Personally what I find weird about this whole ordeal is that from my many years of interacting with nerdy (or maybe not so nerdy) women who played computer games is that there exists one franchise that combines the holy grail of complex gameplay (so it can't be dismissed as another match 3 clone), with insane amount of female appeal, both in the number of hours played and the number of people who play it.
And that franchise is The Sims.
Despite the fact that there has been a huge industry push in the last 10-15 years to make a game that draws in tons of female players, there has been no new game in the franchise other than the safe but ultimately unambitious Sims 4.
I've heard a ton of complaints about players about how much better, more complex and featureful the Sims 3 was (and that game was a glorious mess), and Maxis themselves have acknowledged this. I think there has been a sequel in work at some point in time, that promised to bring back the complexity, which has been cancelled unfortunately.
So in a nutshell, despite all the rage around this question, the industry somehow doesn't even make the games that are known to do well with a female audience.
Another example would be Stardew Valley, or Undertale, which had a huge female following (and sales to match) but had to come out of the indie scene, because all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse at making things that appeal to women than either companies that existed before, or random indies coming from outside the professional world.
Animal Crossing would be another game that has a massive female audience from a AAA studio.
> Despite the fact that there has been a huge industry push in the last 10-15 years to make a game that draws in tons of female players
Ultimately its poor marketing. They want to make Call of Duty and get that audience, but also get girls to play Call of Duty. Instead of making a game with mass appear to both boys and girls.
Not even remotely universal, honestly. They appear to have a reasonably balanced playerbase but that doesn't mean universal at all. Your average COD player doesn't give a rats ass about Stardew Valley, for instance
Universal implies more than just 50-50 split between sexes, imo. It's an impossible standard to reach for any consumer product
Could you imagine a game mechanic complex enough to have these different audiences participate in the same "universe"?
I.e. the FPS players could embody the military forces in a complex society where more RPG players are doing the diplomacy and strategy, others are playing in engaging "home front" social environments, someone is off doing city-planner/factory logistics stuff, etc. There could be some deep-diving, dungeon-crawling sub-games within all these realms, but also more casual modes too.
But, crucially, it is all tied together in a unified simulation so that these different player groups are actually steering a coherent story and state space for the shared world. The outcomes of diplomacy, warfare, industry, trade, local social groups, etc. should all have impact on each other.
The timescale between shooter and strategy layers sounds too great for that to work. Imagine playing Civilization like that. You build and set your army to attack the enemy but then you have to wait for the hour long shooting match in Battlefield to resolve. Sounds as exciting as playing multiplayer Civ where you have to wait for the others to spend as long resolving their turns as you did yours.
Not truly universal, but some games like Minecraft get pretty close.
At the same time, it's not realistic to aim for that level of appeal with every game. Most games are going to aim for some sort of niche, just like any other media.
Yep. Majority of games targeted Men because that's who was buying and playing games. That's starting to shift a little.
But there is probably no way to release an Assassin's Creed or Call Of Duty that is going to appeal to women as much as men. That's just not a realistic product goal imo.
Games need to know their audience, and franky they have been very successful targeting young men for decades. My take is that most times they try to target "both men and women" they flop. There are rare exceptions like Baldur's Gate 3 that seem to reach everyone. But it's rare
I mean, I think that can be cool but there really isn't much substance to the games other than the repetitive "shoot people" gameplay and occasionally decent story. I liked Modern Warfare and World at War I guess, but if you've played a COD you've played them all
I think the real problem is "AAA". AAA games and consoles/gaming computers are expensive and rely heavily on marketing tech-specs and graphics for their appeal. These games usually don't innovate much in gameplay, design, or aesthetics. They are just the same game as last year with higher resolution and more jiggling. With marketing and design culture being male-oriented as discussed in TFA, the studios making AAAs don't/won't have the confidence to make new kinds of games, because they haven't yet identified an archetype that can be sold repeatedly.
The Sims 4 continues to mint money. It came out in 2014, but they've released expansion packs for it every year since then. The latest one came out last month. It costs $40. They've sold tens of millions of these expansion packs over the years.
I agree that it is weird that there hasn't been a AAA attempt to unseat it. You'd think that it'd be a safer bet than yet another hero shooter.
Simulation/Sandbox games probably do well because of their open ended nature.
My GF, daughter and me all play Stardew Valley but we play it wildly differently. It is a farming/relationship simulator for them and some kind of capitalist min/max farming and mining simulation for me.
But yes, the Sims 3 and the 700 add ons are all heavily in their rotation, they make me look like a gaming amateur if you go by hours logged.
My wife plays 'dont starve' like mad (well into 4k hours). She has never step foot in the underworld. Building huge structures on the main area. So I figured I would show her terraria and minecraft. No interest at all. She voraciously played any point and click adventure game she could. That included many hidden object games (good and terrible). There is one Sudoku game she has also several thousand hours into. The match 3 games were amusing to her for a few weeks and she gave up on them. FPS and factory sims are out for her ('they look boring'). So what sticks and doesn't is all over the place.
I guess it's like me and movies. I like sci-fi, but that's not enough for me to like a movie. I don't typically watch dramas, but if it's got enough other interesting things going for it, I can enjoy a drama film.
I really like certain directors, but not everything they make.
I know there are some that can enjoy something based on a single aspect alone, but I imagine most are like me. Then again, it's possible I'm the weird one.
Don't Starve has a certain point-and-clickiness about it. There's one player character and a lot of noticing objects of interest and clicking to pick them up. That's probably important.
I think it's that the biggies are focused on big budget AAA titles that they can sell for $70 or monetize as a FOMO live service, their distinguishing factor compared to indie games is high production values, and they don't feel like they have enough of an advantage in this space, or that they can get enough revenue to justify the huge expenditure of a AAA game.
Basically the same reason many other genres (e.g. roguelites) are dominated by little indie studios.
Plus the studios that have become AAA did it because they implemented interesting ideas, limited by their size constraints. The they get scale and lose the size constraints that caused the to go after interesting ideas.
The real successor to an old AAA series is the new series made by people who played it as kids.
I'm sure there's a huge incentive in these studios to sell games to women, but women (mostly) aren't buying them. That is despite overwhelming evidence that women play games they do like, and play them a lot.
So by greedy capitalist standards, these companies are falling short of what they want to do.
If you want girl games, make them. Don't expect others to make them for you.
Asking for AAA game studios to make something else is like asking a pizza shop to start making burritos. Sure, you can ask. But really, you should just make your own rather than trying to convince someone else to do it for you.
World of Warcraft has been super successful in its space, and yet Blizzard has failed to make an actual sequel.
> Another example would be Stardew Valley, or Undertale, which had a huge female following (and sales to match) but had to come out of the indie scene, because all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse at making things that appeal to women than either companies that existed before, or random indies coming from outside the professional world.
Boomer shooters also came out of the indie space. Survival craft hits? Generally indies. There's plenty of genres that, for whatever reason, have been largely ignored by the biggies.
And The Sims 4 has similarly had a multitude of expansions for it, but the GP is still pointing out there's no sequel, hence me bringing up WoW as the obvious point of comparison.
The Sims expansions aren’t comparable to WoW expansions - Sims exp are optional addons while WoW exp reinvent the entire game over and over again and aren’t optional.
It’s crazy to me that WoW exists but I think there won’t be a WoW 2. But who knows i was wrong about this with StarCraft as well and StarCraft 2 has turned out OK
I’m not even talking about WoW expansions. The game has been so thoroughly modified and improved over the years it is simply not the same game it was at the start, though it retains many familiar elements. Is is essentially a sequel in all but name.
Anything they would add in a sequel is just added to the existing game.
And thanks for that or we'd be inundated with terrible flops ala SimCity disaster of 2013.
Face it, AAA studios just can't do open world and can't do decades-long development cycles, they always immediately lose the plot beneath super-irrelevant graphics, platform deals/restrictions and other crap that's mostly openly detrimental to gameplay and ease of access.
That they insist on treating game development as movie production is my running hypothesis.
Rimworld also has non-inconsiderable female following, but only because it's a) very mod-friendly and b) in continued development for more than 10 years already. Its attention to relationships and interpersonal stuff also helps.
