Casual Games Not For Women?

August 7th, 2006, By Duncan Gough

I think that a lot of the interest around Casual Games doesn’t come from the fact that lots of people wish they could make a living designing games, although that makes up a large chunk of that interest. Rather, I think that a lot of the interest around Casual Games comes from the fact that people can’t figure out how the industry came to be so profitable.

The typical Casual Games audience is, after all, quite a popular and ‘well funded’ market. That is, casual gamers tend to be women, over 20, with disposable income and a fair acceptance of how the internet works. The kind that, especially over here in the UK, magazines are being created for on a daily basis - Heat, Closer, More, etc. Rather that trying to convince a young, faddish and generally poor audience to pay for content, the casual games industry has found an audience that wants its services and will happily pay for them. Whilst companies like Massive struggle to create in-game ads that fit with the mainly sci-fi content their games are playing, the Casual Games industry makes games around sweets, soft drinks, cars, holidays, banks and all other sorts of commercial products. Casual Games tend to be quite abstract to begin with, so although the raft of clones threatens to stifle the creativity of such an indie-based industry, opening up extra revenue streams around any particular game can often be just a matter of swapping out the art in favour of branded, sponsored graphics.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the Casual Games industry has seeming sprung up from nowhere, bringing with it a well sought after audience as well as a simplistic business model that maximises the potential revenue of every single game. So why did I title this post ‘Not For Women’? Because, after a long thread on the Casual Games mailing list, no-one really seems to be able to describe how to design a good game for women. One of the achievements of the last six months, to my mind, is the effective documentation of what makes a good casual game. Amend that question to include women, however, and things start to fall apart. The responses to my initial question and further prompting on the mailing list soon descended into vagueries, ending with the assumption that women like good games (men like bad games?) and women don’t like violent games.

The were a few good stabs at pin-pointing storyline and empathy with the characters as being key to the casual game design process, but nothing specific, no evidence that women react more strongly to a game that they connect with over simple puzzle game. Nor was there any acceptance of the fact that a game that requires emotional connection on a level that is going to engross and affect you can’t really be called a casual game anymore.

For my part, I’m beginning to think that the Casual Games which appeal to women are the ones that are already an abstraction of a recognisable, achievable task. Word searches, Sodoku and Tetris are all pattern matching games that abstract something fundamental that we’ve all learned will lead to a reward. Clearing up a grid of letters, words or shapes is a quick process that provides a short-lived period of self-satisfaction. I’d start there and analyse whether there are any concepts that can be applied to Casual Game design for women, if I were so inclined. From the mailing list, Globz make some pretty abstract casual games, and their response, though succinct, was pertinent. Elsewhere, C|Net explains the disconnect between women and video games, whilst Flicker gaming notes that women in games are showing up on the radar.

It’s not that women in casual games are drastically underserved, though, but that the urge to draw in more women is the same urge to create casual games with a broader appeal. Does taking casual games into the mainstream risk eliminating the casual element from them, especially if we introduce an emotional depth in its place? That’s what passive gaming is all about, though. Casually, immersive, checking-your-email style gameplay. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of social software ideas continue to show in passive gaming circles. It’s a medium for friends (buddies), stories (adventures) and group experiences (quests) that supports abstraction and retains the possibilty of in-game ads, since it’s unlikely to be based on the planet Zog. More likely, it’ll be the planet Arg.

Update - I should have seen this coming, the escapist have a feature on women in games now too.

Update - This has now become part of the August Round Table too.

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