[MUD-Dev] Re: Gender specific

[Adam Wiggins]

[Mike Sellers:]
> At 01:45 PM 11/9/97 PST8PDT, Adam Wiggins wrote:
> >Currently women are reported as purchasing 40% of all PC games sold.
> 
> I just saw this, so maybe I've missed most of the discussion.  But anyway,
> I would sure love to see the support for this claim -- as near as I can
> tell (given our market research) you're too high by probably 2x at least.  

I read it in CGW, they have addressed this issue several times in
recent months.  I believe they sited their source as CompUSA, but don't
quote me on that.  And of course, as with any statistic, it's to
be taken with a grain of salt.  I *do* know that the gender ratio
in your average CompUSA/Best Buy/whatever is pretty nearly even, just
from personal observation.  It's only when you go someplace like Fry's
Electronics that you see a serious imbalance.

> >Also, I think a new generation is now reaching maturity that has grown up
> >not believing that computers are magical devices which nerdy men like
> >to play with, but instead thinking of them as household appliances which
> >can be used for recreation in the same way as a TV.  
> 
> This is what every PC software vendor is just _waiting_ to have happen.
> Unfortunately, we ain't there yet.  It's going to take probably another
> five years, just given demographic and usage trends.  As someone pointed
> out to me recently, *most* of the people who will be on the Internet in the
> year 2000 haven't logged on yet.  

Okay.  All I know is my own personal observations.  Practically everyone
I know is at least semi-proficient with computers.  My grandmother (who
is rapidly approaching 80) called me up with a question about web
browesers the other day - I didn't even know she had a computer!

> First, generalizing from individual experience like this is extremely
> risky.

I don't know how you mean 'risky' - I can trust some percentage
thrown at me by a magazine (like the 40% mentioned above) or what I
see with my own two eyes.  I'll take the second any day.

> >Also, although killing things may be considered 'boy stuff', the best
> >Quake player (very arguably) in the world is a woman.  She beat John
> >Romero (creator of Quake) soundly, as the final round of world-wide
> >Quake competition.  Of course there is also the all-female Quake fests
> >which has become quite popular recently.  I understand that there were
> >several hundred players in attendance recently.  And that's only one game,
> >with a supposedly male-oriented theme.
> 
> Yes, but these women and their clans are notable at least partially because
> they ARE women.  The only estimate I've seen (no attribution handy) claims
> that around 10% of all Doom/Quake players are women.  This figure may even
> be an exaggeration upward.  

Okay, let's say that 5% of all Quake players are female.  Let me
take a completely wild guess and say that there are two million
Quake players.  That means that there are 100,000 female Quake players.
This seems to contrast rather strongly with Marian's assertation that
girl's don't ever buy computer games, which is the statement I was
originally trying to counter.

> >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
> >with 25-year-old D&D-playing males.
> 
> This one is definitely a positive sign -- as are the enduring (sometimes
> baffling) sales of Myst.  Nearly everyone in the industry believes they can
> crack open the "girl market" and several are making solid efforts.  Thus
> far though, no one outside of Barbie has been really successful.  

If we're talking about silicon-technology-as-entertainment in general,
which I thought we were, you can also count in Pac-Man, Tetris, Puzzle
Fighter II, that wierd bubble game for the Neo Geo, AOL, IRC, and
(of course) the WWW.

> Actually I think if you really read what the woman above said, you'll see a
> good crystalization of the problem of reaching out to the female market --
> and for that matter, reaching out to the 95%+ of *men* who don't play
> computer games.

Well, hell, if you want to go that far - that's the whole deal with
marketing to begin with.  People are afraid of things that are new or
that they don't understand, and the misconceptions they receive
through third-hand sources don't help at all.  It's up to the marketers,
then, to try to get out a truer (or, at least, more enticing) picture
of what the product has to offer.  Unfortunately, there's that little
feedback loop of catering to an existing market, which is the whole
point Marian was touching on with her story about her trip to the
store to check out games.

> They are intimidating and/or uninteresting even on the
> shelves, and those few that many women have played have been gifts and have
> not exactly energized them to run out and buy more.  Of course, the fact
> that most game developers are male (on top of that, most are single white
> males in their twenties) doesn't exactly endear them to a somewhat
> 'foreign' market.  If anyone is being presumptuous here, it is the
> developers who cannot do more than snicker at the very people they would
> love to court as customers.

I hardly think that last bit is the case.  It's funny, though...the
female designers that do exist seem to be either ignored or overlooked
when it comes time to discuss "what's wrong with game designs".
Roberta Williams has been designing adventure games for 15 years now,
and has probably had a fairly major impact on the way that adventure
games play, through her own games and the games produced by the
company she founded.
Secondly, I'm not sure that having female designers is going to
instantly make the games appealing to women.  Miyamoto what's-her-name,
who works for Sega Japan, designed the Lost World shooting game
currently found in arcades.  It's quite entertaining, and has some
really well-done effects and animation.  However, I doubt that this
game has had any effect on getting more females into arcades.
Of course, when asked "Do you try to design games targeted more at
women?" in an interview, she responded the same way any designer would:
"No, I make games that I think are fun."