Why games for women have to be made by women
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Back when it seemed to matter my only objection with feminists was never the intensity of their commitment or the integrity of their beliefs. It was always more like - Men are grievously flawed - Why on Earth would you want to be equal to us? It’s a step down for Chrissake! The core takeaway from that fairly useless article opening is that women and men are different. Very different. Not just in the hairless and too much hair way but as sentient beings with perspectives on life, the universe, that item on the menu you like so much and everything. And that there will always be a minority which wrongly believes that being like men as opposed to having the same rights as men is an achievement.
Many women gamers that are accepted by men as mates or one of us are often the second kind. They like the same games we like and for the same reasons. For someone like me who believes in video games as the supreme medium of innovation, collaboration and even redemption it is a poorer medium without the fairer sex and their infusion of the collective joy and angst of being a woman into this genre. The more women we have on board the more we all benefit. And at just fifteen percent of the gamer population, clearly women are not being compelled to games and the video games industry’s development teams are not getting it.
There are Playstation 3’s sitting on retail shelves their cell processors gathering dust while Nintendo’s Wii’s are harder to find then true broadband connections in Pakistan. Xbox 360 is over a hundred titles and unlike those of the PSP a lot of them are actually playable. One PS3 is sold for every three Wii’s in Japan, formerly a market dominated by Sony. Japan is the second largest gaming market in the world after the US and X Box has never existed there and the 360 follows this discredited path with aplomb. More X Box Japan heads have been moved or fired then Prime Minister’s in PK-land.
I am generally fascinated by “the secret sauce” that few studios understand of creating Intellectual Property or IP. How to breakthrough the clutter of creativity and make something that really resonates and breaks out into the mass cultural consciousness. Bungie did that with Halo, Blizzard do it with everything they touch! This is a big deal. That is why Microsoft boughtthe Halo IP. It could not create it despite having billions. Secret sauce baby. Only someone else’s mama knows how to make it.Halo 3 what we expected it to do. It broke the record for any entertainment launch in history. Yes boys and girls it brought more in its first day then Return of the Sith on its launch.At stake are billions of dollars from merchandise deals, additional games and additional media content. What Halo needs to do in order to become the next Star Wars is to become a franchise that can bring money in just by the mention of its name. I think the first test will be Halo Wars. While you are staying in the field of games you are moving from the FPS genre to RTS. It’s a big move in a field with the memory of giants like Westwood still casting a pall on it and with current kings Blizzard etc. dominating. This is a good test to see if Halo can become a franchise. Runaway success for Halo Wars means that Halo has juice as a franchise.
