Silicon Sisters: Industry is failing female gamers
Vancouver-based developer believes most games for female audiences are "superficial"
Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch, CEO of the Vancouver-based developer Silicon Sisters Interactive, believes that the games industry still doesn't know how to satisfy its female customers.
Gershkovitch co-founded the studio last year to address the gulf between the rapidly growing number of female gamers on smartphones and social networks, and the lack of products that display an understanding of their tastes.
"I think there are different levels to what you can offer," Gershkovitch said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.
"What we've seen is a fairly superficial offering where, in the absence of truly understanding what women want in terms of game mechanics and connection, what we're getting is a female wrapper around a game that's really designed for men."
When you look at the visceral thrill of shooting and what it gives men, looking for the equivalent of that in women is non-obvious
Kirsten Forbes, COO, Silicon Sisters
"But while that works to some degree it's not going to, in my estimation, really build the gaming community, and really contribute to that aspirational goal of finding out what it is that women connect with when they game."
The studio only opened its doors after Gershkovitch and her business partner, Kirsten Forbes, conducted 6 months of intensive research. The product of that period is a "bible" that Forbes describes as "the DNA of the company."
"The bibliography on that is probably 20 pages long. There are an enormous number of academic studies that cover tiny slices of female play in all kinds of different ways. We compiled all of that together and saw certain trends emerge."
"It took 30 years to really perfect the three things that males seem to really love, which are shooting, and driving, and sports. And those are absolutely kick-ass games now, and you really have to sit back and go, 'What is the equivalent for girls? And please God, don't let it take us 30 years to get to as high a quality level as that.'"
Silicon Sisters' first release - the iOS game School 26 - was targeted at 12 to 16 year-old girls, and featured mechanics based on empathy, peer pressure and other aspects of the social experience of high school.
According to Forbes, the challenge that the male-dominated games industry faces in creating new forms of gameplay for its female customers shouldn't be underestimated.
"When you look at the visceral thrill of shooting and what it gives men, looking for the equivalent of that in women is non-obvious, and I believe it's going to be more subtle."
For the full interview with Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch and Kirsten Forbes, go to the features section.
But that works only for PS3 and xBox Games, not for Facebook games.
For those my requirements are that its something I can pick up whenever and put down whenever, but gives me a sense of achievement...
Really? the next headline down from this offers some insight: "Zumba still holding on to UK number one"
Its not a game.
And its kinda embarrassing for those of us who really are female gamers.
I do own some workout titles for the Kinect, but I no more consider them games than I do the workout DVDs I own to be films.
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Matthew Green on 22nd August 2011 12:55pm
Current female gamers liking shooters etc is a bit chicken/egg - is that just a case of the games available selecting who is a "gamer"?
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Pete Thompson on 22nd August 2011 2:35pm
Personally, i think there are just gamers: gamers with different preferences. There's no need to segregate by sex or age because fun games that cater to your tastes will always be fun for you no matter what.
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The only thing i think that needs to be kept more in mind is the aspect of inclusion. Don't alienate parts of your potential customers by unnecessarily marginalising their sex or their religion or their race.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by James Prendergast on 22nd August 2011 2:35pm
They assume that this would be different had women played a more significant role, and while it's a difficult assumption to prove one way or the other, they also acknowledge that exceptions do exist - women who play shooters, men who can't stand them, and so on.
From my own personal experience, knowing a lot of a girls who game and don't game, those that do game play just about anything. Those that don't, just don't have the desire to play games. The exact same thing could be said about guys.
Could it be that different proportions of guys want to play games compared to girls? Could it be that for the majority, marginal or not, girls are different to guys somehow? No way, that can't be right, can it?!
Needs more clarity here really.
Because the so called hardcore female gamers arent really much different than most gamers in general.
There are a 1001 different types of gamers in general...and these cant really be categorized in the simplistic black and white group of male and female...
I kinda think its strange for a company to target a gender and by doing so repel the opposite.
Why not just make a good game and leave it at that?
Sure categorize your game, choose a target market, but choosing "female" as a target market is ridiculous.
Just give girls something or someone to idolize and it'd be a much more even playing field. We don't need to make games specifically for girls for that. That just separates girl gamers even further.
With those forgotten types of games, the things they focused on are ripe for the mobile platform and would draw the interest of men and women who don't drown themselves in AXE, pound a 6'er while rolling around in bacon shouting at fox sports about the Badminton championships.
Trust me there are some "guys" that don't find what passes for games these days all that filling either... The recession hasn't helped publishers feel any more adventurous so we mostly get what they always do, copy what sells and don't ever be the first to step off the path, but when someone else does, be sure to run them down as fast as humanly possible with the "genre creating machine" in high gear.
I'm a hardcore female gamer but I also play a lot of casual. I actually don't have any major issues with core games when it comes to my gender. I'm seeing more women playing core every year. Casual games are bringing some converts, as bored casual gamers try out larger file adventure games, which leads to RPGs, and deeper into core gaming. The only thing keeping women out of core gaming is lack of time due to work and family. I have more of a beef with casual game design - it is so filled with stereotypes - too many are about cooking, make-up, clothes, boyfriends, cute animals or babies. I like the ones that go outside of the box (plants vs zombies, my kingdom for the princess, fix it up, etc).
I think that a developer that targets the female demographic that is NOT being satisfied is taking an intelligent route towards being disruptive and successful, which is key in a startup.
A couple of examples: Why are game companies not working more with fashion designers so that women that enjoy fashionable attire can see it while they game? Why are there not more story delivery games that allow for subtle plot nudging, which statistically(note you may fall out of this category, you are unique and special and my comment does not detract from this) is an area women enjoy more than men.
Either way I wish these women luck, there is a lot of space for creativity in the area they are targetting. The one critique I would have would be that games should try to provide satisfying elements for a larger gamer group, so blending traditionally male/female wants should be the end goal, budget permitting.
