Girls in Gaming

According to mmogchart.com’s list of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) with 200,000+ subscribers, the most popular titles are, in order:

1. World of Warcraft
2. Runescape
3. Lineage
4. Lineage II

Two recent releases, Age of Conan and (very recently) Warhammer Online apparently have fewer than 70,000 and about 500,000 players respectively.

Why talk about subscription numbers at all?   In a 2001 survey of 1,240 EverQuest players, Nick Yee found that 84% of them were male and 16% of them were female.  Since then, the ratio has, without a doubt, improved.  In the case of World of Warcraft, 16% constitutes over 1.6 million players worldwide — a significant portion of their subscriber base.  Making an online game that is appealing to a female market is important; Blizzard and others have without a doubt understood this.

What makes a game — especially an online game — appealing to females?  That, of course, is the $1,000,000 question (or the $650,000,000 question,  if you’re Activision Blizzard).  Making games appealing to a specific market is as much of a science as it is an art.  Just because a study has shown that females will like component X does not imply that inserting X into a game will make it popular with that market.

With that said, here is my list of do’s and don’ts for the online gaming market in order to attract a female player base.

DO

1. Provide examples in the online game world of female role-models.
An online MMO is essentially a world upon itself, which gives designers a lot of flexibility to insert and promote characters who, even though they are female, can act as positive role-models for both players and other non-interactive story characters themselves.  In World of Warcraft, Jaina Proudmoore comes to mind.

2. Allow customization of player-characters armour/dress, but leave gaudy looks out.
All players, regardless of gender, want their characters to look “cool” while still retaining ultimate utility.  World of Warcraft offers up a healthy dose of this principle: characters are most definitely attractive throughout the entire game, no matter what they seem to be wearing.  EverQuest II failed, at least at launch, in this respect: armor appeared to simply get uglier as one levelled up.  It should be no surprise that this principle is linked to the success of The Sims as a franchise and the huge female player base of that game.

3. Discourage sexist behaviour from players.
The stereotype of online game players used to be this: male; lives in their parents’ basement; never had a relationship with a woman; spends far too much time on their online game of choice.  Of course, this has changed: demographics of online game players are much more diverse now.  The unfortunate side effect is that the sexism that used to exist in online games still does.  Online games should never be condoning this and should be working with players to promote a positive image of women — not one that is sexualized and taken to extremes, but one that shows that women really are dynamic, functional individuals with a lot to contribute.  Sexual harassment is a serious thing and should be taken very seriously by a game’s support staff: going as far as to remove the perpetrator from the game entirely if they have shown that they can’t handle themselves around the opposite sex.  The loss of a subscriber who can’t get along with women will be replaced by multiple female players who feel just a little less alienated.

DON’T

1. Do what Age of Conan does.
Age of Conan is indeed one of the most sexist video games of recent history, and that sexism is part of why the game has failed — it’s certainly got its share of controversy.  Female characters start the game more or less topless, which players can turn into “completely topless” as soon as they enter the game world.  Not only that, but at release, female characters did 25% less damage than male characters.  It should be mentioned that neither of these components actually have any reasoning behind them in the game’s story, so there really is no excuse as to why these components are included.

2. Limit players to only play characters of their “real sex.”
Ragnarok Online is an online game developed by Gravity Corp., a Korean games developer.  Because of how the game has been developed, a single account is limited to creating characters of only one sex — male or female — depending on what the individual chose at registration.  In Korea, this is determined by their KSSN (Korean Social Security Number).  In other versions, however, there is no national database of individuals who play the game and what their “real sex” is, so there is no realistic way to enforce this restriction.  Aside from being an invasion of privacy, this principle undermines the point of online games: live another life away from your own.  Nick Yee’s research (linked above) showed that almost 50% of female characters were played by males.

3. Allow your players to turn the game into something completely undesirable.
I reserved this one for last because, truly, there is no reason as to why the developer of this game could have allowed this to happen.  Second Life is a world that players build themselves; there is an internal economy (with an exchange to the US$) and creativity runs wild.  Actually, in a lot of places, creativity runs too wild: it’s filled with porn.  Aside from being, largely, a male thing, pornography is frequently degrading to women and promotes a negative stereotype of what women should be.  Anyway, my point is this: if you want to make your world appealing to females, you can’t allow it to be filled with something that makes a lot of females uncomfortable.

No doubt have online games improved over the past decade, but there’s still a long way to go until they reach mass market appeal with a female audience.  World of Warcraft was the first online MMORPG to successfully break into the ludicrous “casual gamer” market — the next step is to tap into the (perhaps even more ludicrous) “girl gamer” market.