I suppose I''m obligated to reply to this, seeing as how Mooglez has pointed a big neon arrow at me. *chuckle*

Hmm, how to attack this topic...

1) Girls are not that different from guys, really! We are certainly not incomprehensible - If I can understand both girls and guys, you should be able to to, with a little study of gendered fiction and sociology of gender roles and stuff.

2) Girls are a little different from guys, and the differences are fairly predictable. Girls are raised to think they are socially obligated to be pretty/stylish/fashionable, while all humans are naturally creative, this tends to be discouraged in boys. Female creativity is what all you poor guys would have had you not grown up in a gender-stereotyping society that treats women as more ornamental than men. To answer the question of how many hairstyles/clothes/etc would satisfy a girl, I think if you had a thousand possibilities (for all the categories together) that would be sufficient. Mush more practical to design into an MM game than a singleplayer, but any game can use a color selector to let the player customize things.

3) Girls tend to be more extroverted (people oriented) then boys, I''m not sure whether this is nature or nurture. So girls like games where NPCs have strong and dramatic personalities, and the player is asked to make choices that have social value, like dialogue choices. Japanese ren''ai games are the place to look for examples of this.

4) Girls are taught that some of the worst thing you can be are callous, indiscriminately violent, unfeeling, etc. This is one reason girls tend to react poorly to games where the player must slaughter monsters or aliens, or games where there are scream sfx and blood splatters. There''s also the fact that monster battles are really boring because they have no social or artistic element at all, and very little strategic element.

5) Girls are taught to be mothers. What do mothers do? They fix problems and injuries, give gifts, provide comfort and advice, create various things (meals, clothes), arrange things (laying out a garden, interior decorating). Look to Harvest Moon and Microsoft Bob, as well as most adventure and pattern/puzzle games for ideas about things like this.

6) The one demonstrable way that girls are naturally different from guys is their taste in people''s appearances. Get a female artist to design some of your characters. Look at one of the characters so popular with women that many have written fanfics about him: Sephiroth from FF7. Women generally like bishounens (pretty boys), sparkly things, fluffy things, slinky things (e.g. a siamese cat), and dramatic color displays (e.g. a peacock). Women also seem to be more sensitive to fractal-type things than men - examples are feathers, flowers or just petals, lightning bugs, clouds, ripples in water, spiral patterns like in a seashell or a DNA, the rainbows an oil spill makes. Shoujo anime is the area to study to learn about this.

7) It is not true that girls are completely non-violent. Girls can find violence appealing if it is individualized, romanticized, poetic justice, or creative revenge with an element of humor involved.

Did I miss anything?

First, i gotta say some of you sound like 13 year old BOYS with the pink and fluffy nonsense.

The STAR TREK series often had worlds where only women ruled, also, Buck Rogers had many roles where women where the leaders, such as that HOT N SEXY brown haired queen in the huge space ship (queen amadala??), along with planets where the women where in control and the men were the sissy's.

MMRPG's include female roles to play, such as in everquest and others. They make kick ass wizards or whatever. Although, I havnt seen much attempt to bring them together. There are a lot of female characters in everquest, at least in character!

Maybe to bring the women together, introduce women leaders(such as a queen for the empire as NPCs), where to be a royal guard, you must first be a women, then secondly an expert in protection(spells, melee, etc). Men also protect the queen. Just take a look at history.

Another idea, as I mentioned, is to define a planet, a guild, or a region of territory, where the women can begin playin there characters TOGETHER. Hopefully, this would spawn more women, in game, and out, to play.

But yes, it hasnt been done correctly, probably because most, if not all, developers and project managers and corporate $$ is run by men who havnt thought about the other half and what to do with them.

Edited by - GalaxyQuest on December 4, 2001 6:42:16 PM

Edited by - GalaxyQuest on December 4, 2001 6:43:55 PM

sunandshadow - well put

Question: From a female perspective, what role would female players like to play in an singleplayer RPG?...I don''t meen a typical D&D type midevil fantasy basied RPG...but a RPG that takes place in a more current setting...

here is a idea for a RPG:

Imagine a singleplayer RPG that takes place in Chicago around 1923-24...Players control a young female school teacher...in a time when women had recently been granted the right to vote...in a time when Jazz was king and silent movies only cost a penny to watch...lots of interesting story, charactor and setting potential.

The young students in the players class would..in a way...represent the players ''stats''...the better the students are doing the higher the related stat...thins would allow for some ''side quest'' elements...like "why is Timmy doing so poorly?" and the such...allowing players to express some of thier mothering insticts...

Then add in the larger setting where America is just starting to come to grips with how women fit into society as the industrial age is in full swing...again lots of potential

quote: Original post by sunandshadow
I suppose I''m obligated to reply to this, seeing as how Mooglez has pointed a big neon arrow at me. *chuckle*

Hmm, how to attack this topic...

1) Girls are not that different from guys, really! We are certainly not incomprehensible - If I can understand both girls and guys, you should be able to to, with a little study of gendered fiction and sociology of gender roles and stuff.

