Girls and computer games

[jobob_80]

Youtube: How to make video games more appealing to the female audience(I'd embed the video, because it's interesting and fun to watch, but it's not giving me the option for livejournal, for some reason

Comments

[rose_kolodny]

The hypothesis of the video was interesting: most video games have been marketed towards men for a long time and as a direct result of this, most women don't feel that these games are for them. As a result of this, any immediate change to video games marketing is not going to have a massive effect in changing the demographics of those who buy video games, but over the long term, things may change. I think he's also correct in suggesting that video game designers and advertising executives change the way in which they continue to design and market games: more strong female game characters that don't have biased stats that make them unplayable and that aren't mostly breasts may well encourage female gamers to try these games

[jobob_80]

You are, of course, correct: anecdote is /not/ the same as data. This works both ways. WRT GTA3 we are now at an impasse and only taking a large sample of women who play video games can this be resolved ;)

Actually my issue with driving games in general is that I can't seem to resolve the graphics into a 3-D picture, and hence I can't judge the distance to the corners. I don't know whether that stems from a short-sighted learned behaviour, or from a woman's spatial perception thing or whether it's just me.

Actually my issue with games like Tomb Raider is less to do with the breast/butt thing and more to do with genuinely poor camera control making it practically unplayable in parts. This may be another symptom of the same problem.

[captain_caveman]

Tomb raider is legendary for it's "leap of faith" camera angle issues so you ain't alone in declaring them almost unplayable.

As to your request for games that do something for you, it appears you may have hit one of the major issues with games as they stand. Games have, on the whole, been about escapism. You become someone or something you could never be in real life, it's about doing something extraordinary or far better than the "real" you ever could. It was only relatively recently the idea games could actually do something for you; make you fit, encourage problem solving, teach you rhythm (unless your name is Raj :D) became a big idea. It's still very much in its infancy but with luck we shall see more of these and ideas as innovative as them. Lets hope so anyway, me I quite like guns and cars and running about nuclear wastelands and space and all that jazz, but we all knew that already. :D

[lordofthemoon]

teach you rhythm (unless your name is Raj :D)

Hmm, Egg-shaker Star... ;)