Well of course girls play games. And of course they do it differently. They’re different. Why is that so hard to face? And why does “targeting girl gamers” have to mean games about fashion and puppies?


by Jeff Edwards, Game Channel Editor

I couldn’t date a non-gamer. It’d just be frustrating. I pour hours into these bits of software, training myself to play more effectively, discovering secrets, leveling up or just progressing, and all that toil is significant to the consumption of games.

If someone asked me “Why don’t you read a book?” all I could say is “Trust me, it’s different.” If I were going out with a girl and she turns to me, flustered, and whines “I don’t want you to play games. I want you to spend time with me!” then she’s due for a big talk that’ll likely end in her dumped and me playing more Call of Duty 4.

But I have the great fortune of having gone out with a girl for nearly seven years now and long before I even knew her, she was a gamer. We bonded over Final Fantasy VIII. When she wanted to play Silent Hill but was too scared to go through with it, I did it for her as she watched, and I continued to do so through the sequels. For a time, we played Gears of War together over the internet, and now we’re level 61 Blood Elves, myself a rogue and her avatar a paladin, venturing through the Zangarmarsh in World of Warcraft.

So of course girls game. But in that time, I’ve noticed things about how she games, which games she picks, and learned why I should never expect her to play Call of Duty or Halo with me.

I come to all this after reading a couple news items on Destructoid, one where a fellow at THQ is quoted as saying “Girls have better things to do than videogames,” and the COO of Oberon Media saying “they just don’t want to spend or have the time or learn ‘up-down-X-X-Y-Y.’” Clearly, these men are missing something. According to them, women want to work and clean before they do anything enjoyable, and clearly all of their time spent doing “girly” things makes it impossible to learn anything more complicated than Zuma Deluxe (product of Oberon Media). Of course these are wild generalizations that entirely ignore women-only counterstrike tournaments. From their positions, they could only be talking about more “normal” girls, the ones everyone is telling them they should be making money hand-over-fist from when they release Bratz Super Babyz.

S0mewhat more troubling is the commentary from other gamers. A person’s gender doesn’t choose what they do, they claim. They only state that one man is clearly sexist, but refuse to break down or interpret what’s been said. Each of those quotes is taken at face value without considering context. Without considering the market. Without considering personal experience. Both by men who make no reference to the experience of women gamers.

These gross generalizations do indicate certain social trends that are inherently different between the genders. Women and men do game differently. No one raises a fuss when another romantic comedy or endlessly tragic chick flick hits the theaters with absolutely nothing a man could like. That romance novels get their own section in book stores, or that toy stores seem to have a designated “pink” aisle doesn’t get anyone in a tiff.

The difference in women’s taste in games does seem to reflect certain ideas in both of those statements. It’s not that they don’t have the time, it’s that they’d rather spend that time on something social. For women, sharing and talking and socializing seems far, far more integral to day to day life than it does for men. And if they play Halo, and none of their friends play Halo, every hour spent playing it is an hour isolated from their friends. However, if a girl can get her friends to play games, they’ll all join the fray with zeal and gusto. My own little sister has been working on Super Mario World for the past few years, hampered by the shoddy internal battery frequently losing her progress. I’ve left my PS2 with her on occasion and heard, late into the night while I wanted to sleep, shrill giggling over Guitar Hero. These are girls in an upper-middle class town who are cheerleaders, sports players, work on the school paper. They are more than willing to game. They make the time, if it’s around.

My own girlfriend and her best friend were devout Square fans during the ‘golden age’ of Final Fantasy. They played Lunar, Evil Zone, Kirby 64, and Mario Party. Dance Dance Revolution became a staple for a time. The first time I met my girlfriend, she was listening to a break-beat remix of the Bubble Bobble theme, and the second time I met her she was playing Sonic 3 on an emulator.

Clearly, girls not only game, but do so with as much dedication and ferocity as any man.

Perhaps more. My girlfriend did reset the gameplay clock in Final Fantasy VIII. That happens at 120 hours.

So why would these men believe that girls and women don’t game at all? The foolishness of it all! But notice that when my girlfriend played Gears of War, it was only to play with me. She only stomped the face off of Final Fantasy VIII when it was relevant and important to her social circle. My sister and her friends only play games together, even if it’s just her and her next door neighbor hot-seating through the Forest of Illusions.

Indeed, girls don’t want to learn excessive button combinations unless it will directly enhance the experience they’re sharing. The work is well worth it when they can share lofty tales of how long it took to level a party to 99 on the Island Closest to Hell using Quistis’s Degenerator, or learning all of the ins and outs in Disney’s Aladdin for the SNES. My girlfriend got pretty handy with the shotgun in Gears of War, though she was constantly guilty of aiming too high (because she wanted to clearly see what was going on). It turned into some pretty spectacular shotgun head shots.

The discrepancy between male and female gamers does seem to follow a familiar line, however. The “casual games” line does seem to separate what most girls are willing to play from what hardcore gamers are used to. Here lies a strange gender divide: men seem more than happy to develop and retain a skill set from game to game. Certain conventions, expectations, and habits become second nature. The first person shooter, for example takes enormously specialized coordination, lightning quick reflexes, the ability to instantly adjust to new situations within the game’s language, and the capacity to learn and leverage a specific weapon’s properties. The first time I sat down to play Dark Forces, I was terrible. I got the nicest joystick I could afford and it still ate me alive. The instant and pressing demands, coupled with swift and frustrating punishment, make games like Halo enormously frustrating to learn, no matter the difficulty setting. This expected language extends out into fighting games and real time strategy.

Men encourage each other to push through the frustration and join the ranks of skilled individuals. Girls typically get bored and frustrated that they keep watching the Kill Cam and wonder why she just can’t play something that’s actually fun.

So here, we stand at a strange line. Everyone likes to have fun. But for the hardcore gamer, there’s fun in working to improve skills, in stupid plot twists, in crates. For the typical non-gamer, gender be damned, they’d rather play a game to have fun. Contrived stories can be found in cheap books. Work can be done for money. Hardcore gamers bond and support each other though the labor of games, and if a strong, connected community of girls start playing a game together, they’ll work as hard as any boy or man at it. Men often forgo the sharing and focus on a game for the sake of the game. Solitude, mastery, and skill are proud qualities for men, and to express those as crushing victories has a primal satisfaction. For women, it’s more about sharing the experience with other people, not dominating them. If it’s easier to do that over shoes and a frappuccino, they’ll take that over being called any list of sexist and homophobic slurs as they gradually, painfully, slowly learn how to look around and aim at the same time, and then grow frustrated as they’re expected to incorporate moving around into that process. And then realize they paid several hundred dollars for this privilege.