> (so it can't be dismissed as another match 3 clone)
As a "serious" gamer, dismissing (and other dismissable games like smartphone Monopoly) makes sense, but if the topic is "girl games", dismissing them is a mistake. I don't have official stats, but based on women around me, they're very popular, with several saying they're addicted to it/them. So what if they're not Baldurs Gate 3 or Stardew Valley. While we want a depth of discourse deeper than "make GTA6 but in pink" in order to actually appeal to women, leaving out a popular genre with women as Ann address of study because they're insufficient complex while trying to study that area seems shortsighted.
I have two young daughters who love video games. While there is definitely a great deal many games in my Steam Library they aren't interested in, that's mostly a reflection of my tastes not being shared by them. As it is, there are _many_ games on Steam that they've sunk thousands of hours into. Some that immediately come to mind are A Little to the Left, Unpacking, Hogwart's Legacy, Grounded, Minecraft, Tower Wizard, Little Kitty Big City, A Short Hike, Squirreled Away, Donut County, Goat Simulator 3, Plants vs Zombies, Kingdom Rush, Castle Crashers, Putt Putt, Pajama Sam...
We'll even play co-operative games of Barony, and Borderlands; but those are more that they want to spend time with their Dad. Likewise, I don't think they'd ever have picked up Castle Crashers or Kingdom Rush if I hadn't played those games in front of them and with them.
I think an important undertone in many of the games that appeal to them is that they're primarily focused on solving a puzzle and telling a narrative through puzzle resolution. Only one daughter is particularly fond of the doll dressing aspect of some games, and there are dedicated Android apps for that specific niche. Neither is particularly interested in playing first person shooters or epic CRPGs, unless it's done with my involvement. Also important is the presentation; there's only one game in those that I listed which is in any way presented with modern realism, the rest are _clearly_ stylized in a more playful manner. But maybe that's a reflection of their age?
Isn't it kind of misguided to approach this as men studying women and trying to make more things that appeal to them?
Video game distribution is insanely low friction. Last month the best selling game was Resident Evil (6m copies) and right alongside it you have a Slay the Spire 2 (3m copies) which is made and distributed by like... 15 people maybe?
I definitely don't think I could make a better game for women than women, so hopefully more girls get into playing and making games. It is definitely one of those areas where you have an opportunity to stand out from the 10,000 games that come out every day.
> Isn't it kind of misguided to approach this as men studying women and trying to make more things that appeal to them?
Why would it be misguided? There are plenty of works that are created by women that appeal to men (Harry Potter, Animorphs, Full Metal Alchemist), so I don't think there's anything wrong with men trying to make something that appeals to women.
I'm interested in helping my daughters discover content that appeals to them, and to do that I need to understand what it is about certain games that is appealing for them.
> I definitely don't think I could make a better game for women than women, so hopefully more girls get into playing and making games.
Some of my favourite game designers and authors are women. I don't think a creator needs to share the gender, sexuality, or ethnicity of their target audience in order to make games that appeal to that audience. They need to _observe and listen_.
Roberta Williams is at the top of the list; her games were a huge part of my youth. Lesser known here would be Lori Cole, who made Hero's Quest. Loved those Quest games.
Rebecca Heineman comes next; again, the games she worked on were massively influential upon me.
I have much respect for Amy Hennig, who pushed narrative gaming to new levels.
Kim Swift is responsible for _hundreds_ of hours of time lost to multiplayer games with friends of mine.
There's good odds most gamers of my age have played, and enjoyed, something worked on by Sheri Graner Ray.
Honorable mention is Corrinne Yu; I started following her career with passive interest when she was hired at 3DRealms, I expected she had the potential to be the next John Carmack.
If we agree that women statistically have different preferences with regards to video games than men, wouldn't it also be reasonable to think that women might have difference preferences towards careers and hobbies than men?
The past 40 years we went from pinball and arcade machines, to most men playing some sort of game on a personal device (phone, console, computer etc). I could see the next 40 years capturing women in the same capacity given the right infrastructure and content.
> Neither is particularly interested in playing first person shooters or epic CRPGs, unless it's done with my involvement.
This is interesting, as my five year old daughter loves Pillars of Eternity. That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.
She absolutely adores the simulation games (Avatar World, Toca Boca World etc) which leads me to believe that she'd love the Sims. I wonder if I can get them on Switch?
She has Animal Crossing, but there's a lot of text there which she isn't yet comfortable with.
> This is interesting, as my five year old daughter loves Pillars of Eternity.
Funnily enough, PoE is the game I've been needling my eldest to try for _years_ now. The PoE games are fabulous CRPGs that I've played through twice each, myself; I expected that she would love the mix of puzzle solving, narrative, and strategy. But it just didn't hook, for whatever reason.
> That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.
Oh, well, yes. My kids love watching me play whatever game I'm playing. That's different: they are choosing to show interest in my interests in order to spend time with me.
Toca Boca World is a game my daughters (8 and 10) love, and i completely don't understand. It doesn't seem to have a goal or any mechanics --they're just playing dolls on a screen, which is cool but with so little interactivity i think i'd rather they just play with dolls (which they do also...)
Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a *game* there...
> It doesn't seem to have a goal or any mechanics --they're just playing dolls on a screen, which is cool but with so little interactivity i think i'd rather they just play with dolls
> Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a game there...
A large part of the problem here is that folks believe that "game" necessarily implies goals and mechanics.
> 1. a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other
vs
> 2. activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
Lots of folks see it as definition 1 (cooperative is still a contest against some non-player), whereas your girls seem to be operating under definition 2.
The equivalent to your statement from the other side of the fence would be women that deride male competition.
At the end of the day, we likes what we likes. Doing fun things is the fullest definition of a game. So the application of the priciple looks different depending on what the people enjoy.
I touched on it in my way-too-long post elsewhere on here, but I think this is exactly it: there's a (fuzzy at some boundary, sure, but useful) distinction to be drawn on something like where the game happens. Does "the game" (the software) supply most or all of "the game"? Or is "the game" (the software) a toy in service of a game that the player brings and gives shape?
Both types of software plausibly "are video games" but can take extremely different forms, and their appeal may diverge wildly—someone who likes one to an extreme, may have zero interest in the other. Others may like both sorts of play, but not regard them as interchangeable (i.e. if what you're wanting at the moment is an e-sport, a visual novel may not be any amount of a a satisfactory substitute, even if you like visual novels).
We tend to draw a "toy/game" distinction (with games perhaps being a subset of "toys", but still its own sub-category, anyway) with physical objects to divide those with built-in goals from those without, and that seems to serve us well, but we've not translated that to the digital realm very well (and maybe we shouldn't, I dunno)
I don't really agree with the author's assertion that things that appeal to women are treated as inherently lesser in general compared to things that appeal to men. I think plenty of things for both genders are treated as silly or shallow or dumb (and that's not entirely inaccurate).
> Games are doomed by femininity. Across media, genres marketed toward women are deemed lesser than their masculine counterparts: romance novels are trashy, chick flicks are shallow, and pop idols are embarrassing.
I was excited to read the love letter to girl games, but this article is more of a disparagement, as if everything that appeals to women is regarded as trash. There are plenty of things made by women for women that are universally loved. There are shallow chick flicks, yes, and they're not trying to be anything more than they are (I love a lot of them). It seems that the author is the one framing all these things as worthless. Is a game worthless because it never hit the (very competitive) mainstream?
The game mentioned in the article, Consume Me, has 922 written reviews, the majority of which are very positive. It has the description: Consume Me is a semi-autobiographical game that depicts dieting, disordered eating, and fatphobia. In my opinion, the art looks cool and the game looks fun enough, but I don't get the impression it was aiming for mainstream appeal. Why should it? Mainstream games are often addiction traps meant to separate players from their money continuously.
This article needs more love and less disparagement.
We liked that there was a strong female lead that wasn't pathetic, I haven't played any of the reboots but from what I've heard maybe they changed that?
I kinda remember a female friend ranting the 2013 game a long time ago, that the first half hour of it is essentially a non-interactive movie, in which Lara spends most of her time grunting and screaming while she gets banged up and falls off from ledges.
Watching the playthrough on youtube its not an unfair assessment:
The reboots are very much about growth -- she starts off as a scared teenager but grows into an unstoppable killing machine by the end. I could see them being less appealing to women though just because of the intense amount of violence in those games (as compared to the original ones)
Great article! Needless gendering absolutely hinders innnovation, in game design and elsewhere. (Not to mention the unfairness, oppression, and general absurdity).
