MORE WOMEN INTO VIDEO GAMES THAN EVER BEFORE

Quick, imagine a gamer.

Whatever image came to your mind, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a willowy 47-year-old woman in a royal blue jacquard suit. Nevertheless, Vanessa Paugh, formerly an electrical engineer, now working on her doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Dallas, is a gamer and aspiring game developer who believes that even girly girls (and womanly women) like herself who don’t want to blow stuff up should be able to find computer games to suit their interests.

“I consider myself a gamer, but hard-core gamers would not because I refuse to play games with weapons,” she says.

Gamer and aspiring game developer Vanessa Paugh believes that even girly girls (and womanly women) like herself who don’t want to blow stuff up should be able to find computer games to suit their interests.

Paugh’s husband introduced her to video gaming. She started playing Quake, but was soon frustrated that she had to play the game as a man—no female images were available as avatars. Eventually she managed to insert a Barbie avatar into the game, then started experimenting with “skins” to alter the appearance of her avatar. “I played Quake until I found the skin editor, which to my mind was more fun,” Paugh says.

In Quake, which is a first-person game (you see the action through your avatar’s eyes), you can’t see your avatar as long as it’s alive, so poor Barbie died a thousand deaths as Paugh experimented. “I had to kill myself to see what she looked like,” she says. “I spent three weeks in suicide mode learning how to use the skin editor.”

Paugh was so into modifying the avatar’s look that at one point she even tried building a bridal “game” that was essentially all skin editor. In I Am the Bride, the idea was that players got to design the characters—bride to guests—down to the last detail. Gowns would be constructed from neckline to sleeve shape to fabric, and wedding and reception locations would be chosen. Players would be able to decide a budget and try to stay within it.

Some objected that it wasn’t really a game—for one, Michael Savoie, director of the Center for Information Technology and Management (where Paugh has assisted with research) at the University of Texas. “I looked at it and I said, ‘So?’” he confesses. But he now knows Paugh was onto something, because he conducted research about gaming with boys and girls ages 6–12, and found that even when they played games intended for boys, girls played differently. For example, “Boys would blow through setup in about two minutes,” he says; girls, however, were painstaking in creating their characters.

Savoie also found (through additional research focused on girls ages 8–20) that girls like to play cooperatively with each other rather than competitively, and they like games with applications to real life—games about planning an event or buying a car. They also like beautiful environments. Paugh remembers reaching a level in Quake that was so beautiful, she just wanted to pause and look around—but she had to kill a bunch of things first.

“I shouldn’t have to kill something to see something this beautiful,” she says. “That was my epiphany.”

Not all women are morally opposed to violent games, says Celia Pearce, who teaches and researches game design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

“I think a lot of women find those games just boring,” she says. “The game mechanism is not that interesting, and they have a hard time getting motivated. Boys just like shooting. Girls don’t get an inherent thrill out of shooting unless there’s another reason.”

Pearce is co-founder of a collective of women gamers, developers and researchers called Ludica. “We’re like the suffragette movement of gaming,” she says. Computer gaming currently is a male-dominated field—despite the fact that before computer games, most board games were designed to appeal across age and gender, says Pearce.

Today’s “hard-core” games—the most complex and immersive games—are developed almost entirely by men and for men. In 2005, according to the International Game Developers Association, less than 12 percent of game developers were women. Yet the Entertainment Software Association says that in America, 40 percent of game players are women—and that’s in a market that has historically ignored them.

Even when they do try to appeal to women, male developers often miss the mark to a ludicrous degree—Savoie remembers one suggestion taking a Madden football game and making the players ice skaters instead of football players, “because women like ice-skating.” Although every Barbie game on the market has done well, few other games marketed specifically toward women have succeeded.

But if women didn’t snap up any old game that came with a tutu or in a pink box, as marketers apparently thought they should, that was no reason to conclude that women didn’t like video games.

When Bellevue, Washington–based Her Interactive developed a Nancy Drew game based on the iconic series of books and started shopping it around to publishers in 1998, president and CEO Megan Gaiser was shocked that nobody would touch it.

“All the publishers said no. They said females will never play video games, because they’re computer-phobic,” says Gaiser. Her Interactive self-published and put the game on Amazon. “We were successful. The New York Times called us the ‘un-Barbie of computer games.’ Shortly thereafter, those same publishers came back. Two years later, we made the giant step of becoming publishers in retail. Now we’ve sold more than 5 million units worldwide.” And, she says, the series is played by both girls and women.

“Casual” games, such as puzzle and word games, also have a solid female audience.

“Everyone likes to play games,” says Garth Chouteau, senior director of public relations of PopCap, which makes casual games such as Bejeweled and Bookworm. “If you make games that are not, by default, excluding certain audiences, you will attract those audiences. Casual games are very quick and simple, yet a challenging and, if you want it to be, very long-term experience.

“These games are consumed in five-, 10- or 15-minute increments,” he adds. “You don’t feel as though your entire mental process is monopolized.”

This sort of quick hit does appeal to women, who are less likely to be able to sit still for hours of play, Pearce agrees. However, she emphasizes, women are not interested solely in casual games, as some in the industry believe. Some popular CD-based games that have appealed to women over the years include Myst, Guitar Hero and The Sims—although Pearce has heard people in the game industry argue that Sims is not a game because there is no winner or loser.

“One of the arguments we’ve made with Ludica is if you force this ‘win’ state, you exclude a lot of patterns and play styles that women like,” Pearce says.

The good news is that game manufacturers have realized what a huge market they’ve overlooked, and efforts to design games for women are increasing. In February 2008, for the first time, the popular Game Design Challenge panel at the Game Developers Conference—in which designers are given a theme and must conceptualize a game around it—included a woman on the panel: Brenda Brathwaite, a pioneering game designer who now works at Savannah College of Art and Design.

“Last year the theme was a needle and thread game and they had no women,” says Pearce, who got up during the Q&A period and pointed this out. “They said gender has nothing to do with it,” she scoffs.

X-Box and Wii are both attracting women gamers, and the voices of female designers are being heard, in all their variety.

Paugh acknowledges that not all women would enjoy a frilly girly bridal game, but she defends the right of all girls and women to play computer games. If you can call them games.

If you can’t always call them games, though, and if they’re played by both girls and women, and if they aren’t quite hard-core but aren’t just casual, then what do you call this genre of play?

“I like ‘chick click,’” says Paugh. And  let us all remember, the next time were playing live and your ass gets handed to us, it may not be by one of the "guys". Peace out.