of them, even the crappy recent ones. And I've never seen Titanic.

Now that you've picked yourself up off the floor, I suppose I can own up to the fact that I've tried to watch Titanic. But seriously, what drivel. Boring drivel at that. I can almost stay awake until they're on the boat, but after that, snooze city. (On the positive side, I have a proven cure for insomnia.)

So, a man who makes rampant gender based generalizations is going to be able to revolutionize the gaming industry by making games that are geared toward women? Maybe he and Lawrence Summers should get together and have lunch to come up with marketing ideas.

Mr. Gardner does go on to say that women don't want pink games based on shopping and make-up, but his determination for that is not that those just aren't good game concepts, it's that they haven't been successful in the past. To me, that means he thought those were pretty much what girls wanted and he's only been proven wrong by a poor sales record and not a fundamental flaw in the thought process of game designers.

He goes on to talk about The Sims, a game that is very successful with both genders but that does seem to attract women more than most games. Unfortunately, he then makes another big foot-in-the-mouth generalization about why: "The Sims is really a game about relationships - and that's what girls want - they want relationships, they want to be able to chat."

Maybe in relation to The Sims that's correct - but I seriously hope that EA isn't going to start pinning their hopes on games that require relationships as their thought process for capturing the interest of female gamers. How many relationship games do you need?

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a big gamer - and part of that is due to the fact that the games that are out there just don't capture my interest. I'm not into military shoot-em-ups (be they aliens or elves or whatever), part of that is because I personally stink at that kind of strategizing. But I don't think that's a particularly gender-based thing, my sister rocks at military games as do a number of other women who I know. Personally I like puzzle-type games - the CSI games have all been very fun (if a tad predictable), JewelQuest was fun, I'm playing NiBiRu right now and it's mostly interesting (though there are some serious UI issues, it's definitely not a cutting edge game). I do like some strategy games - I adore Civ IV (if you turn off the war parts). I've even enjoyed the games in the Thief series.

But here's the other thing - a game that's billed as a game for girls is just going to turn me off from the get-go. How patronizing is that? Unless they're going to start explicitly marking all the games on the shelves as being for boys, we don't need games explicitly marked as being for girls. Create unique games that don't suck and your market will follow.