Girls In Gaming: Data Edition

Ah, yes, the girls in gaming edition of this feature. There had to be one, what with all the gender stuff in the US news lately.

Speaking of that news stuff, can I just say that some consistency would be nice? Either women are too sensitive about sexism and need to toughen up, or they are fragile flowers who need to be protected, or both, or neither, but whatever of those four positions you choose, you should really pick ONE and not change your mind when your side is the one taking lumps. Trust me, this ancient debate has long since been happening in the gaming industry, the military, in scientific laboratories, at software companies, and anywhere else old dudes are startled to find women performing as well as men. It is a tiresome discussion that I’d rather not ever have again, but oh, look, it’s all over the place and I can’t avoid it. The country isn’t red and blue, it’s pink and blue. I may vomit.

Fine. I’ll make it my column this week. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

That statement is in its own way the most succinct description of the gender war as it pertains to gaming that I could possibly come up with. But I digress.

Women have long been a source of confusion for the industry. Apparently there is more to appealing to female gamers than making the box pink, or replacing guns with unicorns. To make matters worse, some women like guns! How is a poor suffering developer supposed to cope with a demographic that doesn’t behave in a uniform and predictable way?

All right, so sarcasm doesn’t help. But seriously, part of the problem is that in years past, the discussion has not been "let’s make a game that appeals to women," it’s been "how do we make the game we want to make also appeal to women." Trying to focus group and committee meeting a game into a form appealing to women results in stereotypes of puzzles with encouraging sound effects and lush sparkly graphics. It’s insulting. Would you try to make a game appealing to young males just by loading it up with guns and blood and thrashy pounding music?

Oh, wait. There may be something to this demographic study thing.

Of course, the big news of the last decade is that social gaming environments appeal to women. Women are, compared to their actual numbers in a population, disproportionately likely to lead a guild, run a website, or start a community. Games that were not necessarily intended for a female market nevertheless found one thanks to the interactive elements of online games. With the internet being a powerful secondary game for many players (by virtue of discussion, information sharing, recruiting, trash talking, and the common bond between people with shared interests), even nominally single player games wound up with community elements.

But we don’t have to rely on theory. Let’s look at the data. First, here’s what we’ve got from our profiles (this is what people have told everyone that they play via GamerDNA):

GamerDNA got its start as a guild host, so the profile data will skew towards MMOs. Even with that in mind, the differences between the charts are striking. World of Warcraft is the dominant game – but among women, it’s REALLY dominant (28% of women versus 16% of men). MMOs in general are big with females – you have to go to seventh place on the pink chart just to get a non-MMO, whereas male players have two shooters and whatever the hell GTA is in their top five, along with two MMO titles.

Twelve games appear on both top 25 lists, although Shaiya was fifth for women and barely made the men’s list. The women’s list reported older titles, interestingly, such as EQ, DAOC, Baldur’s Gate, and NWN. This odd gender quirk might be explained by women being more anal retentive when it comes to fully completing profiles, but even if that’s true, I doubt it’s a factor here. Warhammer Online has not yet launched, but still appears on the men’s list in 19th place (and not at all on the women’s list). Either a lot of men are in the beta, or men are anticipating the title enough that they ran to update their profiles to declare their affinity before so much as logging in.

The Sims have long been reputed to especially appeal to women, and tenth place is not too shabby – but I am fascinated by seeing COD4 and Diablo 2 ranking above the Sims.

All right, that’s self-reporting. What about data that isn’t potentially skewed by memory or motivation, but a faithful reporting of what the machine actually plays?

Men play more evenly – they have multiple games of which they are equally fond. The least played men’s game was still played by more men than women playing any of their bottom thirteen titles.

Some titles are a bit of a shock – Rock Band shows up at eleventh place in the women’s top twenty five games. It doesn’t appear on the men’s chart, because you’d have to go to 37th place to see it. Other games place less surprisingly. Bejeweled 2, Zuma, and Feeding Frenzy all appear on the women’s chart ; all of those games are on the Popcap Arcade disc, and apparently men rarely shove that disc in the drive, as those titles are in the 60s in the men’s rankings.

But the top 25 games are more alike than they are different, with seventeen titles placing on both charts. Four of the top five games are the same, just ranked differently.

Of course, this data can be skewed. My own Xbox reports that I am absolutely MAD for Gears of War, but after an hour of spinning helplessly in circles while dying, my better half took the controller to "demonstrate" something and then never gave it back. For several weeks. But I suspect that it’s quite true that men play more titles more often, and rarely if ever play Bejeweled, so it stands to reason that the rest of the data has value.

So what’s all this mean?

It means that the pundits are right, and they’re wrong. They’re right in that women have flocked to MMOs in large part because the skills necessary to make the most of an MMO are traditional female strengths. But the convergence in the Xbox charts tells me that the distinctions between men and women – at least in the way they game – are starting to fade. I attribute this to the internet and its power to bring together communities of people regardless of game mechanics and external trappings.

A future in which it’s all about the game and not the demographic may well be upon us.