Slightly unrelated, but the point about tutorials starting with the “basics”, i.e., “making a character move and attack” is interesting. On the one hand, if you have a strong enough grasp on programming fundamentals, it should be pretty easy to take what you learn there and make a “dress-up game”. Heck, a basic dress-up game shouldn’t be any harder than a platformer.
But if you lack that fundamental knowledge and are only interested in games, you need to develop it somehow, and you don’t want to build ‘boring’ console apps; games should be a platform for learning programming. So I agree wholeheartedly with the author: we need more diversity in introductory game programming tutorials!
Of course, that brings us to another can of worms with programming education: Tutorial Hell. But beginners need to start somewhere, and that somewhere should motivate them to continue learning and exploring on their own.
It is more than just a problem of tutorials. Game engines absolutely favor some genres over others.
If you are inexperienced and asking for advice on making a game, the most common answer nowadays is to use Unity. That is reasonable advice. Unity is a well established engine, with good tooling, a bunch of tutorials and community knowledge, and can be made to solve almost any problem you throw at it.
However, Unity is oriented around "traditional" games like the article describes: entities moving around in a 2d or 3d world. If your game fits that mold, you can have something up and running within a day; even with no experience. If it doesn't, you are going to need to spend time fighting the engine before you have even the basics of a playable environment.
Maybe you have an idea for a game that is story driven, where players read a portion of the story, then make a decision about what the character wants to do. If you know what you are doing, you would pick a light novel engine light RenPy, and you'll have your basic game environment up within a day.
It all comes down to the character design too. Look at games like Valorant, Overwatch, or Fortnite. Shooters which would you generally associate with men but INSANELY popular among women just because they have good character designs and appeal not because of the gameplay at all.
Ehh, that seems pretty reductive. I could just as easily claim women love games with character customization or games with deep stories. All of these things may have some truth to them. But (1) it’s unclear how universal this is and (2) it’s unclear if this differentiates women from men or is just something people in general like. “Good character design” is incredibly vague and appreciated by a lot of people.
There are no concrete numbers for Valorant that I know of, but the “Head of Esports Partnerships and Business Development for North America & Oceania Riot Games” Matthew Archambault was quoted saying the Valorant player base is 30-40% women [1]. That seems plausible to me based on my own experience playing Valorant.
In my experience there's a substantial number of women who are fans of something like overwatch, but not of actually playing Overwatch. They like the designs and the world, they make fanart and fics and such, but they don't actually play
Now, that might still be a real success for something that is billed as an esport, but if you're trying to move actual copies of your game you have to be aware that there may be a real big disconnect between your fans and actual paying customers
The usual disclaimers apply: I'm not trying to imply that no women play games or that women are "fake gamers" or whatever. This is just my personal observation
> In my experience there's a substantial number of women who are fans of something like overwatch, but not of actually playing Overwatch. They like the designs and the world, they make fanart and fics and such, but they don't actually play
I'm the same way with Warhammer 40K. I love the lore, but have no interest in actually playing with the miniatures.
> Games are doomed by femininity. Across media, genres marketed toward women are deemed lesser than their masculine counterparts: romance novels are trashy, chick flicks are shallow, and pop idols are embarrassing
This idea is trotted out but is really blatantly false when you think of it. Jayne Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility. These books have all withstood the test of time and are considered fine literature but are absolutely feminine. Romance novels are considered less than because they are not good books, just in the sense that Conan the Barbarian is also considered not fine literature despite being dripping in masculinity.
Manhattan, Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally. There are tons of "chick flicks" that are considered great films. Some directors like Catherine Breillat are extremely feminist in their works and well regarded directors with well regarded films in cinephile circles.
Bringing up books is particularly funny considering that reading, writing, editing, and publishing of said books are all things that are dominated by women.
And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.
Actually Romance is probably a stronger novel genre than say Science Fantasy. The bulk publishers run several lines of novel length stories you can pay for, you can pick how "spicy" is OK for you (some cultures are like "OK, yes I like a plot but there is fucking in this story right? Do NOT cut away from the action"; Other readers will be angry if there's so much as a French kiss between our happily-ever-after couple, even if it's only alluded to and not actually described) as well as themes (Doctors? Werewolves? 18th century Dukes? Billionaires?). If you want pulp science fantasy there aren't a lot of options AFAIK.
On the other hand for shorts science fantasy is much better off. Apparently anybody who can knock out six pages of romance tends to use somebody else's character development as shorthand and so can only publish to AO3 but if you can knock together a decent SF story in six pages that's worth some cash from a pro or semi-pro magazine. Even pretty hard† SF, which is not a common taste, can shift enough copies of a bunch of shorts to make economic sense.
† Science Fiction is graded "harder" the more likely that if you ask "How does that work?" about something in the story the author gets as excited as Hank Green and starts explaining details that may or may not just be facts about our universe which they've incorporated into their story -- as opposed to "A wizard did it" or "That's not important". The diametric opposite of the MST3K mantra.
In terms of popularity absolutely, romantasy is super popular these days. Science fiction and fantasy and science fantasy that appeal to men do okay, but they're definitely not as big.
I think we agree largely. My inclusion of Conan there as an example is a stand in for any male dominated slop fiction. Whether that's milslop Tom Clancy stuff, or Warhammer novels, Video Game adaptions, etc. There are millions of books for boys/men that are total slop. So its not really that its books for men vs women. If it was just things that are for men is considered good, then we would be heralding Tom Clancy as a modern day Shakespeare.
I'm struggling to think of a medium other than video games that isn't dominated by women.
... and actually, wasn't it the case that before the discovery of the "whale" brain-hack to crack open a few (mostly) men's bank accounts, most of the gaming market was women, for broad definitions of "a game", both by player count and revenue?
Even comic books, I'm pretty sure it's only the American superhero-type comics that're mainly "for guys"—if we expand it to include stuff like manga and Euro comics, then the overall audience leans female, right?
Books are overwhelmingly dominated by women.
> And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.
Romance is a poor term because it's used to launder literal werewolf "dubcon" porn under the same label as something like Jane Austen novels. That's probably useful to marketers and for sales, but it makes it impossible to make productive use of the label without further qualifiers for anyone who's trying to actually communicate using the term.
(Meanwhile, yeah, much of what actually sells in that genre [and, again, the term is terrible and overloaded] leans pretty hard into being trash. So does pornhub, or Mr Beast videos, or whatever. So what? It's fine to enjoy them, but it's also fine for folks looking for excellent works of art to mostly avoid them in that search. Meanwhile tons of the modern "literary fiction" and poetry market is by and tuned for an audience of women, in fact I'd be surprised if most of those two categories weren't that, but of course few people actually read lit-fic and especially poetry these days)
----------------------------
BUT, the post is actually less about all that than about how older "girl games" are missing from game history and ignored in things like game-making tutorials and instruction. I'd venture that "boy games" that are similarly low-narrative and/or lean toward being more of an activity than a game (bear with me on the terminology, I'm not interested in turning this post into gatekeeping "what is a game" but I think you understand what I mean, yes? The distinction is here useful) also get left out (I can think of a few[0]), plus the factor where a lot of these were licensed games, which doesn't usually help. I'm not so sure this is as much sexism as that narrative games and clear, tight, goal-oriented game loops are both major factors in games having artistic "staying power" or influence, and in lending themselves to "baby's first video game" tutorials (the latter, especially, for that), and are both really, really hard to accomplish in a video game without resorting to a lot of the usual stuff (violence, largely). This is fundamental to how games are built which is that...
...games necessarily objectify the shit out of literally everything in them. This makes satisfactorily modeling things like realistic relationships extremely hard, and even the games that do it remarkably well are prone to feeling kinda weird as a result (see also: Action Button's rightly-famous Tokimeki Memorial review on Youtube). This is why a lot of relationship-focused games end up as visual novels, where they can be contained to basically a choose-your-own-adventure book format. It's incredibly difficult to build a game-loop around relationship mechanics, and have it be any good at all. This is how you end up with so many "girl games" on the "wrong" side of the "what actually is a video game?" discourse (ugh): it's really hard to build "proper" game mechanics around a lot of the aspects of those "girl games" that appeal to girls in the first place.
Take a dress-up "game": in the most-minimal form (and a form which does exist in the wild!) you're not looking at something that's much more game-like, apparently, than MSPaint. Try to add a dress-up mechanic to a "traditional" game and you end up with something that's a pretty superficial veneer over bog-standard mechanics (stat-boosting item equipping, or something like the FFX-2 "dress sphere" system) or is purely aesthetic and has no "actual" "game" effects. It might be fine to include those anyway! But they're never going to feel especially integral to the game. How do you make dress-up itself a video game? You kinda... don't. You attach it to a sandbox, maybe, and let the player develop their own game (goals, narrative) with it, just like toys in a toybox. Like The Sims... which was a smash-hit among women. Go figure.
