Females and the games industry
“Why are there no females working in the games industry?” was a question on an internet message board once, and the quick answer was “There are”. I’m not talking about admin roles - for some reason those are generally always female positions, I’m talking about artists, animators, programmers and designers.
But since then I’ve thought that a better question might be “Why there are not more females in the games industry?”
I think the answer is - “Why would they want to be”?
Why would making games appeal to women, when few games appeal to them?
My girlfriend enjoys video games - console games, not on the PC. However, she finds it really difficult to find any that interest her. Most are games seem to fall into categories - sports or killing. Most of the people that I work with also have a spouse that enjoys games to some extent, and generally they feel the same way. They enjoy games, but it’s difficult for them to find a game that they actually want to play.
Case in point - my girlfriend loved Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain. Plenty of puzzles, a good solid platformer, some fighting. Roll on 2 sequels and she hated it - what few puzzles remained had been dumbed right down and it had mutated into a hack and slash platform game.
(This is not unique- take Ico, where practically every room was a puzzle, you had to balance searching for the way out and performing tasks with keeping the girl safe. Shadow of the Colussus is: find monster climb monster kill monster.)
It seems that the main reason that girls don’t play games, is that there are very few games that girls want to play.
Various surveys tell us that around 35% of gamers are female, and 25% of the games market are females over the age of 18, yet more and more are complaining about the lack of games that they want to play - WHY AREN”T WE TARGETTING THIS MARKET? We’d all be rich. Instead of spending some time and effort finding out what appeals, we end up with horrific poorly thought out pink games. We don’t need more games with falling jewels, or stars, or ponies.
Those are not games for girls, those are games made by men targeted towards women who have no idea idea whatsoever what the female audience want. I’ve seen exactly the same with kids games, for I have worked on a few. You get 35 year old men designing a game for kids with no idea whatsoever what kids actually want. I’ve seen designers believing kids to be too stupid for feature x/y/z to be included and dumbing the product down to a primary-coloured button mashing monstrosity.
But people vote with their wallets, don’t they? Popular games sell, that’s why there are no games targeted at females!
You can’t buy what doesn’t exist. Girls do buy games, and complain that there aren’t games that they want to play. They do vote with their wallets - by not purchasing. If they did just buy all and sundry then the developers and publishers would say “Why bother making games that girls will like, they buy our products anyway?”
So “Why there are not more females in the games industry?” has been answered in my mind, and the next question should be “How can we encourage more to join us?”?
In December 2002 Volvo started a new project to get women to design a concept car for them. There reasoning was simple and forward thinking:
The idea of catering more to women’s needs makes perfect business sense, said Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research in Bandon, Ore. Spinella said women either will act alone or have a say in roughly 80% of all vehicle purchases in the United States this year.
And what were the results of this 2 year experiment? A stunning car that was fuel efficient, self regulating car that was fun to drive
“We learned that if you meet women’s expectations, you exceed those for men,” said Hans-Olov Olsson, president and chief executive of the Swedish carmaker.
The car wasn’t pink.
We need more females in the industry, to push INTERESTING ideas forward.
We shouldn’t try to cater towards female gamers as a marketing strategy based on our current system -that will fail. What we’d have is guys making games for girls, not guys and girls making games for guys and girls.
What we need are games that will appeal to both sexes, and to do this we need to have a more balanced ratio of males to females in the workplace.
Women - apply.