“Chess for Girls” — What women want from games

Asking what women and girls want from games is the wrong question. The question probably has no real answer, and if anyone ever found one, it’d basically be useless.

I’ve put off writing about the topic of women and gaming for a while for two reasons. First, it’s a difficult and big topic. Second, it happens also to be a topic I care a lot about.

Thanks to a minor synchronicity, I’ve decided that today’s the day I begin to tackle to subject, though I’ll have much more to say on the subject in the future. The synchronicity that sparked this post involves reading this one at female-gamer.com and discovering the following video (thanks to this post on Feministing.com).

A very funny fake ad from SNL, but unfortunately it’s not really all that outlandish. The early 90s saw the introduction of “Battle Trolls,” macho versions of the bright-haired plastic dolls popular with girls. Although I saw the original ad over fifteen years ago, I still remember the narration: “Everyone knows that girls like trolls, but what to boys like? Battle Trolls!”

It made me shudder then, and it makes me shudder now, especially when I watch my two-year-old daughter putter in her kitchen for a few minutes making imaginary cakes, then switch over to her pirate ship for some high-seas adventuring.

I don’t pretend that, within our culture, a person’s gender doesn’t influence what he or she looks for in games. I won’t bother to speculate on how much game predilections depend on the biology of gender (my instinct an experience suggest biology has almost nothing to do with it, but that debate goes hopelessly beyond the scope of this blog).

But every time someone asks, “What do women gamers want?” We get the silliest answers—from men, from women, from everyone. For instance, a fascinating article in The Escapist a few weeks ago on the topic of heroines in video games included quotes from a variety of women in the industry. While one woman wished that female video game characters would “be wearing pants,” another said

Give my heroine a PMS day where she, unexpectedly and without reason, decides to pull the ears off small bunny rabbits. Have her try to leave the house and go back to change shirts four times. Let her have some upper body limitations and figure out how to manage using her legs.

Seriously? I game almost exclusively with women, and I don’t know a single one who wants menstruation in her escapism.

Here’s the main reason the question of “what women want” is stupid: We all want exactly the same thing from our games. Oh, some of us may prefer puzzles, others strategic board games, and still others vicious PVP, but what we really want is fulfilling entertainment.

In games with a narrative (most video and tabletop roleplaying games, for instance), this means that we want to be heroes—reluctant heroes, action heroes, and antiheroes, perhaps, but heroes nonetheless. On the more abstract, gamey side, we all want to be challenged, usually progressively, but not overwhelmed.

Do some women want the chance to decorate their avatars in MMOs in greater detail? I can assure you that an equal percentage of men want exactly the same thing. Do some adolescent men like to drool over cheesecakes in chainmail bikinis in their game books? Well, plenty of men are turned off by such illustrations, too.

In the end, the reason fewer women than men are attracted to all genres of gaming has everything to do with culture and almost nothing to do with “what they really want.” Almost all video and roleplaying games fail with women not because women don’t want to play such games, not because the games haven’t been successfully targeted to women, but because the games have been targeted at the hard core of a niche market. Most developers still market to the passionate minority. As soon as they start developing for people, not for “Men aged 18 to 35″ or “Women with $50,000 median income,” they’ll really start seeing a profit.

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I could go on and on about this topic. As I said, it’s very important to me. I’m an unashamed feminist and an unashamed gamer. My regular gaming group comprises one man and four women. And, straight male though I am, I too bridle at the absurd physiques that decorate the books and the sexist language (see he or she) that even my favorite game company ridiculously insists on using.

So I’ll have more to say on the topic in coming posts.

4 comments September 27th, 2007