Can "girl games" transcend shopping, fashion and babies?

Wonderland's Alice Taylor has written a masterful piece analyzing Ubisoft's line of "girl-oriented" games that focus on "shopping, fashion, animals and babies." Taylor produced some amazing original research for the BBC last year on gaming usage-patterns, and is herself a prominent woman gamer (a former nationally ranked Quake player), and her take on marketing games to girls is very sharp indeed:

Ubisoft have a series of games about to come out for girls. Entitled "Imagine", there's a spark of hope .. but it turns out that the series is going to primarily consist of shopping, fashion, animals and babies. Oh yes. But the worst bit about this is, not really the fact that there are going to be shopping games - WoW is at least 40% shopping, frankly - or fashion games (ditto), but that Ubisoft seem to think that this is only what girls like:

Those games were really designed for young girls who are just looking for fun games and ways to explore their favorite hobbies... From what we've seen, [the girls] didn't mention anything about being a police officer.

Research is a funny thing. If you say to someone, what's your favourite food, they'll list three things they love. If you then say, you didn't list chocolate cake, don't you like chocolate cake? They'll say, oh SURE! I love chocolate cake! I just didn't realise you were asking about chocolate cake. If young girls only like shopping, fashion and babies, then they wouldn't like Ratchet and Clank. Or Mario Kart. Or Dance Dance Revolution. Or Wii Sports. Or Pokemon.

Link

See also: Non-hypothetic ideas about women in gaming

• [xenos]

  Yehuda Berlinger – thats hard to believe, 75% sounds awfully high. But even if its true, might it not just be that its mostly just boys using their mothers credit card? (with permission of course)

  Like i have only once seen a woman playing video games – my friends mother would love to play Tomb Raider and Resident Evil (this was way back in the nineties) – but other than that, i havent seen any female playing video games. What i have seen, is women buying games for their children and guys borrowing their mothers credit card (to pay for their WoW subscriptions)
  __

  And what comes to Ubisoft, you should not blame them. Blame the ones who buy this crap.
  And if nobody buys those games, i suspect the “genius” whose idea they were, will get fired. After all, making and marketing the games cost money and if they cannot get back enough money. Heads will roll :D

• [iain010100]

  How about Chess for Girls?

• [Alys]

  I’d certainly be bored to tears with this sort of game, but I know my cousins (girls of varying ages) would probably enjoy them. That being said, it would be one game of many, with most being more action or quest oriented.

  (and just a quick note that my mother is addicted to the Mario games on the DS… and she’s nearly 50. I can’t see her playing anything really girly.)

• [Perla]

  AAAAAARGH! Perhaps they can also add how to clean kitchens and math is hard.
  I do agree that many games are violent but going the other way is not the answer.
  As a young girl, I loved playing with Lego and dissected my dolls to see what was inside and why they cried.

• [danipark]

  that ‘Imagine: Babyz’ game is slightly frightening.

• [Jo]

  Shopping? Fashion? …BABIES?!? WTF UBISOFT?? Who runs your research department? 80-year old men???

  I deal with that crap IRL! I don’t want to play a GAME about it! Give me your Gravity guns, your Zerg rushes, and your hordes of zombies infesting malls!
  But for crizzsakes, don’t make another goddamn Barbie Princess Makeover Fairy/Mermaid/Unicorn Adventure clone!

• [Sue Grant]

  I’m a woman that has always played whatever was the popular games at the time starting way back with Sierra Games adventures through Doom and Half-Life, The Sims, and now I play MMO’s frequently, such as City of Heroes, and Lord of the Rings. I like good games, with challenging content and I don’t go looking for “girl games” in particular. I hate the idea that we have to gender our games.

• [A New Challenger]

  I’m just irritated that titles like this push all the actually engaging and unique DS games off the store shelf. Trying to find the two Castlevania games anywhere besides game specialty stores or online is near impossible. Actually, that’s how I knew the DS was indeed taking off and no longer in danger of failure: when the Hannah Montana and That’s So Raven games came out for the DS instead of the Game Boy Advance.

• [Dracolich]

  I am likely setting myself up for disaster here but am I the only one that feels like they are missing the problem here? So Ubisoft is making games marketed at a segment of girls that like shopping, fashion, animals and babies. I very seriously doubt that this means Ubisoft doesn’t think girls play Ratchet and Clank. I think that Ratchet and Clank already exists and doesn’t need a special marketing department to push for their creation. What is the author looking for exactly here? A special ‘Girl Version’ of Ratchet with pink packaging and an exclusive girl power mode? Now that’s offensive.