Is a toy box a game? Kinda no. Do the contents become vital components of a game when a child plays with them? Often, yes! What is a game? Do we call what kids do with toys, often, "games"? Yep. Is soccer a game? Is chess? Yes and yes. What do soccer and chess have in common with a girl developing stories around her real, actual dolls and such, and dressing them up different ways? Not a fucking lot, but we may use "game" for all of them.
... and so we've come full circle from "romance is a shitty term for a genre of books, and often not very useful for communication": "video game" is a shitty term and often not very useful for communication. The game can be what the player brings to a "toy box" that lets them dress up characters and move them around. Maybe it's fair to call a program "a game" if its main intent is to facilitate that, even if it lacks things like a traditional "game loop" or strong extrinsic goals or motivations (which would let us get away with saying that MSPaint could, situationally, be a toy in service of a game, but doesn't belong in even a very-generously-defined category of "video games" itself, should such distinctions matter for whatever purpose we have in employing the term in the first place).
But a video game can also be an "e-sport", on (kinda) the complete opposite end of a certain spectrum. These things have almost nothing to do with one another aside from that they happen on a computer and are supposed to be some variety of entertaining or fun. "Video games" are both those things, and everything in between, it seems. Not sure how useful it is to lump all that stuff under the one term, but so far efforts to carve out distinctions have been poorly-received, so we're stuck with "all these things are video games even though they're so wildly different that very often their fandoms have no overlap whatsoever, on substantial grounds, not just surface appearance or marketing".
[0] Long ago I had this DOS CAD program for kids called, as I recall, "KidCAD". It was entirely useless for any "serious" work, all it was, was effectively a rudimentary line-rendered digital lego set. Leaning into the kinds of distinctions the linked article uses, I think it's fair to call it a "boy game" in those terms, like a dress-up game is a "girl game". It also had zero built-in narrative and no "game loop" whatsoever. Guess how much attention it gets in game history, and how easy it is to find anything about it now? LOL.
I mean Conan the Barbarian literally exists (by the authors own admission) because he wanted to write historical fiction but couldn't be bothered to do the research.
Acknowledging that I'm not adding much to the conversation here, but I just wanted to respond to say you actually changed my opinion with this post. Those examples are slop not because their category is bad, but because most things are slop. That's fairly clearly true once it's pointed out.
I was talking to a woman last night who still has the Barbie Riding Club CD-ROM that she played in 1999. She mentioned trying to get it to work a few years ago on her computer at the time but it not working. (This probably would have been on Windows 7.)
I thought I remembered a recent update from one of the various API/engine re-implementation projects (e.g. something like but not necessarily ScummVM, Wine/Proton, or something associated with archive.org's Emularity project) that included a list of new titles that had become playable due to some recent fixes, and among those titles were (I thought) a bunch of Barbie and other low-budget franchise games in that vein. There wasn't any particular focus on these outside any of the other games listed—they were just mentioned in passing. Someone did bring it up in the comment section—maybe here on HN—but searching around didn't turn anything up.
lol. So many guys here taking about how girls are involved in gaming.
Me too! But from a different angle.
The vast majority of gaming focuses on zero-sum resolution. Someone loses or dies so someone else can continue or live.
In my experience as an American white male I have a feeling women would be drawn towards win-win resolutions, or even games that are not so focused on conflict. So taking COD and swapping the bad guys for aliens and the base for a “house” and nuclear secrets for “children” isn’t going to succeed. (And would also be super sexist.)
I don't think the reason is primarily that games target men but rather that very few women are interested in this stuff:
Traditionally feminine activities and aesthetics are a wellspring of untapped potential in video games. In Consume Me, your strategy is informed by a collection of cute outfits that offer various stat boosts. Terry Ross’s Sweatermaker is a crafting game inspired by the real process of knitting.
That sounds like the stereotype out of a 1950s commercial that more than a few women I knew would think of as kitsch. I don't even think there is something that gendered for men either, for example some of the more stereotypical cartoonish fantasy or action franchises of the 80s or 90s have relatively little appeal with guys today. And personally I think that's probably a good thing because anything that targeted at a demographic tends to be, to put it mildly not exactly an artistic achievement
I recently saw a video essay by a woman about the surprising popularity of the souls-game and horror genre among women, and the extent to which she appreciated the more 'monstrous femininity' (which you also get in folklore) and I was thinking, maybe you don't get 'chick lit' in games because ironically enough the average gamer now demands more aesthetically mature media than the average reader. You can't make a 50 Shades of Gray game.
My daughter likes most games as long as I'm willing to play with her. She dislikes excessive gore/violence (but has a good threshold anyway... she can watch me play Left 4 Dead 2 even though she finds it scary).
She likes relaxing sandbox games such as "Tiny Glade", story/puzzle oriented games like "Planet of Lana" or "Cocoon", racing games like Mario Kart 8 and Need For Speed (she's awful at it, but she likes it), platformers like "Princess Peach: Showtime!", and will gladly watch me play Space Marine or even help me with XCOM Enemy Unknown (by pointing out enemies). We're currently having a hoot playing "It Takes Two", which is a coop split-screen puzzle platformer.
I think pretty much her only requirements are: "not too scary" and "I can play next to daddy". That's it. Not necessarily just "Girl Games".
One thing I discovered with her is that we both have very low tolerance for "talkie" games with lots of cutscenes where you must skip through all the pointless dialogue. They are very kid-unfriendly (kids want to just play the game and read very slowly anyway, if they can read at all) and, if I'm being honest, also adult-unfriendly. Most games have crap storylines anyway, just give us the gameplay and imply the larger plot briefly, much like Planet of Lana does.
Video games and technology has always been spearheaded by "autistic" tendencies... There is a certain repetition that autistic people and people with adhd have. Most of those people are men...
Women were never excluded. They just never found much interest in it. Just like it is for chess or motor sports.
Chess is actually an incredibly good counter-example: The moment women’s chess clubs and teams started proliferating, women started participating much more. Chess had a “guy’s club” connotation to them, and women were effectively excluded because of that. No intentionally excluded, obviously, but effectively.
Games went very hard into the "shoot stuff" genre from get get-go (presumably in part because it's comparatively easy to design and make) and stayed there, and that's also a factor.
But ALSO, yes, the folks making games tended to be male, and so the target audience also tended to be male.
But on the other hand, as more games became available, and especially as mobile gaming on phones became possible, women quickly climbed back up to being about half of the gamers, so it was certainly never about any inherent differences in how much they'd like games so much as just what sort of games different people might like.
Personally what I find weird about this whole ordeal is that from my many years of interacting with nerdy (or maybe not so nerdy) women who played computer games is that there exists one franchise that combines the holy grail of complex gameplay (so it can't be dismissed as another match 3 clone), with insane amount of female appeal, both in the number of hours played and the number of people who play it.
And that franchise is The Sims.
Despite the fact that there has been a huge industry push in the last 10-15 years to make a game that draws in tons of female players, there has been no new game in the franchise other than the safe but ultimately unambitious Sims 4.
I've heard a ton of complaints about players about how much better, more complex and featureful the Sims 3 was (and that game was a glorious mess), and Maxis themselves have acknowledged this. I think there has been a sequel in work at some point in time, that promised to bring back the complexity, which has been cancelled unfortunately.
So in a nutshell, despite all the rage around this question, the industry somehow doesn't even make the games that are known to do well with a female audience.
Another example would be Stardew Valley, or Undertale, which had a huge female following (and sales to match) but had to come out of the indie scene, because all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse at making things that appeal to women than either companies that existed before, or random indies coming from outside the professional world.
Animal Crossing would be another game that has a massive female audience from a AAA studio.
> Despite the fact that there has been a huge industry push in the last 10-15 years to make a game that draws in tons of female players
Ultimately its poor marketing. They want to make Call of Duty and get that audience, but also get girls to play Call of Duty. Instead of making a game with mass appear to both boys and girls.
> Instead of making a game with mass appear to both boys and girls.
Or admitting that there's just no such thing as universal mass appeal
Stardew Valley and Minecraft are probably the closest of any games I have seen that has universal mass appeal. But even they aren't really universal.
