Where many men grab a game controller, I visit the bloggs.

My seven year old boy is big into the games, and is quite good (though I am going to save the online gaming for later), but my younger daughter has learned that outside fun is more appealing.

Active women have little interest in spending their days on the couch or at the console, and those less active women are interested in something a little more intellectual than games.

And women are more prone to spend money on cosmetics, and other body care products, than they will ever be prone to spend money on games.

I play a lesser-known MMORPG. I don't care about pink and sparkles and shopping so much as I care about customizability. I like being able to tweak everything, and get enormous satisfaction about maximizing efficiency in the process.

Here's my suspicion. I think the men who design these games--and yes, it's mostly men--look at the end, real-life results, like shopping or fashion, and assume that those are the primary drives. Women do these things, so women must be driven to them. Make games about shopping or fashion, and women will play.

But what if things like shopping and fashion are expressions of drives, not drives themselves? Because not all women shop or are into fashion, but a lot of women seem to enjoy customizing and maintaining some aspect of their lives. Shopping can do that, as can fashion, but a lot of other things do it too. Cooking is one example, as are writing, art, gardening, throwing parties and having kids. Any management position can give this impulse an outlet, as can starting one's own business. I can even see why this might help explain how medicine and law are starting to become female dominated.

The MMORPG gives my tweaking impulse free reign, and it's fun. I can mess with how I earn and allocate my character's experience points, how I train, how I make money, and what role I play in group expeditions. I can customize her clothes, but I don't care about her clothes. Another player might, though, and the option is available. You can even make the clothes yourself.

To sum up: I think most game designers look at the most commonly discussed expressions of women's interests, consider that to be the primary interest, design a game around it, and then wonder why the game flops and women still complain that the industry doesn't do much for them.

But look! We made you a shopping game! And it's all sparkly and pink!

We don't want shopping, sparkles and pink. We want something fun. If it's not fun, all the shopping, sparkles and pink in the world aren't going to save it.

Oh I wanted to clarify that I don't think it's necessarily "girlie" to want better in-game shopping. You can look at the gear of the males playing the same game, or look at the names of the players selling or buying items, and realize they have just as much fun with it as any female gamer. When I have played console games like RockBand or Baldur's gate with my brother or fiance, I would notice that after I insisted we go shopping and spent a while picking out what I wanted to wear, they would take just as much time to do the same. Now I don't know if they would have done so had I not insisted we go to the store/vendor, but they seemed to enjoy buying things to make their characters look awesome (not to mention changing their hair and makeup) just as much as I did! It goes back to the statements echoed here in other letters that it's not so much about attracting more females as just making the game-playing better. And it shows me that they damage themselves by stereotyping the male players just as much as the female.. how many marketers are trying to target better shopping and makeup options for male gamers? Maybe they should!

a LW mentioned the female characters looking really hot, and it reminded me of this interesting and very robust discussion on the internets about the sexual dimorphism of the WoW characters, which isn't just limited to WoW but they have such a large variety of non-human races so I guess they made an easy target (Everquest and Eve also have sexual dimorphism but I guess aren't as well-known as Warcraft). Here's the original article on it, I think: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/05/sexual_dimorphi.html

The feminist argument seems to be that the sexiness of the female character shapes was intended to attract male gamers, and that women gamers would rather have characters that look uglier or more realistic (for example, female trolls should look more like trolls and less like supermodels). As a female who plays WoW, it's my fantasy too, and I like my characters to look attractive!

On a similar note, the RPG games I'm most attracted to are the ones where your gaming is rewarded with lots of money and where the shopping has a lot of variety. Sure, I like to kick ass but I also like to go shopping for armor and weapons that look awesome and are color coordinated. When I try out an RPG and the shopping is really downplayed or isn't readily available and doesn't offer a lot of variety, I'm not that interested in the game anymore. Go figure! ^_^

Some of the most satisfying shopping-as-reward-for-gaming I've encountered has been on Baldur's Gate, Warcraft and Rock Band. I even have gotten addicted to those waitress games where you can customize your restaurant at each level, but found the variety of customizability lacking. Sometimes I miss the text-based MUDs where your gear could be as fabulous as your ability to describe it. :)

Microsoft, Nintendo, etc are businesses. Who have decided to increase their market share. And they have decided to go after women in order to do this. I assume that a lot of research went into this decision. Research that goes a bit beyond your anecdotal "well I have friends who are girls who are good at video games so blah to you!" research.

Here's my anecdotal research: I accompany my husband into Gamestop or whatever and either I am the only woman in there, or I stand along the wall sort of looking at the Wii games with the other wives or the mothers of the guys who are actually going to buy something. Why are we attracted to the Wii games? Probably because they're cute and bubbly with bright colors. I guess sexism lives. When we read the backs there is nothing about prostitutes or drug deals or anything that smacks of racism, sexism, homophobia. Some of the games actually sound pretty cute. Yeah, I said cute. I have a few female friends who play shoot 'em up games, and most of them are pretty annoying about it: I absolutely have the sense that their identity is "girl gamer" and not just "gamer." Most of my female friends cannot stand that stuff.

Nintendo is doing a great job selling games to women with a mixture of cute product packaging, nostalgia (we've been playing Mario for, what, 20 years now?), and games that are simple to learn, get more complex to play, and infinitely playable. Other companies are sitting up and taking notice, and it's hard to blame them. Women do make up 51% of the population, and except for a few insufferable "OMG look how cool I am" girl gamers most of us are not really into games where the manufacturer's main goal was to pack as much violence and gore as possible. You can argue that that's sexist and anecdotal, but marketing numbers back me up.