Video gaming industry (finally) sees women

By Jose Antonio Vargas of The Washington Post

Choices: a machine gun, a handgun, a shotgun, a grenade. What’s a 14-year-old girl to do?

“You use them at different times,” says Aikaterini “Kat” Stamoulis, a high school sophomore in suburban Washington, her eyes focused on the video-game screen. She’s playing Time Crisis 3, a point, shoot and duck spree that allows her to keep changing weapons.

Martin Tran, standing to Kat’s left one afternoon at a local mall, looks surprised. “Girls don’t like video games,” he says. “They just don’t.”

Tran’s perception fits the popular notion of the video and computer gaming industry as testosterone territory: 61 percent of players are male, the characters in the games are almost all male, and the marketing (as embodied by PSM, “the world’s No. 1 PlayStation Magazine,” with “10 pages of your favorite game girls”) is pretty much boys-only. Just where girls and women fit into the world’s fastest-growing entertainment industry—$7 billion in game sales last year—is still an open question. Kat, for one, thinks it’s a missed opportunity.

“Some girls like cars,” she says. “Some girls like shooting games. They should gear their games toward boys and girls. Wouldn’t they get more money that way?”

Schelley Olhava, a senior analyst with International Data Corp., a research firm in Mountain View, Calif., agrees. “For long-term growth, the industry needs to figure out how to get to the female demographic. But look at it this way: Who are making the games? Men. They design what they want to play.
“Whenever you see a TV show or read articles about the games, who are being shown? Men.
“Though we have data that says: Yes, women are playing games, and they’re playing all kinds of games.”

Nearly two-thirds of females using games are 18 or older, according to the Washington-based Entertainment Software Association. That includes computer gaming and video gaming in which players use consoles such as Xboxes or PlayStations connected to their TVs.
Women make up 39 percent of all video and computer gamers, and industry analysts say most are computer gamers “on the run”—say, women on their lunch breaks, looking for something fun and quick to do.

Association President Douglas Lowenstein says strategy games—card and puzzle games at Web sites such as Zone.com and Realarcade.com—are attracting women in droves. But “the percentage of women and girls in the ‘passionate’ gaming category is significantly less than the percentage of boys and men,” he says. “I think the industry is really not doing a great deal right now, from a marketing and creative standpoint, to accelerate the adoption of games by girls and women... It’s shortsighted.”
Henry Jenkins, head of the comparative media studies program at MIT, tackled the gender gap in “From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games,” a book he co-edited in 1998. “They call it a GameBoy, right?” he says. “That’s a clear sign, a huge assumption, that the players will be boys.”

Jenkins and others note the exception of a few games aimed at pre-adolescent girls (think of the Mary-Kate & Ashley and Barbie games) that appeared on the market starting in 1994. The “girl game genre,” as industry insiders call it, has barely made a dent in the market, and success has meant overcoming considerable skepticism.

In 1998, for example, Megan Gaiser’s company, Her Interactive, created Secrets Can Kill, a computer game based on a popular Nancy Drew book. “No publisher—now, I’m not going to name any names—but no publisher would put that game on the shelf,” says Gaiser. “They said, ‘Females are computer-phobic, they don’t play computer games, there’s no market for them.’”

Gaiser had the last laugh. She promoted the games on her Web site, Herinteractive.com, and sold them on Amazon.com. The games were a hit. Since 2000, the Nancy Drew franchise has sold 1.8 million units.

Still, most games “are really well-designed to take the traditional aspects of boy-playing,” says Jenkins. “As games have emerged in the past decade or so, a lot of what has been created was taken from what boys like to play in the back yard. But where does that leave the girls?”

The Sims seems to have found it. The PC game—the best-selling PC franchise of all time, selling some 12 million copies of various titles—is now translated into 17 languages.

It’s like reality TV gone virtual, with gamers playing God, dictating what a neighborhood of simulated people (Sims) can do.

There’s the Sims Livin’ Large, the Sims House Party, the Sims Hot Date and so on. Trudy Muller, a spokeswoman for Electronic Arts (EA)—which publishes the Sims and reported a 2003 revenue of $2.96 billion—says at least 50 percent of the games’ players are women.

“With the Sims, you’re really building relationships and, with the focus groups that we’ve done, that’s something that interests women and teenage girls,”’ she says.

What sells are “games that span both genders and all ages,” Muller notes. Her logic: Yes, sports games are made for sports fans, most of whom are men, “but the women are there, and they, too, are playing the sporting games.” She predicts that as video games “become more mainstream, you’ll have a wider range of content.”

“Here’s the bottom line: All the games that succeed are obsessed with being great entertainment product,” echoes J.C. Herz, author of “Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds,” considered the definitive look at the culture of video games. “Talk of ‘girl games’ is nonsense,” she says, “covered in political correctness.”

So just what do women want?

“Asking what women want to play is like asking what kind of movies women want to watch. It’s very divergent. That’s what the industry is so slow to realize,” says Phaedra Boinodiris, who in 1999 started Womengamers.com, one of the few women’s gaming portals on the Internet.

“It comes down to choices,” she says. “Women would like better female characters and more of them, and more gender-neutral games where, as a player, you don’t have to play a man. It’s simple, really.
Women want marketing that acknowledges that women gamers do exist.”