I agree that understanding the other gender should not be hard, but I guess for some people it just is. Those who believe it is too hard to understand usually are those who are unwilling to understand it.

quote:
2) Girls are a little different from guys, and the differences are fairly predictable. Girls are raised to think they are socially obligated to be pretty/stylish/fashionable, while all humans are naturally creative, this tends to be discouraged in boys. Female creativity is what all you poor guys would have had you not grown up in a gender-stereotyping society that treats women as more ornamental than men. To answer the question of how many hairstyles/clothes/etc would satisfy a girl, I think if you had a thousand possibilities (for all the categories together) that would be sufficient. Mush more practical to design into an MM game than a singleplayer, but any game can use a color selector to let the player customize things.

Is that hinting that you like Baldurs Gate''s character creation ability Are you giving away the secrets of what makes games that females enjoy!? lol.

quote:
3) Girls tend to be more extroverted (people oriented) then boys, I''m not sure whether this is nature or nurture. So girls like games where NPCs have strong and dramatic personalities, and the player is asked to make choices that have social value, like dialogue choices. Japanese ren''ai games are the place to look for examples of this.

I like games where NPC''s have "strong and dramatic" personalities, and I am sure other guys do, too. I don''t think this can be limited to females.

quote:
4) Girls are taught that some of the worst thing you can be are callous, indiscriminately violent, unfeeling, etc. This is one reason girls tend to react poorly to games where the player must slaughter monsters or aliens, or games where there are scream sfx and blood splatters. There''s also the fact that monster battles are really boring because they have no social or artistic element at all, and very little strategic element.

This also can not be limited to females. I hate games like Rainbow Six and Counter Strike, or other games the promote terrorism, etc. I do, however, like to kill Orc and Ogre''s and Ogrillons. So I don''t know

quote:
5) Girls are taught to be mothers. What do mothers do? They fix problems and injuries, give gifts, provide comfort and advice, create various things (meals, clothes), arrange things (laying out a garden, interior decorating). Look to Harvest Moon and Microsoft Bob, as well as most adventure and pattern/puzzle games for ideas about things like this.

Guys are taught to be fathers. Watch football, work, drink beer, order their wife and kids to do things for them, etc. Every once in a while a boy will break out of that fatherly teachings and become something more.

quote:
6) The one demonstrable way that girls are naturally different from guys is their taste in people''s appearances. Get a female artist to design some of your characters. Look at one of the characters so popular with women that many have written fanfics about him: Sephiroth from FF7. Women generally like bishounens (pretty boys), sparkly things, fluffy things, slinky things (e.g. a siamese cat), and dramatic color displays (e.g. a peacock). Women also seem to be more sensitive to fractal-type things than men - examples are feathers, flowers or just petals, lightning bugs, clouds, ripples in water, spiral patterns like in a seashell or a DNA, the rainbows an oil spill makes. Shoujo anime is the area to study to learn about this.

??? Are you saying that I am a girl because I like clouds, and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7 I mean, these things are just more stereotypes of what these guys think girls are. I guess it is just because all the girl-friends (like friends that are girls, don''t get the two confused ) I have like everything I like, and do most of the things I do. (The ones who I am not friends with wake up at 3 A.M. to put on the makeup needed for school at 7).

quote:
7) It is not true that girls are completely non-violent. Girls can find violence appealing if it is individualized, romanticized, poetic justice, or creative revenge with an element of humor involved.

Did I miss anything?

See thats more like it. What you said in the beginning: "Girls are not that much different than boys, really!" was enough. There are too many different types of personalities, and so many different types of people, noone can really say what is different.

Some people do, some people don''t.

That statement is as general as it gets.

Everyone should note that that statement doesn''t say:

"Some girls do, some girls don''t." or "Some guys do, some guys don''t."

It says people. People are general.

quote: Original post by MSW
sunandshadow - well put

Question: From a female perspective, what role would female players like to play in an singleplayer RPG?...I don''t meen a typical D&D type midevil fantasy basied RPG...but a RPG that takes place in a more current setting...

Hmm... A school teacher could work. If it''s the ''20s... how about the costume designer for a club with showgirls. The costume designer acts as a mom to the girls, and defends them from the boss and customers, and manages gangsters so they don''t destroy the club...


Drizzt - I was trying to convey the idea of a statistical difference between males and females, you know, when there''s a curve representing males and a curve representing females and the 2 overlap by 70% but you can still tell that the mean, median, and mode are all further to the right for one gender than the other.

quote: Original post by digitaldirt
Not at all. But that is the attitude of a "guy" developer. They are ignorant of the famale audience in games, as they are in relationships i suppose. who knows...

I think there is a lot you can do, without resulting to "Pink" and "My Little Pony".

Sorry, was being sarcastic to highlight that the age old sexist views are still hanging around (Mary Kate & Ashley games for a start).

I don''t think the female''s lack of interest in games has anything to do with the content. Rather, society has told them (and all of us) that computer games are for little boys. Time is changing that for everyone as they become more mass-market anyway.

E

I think a lot of you are still going about this from the wrong angle. You´re trying to guess at what girls want, and then create that.

