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"Male" games vs. "Female" games
This is an interesting topic and everyone's input can be useful here, because I'm sure most of you have opinions on this.
It's no secret that forums are usually overrun with men. Games, for a long time, have also been the same way. Recently though we've seen a few innovative companies capitalize on untapped female audiences: The Sims and FarmVille are perfect examples. Most of us know women who play these a lot, and before FarmVille it was NeoPets. But ruling out FarmVille, clearly there's something about The Sims that attracts women that other games do not have. I became hyper-conscious of this when I stayed over at my girlfriend's suite virtually every other day for a year, while at the same time I was in theater, which is about 80% female. On a day-to-day basis I was engulfed by women. One thing I noticed was that all genders played a lot of games, but the men clearly played games differently than the women. This is what I mean: ![]() If you think about forums and by association games like FFR, it's pretty obvious why games like this one are overrun with men and why there are so few female players at the top tier: quite simply, women are less invested in the competition. For however much you can say "lol, ffr is serious business", men like competition and view their accomplishments relative to what everyone else does, which is why number-based accomplishments ("429 XP! +1 STR!") are so appealing. Women do not usually do this -- they tend to view their accomplishments relative to what their friends do, or at most what people they know do. (The best illustration of this happened when my girlfriend complained to me about "comparison compliments." I would say "you're one of the most beautiful girls I've ever met" instead of "you're beautiful." Honestly, I thought I was giving a more meaningful compliment because it was less ambiguous. >_>) This is also supported somewhat by psychology. An old psych teacher of mine told me about a study where women fared much better in math classes made up entirely of women than they did with mixed genders. Thinking about it this way, it makes more sense, because there's an easily defined group to work with. I've known plenty of girls who would play Pokemon for example competitively among themselves, but they would never, and I mean never think to look up info about ideal team combinations on the internet. Women, also, tend to fare better than men in vocabulary and remarkably worse in spatial skills. Games which heavily depend on sense of direction, like FPSes or flight sims, aren't going to mesh well with the female demographic. In fact, FPSes are almost anti-female. While RPGs also have a reputation for being dominantly male, they are at least dialogue intensive most of the time; FPSes are so designed for men that strictly speaking they're more male than sports games. The image of a bunch of women in a room with tea candles and diaries isn't a common image without reason: women tend to like personal things and sentimental things to a much greater extent than men. I know very few men who keep journals, much less scrapbook; by contrast, almost every girl I know has a scrapbook of some sort. The games they play reflect this -- Animal Crossing and The Sims both allow for high degrees of sentimentality and personalization. It's interesting that most of what has come to be known as "good gameplay" implicitly supports a lot of characteristics of games that men find appealing. Western game creators have gotten very good at making reward systems which make games extremely addicting for men. But the idea of reward systems is still, to some degree, the idea of expansion -- which goes back to that image I posted a while back. Any time you talk about getting better, about beating more people, you're talking about expansion. And now you probably see what I mean, and see why there are so few female games out there. Most female games tend to focus on maintenance. This is an extremely unappealing game type for a lot of men, so when they do make maintenance-style games they do so in a way that can be played as if it were an expansion-style game. Pokemon can be played this way, as can Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and The Sims. By contrast, not many "male" games can be played in a maintenance-style way. They are almost always goal-focused with some sort of objective. Notice that the maintenance-expansion difference also applies to websites, and why there are plenty of women on the internet -- just not in places you visit. My Facebook friends list is about 50/50 with men/women. My internet friends list, though, is a sausagefest. What do you think? Does what I'm saying make sense? Do you have an alternate explanation? Either way, I'd like to hear your input. |
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I want to play some reindeer games :)
On topic: There are exceptions of course, there are some girls on FFR and screaming their faces off on Xbox Live, and I loove pokemon :). I generally agree with this though, girls are more likely to play games like Sims or Animal Crossing while guys are gonna play Halo and Guitar Hero |
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this is why women are perfect in the kitchen. this diagram will be used to support my chauvinism.
no but seriously i have absolutely zero patience for any video game involving maintenance. i'm very much glued to video games with a competitive atmosphere. i'll actually disagree with you on MMORPGs though, i kind of feel they're applicable to both genders. this is purely anecdotal, but a good number of women i know who play video games regularly have WoW accounts. i feel it's because there's a really loose competitive atmosphere in the casual WoW scene to the point where maintenance actually plays a significant role (i agree with your sentiments about women generally finding maintenance games more appealing). personally i don't have a sliver of patience for MMOs. having to maintain a character and perform meaningless and time consuming tasks that vaguely correlate to anything skill related does not appeal to me. i also feel like MMOs are a perfect outlet for insecure women looking for attention from insecure guys (and vise versa). obviously i'm not implying that people that play these games are insecure, but it definitely happens. sc2/dota/cs/stepmania (the games i play(ed)) on the other hand are a totally different story. there isn't any gray area for competition and they are very much male dominated games. |
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I think it would make sense that women would be more often attractive to those types of games, but I don't think it is right to label such games as more feminine. Anyone can get interested in any of those games depending on their personality or their mood etc.