Not even remotely universal, honestly. They appear to have a reasonably balanced playerbase but that doesn't mean universal at all. Your average COD player doesn't give a rats ass about Stardew Valley, for instance
Universal implies more than just 50-50 split between sexes, imo. It's an impossible standard to reach for any consumer product
Could you imagine a game mechanic complex enough to have these different audiences participate in the same "universe"?
I.e. the FPS players could embody the military forces in a complex society where more RPG players are doing the diplomacy and strategy, others are playing in engaging "home front" social environments, someone is off doing city-planner/factory logistics stuff, etc. There could be some deep-diving, dungeon-crawling sub-games within all these realms, but also more casual modes too.
But, crucially, it is all tied together in a unified simulation so that these different player groups are actually steering a coherent story and state space for the shared world. The outcomes of diplomacy, warfare, industry, trade, local social groups, etc. should all have impact on each other.
The timescale between shooter and strategy layers sounds too great for that to work. Imagine playing Civilization like that. You build and set your army to attack the enemy but then you have to wait for the hour long shooting match in Battlefield to resolve. Sounds as exciting as playing multiplayer Civ where you have to wait for the others to spend as long resolving their turns as you did yours.
It's what Eve Online was in better days.
Not truly universal, but some games like Minecraft get pretty close.
At the same time, it's not realistic to aim for that level of appeal with every game. Most games are going to aim for some sort of niche, just like any other media.
Yep. Majority of games targeted Men because that's who was buying and playing games. That's starting to shift a little.
But there is probably no way to release an Assassin's Creed or Call Of Duty that is going to appeal to women as much as men. That's just not a realistic product goal imo.
Games need to know their audience, and franky they have been very successful targeting young men for decades. My take is that most times they try to target "both men and women" they flop. There are rare exceptions like Baldur's Gate 3 that seem to reach everyone. But it's rare
Even BG3, do we have actual numbers on men vs women playing?
Anecdotal, but me and most of my circle of women friends all love(d) BG3.
I mean the existence of stuff like Roblox, Minecraft or the aforementioned games shows there kinda is.
I think there is, but if there existed a topic that was a kryptonite to women, its tacticool grey and brown 'dark and gritty' misery porn.
I mean, I think that can be cool but there really isn't much substance to the games other than the repetitive "shoot people" gameplay and occasionally decent story. I liked Modern Warfare and World at War I guess, but if you've played a COD you've played them all
Hollywood figured it out decades ago. Video games can definitely do it
I think the real problem is "AAA". AAA games and consoles/gaming computers are expensive and rely heavily on marketing tech-specs and graphics for their appeal. These games usually don't innovate much in gameplay, design, or aesthetics. They are just the same game as last year with higher resolution and more jiggling. With marketing and design culture being male-oriented as discussed in TFA, the studios making AAAs don't/won't have the confidence to make new kinds of games, because they haven't yet identified an archetype that can be sold repeatedly.
The Sims 4 continues to mint money. It came out in 2014, but they've released expansion packs for it every year since then. The latest one came out last month. It costs $40. They've sold tens of millions of these expansion packs over the years.
I agree that it is weird that there hasn't been a AAA attempt to unseat it. You'd think that it'd be a safer bet than yet another hero shooter.
Simulation/Sandbox games probably do well because of their open ended nature.
My GF, daughter and me all play Stardew Valley but we play it wildly differently. It is a farming/relationship simulator for them and some kind of capitalist min/max farming and mining simulation for me.
But yes, the Sims 3 and the 700 add ons are all heavily in their rotation, they make me look like a gaming amateur if you go by hours logged.
My wife plays 'dont starve' like mad (well into 4k hours). She has never step foot in the underworld. Building huge structures on the main area. So I figured I would show her terraria and minecraft. No interest at all. She voraciously played any point and click adventure game she could. That included many hidden object games (good and terrible). There is one Sudoku game she has also several thousand hours into. The match 3 games were amusing to her for a few weeks and she gave up on them. FPS and factory sims are out for her ('they look boring'). So what sticks and doesn't is all over the place.
I guess it's like me and movies. I like sci-fi, but that's not enough for me to like a movie. I don't typically watch dramas, but if it's got enough other interesting things going for it, I can enjoy a drama film.
I really like certain directors, but not everything they make.
I know there are some that can enjoy something based on a single aspect alone, but I imagine most are like me. Then again, it's possible I'm the weird one.
What about Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress?
Don't Starve has a certain point-and-clickiness about it. There's one player character and a lot of noticing objects of interest and clicking to pick them up. That's probably important.
> all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse
Corporate interest is primarily financial, anything beyond that is unfortunately all too often only (financially motivated) virtue signalling.
I think it's that the biggies are focused on big budget AAA titles that they can sell for $70 or monetize as a FOMO live service, their distinguishing factor compared to indie games is high production values, and they don't feel like they have enough of an advantage in this space, or that they can get enough revenue to justify the huge expenditure of a AAA game.
Basically the same reason many other genres (e.g. roguelites) are dominated by little indie studios.
Plus the studios that have become AAA did it because they implemented interesting ideas, limited by their size constraints. The they get scale and lose the size constraints that caused the to go after interesting ideas.
The real successor to an old AAA series is the new series made by people who played it as kids.
I'm sure there's a huge incentive in these studios to sell games to women, but women (mostly) aren't buying them. That is despite overwhelming evidence that women play games they do like, and play them a lot.
So by greedy capitalist standards, these companies are falling short of what they want to do.
If you want girl games, make them. Don't expect others to make them for you.
Asking for AAA game studios to make something else is like asking a pizza shop to start making burritos. Sure, you can ask. But really, you should just make your own rather than trying to convince someone else to do it for you.
> my many years of interacting with nerdy (or maybe not so nerdy) women who played computer games
You have a particular experience.
I am not a girl, I do not play games.
The women I know who play games, none play games like that.
World of Warcraft has been super successful in its space, and yet Blizzard has failed to make an actual sequel.
> Another example would be Stardew Valley, or Undertale, which had a huge female following (and sales to match) but had to come out of the indie scene, because all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse at making things that appeal to women than either companies that existed before, or random indies coming from outside the professional world.
Boomer shooters also came out of the indie space. Survival craft hits? Generally indies. There's plenty of genres that, for whatever reason, have been largely ignored by the biggies.
The “sequel” to WoW is already here. Compare modern WoW to the original. It is essentially a sequel, rebooted several times times over.
And The Sims 4 has similarly had a multitude of expansions for it, but the GP is still pointing out there's no sequel, hence me bringing up WoW as the obvious point of comparison.
The Sims expansions aren’t comparable to WoW expansions - Sims exp are optional addons while WoW exp reinvent the entire game over and over again and aren’t optional.
It’s crazy to me that WoW exists but I think there won’t be a WoW 2. But who knows i was wrong about this with StarCraft as well and StarCraft 2 has turned out OK
I’m not even talking about WoW expansions. The game has been so thoroughly modified and improved over the years it is simply not the same game it was at the start, though it retains many familiar elements. Is is essentially a sequel in all but name.
Anything they would add in a sequel is just added to the existing game.
And thanks for that or we'd be inundated with terrible flops ala SimCity disaster of 2013.
Face it, AAA studios just can't do open world and can't do decades-long development cycles, they always immediately lose the plot beneath super-irrelevant graphics, platform deals/restrictions and other crap that's mostly openly detrimental to gameplay and ease of access.
That they insist on treating game development as movie production is my running hypothesis.
Rimworld also has non-inconsiderable female following, but only because it's a) very mod-friendly and b) in continued development for more than 10 years already. Its attention to relationships and interpersonal stuff also helps.
> (so it can't be dismissed as another match 3 clone)
As a "serious" gamer, dismissing (and other dismissable games like smartphone Monopoly) makes sense, but if the topic is "girl games", dismissing them is a mistake. I don't have official stats, but based on women around me, they're very popular, with several saying they're addicted to it/them. So what if they're not Baldurs Gate 3 or Stardew Valley. While we want a depth of discourse deeper than "make GTA6 but in pink" in order to actually appeal to women, leaving out a popular genre with women as Ann address of study because they're insufficient complex while trying to study that area seems shortsighted.