CO-OP, something to think about.
For instance many millions love to watch football - that doesn't mean they all play the sport or the video games about it. There'll be a market for sure...but will it be big enough? (Yes, if football is anything to go by!)
I am some sort of female 'hardcore' gamer and yes, I feel often fundamentally misunderstood or ignored by the gaming industry. And it's not only because many leading characters are male, which indeed often complicates the process of identification. Mostly its just because of what I described above: They somehow try to "translate" the games or available characters into a "female universe" which, as far I can see, does not exist.
So Mr. Clayton is absolutely right! I have a younger brother and we both enjoyed almost the same games for the same reasons. Even my boyfriend has the same gaming experience as I have. And I don't think that I'm some kind of exception.
Ironically female characters that are some sort of boyish sexual fantasy are attracting me too, because they are often strong, smart and sexy women, far beyond those bunny-eared-pink-dressed girls that we are supposed to like. In fact, we often just have no choice.
I watched a video on youtube where girls were shown some images and had to decide whether they preferred playing a fat, ugly dwarf or a cute panda-bear. Of course they chose the panda. And I assume, not because cute panda-bears are something all female players are into, but because there wasn't what I consider to be a 'real or fair choice' (on purpose as you might guess).
The only difference I have ever experienced between me and any male player is my somehow deeper assimilation concerning the gaming world. This of course means that I love games with strong drama and I have to admit I spend much time in the character generation screen, too, but it also means, I sit hours in front of my ps3 till I mastered every combo of my fav. Tekken-character.
I don't want to polemize but I'm afraid games will soon become another media that shows how girls or women "have" to be like and not how they "want" to be like. So please take the chance! Just let us be strong heroines as many games are already doing so well!
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Katharina Trautvetter on 22nd August 2011 10:20pm
By that description, I'd recommend Civilization, almost any of them (except V, being so damned buggy). I've always enjoyed strategy and 'thinking games'. As for the idea that all women are into fashion is not a good way to get women to play a game.
We want a good 'in depth' game-not the casual crap that passes for games on FB. Any game with some background, story telling and role playing would probably catch our eye. Right now, I'm waiting for LA Noire to come out for the PC-that's the kind of game that attracts me.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Mary Hilton on 22nd August 2011 10:36pm
I laughed hard on that paragraph and specially on that question, which makes believe that, either they never looked clearly to the actual gaming offer, or they just try to b***s**t us with some lame marketing strategy.
If we are talking about character identification, we have Bioware games such as ME which let you play one bad ass male/fem commander, Dragon Age and also Fallout series but let us also not forget the reboot of Tomb Raider which I believe will tend to be a female version of the Uncharted series (there is more to this game of course but you'll have to agree that the design is nearly similar) and on top of that, they went easy on Croft's titties (sad T_T but adding more realism ). Hell even in Tekken we had the Nina character kicking some serious ass in a gorgeous red dress.
On top of that, we have the soulless characters like Gordon Freeman, the first Dead Space and many more.
Sure we can use some more females in the design process but those outraged feminist have to take a chill pill and just relax a little bit ;)
Cheers all !
First, computers are much more anti-human in nature than anti-female. As someone with a logical bent who has devoted a good part of his life to developing software-based systems within businesses, it's obvious to me that most men, as well as most women, do not care for and may have little capacity for logical thinking. The primary component of my job is mainly to translate wishful, ill-conceived arm-waving into something resembling a consistent specification that can be implemented on a computer.
Nor is the sort of logical thinking that I need to use to create good software needed to play games. A bit of puzzle-solving in Tomb Raider is a far cry from the sort of rigor one needs to, say, figure out what one's loop invariants are and construct a proof that a function does what you want it to do.
Second: Turing completeness has nothing to do with intelliegent conversations (you are perhaps confusing that term of art with "Turing test," something entirely different and unrelated, not to mention another vague arm-waving idea as opposed to a precise mathematical concept). Whether truly intelligent conversations, or ones that would "pass the Turing test" are even necessary is an open question; a quick read of AOLiza conversations is enough to introduce plenty of doubt about that notion.
There are ever more female gamers but no games they want! That sounds like something doesn't add up because why game if you don't like the games.
To me it sounds like these three girls are over-intellectualizing and/or trying to market them self as knowing something the rest of us do not.
Claiming that girls don't like the games that boys do is silly and frankly sounding like something from the dark ages.
Females are half the populations and at least 40% of gamers, not a special case in my opinion.
Something seems a little outside reality in this article to me, especially with the number of female gamers I know in industry or just day to day.
I'm starting to avoid game news in order to stop getting dissappointed by nearly every big developer/publisher out there.
For me I like quality graphics and immersive gameplay, but there aren't too many of those that aren't mostly about killing stuff.
So perhaps the article should have read "AAA" games fail female gamers?
I'm Male and personally despise shooters unless they have some element besides "run through level gunning stuff down" Bioshock is a good example of a shooter that does more than shoot. I personally like hardcore RPGs, you know the ones like Witcher or Baldur's Gate 2 with ridiculously long manuals and huge learning curves. I know a lot of female gamers and they all have different tastes.
Female Gamers are as diverse in their tastes as Males, and while I think its cool that there is a developer out there targeting the female gamer audience; they would be fools to make the mistake of assuming that all gals like this or all gals like that.
Seriously Guy??? Thats the best example you can come up with to make games more female oriented? That women want our characters to look prettier and more fashionable?
I agree with your second comment of story adjustment being appealing, but come on... fashion????
A lot of games have incredible costume design these days. Well thought out and beautiful.
But we dont play games for fashion, we read magazines for that.
We play games for an immersive experience with an addictive storyline and well designed gameplay.