  I agree that there are a lot of male centric games and probably a lot of things in those male centric games that are off putting to many females. In much the same way that the half naked woman every few pages in Car And Driver or the gratuitous boobs and explosions in commercials on Spike might be off putting to many females. Does this mean that no women watch or read these entertainments. Surely not, it simply means that they are shooting for a demographic with them. Much for the same reason I’m sure not all women like Oxygen, Lifetime and Vanity Fair. It just doesn’t feel like something to get incensed about.

  At least the marketers are recognizing the demographic’s existence.

  PS – And yes, for the record, I am male.

• [edgore]

  “that ‘Imagine: Babyz’ game is slightly frightening.”

  Even more so once you realize it’s a first person shooter…

• [Girl Games]

  You must check Games for Girls It’s the best site for girls.

• [snackcake]

  “…then they wouldn’t like Ratchet and Clank. Or Mario Kart. Or Dance Dance Revolution. Or Wii Sports. Or Pokemon.”

  – But those games are already being made. Just because girls like more than chocolate cupcakes, doesn’t mean they need to stop making Barbie.

  Nobody complained when they made another game about something that girls love: Nintendogs.

• [NarmGreyrunner]

  Maybe it’s just me (since I’ve gotten older and had more responsibilities I do play games a lot less than I used to) but I’ve been getting the impression that games have been maturing in general.

  To me it seems like I’m seeing more female protagonists, more female supporting characters with important roles, less skimpy “babes” and more realisticly clothed women, and gaming technology that allows character development to become an important part of games using a well-balanced cast

  So Ubisoft is just trying to fill a niche with these “girl-oriented” games. If they sell they sell, if they don’t they’ll move onto something else. They still market games specifically as testosterone filled bloodbaths to that young male demographic, and under the same principle if it sells it sells the developers move onto something else.

  It seems the trick being balanced marketing on the games where a woman might actually be intrigued enough to pick it up and try it.

• [Yehuda Berlinger]

  I wrote an article about this recently:

  http://jergames.blogspot.com/2007/09/disconnect-between-casual-game-sites.html

  What startles me is that the majority of game players are women. 75% of online game purchases are made by women.

  If this is the case, why is everyone having such a hard time figuring out what games women play? It’s the games that are currently being made. Hello?

  Yehuda

• [michael zimmer]

  You should check out the Rapunsel Project, where the goal is to create a gaming environment targeted to young girls in order to help them learn programming skills.

• [darryl ohrt]

  Morgan Webb and Xeni should team up and start a toy company.

• [Nick D]

  What about little boys who might want to play games about shopping and fashion? They are even more shut out of those than girls are from games involving sports or trucks, as the social stigma these boys face is greater than that attached to a “tomboy.”

  The marketers (mentioned by #6) are “recognizing the existence” of a demographic that they, or rather marketers historically, have been instrumental in creating.

  I’ve always hated the way we color code our children in this country: blue for boys, pink for girls. It’s ridiculous and primitive.

  I have known professional women who lament the fact that women are stuck being secretaries and can’t be VPs, who then turn around and give their nieces pink princess dolls and their nephews blue Tonka trucks, and never see a connection.

  And then after we have programmed them to have certain preferences, and shamed them into hiding any divergent preferences, we do studies that ask them what their preferences are, and deduce from these studies that these preferences are genetically determined!

  OK, that’s my rant for today. – Nick D. (the poster formerly known as Nick)

• [Brian Damage]

  There’s lots of games out there already that are sensitive without being girly, and reward smarts over reflexes.

  The Longest Journey and Dreamfall by Funcom are the best examples I can give – tons of spoken dialogue, great character development, and a very intriguing fantasy-meets-sci-fi dystopian near-future. Both games have credible, strong-willed, lovable female protagonists. The Syberia series of adventure games is noteworthy as well for similar traits.

  My mom and sister love “asexual” casual games like Bejewelled and Peggle. That’s going to be the next huge market and currently the key demographic is women aged 40-60.

  The aforementioned adventure games are inexpensive but rare in stores, while the latter casual games are plentiful. With the exception of Syberia all these games can be purchased on Steam.