Wednesday 23 November 2005

The Girl Gamer population

Designing games for female players has always been an adventure fraught with danger. Sometimes an enterprising designer might seek out these so-called "females" and actually ask them what kind of games they'd like to play. I expect that the answers vary from the younger marks' terse and nondescript answers ("Barbie" and "ponies") to the older girls' standard "I don't want to play games because they're all stupid". Basically there's an entire untapped half of the market out there if someone can figure out what girls want. Good luck with that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The Sims seems to be the closest to the mark so far.
PPS - That is, if there is just one mark. I expect the market is richer than that.

3 comments:

Pstonie said...

I've heard of something called Animal Crossing that is said entertain these mythical 'females'.

John said...

So obviously someone is looking into it, and someone sometimes does a good job.

One thing to note is that video and computer games don't appeal to all boys, so there must be a sub-population of girls that would be interested in games, if there was anything good out there. You don't have to hit the entire gender all at once.

Erin Marie said...

There are, of course, freakish nerd-girls like me who actually do like a variety of the 'boy' games that are out there. Of course, they're the least 'boyish' ones - all the adventure-ish ones like MYST. And, at the risk of letting out my geekiness - anything dungeon and dragonish. Maybe game designers could talk to me, because I understand some of what's out there, and, being a girl, I could help them figure out what it is they could take from those games to make new exciting girl games.

Maybe.