Pretty much the same thing as I do, it turns out. Am I a female gamer?
I stumbled across this research paper from Belgium’s Ghent University via Tom Chick’s Fidgit blog. It begins with the thesis: “Girls like to game, but games are not well tuned to their interests.”
So what do girls find interesting about games?
Chick pulled the following quote from the paper:
“Women are strongly motivated to game when there is a possibility to choose their own assignments and to explore freely. Women like to hang around in beautiful and rich environments and they prefer game worlds in sharp and bright colours to darker settings. Exploring also includes performing other activities (side-quests) in addition to the main game objective.
Surprisingly, social contact is the least strong motivation for women to game whilst it is the strongest one for men. Other factors that strongly appeal to women are freedom and control, challenge, competition and immersion.”
As I read through it, I couldn’t help but think it all sounded rather familiar. In fact, it’s remarkably similar to what I wrote a couple of months back about what I look for in a video game.
Turns out the appropriately-named Chick was thinking the same thing. We’re both girl gamers. (That’s Tom and I pictured up there.)
Clicking through to the full article to read more detail about the research, however, I regained an amount of masculinity. The article states, “In contrast with men, women want a game to be logical and easy to use. Controls should be common sense and the combination of keys should not be too complicated.”
As someone who relished the challenge of playing Descent with just a keyboard, I don’t understand how any combination of keys could be considered too complicated.
But, wait!
Female gamers “prefer to play with strong, pretty and feminine characters that get things done.”
Are you a girl gamer, too?
Girl gaming on the rise [Alpha Galileo, via Fidgit]
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