Gender and Games
Triple-A Games:
In an article on Gamasutra, there was a discussion about triple-A games for women. Ernest Adams says that while women may play small or free games, not many women will not pay out for triple-A console games for themselves.
He then goes on to question Brandii Grace about her founding a company to make triple-A games for women. From this interview, I have pulled the following key pieces of information:
- Current triple-A games on the market are custom maid to suit men more than women. The themes and executions of these games don't support the needs or attitudes of female audiences, (Difference between Twilight and Underworld in films).
- A successful big title game that did attract a lot of female players was 'The Sims' due to interpersonal conflicts between AI characters in the game. These types of mechanics would include deception and alliance manipulation.
- Men obtain fun from overcoming challenges within games, however in many cases women can be deterred by challenges as they are so averse to the risk of failure. Only 10% of women play for the challenge.
- Comparisons are made between games released on the Nintendo Wii & Xbox Kinect and core games released on the same consoles. This indicates that women head more towards the family friendly and socially interactive games and consoles, however the example given in the interview for the Xbox Kinect game 'Kinect Adventures' lead to a biased result statistic as the game is included for free when the Kinect is bought.
- Allowance for local multiplayer games where players can join and drop out as and when they please. Not currently many games on the market that permit this.
- Advertising and distribution to be related to the product / game theme. The examples given are to advertise women's games in women's magazines or cooking games in cooking magazines, and to distribute games including PoS (point of sale) in related areas such as cooking games being sold next to recipe books etc.
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