I have two young daughters who love video games. While there is definitely a great deal many games in my Steam Library they aren't interested in, that's mostly a reflection of my tastes not being shared by them. As it is, there are _many_ games on Steam that they've sunk thousands of hours into. Some that immediately come to mind are A Little to the Left, Unpacking, Hogwart's Legacy, Grounded, Minecraft, Tower Wizard, Little Kitty Big City, A Short Hike, Squirreled Away, Donut County, Goat Simulator 3, Plants vs Zombies, Kingdom Rush, Castle Crashers, Putt Putt, Pajama Sam...
We'll even play co-operative games of Barony, and Borderlands; but those are more that they want to spend time with their Dad. Likewise, I don't think they'd ever have picked up Castle Crashers or Kingdom Rush if I hadn't played those games in front of them and with them.
I think an important undertone in many of the games that appeal to them is that they're primarily focused on solving a puzzle and telling a narrative through puzzle resolution. Only one daughter is particularly fond of the doll dressing aspect of some games, and there are dedicated Android apps for that specific niche. Neither is particularly interested in playing first person shooters or epic CRPGs, unless it's done with my involvement. Also important is the presentation; there's only one game in those that I listed which is in any way presented with modern realism, the rest are _clearly_ stylized in a more playful manner. But maybe that's a reflection of their age?
Isn't it kind of misguided to approach this as men studying women and trying to make more things that appeal to them?
Video game distribution is insanely low friction. Last month the best selling game was Resident Evil (6m copies) and right alongside it you have a Slay the Spire 2 (3m copies) which is made and distributed by like... 15 people maybe?
I definitely don't think I could make a better game for women than women, so hopefully more girls get into playing and making games. It is definitely one of those areas where you have an opportunity to stand out from the 10,000 games that come out every day.
> Isn't it kind of misguided to approach this as men studying women and trying to make more things that appeal to them?
Why would it be misguided? There are plenty of works that are created by women that appeal to men (Harry Potter, Animorphs, Full Metal Alchemist), so I don't think there's anything wrong with men trying to make something that appeals to women.
It's the "trying" part that taints the stew.
Make art that is truthful and your audience will find you.
Knowing your audience is the most important step in serving them content they want.
I'm interested in helping my daughters discover content that appeals to them, and to do that I need to understand what it is about certain games that is appealing for them.
> I definitely don't think I could make a better game for women than women, so hopefully more girls get into playing and making games.
Some of my favourite game designers and authors are women. I don't think a creator needs to share the gender, sexuality, or ethnicity of their target audience in order to make games that appeal to that audience. They need to _observe and listen_.
Who are your favorite game designers that are women?
Roberta Williams is at the top of the list; her games were a huge part of my youth. Lesser known here would be Lori Cole, who made Hero's Quest. Loved those Quest games.
Rebecca Heineman comes next; again, the games she worked on were massively influential upon me.
I have much respect for Amy Hennig, who pushed narrative gaming to new levels.
Kim Swift is responsible for _hundreds_ of hours of time lost to multiplayer games with friends of mine.
There's good odds most gamers of my age have played, and enjoyed, something worked on by Sheri Graner Ray.
Honorable mention is Corrinne Yu; I started following her career with passive interest when she was hired at 3DRealms, I expected she had the potential to be the next John Carmack.
If we agree that women statistically have different preferences with regards to video games than men, wouldn't it also be reasonable to think that women might have difference preferences towards careers and hobbies than men?
The past 40 years we went from pinball and arcade machines, to most men playing some sort of game on a personal device (phone, console, computer etc). I could see the next 40 years capturing women in the same capacity given the right infrastructure and content.
> Neither is particularly interested in playing first person shooters or epic CRPGs, unless it's done with my involvement.
This is interesting, as my five year old daughter loves Pillars of Eternity. That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.
She absolutely adores the simulation games (Avatar World, Toca Boca World etc) which leads me to believe that she'd love the Sims. I wonder if I can get them on Switch?
She has Animal Crossing, but there's a lot of text there which she isn't yet comfortable with.
> This is interesting, as my five year old daughter loves Pillars of Eternity.
Funnily enough, PoE is the game I've been needling my eldest to try for _years_ now. The PoE games are fabulous CRPGs that I've played through twice each, myself; I expected that she would love the mix of puzzle solving, narrative, and strategy. But it just didn't hook, for whatever reason.
> That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.
Oh, well, yes. My kids love watching me play whatever game I'm playing. That's different: they are choosing to show interest in my interests in order to spend time with me.
Toca Boca World is a game my daughters (8 and 10) love, and i completely don't understand. It doesn't seem to have a goal or any mechanics --they're just playing dolls on a screen, which is cool but with so little interactivity i think i'd rather they just play with dolls (which they do also...)
Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a *game* there...
> It doesn't seem to have a goal or any mechanics --they're just playing dolls on a screen, which is cool but with so little interactivity i think i'd rather they just play with dolls
> Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a game there...
A large part of the problem here is that folks believe that "game" necessarily implies goals and mechanics.
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/game
> 1. a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other
vs
> 2. activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
Lots of folks see it as definition 1 (cooperative is still a contest against some non-player), whereas your girls seem to be operating under definition 2.
The equivalent to your statement from the other side of the fence would be women that deride male competition.
At the end of the day, we likes what we likes. Doing fun things is the fullest definition of a game. So the application of the priciple looks different depending on what the people enjoy.
I touched on it in my way-too-long post elsewhere on here, but I think this is exactly it: there's a (fuzzy at some boundary, sure, but useful) distinction to be drawn on something like where the game happens. Does "the game" (the software) supply most or all of "the game"? Or is "the game" (the software) a toy in service of a game that the player brings and gives shape?
Both types of software plausibly "are video games" but can take extremely different forms, and their appeal may diverge wildly—someone who likes one to an extreme, may have zero interest in the other. Others may like both sorts of play, but not regard them as interchangeable (i.e. if what you're wanting at the moment is an e-sport, a visual novel may not be any amount of a a satisfactory substitute, even if you like visual novels).
We tend to draw a "toy/game" distinction (with games perhaps being a subset of "toys", but still its own sub-category, anyway) with physical objects to divide those with built-in goals from those without, and that seems to serve us well, but we've not translated that to the digital realm very well (and maybe we shouldn't, I dunno)
I don't really agree with the author's assertion that things that appeal to women are treated as inherently lesser in general compared to things that appeal to men. I think plenty of things for both genders are treated as silly or shallow or dumb (and that's not entirely inaccurate).
I do wonder if there's data on this, though.
> Games are doomed by femininity. Across media, genres marketed toward women are deemed lesser than their masculine counterparts: romance novels are trashy, chick flicks are shallow, and pop idols are embarrassing.
I was excited to read the love letter to girl games, but this article is more of a disparagement, as if everything that appeals to women is regarded as trash. There are plenty of things made by women for women that are universally loved. There are shallow chick flicks, yes, and they're not trying to be anything more than they are (I love a lot of them). It seems that the author is the one framing all these things as worthless. Is a game worthless because it never hit the (very competitive) mainstream?
The game mentioned in the article, Consume Me, has 922 written reviews, the majority of which are very positive. It has the description: Consume Me is a semi-autobiographical game that depicts dieting, disordered eating, and fatphobia. In my opinion, the art looks cool and the game looks fun enough, but I don't get the impression it was aiming for mainstream appeal. Why should it? Mainstream games are often addiction traps meant to separate players from their money continuously.
This article needs more love and less disparagement.
I can read a trashy romance novel on a bus. But if I crack open a skin mag, I am a weirdo.
So which is the lesser?
Actually… false comparison. They make skin mags featuring men too.
So let’s try this:
Woman reading a romance book. Vs a man reading a romance book.
One of those is “weird”.
A point of contention with the article. Most women I know who played the old Tomb Raider games loved them, and preferred them to the reboots.
We liked that there was a strong female lead that wasn't pathetic, I haven't played any of the reboots but from what I've heard maybe they changed that?
I kinda remember a female friend ranting the 2013 game a long time ago, that the first half hour of it is essentially a non-interactive movie, in which Lara spends most of her time grunting and screaming while she gets banged up and falls off from ledges.
Watching the playthrough on youtube its not an unfair assessment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcsVU70dI3s
The reboots are very much about growth -- she starts off as a scared teenager but grows into an unstoppable killing machine by the end. I could see them being less appealing to women though just because of the intense amount of violence in those games (as compared to the original ones)
That's not growth, that's a regression. That is trauma and suffering.
Nathan Drake is similarly presented as a hero, but requires a deep psychopathic disconnect from reality to exist as a character.
It's perplexing that strong female leads often end up just being more masculine.
