Child Of Light - What Do Women Want?

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Child of Light Lead Programmer Brie Code shares her opinion on what women want in video games in a new article on gamesindustry.biz.

Now a warning keep the comments civil.
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"What do women want?"

It's a question the game industry asks itself with great frequency, and it's one Child of Light lead programmer Brie Code answered in a presentation today at Toronto's final Gamercamp festival. Well, sort of.

"I don't know," Code said in response to her own question. "I don't think that women want something [singular], because they're half the population. They're a varied group of people with different backgrounds and different preferences. At the same time, I know that I'm not completely happy with what the games industry is making. I would love to see some different stuff."

Code said what she wants is to share games with her non-gamer friends, people she grew up with who share many of her tastes, but not her interest in games. Something historically has been stopping them, Code said, but those barriers are falling. Many non-gamers have access to gaming platforms now, whether they realize it or not. From the phones in their pockets to hand-me-down consoles loaned from gaming friends who've jumped to a new generation of systems. Code has been using those openings to introduce her friends to games with titles that challenge their traditional notions of what games are. Recommendations to play Journey and Skyrim have been particularly well-received, Code noted.

"I think they would play games if it was more friendly to them, more welcoming," Code said.
More information.
 
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This game gets good reviews. Has any Watcher played this game yet?
-> I need first impressions...
 
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Checks GameRankings

Oh well that's odd. 7 PC reviews put it at about 76%, 4 PS3 reviews put it at 90%. What's up with that? Small sample sizes? Ubisoft screwing up with UPlay again?

P.S. Genre is listed as "Metroidvania RPG"!?
 
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This game gets good reviews. Has any Watcher played this game yet?
-> I need first impressions…

I haven't, though it's on my wishlist. Secondhand, I've only heard very good things.

* * *
"I think they would play games if it was more friendly to them, more welcoming," Code said.

This is exactly the problem, isn't it? Exactly the problem. Though as she said, barriers are falling.
 
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finished it, and im not a guy who finishes many games.
A bit long for me though
and the writing could;ve been better
can't remember what i liked about it though ). maybe it was just because i could multitask (work at the same time)
 
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I played it but never finished it .It starts great but rhyming gets old fast and combat gets boring after some time since there is too much of it and it lacks options and enemy variety.
 
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I've not played this one, but to answer the question, the few women that I know as gamers want the same things men desire in games.....challenging and engaging at the same time. Most of the girls that I'm familiar with also are exclusively PC gamers.
 
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My niece has been playing this, but since she is away at college I haven't heard how well she likes it, though I suspect she is enjoying it since I can see on Steam that she has been playing it.

What do women want? Well, I can say what they don't want - Uplay. That's the only comment she has made to me, complaining of having to create a Uplay account and log in to it to play.
 
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In my experience women are far less interested in videogames than these articles purport them to be, and the Aubrielles are rare although they do exist. A factoid which I've seen in a recent video is that although women are purported to make up 50% of gamers, when it comes to people who play games for more than 20 hours a week, it drops to barely above 10%.

From what I can see it is because women are eminently practical and tend to see this as a mindless or pointless activity. Women's hobbies tend to revolve around things which are very practical and direct. They can understand wasting a bit of time in rounds of Bejeweled, but when it comes to dedicating multiple hours every week to complete something that is challenging, doesn't really translate to any real-life skills or achievements, and involves being by yourself in front of a computer screen without social validation or support? They simply don't see the appeal to that at all in the majority of cases, and I don't think anything can be done to change that, and it's fine. Men can be men, and women can be women. Sure there will be some overlap and there is nothing wrong with that, but there's a saying that goes in French "Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop" which I think applies here. It's a bit like trying to draw tons of women into STEM, thinking this is down to cultural conditioning, it simply never works at all, and we have statistics to prove it time and time again. Similarly, you're never or seldom going to get the industry to turn millions of new women into becoming hardcore gamers, because ultimately what it comes down to is something much more inborn, something much more visceral.

What I see often answered in response to things like these is that some games try to offer a bigger social aspect to draw women in. But I think that to be truly interested en masse women need to be physically around people, as they are very sensitive and attached to social cues based on people's physical bodies and facial expressions, things like these, whereas a computer platform is overall probably too abstract to give an effect that's anywhere close.

Men do have an inner drive to be heroes and to have their competencies tested which is testosterone driven, and thus videogames can provide a natural outlet for that, whereas women have far less testosterone. Our hormones affect everything we think about and everything we do, after all. One example of this which is actually quite interesting is that post-menopausal women, who go through a precipitated drop in their female hormone levels and thus have a higher ratio of testosterone to female hormones than younger ones, are more compelled to vie for leadership positions or to become involved in politics. Just like it does in that specific cases, our hormones shape the very core of our being and our m.o. I know personally because at some point in my life I actually had to take something to correct a severe hormonal imbalance of a female hormone that was produced in excess in my body due to disease and which inhibited males ones such as testosterone, and when it happened I started feeling much more masculine and much more driven and I suddenly needed to do tons of sports and to affirm myself with virility, and my whole personality shifted. So this is all quite fascinating stuff.

My wife has seen me play a lot of games, but yet she isn't really interested in any of them, except those who can be completed quickly like match 3 ones. The only one which is more involving which I've ever seen her play is the TERA Online MMO, which she even played to completion. Then she said it was enough for her.
 
