Randy-JAJourneyman
Posts : 1351
Joined: 11 OCT 2002
Location: US
Status : Offline | Of course, there is some truth to the stereotype. The industry has a long way to go to attract Harmony Davis and Kayley Harrington, both 21, both averse to playing what they call "silly" and "pointless" games. (Dating a guy addicted to games is a no-no, they say.)
"I just don't get it. I never did, I probably never will," says Davis, a student at Columbia University who was visiting Harrington, a District resident. "To me, video games are a waste of energy, a waste of time. Read a book. Read the paper. Do something constructive."
Harrington nods. She has a 16-year-old brother who is "a huge, huge" gamer, glued to the TV for hours. "I don't identify and relate to it at all. I don't think many girls do."
"It's a personality thing, isn't it?" asks 33-year-old Minerva Torres, catching the Metro to Fairfax. "Guys are happy to play by themselves." She laughs. "But girls, girls want to interact. They want people involved. Most of the games aren't set up like that."
Most games, as they exist now, "are really well-designed to take the traditional aspects of boy-playing," says Jenkins. "As games have emerged in the past decade or so, a lot of what has been created was
taken from what boys like to play in the back yard. But where does that leave the girls?"
The Sims seems to have found it. The PC game -- the best-selling PC franchise of all time, selling some 12 million copies of various titles -- is now translated into 17 languages. It's like reality TV gone virtual, with gamers playing God, dictating what a neighborhood of
simulated people (Sims) can do. There's the Sims Livin' Large, the Sims House Party, the Sims Hot Date and so on. Trudy Muller, a spokeswoman for Electronic Arts (EA) -- which publishes the Sims and reported a 2003
revenue of $2.96 billion -- says at least 50 percent of the games' players are women.
"With the Sims, you're really building relationships and, with the focus groups that we've done, that's omething that interests women and teenage girls," she says.
What sells, ultimately, are "games that span both genders and all ages," Muller notes. Her logic: Yes, sports games are made for sports fans, most of whom are men, "but the women are there, and they, too, are
playing the sporting games." She predicts that as video games "become more mainstream, you'll have a wider range of content."
What sells, ultimately, are "great games that provide great entertainment -- period," echoes J.C. Herz, author of "Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds," considered the definitive look at the culture of video games. "Talk of
'girl games,' " she says, is "nonsense," covered in "political correctness."
"Here's the bottom line: All the games that succeed are obsessed with being great entertainment product," says Herz. So just what do women want?
"When it comes to girls, gaming interests run the gamut," says Phaedra Boinodiris. "Asking what women want to play is like asking what kind of movies women want to watch. It's very divergent. That's what the
industry is so slow to realize."
Boinodiris took action in 1999. With her sister, husband and cousin -- all of them "passionate" gamers -- she started Womengamers.com, one of the few women's gaming portals on the Internet.
"It comes down to choices," Boinodiris says. "Women would like better female characters and more of them, and more gender-neutral games where,
as a player, you don't have to play a man. It's simple, really. Women want marketing that acknowledges that women gamers do exist."
That's certainly Kat Stamoulis's wish. She has played since the second grade, though she didn't get a PlayStation2 until last Christmas. I held out until she was 14," says her mother, Maureen Stamoulis,
laughing. "I'm still opposed to it. I still try to limit her playing time. "It's not like she gets C's and D's in school and plays games all day," says Stamoulis, the principal at Cashell Elementary School in Rockville. "She's a good student. She's got other interests." Such as musicals -- she was in the chorus of "Bye Bye Birdie," "Grease," "Guys and Dolls." And books. But video games, mother and daughter agree, trump
everything.
Now she is playing GTA3. "I just love, love this game," she says. "I mean, it's just, well, fun. It's hard to explain." She's on the first level, working for the Italian mafia, driving a Yamaha Banshee -- or, trying to drive -- around Liberty City, USA, "the worst place in America." She (or he, since the character is male) beats
four people with a bat, blood splattering on the pavement. She gets $1,000 for that. "When you carjack a taxi," she says, "you get the money, too."
"You can run people over. You can drive like crazy." But isn't there a part where you can pick up a prostitute, have sex with her, then kill her for the money?
"Yeah, so?" she answers. "It's a game. It's only a game. I don't take it seriously. Come on."
Twenty minutes pass by; an hour and a half.
Three hours of playing games, if you think about it, is not that much," Kat says. "You've got 24 hours in a day."
(c) 2004 The Washington Post Company
|
