Women seek to level playing field
Imagine you're an elite warrior, master of every weapon and fighting style known to man. What would you wear to work? Combat fatigues, perhaps, with some advanced body armor on top.
Unless, of course, you're a female warrior in the typical computer game. In that case, you'll probably make do with a skin-tight leather outfit and spike heels, or perhaps a nice bronze bustier that leaves your cute belly button exposed to the enemy's deadly weapons.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that most computer games are designed by men, for men. Phaedra Boinodiris hopes to change this. She's CEO of the Internet site Women
gamers.com. "We specifically offer a community for women," Boinodiris said, "so that they can feel more included in the community of people who are playing computer and console games." Considering that the Entertainment Software Association reckons that women make up about 40 percent of computer game players, this doesn't seem too much to ask. But for Boinodiris, inclusion means something rather more sensible than games featuring half-naked female commandos. What's needed are games featuring more plausible and respectable images of women. "We like women warriors," she said, "but how are they dressed?"
Womengamers cosponsored a conference on women and gaming last week in Austin, Texas. The company also announced it's teaming up with Southern Methodist University, one of the few schools to offer academic training in game design through its Guildhall program. Together, they'll establish a scholarship fund for women seeking careers in the gaming industry.
Peter Raad, executive director of the Guildhall, said there are only two women among his school's 100 students. "We need to get the message across to young women and older women that digital games are a profession," Raad said. "The art form will benefit as a result of it."
Some might argue that the tastes of male and female gamers aren't really all that different. There are many women players of violent games such as Quake and Counter-Strike; some have even formed Internet "clans" where they team up online to blaze away at male rivals. Still, New York-based Jupiter Research has studied the matter and found only about 2 to 3 percent of women gamers are interested in such fare.
So which games are women playing? Mostly the ones that offer a chance to schmooze with other gamers. These include the "casual" games such as bridge, checkers, or bingo that are offered on many Internet sites.
These female gamers aren't looking for intense competition. Indeed, some have been scared away from the big online game sites, where serious rivals sometimes talk trash and strive to crush their opponents. Cyndi Webb, founder of Mom's Network, a group of websites for mothers, set up Damegames.com as an easygoing alternative. Webb calls it "our fun, foo-foo site . . . where it would be just the gals hanging out and playing." Damegames offers about 150 games to its 20,000 members, and nobody much minds whether they're winning or losing. "For a small little nonprofit organization for fun, it's not bad," Webb said.
Still, many women gamers would like to visit rich, complex fantasy worlds like the ones the guys play. Too often, these are grim, brutal places that make female gamers uncomfortable. But the massively popular "life simulator" game The Sims is a major exception. With its various expansion packs, The Sims has become the best-selling computer game of all time, largely because of its popularity with women. "I think it would've been a successful game if no girls had bought it," said Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "but the icing on the cake is the girls' market."
There's almost no violence or conflict in The Sims; players compete at throwing grand parties and creating the most stylish homes. It's all about social status.
Jenkins credits the sizable number of women employed by Maxis, the game development house that produced The Sims. "It has a higher proportion of women working there than any other game company I've visited," he said. Even though The Sims isn't explicitly a "girl game" -- many males love it, too -- Jenkins thinks the input of women designers gives the game a female-friendly sensibility.
Not that women game designers sit around thinking of ways to make games more feminine. Judith Hoffman certainly doesn't.
Hoffman works at Turbine Entertainment Software Corp. in Westwood, where she helped design the company's online adventure game Asheron's Call 2. These days she's executive producer of a forthcoming online game based on the popular fantasy card game Dungeons & Dragons, marking its 30th anniversary this year. D&D fans value loyalty to the traditions of the game, not innovations to make it more welcoming to women, Hoffman said.
Still, if she were designing a game from scratch, with an eye to pleasing female players, Hoffman would emphasize the community-building and social aspects. "In that case," Hoffman said, "we'd probably be coming up with a somewhat different game."
Not too different, of course. There are still a lot of bustier-loving male gamers to be satisfied. But as more women enter the game development business, we can expect to see more digital warriors unlacing their iron corsets and settling back for a chat with the rest of the girls.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
