Why Women Aren't Gamers - Yet

Hands Up Who really Wants Women In Videogaming ?

A fairly recent and growing issue in the videogame sphere is the inclusion of women as both players and developers. For years, we have been bemoaning the fact that women do not play the same types of games as men. But they are not nearly as well represented on development teams in the industry as their male counterparts. This leads to almost all videogames being developed by men with men in mind.

We have been lamenting the new innovations that are not being discovered simply because we’re blocking out half of the species and attempting to oversimplify the issue. Short statements such as "women are not as inherently competitive and violent as men" are meant to explain away the whole subject in as neat a fashion as possible.

Yet for all our regrets about the situation, underneath it all, we males are rather happy to maintain the status quo. We know that beating a prostitute to death after having sex with her is considered a despicable act in the real world. But in videogames we can do that ; they are the last bastion for giving in to our wicked side, doing things like playing with helpless female characters wearing less than they do in the swimming pool, and then turning on them with a baseball bat (depending on the game in question.)

To be perfectly honest, I don’t want this status quo to change, either. When I sit down to play a game with my male friends, we get a great kick out of doing things in videogames that appall most females and other sensitive viewers. We can exist in our world, free from the constraints of society and our significant others for just a few hours. We can give in to primal hunter urges and laddish temptations without needing to think twice. If we so much as let one female rise through the ranks of the industry we could start a revolution that would make all our games cuddly and Sims-like.

However, when one thinks about the matter a little more, this is not so much of a threat as a made-up fantasy to help us rationalize our conservative reluctance to see the current model change. We like the types of games we get and don’t want to take the time to figure out why women don’t like them. The fact of the matter, however, is that it’s not just the matter of content - like a single-minded trek through City 17 blowing away everything in your path - that prevents women from playing the same games as men. It’s a matter of biology and poor design.

I read a very interesting piece by Jess Bates, a female artist and videogame designer, who put forward a scientific reason for this. Yes, women don’t like to see their sex portrayed in the manner that is so common in videogames. But they also see things inherently differently from men.

To put it quite simply, there is a physical difference between the eyes of men and women, which mean that men focus in on specific parts of the image presented to us by our eyes where women see the "big picture." From where I’m sitting writing this, I can see a garden with some plants and gnomes at the end of it. When I and any other male look into the garden we focus in on an individual object within it - a plant or gnome, say. When a woman looks into the garden she sees the whole thing at once. Instead of focusing in to see the extreme detail of a particular object, a woman tends to soak up the generalities of the whole thing.

So when it comes to vision, women do not like to be as focused as many of our videogames require. To engage a woman in a videogame you need more than the precisely focused gameplay mechanics which otherwise work so well for men.

Another thing to bear in mind is the instincts that lead on from eyesight. For men, survival is a key concept, and whatever one may say about exceptions to the rule, generally speaking men can reason far more "extreme" ends to survival than women can. Instinctively, men enjoy the challenge of overcoming a struggle or beating an enemy to death. Women on the other hand usually do not enjoy these things.

The different ways in which women perceive situations both physically and emotionally needs to be taken into account when developing videogames. The only way to do this is to take more women onboard when developing them. Does this mean we need to have separate games for men and women ? Hell, no - that’ll only divide the industry further. What we need is an openness to allow women to develop games alongside men. Men cannot emulate what women want to see in a videogame. Only by working together can we blend elements that everyone can appreciate. It won’t be easy, but then nothing worth doing ever is.

The first step we can take in this direction is to limit just how widely we employ the sexual objects that we pass off as women in videogames, without taking them away entirely. I still want to be able to enjoy my session of rampage and carnage in Grand Theft Auto , but I don’t need to do it in every game I play. Developers need to realize that by attempting to sell to the most perverted lowest common denominator in the male audience, they’re switching off an entire sex, sometimes just by what’s on the cover of the game box. After we overcome that obstacle, we can begin to develop really interesting games that may please both sexes.