Perfect Dark N64 commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAo7Vt4X_Ys
Great article! Needless gendering absolutely hinders innnovation, in game design and elsewhere. (Not to mention the unfairness, oppression, and general absurdity).
Slightly unrelated, but the point about tutorials starting with the “basics”, i.e., “making a character move and attack” is interesting. On the one hand, if you have a strong enough grasp on programming fundamentals, it should be pretty easy to take what you learn there and make a “dress-up game”. Heck, a basic dress-up game shouldn’t be any harder than a platformer.
But if you lack that fundamental knowledge and are only interested in games, you need to develop it somehow, and you don’t want to build ‘boring’ console apps; games should be a platform for learning programming. So I agree wholeheartedly with the author: we need more diversity in introductory game programming tutorials!
Of course, that brings us to another can of worms with programming education: Tutorial Hell. But beginners need to start somewhere, and that somewhere should motivate them to continue learning and exploring on their own.
It is more than just a problem of tutorials. Game engines absolutely favor some genres over others.
If you are inexperienced and asking for advice on making a game, the most common answer nowadays is to use Unity. That is reasonable advice. Unity is a well established engine, with good tooling, a bunch of tutorials and community knowledge, and can be made to solve almost any problem you throw at it.
However, Unity is oriented around "traditional" games like the article describes: entities moving around in a 2d or 3d world. If your game fits that mold, you can have something up and running within a day; even with no experience. If it doesn't, you are going to need to spend time fighting the engine before you have even the basics of a playable environment.
Maybe you have an idea for a game that is story driven, where players read a portion of the story, then make a decision about what the character wants to do. If you know what you are doing, you would pick a light novel engine light RenPy, and you'll have your basic game environment up within a day.
It all comes down to the character design too. Look at games like Valorant, Overwatch, or Fortnite. Shooters which would you generally associate with men but INSANELY popular among women just because they have good character designs and appeal not because of the gameplay at all.
Ehh, that seems pretty reductive. I could just as easily claim women love games with character customization or games with deep stories. All of these things may have some truth to them. But (1) it’s unclear how universal this is and (2) it’s unclear if this differentiates women from men or is just something people in general like. “Good character design” is incredibly vague and appreciated by a lot of people.
Wait, do we have actual gender breakdowns for each of those games?
There are no concrete numbers for Valorant that I know of, but the “Head of Esports Partnerships and Business Development for North America & Oceania Riot Games” Matthew Archambault was quoted saying the Valorant player base is 30-40% women [1]. That seems plausible to me based on my own experience playing Valorant.
[1] https://gamesbeat.com/how-riot-games-wants-to-ensure-that-va...
You have to be kind of careful with that too
In my experience there's a substantial number of women who are fans of something like overwatch, but not of actually playing Overwatch. They like the designs and the world, they make fanart and fics and such, but they don't actually play
Now, that might still be a real success for something that is billed as an esport, but if you're trying to move actual copies of your game you have to be aware that there may be a real big disconnect between your fans and actual paying customers
The usual disclaimers apply: I'm not trying to imply that no women play games or that women are "fake gamers" or whatever. This is just my personal observation
> In my experience there's a substantial number of women who are fans of something like overwatch, but not of actually playing Overwatch. They like the designs and the world, they make fanart and fics and such, but they don't actually play
I'm the same way with Warhammer 40K. I love the lore, but have no interest in actually playing with the miniatures.
Yep! There's nothing wrong with this. It doesn't make you lesser or anything
But from the company's sales perspective it's important to recognize the difference between fans and customers
How many games or products had huge social media followings and then flopped hard when they came out? Plenty.
> Games are doomed by femininity. Across media, genres marketed toward women are deemed lesser than their masculine counterparts: romance novels are trashy, chick flicks are shallow, and pop idols are embarrassing
This idea is trotted out but is really blatantly false when you think of it. Jayne Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility. These books have all withstood the test of time and are considered fine literature but are absolutely feminine. Romance novels are considered less than because they are not good books, just in the sense that Conan the Barbarian is also considered not fine literature despite being dripping in masculinity.
Manhattan, Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally. There are tons of "chick flicks" that are considered great films. Some directors like Catherine Breillat are extremely feminist in their works and well regarded directors with well regarded films in cinephile circles.
Bringing up books is particularly funny considering that reading, writing, editing, and publishing of said books are all things that are dominated by women.
And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.
Actually Romance is probably a stronger novel genre than say Science Fantasy. The bulk publishers run several lines of novel length stories you can pay for, you can pick how "spicy" is OK for you (some cultures are like "OK, yes I like a plot but there is fucking in this story right? Do NOT cut away from the action"; Other readers will be angry if there's so much as a French kiss between our happily-ever-after couple, even if it's only alluded to and not actually described) as well as themes (Doctors? Werewolves? 18th century Dukes? Billionaires?). If you want pulp science fantasy there aren't a lot of options AFAIK.
On the other hand for shorts science fantasy is much better off. Apparently anybody who can knock out six pages of romance tends to use somebody else's character development as shorthand and so can only publish to AO3 but if you can knock together a decent SF story in six pages that's worth some cash from a pro or semi-pro magazine. Even pretty hard† SF, which is not a common taste, can shift enough copies of a bunch of shorts to make economic sense.
† Science Fiction is graded "harder" the more likely that if you ask "How does that work?" about something in the story the author gets as excited as Hank Green and starts explaining details that may or may not just be facts about our universe which they've incorporated into their story -- as opposed to "A wizard did it" or "That's not important". The diametric opposite of the MST3K mantra.
In terms of popularity absolutely, romantasy is super popular these days. Science fiction and fantasy and science fantasy that appeal to men do okay, but they're definitely not as big.
I think we agree largely. My inclusion of Conan there as an example is a stand in for any male dominated slop fiction. Whether that's milslop Tom Clancy stuff, or Warhammer novels, Video Game adaptions, etc. There are millions of books for boys/men that are total slop. So its not really that its books for men vs women. If it was just things that are for men is considered good, then we would be heralding Tom Clancy as a modern day Shakespeare.
I'm struggling to think of a medium other than video games that isn't dominated by women.
... and actually, wasn't it the case that before the discovery of the "whale" brain-hack to crack open a few (mostly) men's bank accounts, most of the gaming market was women, for broad definitions of "a game", both by player count and revenue?
Even comic books, I'm pretty sure it's only the American superhero-type comics that're mainly "for guys"—if we expand it to include stuff like manga and Euro comics, then the overall audience leans female, right?
Books are overwhelmingly dominated by women.
> And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.
Romance is a poor term because it's used to launder literal werewolf "dubcon" porn under the same label as something like Jane Austen novels. That's probably useful to marketers and for sales, but it makes it impossible to make productive use of the label without further qualifiers for anyone who's trying to actually communicate using the term.
(Meanwhile, yeah, much of what actually sells in that genre [and, again, the term is terrible and overloaded] leans pretty hard into being trash. So does pornhub, or Mr Beast videos, or whatever. So what? It's fine to enjoy them, but it's also fine for folks looking for excellent works of art to mostly avoid them in that search. Meanwhile tons of the modern "literary fiction" and poetry market is by and tuned for an audience of women, in fact I'd be surprised if most of those two categories weren't that, but of course few people actually read lit-fic and especially poetry these days)
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BUT, the post is actually less about all that than about how older "girl games" are missing from game history and ignored in things like game-making tutorials and instruction. I'd venture that "boy games" that are similarly low-narrative and/or lean toward being more of an activity than a game (bear with me on the terminology, I'm not interested in turning this post into gatekeeping "what is a game" but I think you understand what I mean, yes? The distinction is here useful) also get left out (I can think of a few[0]), plus the factor where a lot of these were licensed games, which doesn't usually help. I'm not so sure this is as much sexism as that narrative games and clear, tight, goal-oriented game loops are both major factors in games having artistic "staying power" or influence, and in lending themselves to "baby's first video game" tutorials (the latter, especially, for that), and are both really, really hard to accomplish in a video game without resorting to a lot of the usual stuff (violence, largely). This is fundamental to how games are built which is that...
