What do women gamers want?

Attended the Women in Games talk last night (part of the London Games Festival), its an area of interest to us in that it is such a clear area of arbitrage - these days lots of women have games devices, yet few in the mainstream games industry really write games for them. Hoped to get some insight into the whys and wherefores.

Emma Westecott, Senior Games Researcher at The University of Wales, Newport (and previously Producer on such titles as Starship Titanic) chaired a panel comprising of:

- Nicola Bhalerao, a senior software engineer at Rare and chair of WiG2008 with a focus on encouraging girls and women to engage with games programming as a creative and fulfilling career path.

- Matthew Jeffery - Head of European Recruitment, EA talking of the need to broaden the talent base of development talent and to attract a more diverse workforce.

- Helen Kennedy - originating member of Women in Games, active in driving the academic context of the event forward. Helen’s PhD is in Feminism and Play and she brings substantial expertise in feminist and gender studies to the event.

My take on it all was threefold.

Firstly, it became clear that the games industry was largely populated c 10 years ago by the sort of men who people like Helen love to hate (being un-PC in every conceivable way it would seem), and has remained so - and they haven't really had to change much because by and large their market was growing with them. Now however it is maturing and structurally an all male geek gamer industry is unable to make the stuff it needs to do to attract new audiences, so carries on making ever more expensive versions of what it already does.

Matthew mentioned most in-industry companies totally did not "get" the Wii (or Nintendo DS), and are now scrambling to catch up. Nicola made some good points about the difficulty of attracting women into games development, but I must note that the argument is not only for gaming - its the same issue with attracting women into anything related to the "hard" sciences.

(Postscript - interestingly, Nintendo - makers of Wii and DS has just recruited a senior Yahoo woman in the US)

Secondly there are a lot of Wii's and DS's now in women's hands, and these are the tools of choice - so for anyone who is going to break through, these (or similar devices) are the platforms to use. Point 1 above implies that the current industry is unable to structurally imagine itself out of its current box very easily, so now is the time for (women?) entrepreneurs to strike.

Thirdly, Women in Gaming seems like it has had what I would call "utopian hopes" thrown at it, I frankly felt uncomfortable with some of the feminist Agendas being bandied about last night. Its probably very un-PC to say this, but my take is that Gaming is just a business like any other, and will stand or fall on serving real (women) customers with what they want, rather than cleaving Gaming to any particular set of ideologies / sociologies.

In my view, given the opportunity, the best way to cure gaming of its (apparent) misogyny is to start up companies with different cultures writing games that women want to buy. That would rapidly start the established players changing their ways.

The billion dollar question, of course, is what do women gamers want. Research so far has shown a few general principles about what women like in games:

(i) creativity - do it yourself, or at least some say in defining environments
(ii) being part of a non-competitive, collaborative system (some wags argue that social networks are really just games for women
(iii) using simple, easy to load and use games systems
(iv) tend to like non-zero sum games (ie everyone wins)
(v) are more likely to play casual, Java and Flash-powered web games like Bejeweled5, generally passing on download-install-and-play “hardcore” online world games like World of Warcraft.

Now these are "high" probabilities, ie they do not cover the whole gamut of what women like by a long shot. To be honest, I suspect the best way to write games that women want is for women entrepreneurs to write the sort of games they would like to play.

A useful event though, and very necessary. Thanks also to Thayer Driver who co-organised.