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I think something like the sim's has at least as many female players as male ones.

While the taste is probably different between the majority of male and female gamers, I have seen a lot of cases of "tough" males ( Joxer ) who likes the sims, and I had a frail neighbour girl a long time ago who always went out red eyed because she spent the nights playing Diablo 2.

Another thing to consider is that a lot of "new" gamers will start with something like pong or pacman.. didn't most of us? and move into more "heavy" games as time goes by.
 
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You have to be careful with anecdotal examples though. For example, I could say I do not know a single woman who played a more "hardcore" game or developed a vested interest in them in spite of having being closely exposed to them for years, or even decades.

It makes me think of an old video from Shigeru Miyamoto who talks about his history of developing games for Nintendo, and his attempts to get his wife interested in gaming. Basically, he failed very miserably until they started working on the casual DS and Wii games, and the first game which piqued her interest was Brain Age, a game with practical applications.

 
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The only problem right now with women and gaming is the fact that the community is still quite sexist, which is obviously a massive turn off. I recently saw a study which showed that a surprising amount of women actually lie about being women in MMOs and other online games because they're getting harassed either directly or in-directly (for example "compliments" that are actually hidden insults, such as being good.. for a woman).

That sort of nonsense simply has to stop, and I believe it will in time. It's now considered perfectly legitimate for teenage girls to be gamers (according to my teenage relatives at least), which certainly was not the case when I was growing up. They had to be geeks in secret.

At any rate, the girls in question are not only playing specific games, nor do they want anything specific; they're playing everything from COD to WoW or RPGs.

In fact, the only specific thing I've heard of is wanting gender choice during character creation, which is something I understand. I don't mind playing female characters from time to time, but I would be somewhat annoyed if I was forced to do it more often than not.
 
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Hmmm, my wife defintely breaks the 10 hours a week and the playing games as a social outreach mechanism. My wife is addicted to Facebook games. Candy Crush, Hidden Object, and Puzzle games are her forte. She also enjoys trivia that is related to TV or country music. She games as many hours as I do probably, but her interests are far different. She really didn't start gaming until Facebook though, so you could say it was the social aspect that lured her into gaming and then it took a backseat to the games themselves.

My sister-in-law is also a gamer but she loves baseball simulations and slot games; especially the slot games that have real life counterparts in the casinos. In her case, she's found a free way to play the slots when she can't afford to go to the casinos.

My Mom, when she was alive, was addicted to Baldur's Gate and played most of the games that I played. I could say it was her active interest in what I liked that got me into AD&D and computers.

My sister plays all of the social games that HHR mentioned. She enjoys anything where you build a pet or dragon or carebear up in levels. These games are very simplistic role-playing games and she'll occasionally try something like Skyrim, where she mostly enjoys creating bodies and then dressing them up in various armors, clothing and housing. I bet she's never even killed a dragon and she has over 100 hours in Skyrim :)

The only thing these women have in common is me as the person who got them hooked. Each person took the computer I bought them and did different things with it.
Okay, Mom actually bought computers for me, at first :)
 
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Here's what should be an anecdotal example, but it isn't: In my experience, women don't like playing competitive FPSses. "But that's in your own experience! It's anecdotal!". And you'd be right, had I not been playing them, server admining them and operating VOIPS for them for 20 years. I played, met and talked to thousands of players over these years, and I can count in one hand the women I met. This includes Doom, D3D, Quakes, UTs, BFs. both Planetsides, Descent, and other less played games (Fear, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Renegade, and a lot more)

So be careful with the "anecdotal" tag. Given some people's exposure to the subject, that may be "actual" evidence.
 
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In my old Left 4 Dead player's group were a few women. Playing together was a lot of fun. We played mostly coop story mode.
 
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News flash: Most men I know don't like to play competitive FPS games, and even those that do only play them casually. Evidence much for you?

I don't think I can declare at length what any category of people want no matter what discriminating feature I use apart from "RPG players like to play RPGs".
I could mention what my mother, my wife and my daughter play, but I doubt that's worth much to this discussion, nor would anyone care. It's Solitaire, nothing at all and everything she gets her hands on, respectively.

As a teacher, I know a thing or two about girls' penchant for the STEM thing, though. The bias against it observed among young girls is apparently exclusive to our Western culture. In many countries, there is no significant difference, and I believe I recall there is at least one where it's the other way around.
I doubt it's the genes…

Edit: Almost forgot the real reason I wanted to comment here: I don't think any programmer (STEM enough for you?) could have a much better name than Brie Code!
 
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Growing up, I certainly wasn't the only girl I knew that played video games. I routinely talked to two other girls in my grade school class about (S)NES and PC games, and we swapped games often. My roommate in college had an NES from about the time I did, and she's been a ravenous gamer her whole life - RPG's, FPS's, everything. Her female cousins played everything too - including Grand Theft Auto. Finally, my wife is an RPG fanatic. We met on WoW, if that tells you anything, and on there, she'd been the lead tank in her guild for a long time. She's still a tank in every mmo she plays, and right now, she's playing Wasteland 2, quite addicted…and that's a game I haven't gotten to yet.

Lines aren't as easy to draw as some might like to believe…:)
 
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