Women are just less likely to be interested in the competition aspect of games. |
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hey, the Sims is fun but I do love Rockband, Guitar Hero, Halo, COD, and other "male" games. While some "Female" games are fun most are cheesy imo.
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Quite a fascinating anecdote.
I'd totally agree with a very large portion of what you said, but there's something to say about hayden's point with girls and WoW accounts. So many people that I used to play WoW with were couples where the gf/spouse would love to be just as involved as her male counterpart, even though the characters they'd play would take a considerably less amount of effort and skill to play |
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I agree with almost everything you said. Yes, girls do play The Sims, Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, etc.
However for MMORPGs... not really. I know quite alot of girls who play Maplestory. For competitive music games, alot of girls I know play Audition (Which is a Korean rhythm game) Some girls/boys however, just play MMORPGs, competitive games, Farmville, almost any game for that matter just to follow their peers or follow the trend. (In Singapore, Maplestory, Audition, Blackshot) Like my girlfriend, for example. She's playing Stepmania just to get along with me more, probably not for competitive gaming. So I'm guessing this. People (regardless of gender) play games because of their interest OR it's by an influence. |
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I have always played games that wouldn't be categorized as typical female games. (I'm female) I completely agree that some games are more geared towards women and women are more likely to gravitate towards these games because they involve skills women have been taught to develop their entire lives. Women aren't encouraged to be power seekers as is a typical theme in MMORPGs, but at the same time many of these games allow characters to forge their own paths. As long as women can customize their characters in an MMORPG then they are more likely to play them over games like Eve Online, where you don't even HAVE a character. I never came across another female on Eve, at least none that didn't end up being males pretending to be females. At the same time the SIMS gives a player complete control over characters in a game and the player gets to play God, but it's all about maintaining a balance and keeping them in complete harmony just like you said.
I will contribute more to this thread when I am not Christmas drunk and it's not 1:51AM. But I think this is a great topic. |
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My mom plays like any game except FPS games. Like, Final fantasy (all of em), Castlevania, Diablo 2, The sims, like any rpg's actually.
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LOL before I came on FFR, I used to be addicted to Neopets xD. I'm glad I'm not now haha.
But I agree with everything that you said. Such an interesting topic too. Also, I think for guys it's either sports or video games. Regardless, there's always a competitive aspect. Even though I am a guy, I dislike competition but I like the ranking system. I generally view games and sports as a form of "self-improvement" rather than a competition. It's a strange way of perceiving such things lol |
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For example, most stepmania players don't do rates. I do ABSURD rates lmao. There are only a couple other players that actually do that but I do it because it's different from what other players do and I find it to be a lot more interesting and a nice break from the usual. Of course there is the competitive aspect but it's more about seeing what I can do since almost nobody else does it. Honestly I don't like labeling "male" and "female" games. I've seen both genders play FFR - while males are the majority of the players, that doesn't necessarily mean that FFR is a guy's game. I could very well play a maintenance game like The Sims but the problem is that there's no reward! It's a never-ending game and I get nothing from it. Stepmania has achievements as well as FFR, and the game itself can be improved upon (different themes, noteskins, stepfiles, and such). |
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This makes a lot of sense.
It also explains why whenever my mom plays family feud on facebook, she loves it whenever she sees her score is like 10 times higher than anyone on her friends list. |
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oh god, you've gotten me started.
