"Male" games vs. "Female" games

[ShAiOnEi]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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...

[benguino]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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.

[Cavernio]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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.

[deadlydreams_x]

Re: "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.

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.

[Vendetta21]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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.

[Cavernio]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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.

If you were making your living off of making video games, who your market is, and designing for it, would be somewhat crucial I think.

[Vendetta21]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

If you were making your living off of making video games, who your market is, and designing for it, would be somewhat crucial I think.

i guess but that makes this sorta ivory tower instead of some weird proxy about trying to understand each other (which is what it is)

[phe0nixblade]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

i dont think killroy knows who arch0wl is lol

[LJRoX]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

i dont think killroy knows who arch0wl is lol

Looking at his FFR stats, he's really bad in music games in general.

[Kilroy_x]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

i dont think killroy knows who arch0wl is lol

Arch0wl: A dude who is terrible at everything except maybe stepmania and O2jam, dunno whether or not he's decent at IIDX but I doubt it.

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.

Looking at her FFR stats, she's really bad at FFR.

Fixed 4 coherence. Nice ban.

[devonin]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

Don't give in to the temptation to flame back at people upsetting you, or it'll be "nice ban" for you as well.

[Arch0wl]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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.

[DarknessXoXLight]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

Trolls trolling trolls haha, nobody wins. Now shush and go play some FFR.

[LJRoX]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

Rofl. FFR is clearly a demonstration of your rhythmic skills... more like hand-eye coordination but PAing is simply rhythmic.

[~kitty~]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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.