Decoding The Complex Relationship Between Women And Video Games
Academic, corporate, and social watchers are all now suddenly fascinated by the way women users of video games are different from men. In fact, the whole field of women playing video games seems to have attracted special attention these days due to LOreal the cosmetics giant recently introducing a special beauty app for women gamers, where fashion and beauty tips wil be delivered in a highly interactive and engaging game-like format.
More branded innovations like this are sure to follow once one dominant brand has thus betted on finding sufficient numbers of women target audiences amongst game fanatics. Could the female gamers be a reasonably sized market hitherto undiscovered or ignored, but now exploitable by brands?
Till now it has been believed that though women form half the population anywhere in the wold, female gamers are a distinct minority amongst the total population of gamers. Could this be true? LOreal actually talks of a women gamers market that is 40% of the total gaming population!
Whether the numbers are that large seems to be still a question mark, but one fact that marketers can count upon is that the numbers of women who are attracted to gaming is increasing at a very rapid pace, and women gamers are likely to match the numbers of male gamers very soon, even if women are at present slightly fewer than men as a group interested in gaming.
Trend watchers seem to point to many reasons that may holding women back from taking a more active interest in video gaming. Among the issues identified by researchers are that, firstly, there is a lack of sufficient numbers of female game creators, and thus there has been less content of interest to women gamers so far. Secondly, gender biases prevailing in research and marketing seem to have caused many gaming equipment and software brands to bypass gaming audiences when looking for female consumers for their creations. Thirdly, a lot of researchers and brands seem to have assumed, wrongly perhaps, that there are intrinsic psychological differences between males and females, and that males are somehow hard-wired to appreciate gaming as an activity more than females.
Socially also, the term "girl gamers" seems to have been given connotations that are not flattering to women. Girl gamers are sometimes characterized as girls with manly interests, leading to some kinds of discouraging stereotypes and generalities about girl gamers.
With the advent of brands like LOreal now entering the gaming market, with special and exclusive offerings tailored for women gamers, a debate has now been sparked on whether marketers should start looking at women gamers with greater seriousness and whether companies and brands should be offering special products and applications aimed more specifically at women gamers.
Alongside of this main debate however, there is another whole subset of debaters who wonder whether it would not dilute the whole video-games genre itself if some programs are created for women that soften the aggression inherent in video gaming. They argue that video games are popular because of the kinds of excitement and aggression built into the genre, and diluting the whole genre would actually be a disservice to the appeal of gaming as a whole.
As a result of such debates, some experts now seem to believe that it is not that brands should be looking at female versus male fare for the games market, but marketers should instead now be focused on producing more gender-neutral content for the various gaming platforms, so that women are gradually attracted to new ways of interacting with soft products using the contrasting but highly engaging aggessive action-orientedness of the video-game format.
It is going to be extremely interesting to watch where all these debates will now go. At any rate, the field of gaming has been emphatically thrown open to women with LOreals app launch for the Microsoft Xbox 360. It will be hard to ignore women gamers as a class from now on.
More branded innovations like this are sure to follow once one dominant brand has thus betted on finding sufficient numbers of women target audiences amongst game fanatics. Could the female gamers be a reasonably sized market hitherto undiscovered or ignored, but now exploitable by brands?
Till now it has been believed that though women form half the population anywhere in the wold, female gamers are a distinct minority amongst the total population of gamers. Could this be true? LOreal actually talks of a women gamers market that is 40% of the total gaming population!
Whether the numbers are that large seems to be still a question mark, but one fact that marketers can count upon is that the numbers of women who are attracted to gaming is increasing at a very rapid pace, and women gamers are likely to match the numbers of male gamers very soon, even if women are at present slightly fewer than men as a group interested in gaming.
Trend watchers seem to point to many reasons that may holding women back from taking a more active interest in video gaming. Among the issues identified by researchers are that, firstly, there is a lack of sufficient numbers of female game creators, and thus there has been less content of interest to women gamers so far. Secondly, gender biases prevailing in research and marketing seem to have caused many gaming equipment and software brands to bypass gaming audiences when looking for female consumers for their creations. Thirdly, a lot of researchers and brands seem to have assumed, wrongly perhaps, that there are intrinsic psychological differences between males and females, and that males are somehow hard-wired to appreciate gaming as an activity more than females.
Socially also, the term "girl gamers" seems to have been given connotations that are not flattering to women. Girl gamers are sometimes characterized as girls with manly interests, leading to some kinds of discouraging stereotypes and generalities about girl gamers.
With the advent of brands like LOreal now entering the gaming market, with special and exclusive offerings tailored for women gamers, a debate has now been sparked on whether marketers should start looking at women gamers with greater seriousness and whether companies and brands should be offering special products and applications aimed more specifically at women gamers.
Alongside of this main debate however, there is another whole subset of debaters who wonder whether it would not dilute the whole video-games genre itself if some programs are created for women that soften the aggression inherent in video gaming. They argue that video games are popular because of the kinds of excitement and aggression built into the genre, and diluting the whole genre would actually be a disservice to the appeal of gaming as a whole.
As a result of such debates, some experts now seem to believe that it is not that brands should be looking at female versus male fare for the games market, but marketers should instead now be focused on producing more gender-neutral content for the various gaming platforms, so that women are gradually attracted to new ways of interacting with soft products using the contrasting but highly engaging aggessive action-orientedness of the video-game format.
It is going to be extremely interesting to watch where all these debates will now go. At any rate, the field of gaming has been emphatically thrown open to women with LOreals app launch for the Microsoft Xbox 360. It will be hard to ignore women gamers as a class from now on.