Well, when we talk about sports there's really two things going on here: (1) team sports (you have "the [city/institution] [noun]s", such as the Notre Dame fighting irish or the LA Lakers or whatever. a group wins, a person doesn't win) (2) individualist sports (racquet sports, track, wrestling, weightlifting) No offense to people who like these, but I can't stand (1) for a metric Limbaugh of reasons. The biggest reason is the diffusion of responsibility. If you win, you don't know if you really won or if some other douche won for you, and the same is true for losing. Further, the standards are vague because you are compartmentalized; not everyone can be compared because there are different roles in a team. A linebacker is not the same as a quarterback. But another more psychological thing that gets to me about sports played on a team is the tribal aspect which has bothered me since I was a kid. As Haidt said in this video, it's to war as porn is to sex. It's group identification for the sake of group identification; it's group v group because some people are addicted to group warfare. There's The [X]ers v. The [Y]ers and you have to pick a side and mold yourself to the wishes of that side. Groupthink flourishes in this environment. I'm uneasy when I'm in this setting because I know that people want me to mold to the pressures of the group just because it's anti- some other group. People who are otherwise very level-headed can engage in collective narcissism when in this sort of setting. It's disturbing to me. (I suppose you could draw an analogy with bands, though -- there are different roles in bands, after all. What I find different about this is that it's something of a requirement; music which has a beat and backing instruments is usually more entertaining to listen to than music which doesn't, while sports don't have to be about teams. Also, bands are not usually in competition with each other. They can be, but they're usually not. There is less pressure to be a certain way. Having said that, I also prefer playing piano to any other instrument because it's far more individualistic >_>) Sports of the #2 variety though I enjoy a lot. In a game like tennis, there is always something you can do better -- sure, there are factors that contribute to your loss which are beyond your control. But you are largely responsible for improving your game, and you're on the same playing field as everyone else. There are less divisions -- okay, yeah, there are doubles and singles in tennis and weight classes in wrestling. But you're using the same skills, essentially; even though people will have their strengths at a game like tennis or racquetball, there isn't a division in type as strong as there is with linebacker/running back or catcher/pitcher. --- This was a huge tangent, lmao. I've noticed that the group v. group aspect is something that both genders do though; in fact, I think women might be more likely to engage in competitive group behavior than men. I don't know why. It just seems to me like women in general fear rejection from membership into a group than men do. however, I think this only applies for women when it's groups of people, which goes back to the expansion-maintenance thing. men seem to fear group rejection when it's part of a larger group label, like "smart people" or "alpha males", while women don't seem to care as much. my girlfriend for example thinks in terms of who she is beautiful to, who she is smart to -- I, by contrast, ask am I attractive, am I smart, etc., and it's not an issue of who thinks it. edit: Dossar, I can understand how you would read that as creating a gender construct. I didn't mean "for men." When I say "male" or "female" I'm speaking in generalities and majorities. Think of it this way: obviously there are men who know about fashion, interior design, etc. I've been asked to give people clothing advice on several occasions. But these things are definitely female activities. So in one sense, it's a "girl thing" because many girls do it. However, I don't think it's a "girl thing" in the sense that it's "for girls" or that no one other than girls should do it. |
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Very interesting post (@OP), I think there's definitely something to that.
If I may refer to a bit of evolutionary psychology: perhaps men prefer games with expansion/power themes because they would typically have to search for a mate and then be in charge of supporting the family through various skills, whereas women prefer games with maintenance themes because they would typically be in charge of raising children. About sports, I totally agree with you about team sports. I've never been very athletic, and never really cared about following sports teams, but when I did do sports it was always an individual thing (running, tennis/squash, martial arts) where I could be sure anything I accomplished or failed at was due to only me. |
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girl gamers LMAO
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I know plenty of female MMO players, but they're usually casual. That's the cool part about MMORPG games -- there's something for everyone, both hardcore and casual. Personally, I hate MMO's because they require so much timesink.
Agreed about "maintenance" though. I can't count the number of times I've heard of female gamers who were really into Pokemon, The Sims, and Harvest Moon, haha. |
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Totally agree Arch0wl. What I want to know, though, is why you women/girls DON'T find competition and winning as meaningful?
I am female, but I definitely feel like I fall on the male side when it comes to gaming. I was raised playing shmups and other quality Apple computer games (which I think we had hacked versions of?), and thanks to my older brother, had lots of exposure to them. I liked to win. These days I don't play many competitive games, although the main reasons for that is that now I'm old and slow, but the main reason is that the damned console controllers where all the GOOD competitive games are on, are unsuited to having a fingerless hand. (Giant xbox controllers are still giant and fail.) It also doesn't help that many competitive games have a single-player version that I don't want to bother playing (so I don't bother learning the controls well), and then I get my ass handed to me in online play. Furthermore, about the gender differences in spatiality (is that a word?), those could easily figure into why women gamers might find it harder to learn the games. Most competitive video games are based on spatial reasoning in someway or another, and if you're just bad at something (and bad at something where people like to rub it in your face that you suck), you're not likely to try that thing again. (Hell, this is why I don't play fps's anymore...I just have a steep learning curve. All that no-fingers crap is bullshit, I've overcome a million 'challenges' to having no fingers that if I really wanted to, I'd suck it up and learn to use a controller well if I wanted to.) Anyways, I am a gamer, and I totally game (board and video) for the competition, and I feel that games are the perfect mediums to be a douche, because at the end of the day it doesn't matter. I don't want to pull all that competitiveness into real-life situations though, so I guess I do kinda get the non-competitive mentality. My WoW main, uh, has over 9000, and, ummm, is a male character because ever since the advent of the internet I've hated being treated differently for being a girl. |
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I assumed women don't find competition and winning as meaningful because, generally speaking, they usually don't. What is true in general is not always going to be true in an individual's case, like yours.
