This book reminds me a bit of those manuals with instructions on how to make love to women. To a man, it all sounds like such a hassle 😉 : she has to be in the right mood, and you have to have foreplay and you have to find some tiny nerve center, not to mention a secret zone hidden inside and then you have to make sure that you don’t come first. A hassle! No wonder men have sex with other men all the time instead! 😉
Seriously, I imagine that most male programmers who read Mrs Ray’s recommendations sigh and groan to the tought of having to take all the things into account that females apparently need in games (female -but no “hypersexualised”- avatars, emotional involvement, non-confrontational competition, short play times, etc). Much like they would if they were to read a sex manual.
Yet many of them have sex with women regularly. And I bet many of these women don’t dislike it most of the time. So surely, there must be different ways to stimulate a man into pleasuring a woman better.
Because that’s what games have in common with sex, right? Pleasure.
Anyway.
Most things that Mrs Ray mentions sound simply like recommendations for good design to me. And not terribly gender-specific. I know many men who enjoy the elements in games that are considered typically female in the book. Good design is well-balanced per definition. And that includes gender-balanced.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that current computer games are heavily biased towards excessively male play-features. I find this odd. I don’t think that I know any design discipline that is so gender-biased. Most chairs fit both male and female buttocks! And if there is a gender-bias, like in fashion, it usually doesn’t mean that there is no equivalent for the other gender (although one could argue that the male equivalent of fashion is often of much lower artistic quality than its female counterpart).
So Sheri Graner Ray does have a point. The extreme one-sidedness of game design is very problematic. I personally find design with an extreme gender bias simply bad design. And I (even though I am a man) would love to see many more of those supposedly feminine features in games. So I applaud the effort the book makes to try and convince game designers to include women in their target audience (if only for profit). I’m just not sure if it has the right tone. It does put the problem on the agenda. As an economic issue more so than an artistic one. So perhaps it is making a difference already.
Posted on May 18, 2006 at 12:30 am
Mrs Gray suggests that it would take only a small effort to adapt current game genres to appeal also to women. I don’t agree with that. First I think she underestimates the impact on production and design of e.g. offering different solutions to every problem. And second I think this will lead to muddy designs that nobody likes.
I agree with Ellen Guon Beeman, quoted in the book.
She believes that a game that appeals to both genders comes out of solid, thoughtful game design. “It’s more a case of deliberately not limiting your market, as opposed to expanding it,” she says.
This, however, requires more than adding puzzle solutions to shooter games. It requires rethinking a lot of game concepts, and to a large extent starting from scratch and developing games outside of the current genres.