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.
But it is not going to happen when men are making the games for women. The empathy, the secret sauce of greatness…. It just won’t happen. And this is now a pressing concern. Women gamers are coming out in greater numbers then ever before as the casual game market led by the iPhone and facebook applications explodes. Yet more women are not making the games that women want to play. This is not a normal evolution of things in my opinion. All hardcore gamers end up becoming loosely affiliated or actively governed by a sort of tribal community mechanism either via gaming forums dynamics or the institution that is a gamers guild. These are male dominated entities and act as a deterrent to the recruitment of women. Initiatives like Women In Games International http://www.womeningamesinternational.org/ and G.I.R.L Gamers In Real Life that seek to place women in game development positions are welcome initiatives but without the ability to scale to critical mass.
What is needed is for the Video Gaming industry and groups that formally represent it to embrace this as a key initiative and enforce it via collaboration of relevant academic institutes so that the percentage of women making games increases dramatically. Gaming studios can chip in by making sure female characters in games are not overly curvaceous scantily clad women who talk with bedroom eyes and husky voices. Making them believable and full of character will get women wanting to play them. In the long term studios need to make sure that the narrative that unfolds in a game - whether it be an RTS, FPS or and RPG - makes an emotional connection with female who may want to play a game. I have always thought of the best video games as movies in which we ourselves star. The games industry could take some lessons from Hollywood in creating empathy with a female audience.
At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in potential revenue that are already being leaked to the emerging causal games juggernaut. This is not an academic argument. - Habib “Noori Nath” Khan
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