Gender in Games

It's pretty obvious that there is a huge imbalance between genders in gaming which has led to segregation in a male-dominated industry.

The imbalance between genders is very easily shown when you look at the statistics of men and women working in the games industry throughout various roles both in development and outside of development.

The number of women who play games and how often compared to men though is very close, this leads me to believe there are some psychological factors effecting which games they play and how women see these games.

Men and Women on Playing Games

I read a rather interesting article from The Daily Mail by Deborah Arthurs who finds that women would "rather spend time playing on their gadgets than having sex".  That isn't really important as far as this article goes. The key points I took from her article were that she found women to play games more for relaxation whereas men would play for competition. The fact that men compete and women relax, to me implies there are some genetic and instinctual traits coming out from both genders when playing video games. Males in almost all mammal species' are competitive because in nature, that's how a male would acquire a mate. Women however, just need to chill the fuck out! (I'm just kidding, nobody sue me for sexism! I was joking, sort of.)

Women naturally experience more stress than men and chronic stress can lead to a breakdown in health. This could be why women consciously or subconsciously seek methods of relaxing themselves. Women statistically play more casual games, collectively, than any other game genre.

Segregation in The Market

The type of games played by each gender effects how we design games for each target audience. If we know women prefer games to be relaxing we would create games with soothing soundtracks, simple goals and easy to pick up gameplay.

With men looking more towards competition in games we would have to look at creating a more aggressive feel to playing the game. Aggressive soundtracks to get players 'pumped' for playing and get more blood flowing is a popular thing in male dominated titles such as Call of Duty, Gears of War and Halo. What makes a game competitive though? Massively played games such as League of Legends, Starcraft, and Halo (2&3) all have pretty huge skill gaps between players and as such, ranking systems.

As soon as you introduce a visible ranking system to a game, players will always compete for the highest rank.

I remember playing a game called 'Puzzle Pirates' which I feel hit the nail on the head when it comes to drawing in both male and female players. The game had a visible ranking system which held experience and skill separate very well. The game was casual enough with all the puzzling and simple games which really were easy to pick up and play although it allowed players the opportunity to compete with eachother. Puzzle PIrates offered brightly coloured, cartoon styled graphics and a soothing soundtrack. As a male, I would love sailing around, taking over other peoples boats and stealing their 'booty' although I can see how you could enjoy the exact same action purely because the entire game is based around puzzling. Sword fights, ship fights, fist fights and anything aggressive in the game was all dictated by your performance in comparison to your opponents puzzle abilities.

Deborah Arthurs (2011) Women play computer games just as much as men - and they prefer gaming to sex, survey reveals. In: Daily Mail 14th July 2011: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2014821/Women-play-games-just-men--prefer-gaming-sex-survey-reveals.html