Girls and Gaming

One of the most famous Ted Talks of all time is Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce. In it, he discusses how Prego dominated the spaghetti sauce market with a very basic idea: instead of creating one sauce that would appeal to the most people, Prego would create many sauces that would appeal to many people. The idea was so profitable that all saucemakers have adopted the model. And today, when you walk down the spaghetti sauce aisle, you're met with literally dozens of choices.

The idea has absolutely not caught on in the video game industry. Yesterday, at PAX East, I sat in on a panel, Girls and Gaming: The Growing Role of Women in the Game Industry. And many of the questions asked by audience members cannot be answered by anyone in the gaming industry because they basically asked variants on the theme: why aren't more women going into technology careers? Sociologists and Social Psychologists spend a lot of time trying to answer this question and since its effects go beyond simply the video game industry, I think it's fair to say the video games industry isn't necessarily causing it.

Unfortunately, no one asked the question why the industry does such a poor job of making games that appeal to women. Oh, they make plenty of games they think appeal to little girls (Imagine Babyz! Imaginze Babyz Fashion! Imagine Salon Stylist? ...Imagine Interior Designer?). Takeaway being: Industry insiders know that access to the youth market is guarded by parents, and it's parents, who when buying games for children, probably steer their girls away from titles boys want like Halo in part because they think it "unladylike" to spend hours shooting at grunts and spending their carpool time talking about how superior a weapon the plasma rifle is to all other weaponry. And for the same reasons they don't buy toy guns and toy swords for girls, you're seeing parents refrain from buying titles with guns and swords on the cover for their daughters.

Obviously, this has ramifications as those girls grow up into young women and refrain themselves from entering into the gamer demographic, since most games for adults have guns and swords on the cover (oh and usually a half-naked chick clinging to the muscle-bound dude holding them, but another time). To this end, there's no amount of pro-female marketing (i.e. Ubisoft's fragdolls) that is going to undo such socialization when it's met with a gaming market dominated by titles like Gears of War and God of War.

From where I sit, most games we see today are divided into two ultra-violent genres: first-person killing spree (Halo) or a more a free-range killing spree (Fallout 3). Games outside this dichotomy (Rockband 2; Mario Galaxy; Zelda Wind Waker) actually tend to secure a larger female audience. I imagine America's base for the Kingdom Hearts franchise is pretty evenly split down the gender divide. Seemingly "bizarre" games like Katamari and Viva Pinata come out of the blue, are told by other industry-makers that they'll fail, and yet reap huge profits selling to non-traditional markets--probably because they appeal to a lot of women!

And yet we continue ask: "How can we get more women into the gaming industry?"

But it's Nintendo, the company that basically brought video games into our homes, that gets shat on constantly by male gamers for doing exactly what it is all companies need to be doing: diversifying their product production. Liv Tyler playing Brain Age on the DS is a good example--she's not being sexualized, she's just being shown enjoying herself with a clever game (you know, in sharp contrast to Heidi Klum dancing to her underwear holding--not actually playing--Guitar Hero). Mario Galaxy is a stunningly beautiful title I'd want any kid to play. In this way, Nintendo works like Prego. It doesn't care about making one game that really, really appeals to the majority in a specific audience, but churns out new products all the time. It can do this, in part, because the games they make are cheaper to produce and they have more flexibility to try new things...

...but virtually all other game companies are operating a lot like Ragu. They put a lot of investment into one product and scratch their heads thinking, "Why can't we get those girls to like our product? The guys obviously like our product. What's wrong with those girls?" And so we see the Fragdolls teabagging their opponents in games and supporting what is an essentially one-size-fits-all model of gaming. And, er...I...er...don't want to teabag anyone.

So though, over the course of my 24 years, I've played pretty much every genre in the gaming world, I have at this point in my life cloistered myself into a segmented market. The titles I have loyalty towards (Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Fable, Zelda, etc) I can look forward to maybe once every few years. I fill up the time in between with Rock Band and Lego titles. The games I really, really like to play are not those games that are dominating the market month-in and month-out. Though I might get a little bit of fun from Dante's Inferno, I'm not likely to eat the opportunity cost of buying it given I could get equal enjoyment--in my world--from reading a $10 book.

The industry is pre-occupied with getting women who don't play games at all to make a ridiculously big jump into games they probably wouldn't want to play in the first place. (Probably because if they can figure that out, they won't need to divert any money towards gaming innovation.) But there are plenty of girls who approach the market perfectly willing to play and not finding anything. Those who aren't fans of the traditional sauce have very little alternative--and furthermore--are belittled by the industry, its marketing and its base for wanting anything else. Maybe this is the problem.