On Wednesday I read an article in the Metro called ‘’. The article is based on a report produced by Gamesvision. This report claims that 23% of people aged between six and 55 play computer games and 41% of gamers are female. These are encouraging statistics.

The article argues that this is due to more women who join the labour force and program and develop games. The games have in turn become more realistic. This means that the busty Lara Croft went from a 36DD to a 36B. Well, she still fulfils the ideal of slender femininity and has still a perfect wais to hip ratio. However Lara Croft is now a bit more realistic than before.

This makes business sense for game producers. If they alienate half of their potential consumer market, it does not make sense to have stereotypical representations of women. Having more women programming games together with consumer demand might thus change the face of gaming or rather the representation of female characters.

A fascinating topic. The university of Warwick will host a conference on Women in Gaming from 10 to 12 September.

Nokia has finally unwrapped its N-Gage mobile games service globally, allowing users of their newer smart-phones to download some half-decent games for their mobile phones and providing a real alternative to console and PC gaming.

Mobile gaming is on the increase: Its a great way to attract ‘snack’ or casual gamers, of which a large proportion are women. I have seen many women on the bus, train who play games on their phones. I do not think these women would ever be seen in public playing a DS or a PSP – playing a game on the phone is more respectable (even if it’s that boring breakout game on the BlackBerry).

Travel time is ‘dead’ time for women – they don’t have the same guilt and feeling of indulgence that they would have if they were to ‘surrender’ an hour of valuable home time to play Mario Galaxy. Home time is too valuable, and this is why the hand-held gaming market is skewed towards female gamers.

The genius of N-gage is that Nokia have delivered a fully portable game-platform that allows players to try before they buy. Like the XBox Live Arcade at home, this feature of the new N-Gage takes the risk out of choosing games, as buyers are safe in theknowledge that they will not be mis-sold. You always know what you are going to get before you hand over your cash.

The new N-Gage games are just downloads. There is no need to visit a game store (hooray as they are not exactly inviting to women) and there are no game packs to be lost or damaged.

According to Mintel data (2007), women are far less likely to spend money on gaming, particularly on a subscription model that dominates the hardcore gamer market. Nokia have sensibly adopted a pricing model similar to Nintendo’s Wii, that is once bought games are free to play online.

While I think Nokia have got much of this right, it’s still going to be a tough sell: The Nintendo DS is the hottest selling games platform right now, and shelves are literally bulging with many lifetimes worth of casual games.

Having the N-Gage platform pre-installed on all future phones will make a big difference – however even then I think Nokia will need to advertise heavily in order to help women understand the clever features that are buried deep within their phone’s memory.

I bought an Xbox a few months ago and I was quite excited at the prospect of having it in my living room. My husband enthused that it was ‘something for the living room to watch films on’ which would replace our DVD player’ – this seemed like an an interesting prospect. Being a film aficionado, having lots of new films/TV shows and video on demand is very appealing.

The first thing I noticed about the Xbox Marketplace was the selection of films are very limited and not that appealing to women. Its mainly the hardcore men titles with the occasional “chick-flick” (Miss Congeniality) thrown in for good measure. The selection is designed to appeal to adolescent boys – there’s a surplus of action films and high-octane thrillers. The movie store was a dissapointment, but what about all the other content that Microsoft sold us on?

There’s a TV and short-films section which mainly consists of pop videos and the kid’s show “Viva Piniata”. These are the same pop videos you can watch for free on any of the Freeview music channels, except in the Xbox marketplace you pay a few pounds for the same content you can get for free on TV or via YouTube.

The value of these official downloads is further diluted by XBox marketplace’s vague licensing: Downloaded movies must be watched within a week of the original download or else the movie becomes unplayable. Likewise a move which has been started must be finished within 24 hours before it expires and becomes unplayable. Does the same restriction that applies to a Will Smith movie also apply to a Britney pop video? Who knows – I wasnt going to waste money trying to find out!

On the subject of payment once again the Xbox marketplace is confusing: Microsoft have decided to invent their own currency which is neither Pounds, Dollars nor any other familiar currency but “Microsoft Points” whose rate is arbitrarily set by Microsoft. This means we never really know how much an Xbox marketplace costs until we check the latest points to pounds exchange rate. How much money is two-hundred Microsoft points? I’ve absolutely no idea and I doubt that most Xbox 360 owners do either.

So far, I haven’t downloaded a single paid-for film – that’s only partly because Microsoft’s commercial media proposition is a failure. The other reason is that the XBox 360 can play XviD and DivX files – these files can be downloaded from a huge selection without payment and then kept forever (or until I decide to delete it). The XBox 360 is such a superb movie player that nobody who knows this would ever be tempted to waste money on the sub-standard good in the Xbox Marketplace.

This is a massive missed financial opportunity for Microsoft. The Lady Geeks I spoke to were similarly impressed by the XBox 360′s media player abilities but felt let down by the range and restrictions of the marketplace. Ultimately YouTube and illegal downloads offered a better value proposition than Microsoft’s half-hearted offering. Microsoft should offer a wider selection of movies which appeal to more than just the traditional adolescent male gamer, plus they should price their downloads in real money rather than confusing points. These are all modest changes (compared to the technical difficulty of building the system in the first place) that would dramatically extend the Xbox 360′s appeal to women.

As “Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain” hits the Five million mark in unit sales at the begining of this year and “More Brain Training” gets to 2.8 million units, I am wondering if the world has gone mad…

… And then I see this story in the Times; Primary school children are being encouraged to play Brain Training in class to boost their “cognitive skills”. I have no problem with girls or boys playing games. But Brain Training is one of the dumbest games in the whole DS catalogue, and despite it’s maker’s claims I think it’s the least likely to boost any kind of skills.

I have played Brain Training. Its very basic and repetitive – I’d barely even qualify it as a game. Its mind blowingly dull. I can think of a number of DS games that have a greater potential to challenge a young mind.

Brain Training challenges players to quickly answer primary-school grade arithmetic puzzles. The puzzles in Zelda or the strategic challenge of Advance Wars both encourage a more useful kind of logical thinking than Brain Training requires. All Brain Training seems to do is rote-learning of basic arithmetic.

I teach my nieces and nephews French. At school, they learn to recite the numbers. They can count up from one, but they cannot translate simple random numbers. That’s just one example of how rote-learning does not work. It’s a dumb, boring and ineffective way to study.

I think we should applaud Nintendo for recognizing a role for their technology in the classroom – but surely our children deserve something better than this?

As if we needed another video game for girls “Guppylife for girls”

The purpose of the game is to look after the furry inhabitants of the planet; what an innovation! I do agree with Alice though, the design looks great but please, its bad enough creating another video game for girls (have a look in any games store at the DS titles and you will agree) but to brand it “for girls” is not the best way to market it. Women and girls are put off by anything which overtly targets them as women. Not only does it put women off, but as one Lady Geek told me “just because I have breasts, doesn’t mean I gravitate to other breasts.” Nicely put i think. Apple never brought out the ipod and marketed it “for girls” but they did alot of research into understanding what women would respond to. Sony Bravia are positioning their TV as “a piece of furniture” not as “a piece of furniture for women” but their strategy is very much to appeal to the female market. The opportunity is for brands to understand the subtleties of connecting with women. Its complicated. Women are complicated. And an overt “girls only” approach just ain’t going to cut it.

It seems there is no end to marketing opportunities and development of products that we clearly ‘need’ to keep your brain well oiled. From brain training to this.

A gaming pill to improve your first person shooter performance. Its been introduced by German PC builder Tomarni who state that their “staff use FpsBrain at least four times a week to enhance their mental performance and their work efficiency.”

From what is reported from Gizomodo, its just a load of vitamins with a shot of caffeine. I can’t see an audience for this, although I said that about brain training.

There may be a rationale for this product: If hardcore game-geeks exist on a diet of pizza and Dr. Pepper then A multivitamin supplement like this might be just what they need to live a slightly healthier lifestyle. As the nature of gaming is changing, this cliche of the nocturnal acne-faced game-nerd is on the wane – I’m not sure that there is a substantial audience who would identify with the need for this product.

Are we so vulnerable and dissatisfied that we would resort to products like this? I hope not. I am sticking to my decaff latte (recently told it was referred to as a lesbian latte)

After hearing that Sony Playstation 3 is set to spend a whopping £4million on its first Christmas TV campaign, I was intrigued to see what they had produced – would this campaign be effective in helping Sony attract a broader audience? Could they reach beyond the teenage and twentysomething audience they have traditionally been very good at reaching?

I wanted to find out if the ads would connect with women, who make up a large growing proportion of the casual gaming audience and whom in the main, with the exception of Nintendo’s activity, have been neglected or patronised up until now.

Their strategic positioning of ‘entertainment super computer’ was not particularly inspiring. I expected that the campaign would focus on the exceptional computing features of the campaign: i.e processing power, gigabytes and they would fail to sell me the overall benefit of how the Sony Playstation would enhance my life. However I was pleasantly intrigued when I watched the Dr Beautiful ad which is based on the idea of the world being a stage and Sony being the entertainers. Its designed to showcase the wealth of entertainment available on PS3. The commercial will run in 17 territories in Europe and Australia.

Executionally, this is a visual treat; using old fashioned theatrical music which contrasts to the state of the art technology. The message was benefit led, emotional and humanazied the technology and got me excited about the possibility of some of the exciting features of the console. And it certainly was unique.

My only critique would be that it feels like a teaser ad- it has the power to seduce and intrigue but the PS3 has been out now for 8 over months. The role of the advertising now needs to help a broader audience understand how its going to enhance their life, how its better than the Wii & Xbox, and how its so much more than a pure gaming platform.

I spoke to my panel of Lady Geek experts and got their visceral reaction to the ad. They felt in the main, whilst visually spectacular, it still wasn’t enticing them towards to the console and didn’t improve their understanding of why they should spend all that money. They think of the Playstation as sleek, fast, with the best games and newest technology (vs. nintendo-easy, cartoony and fun for all) (x-box, multi-player, graphics). They weren’t quite sure of this positioning. They wanted to see more of the social aspect of gaming, the PS3 as the catalyst for bringing the fun factor to their families, friends.

That’s a big job for one ad. Its a fully integrated campaign so I look forward to seeing what else Dr Beautiful has in store for us…

 

In the recent article Would the ‘real’ girl gamer please stand up? Gender, LAN cafés and the reformulation of the ‘girl’ gamer, which appeared in Gender and Education, Catherine Beavis and Claire Charles look at girl gamers in a cyber LAN café in Australia. Earlier research in the field has suggested that gaming is seen as something that boys and men do. Women and girls just do not play. This article highlights how girl gamers construct their identities.

 

What is interesting is that these girl gamers often claim to have started gaming due to their boyfriends or other male friends. This is very similar to what I found in my research on IT workers. While men regularly claimed to have a natural interest in technology, women claimed to have become interested in technology though fathers, uncles, brothers or boyfriends. I have analyzed this in my PhD thesis as a way in which gender norms are reenacted in society. Whereas it is normal for men to be interested in technology, women somehow need an excuse to be fascinated by technology.

 

The article on girl gamers argues that these young women create new ways in which being a woman is performed in society. In the long run it might then be seen as less ‘odd’ that women have a genuine interest in technology and they might finally been seen as a target group for technology that is taken seriously.

“38 percent of video-game players are female, and most of the industry doesn’t know — or care — what they want” according to an article in Yahoo this week.

They review “Babyz” is one of Ubisoft’s “Imagine” series of girl-oriented games, which also includes “Fashion Designer,” “Animal Doctor” (can you believe that they didn’t want to use the word veterinarian as they thought it would put children off?) and “Master Chef.” I haven’t tried any of the games so can’t agree or disagree if its as dire as the reviewer makes out. What I do know though, is with the amount of “shovelware” targeting this group needs a deep understanding of what young girls want and like and this goes beyond the superficial of make it pink, girly and princess like. Young girls are so grown up these days, I am often shocked like most parents I imagine, at how sophisticated and complex my 8 year old niece is.As one woman writes in womengamers.com, “Most of the content sounds like “girl sanitized” versions of other games. I think this stuff is dreamed up in the minds of clueless marketing people that just see a marketing demographic and strategize how to make a game more “girly.”

Whilst there is clearly a market for this genre of games, otherwise games companies would not keep churning them out, there are girls out there who do not respond to this and companies have to be brave and be amongst the few to really push the boundaries and not end up sanitizing the game play. Lets hope that the Imagine range goes onto show a true understanding of young girls and the imagination of the marketers behind it.

I was spending an afternoon with a group of young girls this week getting under the skin of whats its like to be a ‘tween’ for a client. I met Hannah 9, Emily 10 and Grace 10 years old. They have been friends for ages.

I was asking them about how it feels to be a young girl, what’s important to them and how they feel about technology. I was expecting the whole pink think to be super appealing but i was shocked to find out that at this age, ‘pink’ anything, let alone pink gadgets are NOT cool:

Neither are dresses, particularly not pink dresses, nor are boys (the gender thing kicks in around now), nor is Barbie or Angelina Ballerina. This stuff is reminiscent of their earlier years and is for ‘young girly girls!’ I got them to do some drawings of what isn’t cool.

What’s also interesting is what is cool. All 3 cited their nintendo DS lite as super cool and when I mentioned the new silver version (sorry to their mums in advance) they got really excited.

The other interesting thing was I asked all their mums if I could get them a game for their DS as a thank you, and all the mums said ‘it would be better to get them a book voucher’ which was insightful in itself. Clearly their is still prejudice as to the value of games and many parents still see them as a ‘waste of time.’

As Kitt, the frag doll highlighted, there is so much ‘shovelware’ out there and over 450 titles for the DS lite launching between Oct and Dec, a lot of which are targeted at the young girl (My Pet Dolphin, Animal paradise, I Did It Mum, Fashion Designer to name just a few) that there is serious competition for manufacturers, not only for the girls but for the parents who are so often the gifters. Games publishers need to really understand what is it like to be a young girl and what is going to have enduring appeal and the potential to be a true Lovemark for this audience not just a fad.

My advice for mums and dads is don’t go for the pink. It seems silver is definitely the new pink.