Female Gamers

[sscott]

My wife plays Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja on the iPad... and that's it!

[Jericho98]

Female gamers are just gamers to me. Its true that in the media and I guess in some people's heads female gamers = nintendogs or whatever the hell, but for those who have played against enough people they know that that certainly is not the case.

Btw I find female gamers hot

[Pye]

My mum used to like shooting all the little ducks on Carousel for the BBC micro. She looked evil whenever she cleared it. We don't let her loose on modern games. Might be risky!

[o.pwuaioc]

I got my girlfriend into games. It started out with Mario Kart 64 (although to be fair, she played that before we started dating). I then showed her some old school SNES games like Super Mario World and Link to the Past, and finally Lara Croft for XBOX. Ooh, and we play Rise of Nations all the time - speaking of which, we're always looking for new players to join us in RoN games if anyone's ever interested.

[Rinoa]

the average female gamer will only buy games, that consist of Cuteness and housewife activities, Examples being games like "The Sims" and "Nintendogs"

Those games have never appealled to me.

Although my main genre would be JRPGs, I'm into quite a broad range of games.

[Juggernaut Headcrush]

My pal phones me up every night to get a multi-team game of Halo. She's quite good at it, if a little grenade happy; we compete to see who gets MVP the most. Her boyfriend keeps annoying her to play Cod. She's even dragged her sister into our Halo sessions. In fact, I made this for my friend's birthday yesterday (it's myself and friends). She's the one in the middle. Her sister is "driving" the Warthog.

[edit: eeeeem, forgot it had swearing in the picture, so I took it down before it was taken down...here it is on my Da page instead http://zombie-pacman.deviantart.com/#/d36lxae ]

[GarryG]

My wife is a Sonic fan, but shes played most (if not all) the point-and-klick detective/adventure type games on the DS.

She hates the sims and nintendogs and their ilk with avengance.

[Uaithne]

Well, my step-mum tells me she used to play games like Myst and Under A Killing Moon back in the day. I know she also started playing Myst 3 on the XBOX a few years ago, and is half keen to get an XBOX 360.

At work there are quite a few female gamers. They usually don't talk about it too much, but once you get them going, you just can't shut them up. Most have been playing WoW for a while, though I was quite surprised when one girl I was chatting with started going on about playing Black Ops online.

Now that I think of it, at big LAN parties when I was at uni years ago, there were quite a few females playing FPS games - and they were good! Kind of reminds me of how Stevie Case was portrayed in the book, Masters of Doom.

[Freestyler]

When I first met my wife she'd grew up playing Commodore 64. She knew a lot about those old 80's games and appreciated them. She'd also stopped playing since.

I met her in the mid 1990's and had the usual for the time (SNES. Saturn, PS) and so she'd join me for a session on games like Baku Baku Animal, Bust A Move and stuff, although her favourites were always Abe's Oddysee and games of that ilk. Mine at the time were stuff like Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment. That kind of thing.

Today it's different. For a while she'd stopped playing completely (kids, work, real social life etc) but she's joining in a lot more with our gaming sessions again, now that the kids are getting older and are able to interact with games more. She's strictly a Wii player though, and the usual games pique her interest: Wii Fit, Wii Sports, although she's more than up for challenging the kids on Virtua Fighter and Tekken. Sometimes she wins, sometimes she loses. To be honest she doesn't care either way. As long as she gets a turn.

Bloody shooters and shoot-em-ups? Resident Evil style games? Gears of War? She couldn't give a censored.

[greenberet79]

Sorry, what's a 'female gamer'? Is it something to do with a cable end?

[Freestyler]

Sorry, what's a 'female gamer'? Is it something to do with a cable end?

The Wii is well known to a be an effective Male-To-Female adapter.
It is if you let 'em win.

[PacSuit]

the average female gamer will only buy games, that consist of Cuteness and housewife activities, Examples being games like "The Sims" and "Nintendogs"

Those games have never appealled to me.

Although my main genre would be JRPGs, I'm into quite a broad range of games.

That's why I'm trying to get at. I remember seeing a standee in Game, which was advertising games for females, which mostly consisted of the "Imagine" series on DS. Nintendogs was squeezed in there, alongside some disney titles and DS/Wii Shovelware.

Something tells me, that Game has no idea how to appeal to a female fanbase.

That's why I was surprised when I saw Nintendo Promoting Dragon Quest VI towards a female demographic. Sure it was mostly to do with dressing up your character, but it's a start.

[Negative Creep]

the average female gamer will only buy games, that consist of Cuteness and housewife activities, Examples being games like "The Sims" and "Nintendogs"

Those games have never appealled to me.

Although my main genre would be JRPGs, I'm into quite a broad range of games.

That's why I'm trying to get at. I remember seeing a standee in Game, which was advertising games for females, which mostly consisted of the "Imagine" series on DS. Nintendogs was squeezed in there, alongside some disney titles and DS/Wii Shovelware.

Something tells me, that Game has no idea how to appeal to a female fanbase.

That's why I was surprised when I saw Nintendo Promoting Dragon Quest VI towards a female demographic. Sure it was mostly to do with dressing up your character, but it's a start.

Doesn't that happen with a lot of things? For example the electronics marketed towards females seem to have the chief attraction of being pink, or cars aimed at females are "cute" and as undemanding to use as possible

[RetroMartin]

My missus used to play her megadrive with her twin brother when they were little. She liked games like age of empires, lemmings and GTA2 in the years between then and now.

She now likes watching me play any sort of game and shows some interest in asking me what its about/what you do. However as a Teacher, she loves seeing WHAT you get out of it (so interaction skills or whatnot as an example)

She currently loves lego star wars for its simplicity, golden axe and streets of rage all over again, classic Sonic and I recently got her COMPLETELY addicted to oblivion - she loves having a character that is "her" that she can build the skills up, have to figure out what to do without much prompting etc etc.

Everybody is different - its the media and people that cause splits, divides, stereotypes etc etc

[Freestyler]

That's why I'm trying to get at. I remember seeing a standee in Game, which was advertising games for females, which mostly consisted of the "Imagine" series on DS. Nintendogs was squeezed in there, alongside some disney titles and DS/Wii Shovelware.

Something tells me, that Game has no idea how to appeal to a female fanbase.

What's even worse is when games stores have a rack which bears the legend "Games For Girls."
It's a tacit segregation. They are directly implying that every other game NOT in that display isn't for girls. Or women. We get our Halo's, our GTA's and our Modern Warfare's, and the girls get their Barbie Dream Home's. Their Imagine: Babysitter.

For anyone who doesn't think this impacts "in the real world" then spare a thought for those times when I've been in a store and saw a parent deliberately steer their daughter over to the "Girls" rack while letting her son look everywhere else. But not at the girl rack, obviously.

MOST parents wouldn't know a game if it shat in their kettle. While the thirty-somethings of today grew up in a world with Atari 2600 and NES only a teeny tiny minuscule percentage of them actually owned one. It took the Playstation generation (specifically PS2) to really bring it to the masses.

If I had daughters I would FORCE them to play games like Manhunt and Dead Space. Just to right the World's wrongs.