1) It´s not about the main character, or the representation of that character. Male players have no problem playing female characters and vice versa.

2) It´s not only about catering to the "female skills" (at least this is what it sounds like when you describe them), the things female players go for are usally things which male players can enjoy just as much.
To create a good game you don´t have to go out of your way to include the mothering instinct or whatevery you consider to be a typically female trait.
Similarly, attacking the "female pride", as eng3d describes it won´t work. If you print on your box "GUYS ONLY", the potential female customers will think something along the lines of "what do i care" and pass it by. As chance has it, most products in our society which are labelled "guys only", are usually interesting to or primarily bought by guys alone.

3) I think the games girls are traditionally bad at have been stated pretty correctly above, but that distinction is NOT due to some inherent difference between men and women (someone suggested motor control, i think that´s bs, no offense intended), but because these games (2D platformers, FPSs, RPGs and martial arts games / beat ´em ups) are games which are the least attractive to the casual gamer, which women in nine out of ten cases are.
In order to be good at Quake Deathmatch you have to have a lot of 3d experience, quick reflexes and lots of practise. In order to be able to play a beat ´em up well you have to know a lot of moves.
Its not that women CANT be good at those games, I think they don´t want to, because they usually lack the background in those genres which equals the fact that they lack the training, which in turn makes those games too hard. The same thing goes for games with a high degree of realism (especially management sims), these (as the others mentioned) are hard to get into, and require a lot of time to be learned properly.
On a personal note: I´ve had a lot of fun playing games like SoulCalibur and Tekken with girls, but it only works when you pick up the game together (=start at more or less the same point of the learning curve), or find some way to bridge the skill gap.

For those of you who are really interested: THere is already a lot of literature in the field of media studies / gender studies, so it might be a good idea to pick some of those up at the local university library.

The whole naked women ruling the planet while the men are sissies, show girls, buck rogers and so on. are guy ideas or possibly fantasies. i don't know. but yeah, someone said it right when they said "you guys sound like a bunch of 13 year old boys".

I brought this subject up, and I thank the ones who have replied with thoughtful responses, instead of ignorant "i don't undersand them." remarks. Its very interesting to see how the online game community see's the opposite side of things. I've been holding study groups with women of different ages, with presentations and content brainstorms, and so far i've held 32 groups of 16 women. From my studies, Women don't want to "see what little timmy is doing".. they want more worldly plots, not just "womens rights/voting". They really enjoy the fantasy genre more than the futuristic genre, but they have nothing against that genre. its been a 80/20 split. I've been using all of this in my game design for a new title.

It is my hope that we are making more strides to grow the female audience in interactive entertainment.



Edited by - digitaldirt on December 5, 2001 5:42:35 AM

Haste - Ever heard of "chick flicks" and romance novels? Arn''t those aimed more at females then males?

I''m not saying a female isn''t going to be interested in guy type forms of entertainment (or vice versa)... or that certain examples in entertainment cannot "cross over"...but there are some very general stories, ideas, concepts, characters, and themes that attract females more then men (and vice versa).

Games being a form of entertainment are no different...nor should they be...


Digitaldirt - I''m just throwing ideas up to see what sticks...It''s good that you''ve included females in your brainstorming sessions, it really is...But, from your postings, you seem to be giving them two different game settings to chose from...fantasy and futuristic...Has the potential for a more modern game setting been brought up? something that doesn''t fit into the common cliched RPG game settings?

I''m also curios about the "different ages" of females you have included in your groups...what are the age ranges? do any have kids, families? in school? single, married, divorced? grandparents? teens?

Yay, another games for girls thread

I agree with Hase here. You don't have to target women particularly. Funnily enough, just like men, women like different things. Some girls might like playing My Little Pony's Adventure In Happy Fun Land, others enjoy Quake III.

You could argue that there are two types of women gamer:

1: Regular Gamers. These play the same games as men through choice, and are therefore unlikely to even consider My Little Pony's Adventure In Happy Fun Land unless they get to frag some guys in it. I believe there are women only quake clans dedicated to fragging blokes.

2: Occasional Gamers. Most women I know fall into this category. These people generally don't play games, since they often have 'better' things to do, but that doesn't mean they are completely opposed to playing games. They certainly don't spend much money on games, preferring to play on their boyfriends/brothers/fathers computer. Thus they are very unlikely to play My Little Pony's Adventure In Happy Fun Land since it is very unlikely that any guy will be seen dead with it installed on his computer. They tend to prefer games which don't take a long time to play and relatively simple controls. In otherwords, stuff which you can pick up and play very quickly. Violence isn't really an issue, neither is big boobs. For example, my girlfriend likes Kill 'em All (a missile command style game where you shoot cute bunnies with parachutes) Lemmings, Tetris, Tekken 3, stuff like that. Half of the games she likes could be written in an afternoon.

In short, by writing a game like My Little Pony's Adventure In Happy Fun Land, you are not only alienating the male gaming population, but you also alienate most of the female gaming population too.

In other words, just write the game how you like. Some women will like it, some women will hate it. Some men will like it, some men will hate it.


Edited by - Sandman on December 5, 2001 8:18:22 AM