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I have to say that I enjoy other types of games than just competitive ones though too, so maybe I'm just getting old or rebelling less or something. Recently I've gotten really into co-operative board games.
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Also... ugh. I don't know whether or not I use myself as an example against the OP or not. I know a lot of women that play MMORPG's and RTS's though. |
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Even if you "used yourself as an example against the OP" this would only advance an argument about yourself and not women. You are hastily imposing a proposition of "All women are [x]" on my post, which is a misunderstanding of both my claim and the nature of general claims; in doing so you're making the ecological fallacy. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy Quote:
I take from your reply that you took this to mean "generally speaking, they usually don't [win]", but that's a misreading. You should read the sentence as "I assumed women don't find competition and winning as meaningful because, generally speaking, they usually dont [find competition and winning as meaningful]." |
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You might have a better tournament record than me in music games. I usually don't go to music game tournaments. I also don't know how you'd go about finding such a record. But this again would only matter if an individual example could counter the general, which it doesn't.
The claim of the first post can be reduced to "women generally prefer 'maintenance' games to 'expansion' games and this might be a plausible explanation for why men are overwhelmingly prevalent on forums and competitive video games despite their seemingly equal presence on websites like Facebook." The data is pretty self-explanatory: look at the sex of FFR regulars (or the sex of regulars on the vast majority of forums) and compare that to the sex of any given person's Facebook friends list (even the most male-infested friends list usually tops out at 60%m-40%w); the sex of regulars at game tournaments (music games -- LAN games -- it's usually overwhelmingly male); the readership information for gaming magazines; honestly, all of this is common knowledge. This applies to most adversarial environments, as there are dramatically more male attorneys than female attorneys. Do you dispute these ratios? Either way, this is unimportant, because I'm offering a possible explanation for those ratios, not establishing that they exist in the first place. If your concern about data was with respect to my psychological claims, here's an interesting article on the subject: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/...jec.122.3.1067 |
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Ok, fair enough. There's just something about this discussion that makes me really uncomfortable. Perhaps it just makes me feel, well, between worlds if that makes any sense. Anyways, obviously I have nothing to contribute. Carry on and suchforth.
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I indeed did misinterpret your quote arch. Now your quote is just meaningless though. 'It is so because it is so.' Not that I expected a contribution from you, being a competitive male gamer. I want female gamer's answers...why do you not want to compete in games? Is that really the case? Do some self-searching. Maybe this is a dumb question. Maybe if you answer that you don't understand how there's a strong desire to compete..?
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An accurate paraphrase would be "I assumed women don't find competition and winning as meaningful because observable behaviors of women as a collective show that they do not demonstrate this tendency." |
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Anyways I kind of agree on arch0wl's personal theory on this because my girlfriend tends to like the facebook games such as farmville, millionaire city and harvest moon but what's also cool is she does sit down and play mmo's like runescape, FF 14. In that case she would also never lay her hands on an fps everytime I ask her if she wants to play black ops I get the same answers "oh I'm not good at that game, there is too much going on, I have a bad reaction time" what's funny though she can point out certain scenarios when watching me play online like people camping and the last stand perk that always pisses me off and empathizes with me which is kind of cool. I think she understands the game just isn't into it like I am. |
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I don't know if I have some sort of magical power but recently everytime I post in a thread I epically kill it for good...
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Funny thing you guys mentioned Harvest Moon. I'm male and I have played that game (and actually enjoy it.) However, I don't play it for the maintenance or "female" aspect, I play it for the "male" or goal-oriented/expansion aspect. I place goals for myself as to go through the game in the most "perfect" scenario: marry the Harvest Goddess, get EVERY single item, master EVERY single crop. There is a statistics menu in the game and my general goal is to maximize every statistic in that menu. I actually dread the maintenance aspect. I hate having to ****ing plant, water, harvest, etc every single day in the game. I honestly play the game just to strive for those goals set in the game and to allow myself to expand in the game.
