I consider their very existence insulting. Who would really want to sit around and play with a virtual Barbie if they were of the demographics to play with a real one? As I said, it’s just product-placement bullshit.
But I can’t think of many other games explicitly targeted toward any females in any way.
There was a game called “Princess Maker” that was quite popular when I was in middle school: you were basically bringing up a princess, and your decisions decided whether she was going to become a princess or a whore (seriously). I played it once and found it very tedious, but the other girls loved it.
As others have already mentioned, I need some kind of story to keep me interested (even if it’s on the level of Diablo 2). I suck at games like Starcraft because I’m terrible at multitasking. (I used to play Warcraft3 with my friends; usually I’d just serve as a huntress factory.) The one exception for me has been that music game you press the buttons in time to when the notes hit the bar (on the PSP). That game was like crack.
If I were to try to write a game that female gamers would like, I would make sure that in addition to having stuff to do (whatever that is), that the side characters are well-written, and that there are ways to interact with an influence them. I didn’t like the Oblivion mini-game for influencing NPCs, but I liked the idea that you could talk with everybody and make friends. I have an idea for an interactive fiction game right now that seems like it could be fun, but it’s going to take a lot of writing to create some realistic NPCs for it.
Out of wonder, do you dislike the “silent protagonist” trope in general, or just Zelda? Because Link having no personality is sort of the POINT. he’s called “Link” because his personality is (essentially) your personality, meaning they named him “Link” because he is your “Link” to the game world. It may not effect the plot, but you’re generally supposed to imagine yourself responding to the NPCs, not the character on the screen, Nintendo (and Japanese games in general I’ve found) just value linear narrative over the more Bioware model of choice branches. I’m not blasting you here, just wondering if it’s a Zelda thing or a trope thing, because from reading some of your post I would’ve pegged you as someone who would like Golden Sun or Chrono Trigger, however both of them have rather “flat” protagonists if you consider the fact that neither “talk” without your imagination and are meant to be your incarnation in the game world.
Anyway, seeing as how we recently discussed this in my intro to game design class we pretty much discovered that (both from the females in the class and polling data), the female gamer and the male gamer are pretty much in line. In fact, 40% of the existing market is female, it’s not a giant 90/10 split like some make it out to be. I think the main issue is when they make women, and I hate saying this, objects. I can somewhat understand it in games like Grand Theft Auto where the POINT is pretty much tasteless bouts of debauch, but I just started playing Soul Caliber 4. Seriously the women in that cross the line, the proportions were GROTESQUE, the only people that could possibly get off to that are 14 year olds just discovering new ways to feel good alone. It’s almost embarrassing.
Other than that there are some small differences noted:
Females tend to value story development more than males, but the results were close enough you could easily conclude it’s more personal taste (i.e. those raised on RPG’s rather than Male-Female).
Objectives - I’m sure we’ve all heard it by now:
“Men like finding a moving object in a blank field, like finding a gazelle in a barren savanna, whereas women tend to like to find an immobile object in a cluttered field, like a certain colored tree in an orchard.”
Finally, we had no numbers, but we considered that women may like friendly social interaction (a la grouping in MMOs) more, but we can’t say for certain.
Overall it’s mostly the same, it’s more about turn OFFS than turn ONS. I.E. try not to patently offend a portion of your audience.
My girlfriend likes Super Mario 3 and Sonic the Hedgehog. She always beats me at Tekken 3 also.
Oh, I know you’re not blasting me! I’ve actually wondered a lot about this. It seems like I should like Zelda a lot, yes? Lots of people have recommended it to me. I just don’t, and it’s really hard to tell sometimes. I really love Dragon Quest 8, for example, and there is a character who never speaks. BUT the NPCs are varied and very entertaining, and for a cartoony game, that is a helluva deep story.
I don’t like Link’s fighting method…but I love Final Fantasy 12, where you see the enemies against you. But then again, that has gambits.
Not only is Link kind of boring, all of the NPCs don’t have much depth, either.
I did like Chrono Trigger; it got me started on gaming, but that was a long time ago I played it. I don’t know if I’d still like it since I’ve played a myriad of other games since.
Not totally game related.
I used to work for Paramount Pictures, sending out promotional material to theatres. So theatre managers would call me and ask for stuff, especially if it was something they really liked like Star Trek or something.
While I was there we released Tomb Raider I & II.
By far, more female managers would call me, begging for Tomb Raider stuff, because they loved the game/character/Angelina Jolie.
I played Tomb Raider I…it was cool, but lots of jumpy stuff, and besides, I really don’t have any interest in Lara Croft.
But back then she was kind of the only major female character, so I can see why. I remember her training room in the opening, that was awesome.
I think herein lies the problem–when game designers think girl, they think girl. As in ‘still plays with Barbies and loves ponies’.
Me, I just say screw designing games for girls. Focus on making the game good–we like many of the same things guys like. My friends and I used to get together and spend an evening playing WWF Wrestling and Soul Caliber. I don’t want pink and frilly (actually, I loathe pink and frilly). I want to get in there and enjoy a good story and some strategic playing. Or nuke things into oblivion, depends on if I’ve had a bad day or not.
Either way, there is no such thing as a ‘girl gamer’, really. There’s gamers that happen to be girls, and just like guys, we all have our own tastes. The idea that a game needs to be made for us is rather insulting, in my mind.
Just grabbed that yesterday. SC has been like that for as long as I’ve been playing, and honestly it doesn’t bother me so much as some of the outfits do. The biggest problem in that game is that graphics aside, it pales in comparison to SCIII in pretty much every way. I think I’m going to go hook our PS2 back up.
Those sound an awful lot like “details” to me.
But you’re having fun doing it, no?
Even the custom character creator? That’s a bummer. I don’t have a PS3 or 360 (yet), so it’s not a big deal, yet, but I was looking forward to improvements in that.
As to the costumes, they’ve always been pretty ridiculous, but some of them - Ivy, particularly, go to a whole new level in IV, from what I’ve seen.
I know what the real problem is. Link is left-handed.
And you know those left-handers! Bastards!
That’s gotten a bit of an upgrade, and you can adjust the story characters too to make your own versions to use. I’m not sure how much I like the new skill system, but I’ll have to play around some more.
Story mode is only five stages long though, with only a handful of cutscenes in between stages, and Chronicles of the Sword is gone, along with the challenges. They’ve added a few interesting touches, but content-wise, it feels very empty.
That brings me to the thing that bothers me the most–busty women is no problem for me, but not a single one of them is wearing a freaking bra! There’s creative, and then there’s impractical, and it seems to keep edging closer to the latter.
Exactly. Every last one of them.
These are obviously jokes.
I’ve been perfecting my Undercover Brother parking skills. (For those who don’t know, it’s swinging into the parallel parking spot by doing a complete 180.) That and single-round headshots with the carbine. And coming upon little secrets. And and and…
Yes, I’m loving the game.
*I * want a game like the sims (control their families, careers etc), but with various sorts of creatures as well as humans. And they could all be crossbred, creating a variety of hybrid creatures. Then there could be an exploration of these hybrids role in society - would they be automatically considered lesser than the humans? Would it depend on if they favored their human or animal parent? There’s a lot of potenial there.
And a new version of Cultures. One with people who don’t look like Hobbits.
I got a great idea. Take a classic game, make a few additions to it, and voila! You got a girl gamer goldmine!