"Male" games vs. "Female" games

[Arch0wl]

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.