Ask the film industry...
> can't the idiots
> making games see that they miss a lot of bucks by only making hack'n'slash
> software for testosterone-packed young males? i mean, face it, there's
> a huge market out there! half the population, yet to be drawn into the world
of
> computer games! aren't the creators of games interested in this huge,
> yet unexploited market segment?! ;-)
Well, yes. Now for the million-dollar question: what, exactly, would a
"game for girls" consist of? I've heard of at least two game companies
formed for exactly this purpose, and I haven't seen any noticeable
product from either of them.
Like movies, games are now very expensive and labour-intensive to produce;
the days when you or I could sit down and write a commercially viable game
singlehandedly died with the C=64 (and the same thing is about to happen
to the Web) (the sole recent exceptions are Tetris, and the
Wolfenstein/Doom phenomenon [started when Id Software was basically two
programmers, I think]). And nobody has much more than a vague idea of
what might constitute a successful game, and most of these vague ideas
are based on modelling past successes. We know more or less what young
males will buy -- but what do women as a market want? Do they even all
want the same thing, or are they hopelessly fragmented as a market (and
thus commercially trivial, relative to dependably homogeneous young males)?
The movie industry's best effort to crack this problem has produced the
recent mini-genre of "women's movies", which are not only mediocre, but
ghettoized, and commercially minor relative to the vast worldwide market
for young-male movies (where even Waterworld eventually made a healthy
pile of money). The game industry hasn't even begun to get this far.
Has there _ever_ been a game that sold in high numbers to women (if such
information even exists)?
What do you women out there _want_ in a game? I've heard game companies
toss around the usual terms like "sharing" and "nurturing", but that's
just bad armchair sociology and stupid cliches (similar arguments would
establish that women don't really want to play competitive sports, which
appears not to be true), not to mention the fact that nobody has any idea
how to make a "game" that incorporates those elements.
-- Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu