pseudoberries random thoughts about life, hacking and open source

Game girls

I read a very interesting article about the increasing amount of girl gamers. Titled 'Game girls' it poses the question: Girl gamers are on the rise, so why isn't anything being made for them?

According to the article, 41% of Australian gamers are female. The trend is the same in the US with 38% female market share.

Yet with this fast increasing market segment, the game industry struggles to keep up. Most games are still targeted toward males. Popular titles like Counter-Strike and Grand Theft Auto IV all have a violent nature, and is marketed specifically towards boys. From the article:

The industry's response to luring women gamers has often been cynical and heavy-handed. Many of the games aimed at females are unimaginative, such as Ubisoft's new (paradoxically titled) Imagine range of hand-held games that feature stereotypical "pink" subjects such as dressing up, cooking and nurturing babies and pets.

However, two titles stand out from the crowd: The Sims and World of Warcraft, which are both immensely popular among women. The Sims, ranked as the world's most popular game, was designed specifically with girls in mind. The Sims franchise has more than 100 million games sold since its launch in 2000. The publisher, Electronic Arts, says more than 60% of Sims players are female. The reason it managed to successfully draw such a big female audience?

"I think the main reason we were able to do that successfully was that about 40% of our development team, and my two other designers, were women," he says.

Why don't other companies manage to get this right then? Are female game developers really so hard to find? The MSc Computer Science study programme at NTNU (where I'm currently enrolled) struggle to attract women to the field. Despite a lot of work being done to attract women to these studies [English translation], the amount of female students in these programmes were still only at approx 12% in 2003 [2, Wnglish translation].

On an interesting side note, the winner of Innovator 08 [English translation] is a woman with a computer game concept aimed equally much towards girls and boys. Named 'tisu it's inspired by Japanese cartoons as well as MMORPGS like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy.

The goal is to lure those who do not currently engage in a high degree of role-playing games to experience the fun it is to meet other people and be involved in a story over the Internet,"

says Nina Fjelnset, the woman behind the idea. It is targeted at an international audience.

Innovator 08 is an annually competition held in Norway to support people with exciting new business ideas. Nina Fjelnset won this years price within her field and received a sum of 500 000 NOK (approx $100 000 USD) for start-up funding. Only time will show if this concept will succeed in the rigorous game industry.