Triple-A Games for Women?

Triple-A Games for Women?

A fine evening to you mortals.

So, as stated in my previous post, I've been reading the Gamasutra article "Triple-A Games for Women? Seriously?" written by Ernest Adams.

Ignoring my personal irritation at what appear to be wild and unjustified accusations made toward video game marketing researchers, let's jump into this one without looking first and answer the question provided:

What do women want from games? How does this differ from men?

Well, according to Brandii Grace, the article's interviewee, women want games which offer more in the way of emotional conflict, as opposed to the direct conflict so popular among male gamers. And they certainly are popular; just look at more or less any popular core game over the last few years, violence and other direct conflict is fun in games. Guns, swords, armies fighting armies, people being killed left right and centre, core games are typically a very violent part of the media.

However, can we be certain that games with emotional content are what female gamers would play? This is somewhat hard to tell by looking at video games; most video games have a certain level of anonymity, making it hard to tell if any one player is male or female, unless they grab a headset and start talking to other people playing the game, at which point they are instantly treated differently by many players because she is female.

Video games are also very much a male-dominated medium, as this piece of science shows:

Now, this fact sheet shows an estimation of the male to female ratio of people playing games, and roughly how much time each side of the demographic spends playing games. As you can see, males typically form the majority of both, very significantly, in the case of younger males in the case of time spent gaming.

So, if we can't draw any solid, dependable conclusions from this media, the next best thing is to look at a similar media and work it out from there. Movies are about as close to video games as we could wish for in this case; action movies, like action games, are very popular to male movie-watchers, as with science-fiction, horror, and sport (though of course, popularity is usually on a film-to-film basis, rather than overall genres).

So, if the same genres and themes are popular between video games and movies for men, we can assume that the same could well be true for women.

Let's look at some films which are popular among women, and the themes replicable in video games.

Number one, Twilight. No getting around it, this film series was popular among the ladies. The most major theme employed by the Twilight series was, of course, romance, probably the most emotional of all film genres. Other themes include mystery, action (to a lesser extent), and drama. So, overall, a very emotions-based series.

Another popular film among women was The Notebook (apparently). Again, just from reading the IMDb brief on this, I can easily see that romance was the major theme. Looking at IMDb's list of most popular women's movies, actually, I can tell you that more or less all of them have at least a minor theme of romance.

So, the stereotype that women like romance movies is very much true, it would seem. Romance bases itself in the emotions of the characters on-screen, and the emotional reactions of the viewer, so it's very much an emotion-based theme.

Assuming that popular themes and genres among men and women carry over into games, it would appear that emotional content, such as relationships and both personal and interpersonal conflict, is exactly what female gamers want. Men, as we have already established, typically enjoy direct conflict in movies and video games, but that doesn't mean that's all that we want.

If you look at my previous blog, I presented three video games with differing levels of action and emotion. Call of Duty 4, the least emotional game among the examples, made the least impression on me, while Katawa Shoujo, the most emotional, made the biggest impression, and is the game I am most likely to remember of the three a hundred years from now. Of course, that's not to say that Katawa Shoujo was my favourite title in that list; Mass Effect 2, offering a nice blend of emotion and action, in my opinion, was easily my favourite.

So, taking that into account, we may be able to conclude that while male gamers do enjoy action in games, many might also like emotional content to be there in some form as well.

Well, that's me more or less done, I think. At last. It was a long post, but I'm kinda proud of the effort I put into this one. I coulda left it at a single paragraph, but no; I decided to do some research and draw my own conclusions.

I don't frankly care for this article overall; the idea of marketing directly to female gamers is nice, but they're slicing out the majority of the gaming demographic with it. Rather, why not just advertise to both males and females with more emotionally-focused game content? That kind of stuff could be popular among male gamers as well.

Also, I have no idea where Brandii Grace is getting her information from, but any video game market researcher who says "women need main characters with three-letter names," was either fictional, or had no right to be a market researcher. Or be allowed into normal society, for that matter. The same with "women won't play games with no real-world benefit." Honestly, if there is any such researcher, then please immediately fire him, he's doing his company no favours.

Have a good weekend, mortals. May the Emperor go with you.