Selling gaming to girls

Copyright (c) Noelle Adams. All Rights Reserved.

Despite an increase in the number of game-playing girls, recruiting more women to the gaming fold remains a hot topic. Publishers want to propel their profits by targeting the other 50% of the population. Gaming guys want to share their passion with the opposite sex. And women who already play games want to know they’re not alone.

Yet, it’s counter productive to rant about the need for more women’s games. After 20 years of debate, no one has yet been able to successfully define “a girl’s game”.

The standard argument is that women gravitate towards non-competitive titles that accommodate experimentation. Newcomers, just dipping their toes in the gaming paddling pool, don’t want to drown for simply mistiming a stroke.

There’s certainly evidence to support this theory. The open-ended Sims series, where players largely set their own goals, is massively popular with women. Casual puzzle games like Bejewelled have a huge female following.

But for every woman who devotes hours to Minesweeper, there are girls satisfying their gaming appetites with traditionally masculine fare. All-girl, competitive gaming team, the Frag Dolls, dominate at Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon.

It’s impossible to pigeon-hole female gaming tastes. Just like guys we enjoy a mouth-watering mix of flavours when it comes to our entertainment diet.

Game choice is not a barrier to female gaming. Neither is technical inexperience. Many women are clued up about digital lifestyle accessories like cell phones and iPods. Gaming equipment could easily join that list.

In reality, marketing is the make-or-break issue. If you want women to play games you need to ‘sell’ the pastime to them.

The first thing to do is shatter gaming’s ‘Boys’ Club’ association. That means an end to macho, posturing adverting. A recent TV commercial for a popular football game consisted of drunken louts slurring a speech about graphic realism. The ad was supposed to make game-playing appear fun. Instead it reinforced the horrible misconception that the pastime is a male-only, socially challenged activity.

The female gaming ‘cause’ would certainly be helped if women’s magazines widened their scope beyond designer fashion, dating and diets. Despite movie and music coverage, these publications have been stubbornly resistant to a gaming section, arguing that the topic is irrelevant to their readers.

A recent exception is worth noting. Last year British Glamour magazine ran a tongue-in-cheek advertorial on the Nintendo Wii as the ultimate Girls’ Night accessory. Instead of embracing the article as pro-female gaming, gamers ridiculed it, and sniggered sexual innuendo about the Wii remote. The Wii was dismissed as ‘effeminate’, and similar scorn was shown for Sony’s limited edition pink PS2s and PSPs.

A feminine colour change may be an overly-simplistic attempt to attract girls, but the snide reactions it drew highlight the most crucial need relating to girl gaming: a change in attitude. Playing any game, on any platform, has to be accepted without judgement. There are curious women loitering on gaming’s doorstep, and when these ladies develop the courage to ring the doorbell, we have to be there to welcome them.\