...games necessarily objectify the shit out of literally everything in them. This makes satisfactorily modeling things like realistic relationships extremely hard, and even the games that do it remarkably well are prone to feeling kinda weird as a result (see also: Action Button's rightly-famous Tokimeki Memorial review on Youtube). This is why a lot of relationship-focused games end up as visual novels, where they can be contained to basically a choose-your-own-adventure book format. It's incredibly difficult to build a game-loop around relationship mechanics, and have it be any good at all. This is how you end up with so many "girl games" on the "wrong" side of the "what actually is a video game?" discourse (ugh): it's really hard to build "proper" game mechanics around a lot of the aspects of those "girl games" that appeal to girls in the first place.
Take a dress-up "game": in the most-minimal form (and a form which does exist in the wild!) you're not looking at something that's much more game-like, apparently, than MSPaint. Try to add a dress-up mechanic to a "traditional" game and you end up with something that's a pretty superficial veneer over bog-standard mechanics (stat-boosting item equipping, or something like the FFX-2 "dress sphere" system) or is purely aesthetic and has no "actual" "game" effects. It might be fine to include those anyway! But they're never going to feel especially integral to the game. How do you make dress-up itself a video game? You kinda... don't. You attach it to a sandbox, maybe, and let the player develop their own game (goals, narrative) with it, just like toys in a toybox. Like The Sims... which was a smash-hit among women. Go figure.
Is a toy box a game? Kinda no. Do the contents become vital components of a game when a child plays with them? Often, yes! What is a game? Do we call what kids do with toys, often, "games"? Yep. Is soccer a game? Is chess? Yes and yes. What do soccer and chess have in common with a girl developing stories around her real, actual dolls and such, and dressing them up different ways? Not a fucking lot, but we may use "game" for all of them.
... and so we've come full circle from "romance is a shitty term for a genre of books, and often not very useful for communication": "video game" is a shitty term and often not very useful for communication. The game can be what the player brings to a "toy box" that lets them dress up characters and move them around. Maybe it's fair to call a program "a game" if its main intent is to facilitate that, even if it lacks things like a traditional "game loop" or strong extrinsic goals or motivations (which would let us get away with saying that MSPaint could, situationally, be a toy in service of a game, but doesn't belong in even a very-generously-defined category of "video games" itself, should such distinctions matter for whatever purpose we have in employing the term in the first place).
But a video game can also be an "e-sport", on (kinda) the complete opposite end of a certain spectrum. These things have almost nothing to do with one another aside from that they happen on a computer and are supposed to be some variety of entertaining or fun. "Video games" are both those things, and everything in between, it seems. Not sure how useful it is to lump all that stuff under the one term, but so far efforts to carve out distinctions have been poorly-received, so we're stuck with "all these things are video games even though they're so wildly different that very often their fandoms have no overlap whatsoever, on substantial grounds, not just surface appearance or marketing".
[0] Long ago I had this DOS CAD program for kids called, as I recall, "KidCAD". It was entirely useless for any "serious" work, all it was, was effectively a rudimentary line-rendered digital lego set. Leaning into the kinds of distinctions the linked article uses, I think it's fair to call it a "boy game" in those terms, like a dress-up game is a "girl game". It also had zero built-in narrative and no "game loop" whatsoever. Guess how much attention it gets in game history, and how easy it is to find anything about it now? LOL.
I mean Conan the Barbarian literally exists (by the authors own admission) because he wanted to write historical fiction but couldn't be bothered to do the research.
Acknowledging that I'm not adding much to the conversation here, but I just wanted to respond to say you actually changed my opinion with this post. Those examples are slop not because their category is bad, but because most things are slop. That's fairly clearly true once it's pointed out.
Curious, is The Sims considered a "girl game"?
I was talking to a woman last night who still has the Barbie Riding Club CD-ROM that she played in 1999. She mentioned trying to get it to work a few years ago on her computer at the time but it not working. (This probably would have been on Windows 7.)
I thought I remembered a recent update from one of the various API/engine re-implementation projects (e.g. something like but not necessarily ScummVM, Wine/Proton, or something associated with archive.org's Emularity project) that included a list of new titles that had become playable due to some recent fixes, and among those titles were (I thought) a bunch of Barbie and other low-budget franchise games in that vein. There wasn't any particular focus on these outside any of the other games listed—they were just mentioned in passing. Someone did bring it up in the comment section—maybe here on HN—but searching around didn't turn anything up.
Any ideas?
There's instructions by a user named Grace_Grape here: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/barbie-adventure-riding-c...
lol. So many guys here taking about how girls are involved in gaming.
Me too! But from a different angle.
The vast majority of gaming focuses on zero-sum resolution. Someone loses or dies so someone else can continue or live.
In my experience as an American white male I have a feeling women would be drawn towards win-win resolutions, or even games that are not so focused on conflict. So taking COD and swapping the bad guys for aliens and the base for a “house” and nuclear secrets for “children” isn’t going to succeed. (And would also be super sexist.)
But really don’t listen to me. Ask a woman.
>games in traditionally feminine genres like fashion games and visual novels
...
> The solution is giving people the tools to start exactly where they want to start
Isn't ren'py one of the easiest game engines to use?
Calling visual novels a "traditionally feminine" genre is rather hilarious.
I don't think the reason is primarily that games target men but rather that very few women are interested in this stuff:
Traditionally feminine activities and aesthetics are a wellspring of untapped potential in video games. In Consume Me, your strategy is informed by a collection of cute outfits that offer various stat boosts. Terry Ross’s Sweatermaker is a crafting game inspired by the real process of knitting.
That sounds like the stereotype out of a 1950s commercial that more than a few women I knew would think of as kitsch. I don't even think there is something that gendered for men either, for example some of the more stereotypical cartoonish fantasy or action franchises of the 80s or 90s have relatively little appeal with guys today. And personally I think that's probably a good thing because anything that targeted at a demographic tends to be, to put it mildly not exactly an artistic achievement
I recently saw a video essay by a woman about the surprising popularity of the souls-game and horror genre among women, and the extent to which she appreciated the more 'monstrous femininity' (which you also get in folklore) and I was thinking, maybe you don't get 'chick lit' in games because ironically enough the average gamer now demands more aesthetically mature media than the average reader. You can't make a 50 Shades of Gray game.
My daughter likes most games as long as I'm willing to play with her. She dislikes excessive gore/violence (but has a good threshold anyway... she can watch me play Left 4 Dead 2 even though she finds it scary).
She likes relaxing sandbox games such as "Tiny Glade", story/puzzle oriented games like "Planet of Lana" or "Cocoon", racing games like Mario Kart 8 and Need For Speed (she's awful at it, but she likes it), platformers like "Princess Peach: Showtime!", and will gladly watch me play Space Marine or even help me with XCOM Enemy Unknown (by pointing out enemies). We're currently having a hoot playing "It Takes Two", which is a coop split-screen puzzle platformer.
I think pretty much her only requirements are: "not too scary" and "I can play next to daddy". That's it. Not necessarily just "Girl Games".
One thing I discovered with her is that we both have very low tolerance for "talkie" games with lots of cutscenes where you must skip through all the pointless dialogue. They are very kid-unfriendly (kids want to just play the game and read very slowly anyway, if they can read at all) and, if I'm being honest, also adult-unfriendly. Most games have crap storylines anyway, just give us the gameplay and imply the larger plot briefly, much like Planet of Lana does.
It's really hard not that deep...
Video games and technology has always been spearheaded by "autistic" tendencies... There is a certain repetition that autistic people and people with adhd have. Most of those people are men...
Women were never excluded. They just never found much interest in it. Just like it is for chess or motor sports.
Chess is actually an incredibly good counter-example: The moment women’s chess clubs and teams started proliferating, women started participating much more. Chess had a “guy’s club” connotation to them, and women were effectively excluded because of that. No intentionally excluded, obviously, but effectively.
Soccer is a similar example.
It's both. Women were definitely excluded, especially in the 80s and 90s. Ads were a little....let's say a little focused on the male gaze: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1k3dre/game_boy_poc...
Games went very hard into the "shoot stuff" genre from get get-go (presumably in part because it's comparatively easy to design and make) and stayed there, and that's also a factor.
But ALSO, yes, the folks making games tended to be male, and so the target audience also tended to be male.
But on the other hand, as more games became available, and especially as mobile gaming on phones became possible, women quickly climbed back up to being about half of the gamers, so it was certainly never about any inherent differences in how much they'd like games so much as just what sort of games different people might like.
There's definitely some exclusion, but I'm still inclined to agree that interest is the larger determining factor.
The interest has been there just never promoted as a your welcome too. It has pleasantly been gate kept.
The early 90's was heavily painted pink and dolly for girls and camo & macho for the boys.