A year ago I received a fairly large group of JC students who were at my institution as part of their immersion program to better understand video games in society. One of the topics I spoke to them about was on gender in computer games, and there are two widely debated areas of interest in this theme: the representation of females in games (think Leisure Suit Larry, Lara Croft etc.), and the dominance of masculine game themes that also ties in with the kind of physical differences between men and women that in turn lend to certain advantages in games (e.g. spatial orientation). That shouldn’t be a surprise, because conventional wisdom tells you that women don’t play games, and even less want to develop games.
What a lot of people don’t realize though is that in the 2008 industry findings on demography, 40% of gamers are women and 44% of online gamers are women. Ok; so that industry finding likely includes people like my mom at Lentor who plays loads of Solitaire, or any one of my several dozen neighbors in Frontierville. But there are a lot of women gamers – proportionately, nearly as many as men. But for some reason, while there’s a sizable number of women who play games, very few actually want to develop them.
That situation has proven to be quite an interesting challenge for the industry, because it makes immediate marketing sense that if you want games to appeal to a gender segment, you’d need persons who understand the needs of that segment. There’s a few; like here and here, but it’s not enough.
Part of the complication I think has to do with the kind of inclinations the general public has of computer games – that its just for entertainment, and it doesn’t help that a lot of the commercial games you find on retail feature male-dominated themes (e.g. violence). But thankfully that’s changing pretty fast, with the kind of funding the industry receives towards the development of game-based learning and edutainment. Or that at the national level, there’s a lot of interest in serious games. Put in another way, the educational sector has realized that games aren’t just for fun any more, and there are real instructional opportunities. That’s why industry is looking seriously at attracting the fairer sex to game development through attractive grants and scholarships from industry giants like Sony like this one here.
Which brings a thought. While I got inducted into video games at a pretty early age at 12 years old and one year later at 13, programmed my first video game – a graphical text-based adventure – my position in the industry today lies more along the domain of game studies, or the discipline that looks at video games as social and cultural phenomenon, as opposed to game development. It’s been an interesting transition. I have three degrees; one in computer engineering, one in business, and one that’s only nominally in ‘information systems’ but really entrenched in social studies and behavior. I should blog about this rojak mix sometime soon now that I have the benefit of retrospection years after the fact.:)
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