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I have no fingers on my left hand, pretty easy statement to understand :-p
In any case, I take back a lot of what I said. I don't think its a competition vs maintenance thing, at least not wholly. Its really about marketing and who the game is primarily being made for, and competition is just a small part of those games. Farmville doesn't explode things, have gore, and...explode things. They are specifically designed for a niche market, and the competition factor in those games is just one part of them. And the more I think about it, the very definition of a game implies competition, and since apparently women play even MORE games than men (according to a link someone put up earlier in the thread,) the competition thing just doesn't hold weight. I believe that women play less FPSs, and since most games that are multiplayer on xbox and ps3 ARE FPS's, it makes a lot of sense that you don't find women on your friends list. |
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I apologize if this isn't formatted correctly, it's my first post :). Id have to say i agree with the chart, and the fact that MOST females are about there social life/circles. Females love to feel tight in a social circle, they enjoy bonding over having what they consider fun. Men can have fun while still being competitive. They are also a whole lot less sensitive. Men can loose a game and get upset, but know its just a game and there will be a chance for redemption, females being of an emotional gender, take to loosing personally. (when i say this i mean MOST not all lol). I do however feel there is a small percentage of woman who do not care about socialization. I would not classify myself as a man by any means, but i do feel game-play is competitive, i love gore, fps, and intense- interactive game play. i love to get better and better as i play. Most females don't find a game fun if they arn't good at it at first and almost instantaneously drop it (from what Ive seen) and move on to the next game they think looks cute or cool. They would not look up the strategical combination online, but instead dump the game. I feel game play that is not hard can get tiring after a while, and theres nothing more satisfying the completing what you have started in a game. Men however will keep trying if the game is intriguing (not they they have better attention spans they just are very goal oriented), which i respect and can relate to. i dont mean any disrespect to woman, lol i am one, i have just noticed these things over the years. I have sort of drifted from female friends and began gaming as i please. Maybe im just a rarity who knows. :-D |
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I don't understand why these generalities are at all important specifically because illuminating them feeds into the codification of gender roles and they are a somewhat dull and weak proxy for some underlying biometrics that we don't or aren't willing to understand.
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i dont think killroy knows who arch0wl is lol
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Also, I don't think you know who I am, especially since you can't spell my name even though it's right in front of you. Quote:
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Don't give in to the temptation to flame back at people upsetting you, or it'll be "nice ban" for you as well.
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Kilroy, I take it you're the same Kilroy I met in Nebraska and at the US Open. The way you've responded to me here is extremely passive-aggressive and spiteful given that you didn't have a problem at all with me when I was chatting to you in-person.
On a more relevant note, I just now put two-and-two together to realize that you're someone I knew who has gone through a gender conversion, not someone who was female from the beginning. I'm not sure how that would affect the female/male components of these games or even their competitive aspects; you could throw a similar monkey wrench into my construct by asking what gays or lesbians would look for in games. Right now, I can only speak about Generic Heterosexual Male and Generic Heterosexual Female. |
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Trolls trolling trolls haha, nobody wins. Now shush and go play some FFR.
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Rofl. FFR is clearly a demonstration of your rhythmic skills... more like hand-eye coordination but PAing is simply rhythmic.
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I like harvest moon for the maintenance. I like some maintenance games. I also like competition. I like both. Sometimes I like maintaining something and enjoying the results from the maintenance. Yeah.
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I play Halo Reach, but those MLG players are like living aimbots.
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I'm a female gamer and video game tester and I like pretty much everything but sports games. I rather go outside and get my sports fix. But yea, idk where this business about girls not being competitive comes from. Most female gamers i know are pretty hardcore.
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Perhaps those majority girls feel the need to compete with other girls stronger than they do other men, via things like looks and popularity. Perhaps its not as noticeable to you and everyone else, however, because winning in that is much more subjective...there is no top score to clearly beat.
I dunno about you all, but when I was in junior high and highschool, there seemed to be a very strong clique of popular girls, but, I know, at least from the perspective of a girl myself, that there wasn't quite the same thing for guys. If you were to be cajouled into taking up knitting from your gf, would you feel the need to be as competitive in it as you are in video games? |
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I'm a girl and the only reason why i play games is to get as good as my brother and guy friends so i can be able to play with them or kick their ***. I guess it's to show that girls can play games so dont take us lightly, but we do enjoy playing games.
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