[MUD-Dev] Re: Gender specific

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Adam Wiggins <nightfall at user2.inficad.com> wrote:
>Currently women are reported as purchasing 40% of all PC games sold.

Does this include mothers handholding their sons? :-)

>Also, although killing things may be considered 'boy stuff', the best
>Quake player (very arguably) in the world is a woman.

Hold on, we all know women that enjoy violent slaughter games, but
I'll hardly say that hold for the average woman I know. Add to this a
general acceptance of violence in american entertainment industry as a
whole which might again lead to a view of hollywood-type violence as
in Quake etc as something unreal or usual (and therefore less
violent). Is there an identification with the character? Is it YOU
that kill? Is it SOMEONE you kill, or SOMETHING?  Is there a
difference between Europe and US?

>Finally, one might note that the Barbie Fashion Designer CD-ROM has
>been on the top ten list of best selling CD-ROM games for half a year
>now.  I have trouble believing that this product has a lot of marketability

"Brand-games" almost always do better than they deserve, but this one
is probably filling a hole.  I'm not sure if it is a game-hole or a
Barbie-hole.  Are they getting "Barbie" because the want to play, or
because the collect?

>Again, I don't think it has to do with 'gender bias'.  I think that the
>people that write the games try to create things which they think would
>be fun.

Depends on the game-type.  There is definitivly houses out there that
run projects with the concept "we're going to produce the nastiest
game ever seen, that will get us attention and market penetration".
Then you have the tuning, testing, feedbackstuff right?  There's a lot
of bias there. Don't tell me the big houses are so unprofessional that
they don't have profiles of their target audiences.  They do, they
even produce different versions for Europe and the US. Even different
game music!

Besides, you forget culture and norms.  Even if a boy might enjoy
Barbie if he tried... You forget cultur norms and identification.
There is a lot of identification in computergames for kids. Heros.
And for men.  Cars.  Dogfights.  Wars.

Ola.