So what *would* be appropriate for female video gamers?

The Game Room
41

I love the following:

RPGs (Fable, The Witcher, Diablo, etc.)
Roller Coaster Tycoon
The Sims series
Some Half-Life mods (Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, etc.)
RTS games (Red Alert, Empire Earth, Caesar III, etc.)
Stupid Yahoo games (Diner Dash, Sally Spa, etc…ugh)

I’m pretty picky about my games lately. I see no problem with a game like Fat Princess. She’s fat, she’s supposed to eat cake, who cares? It’s not like this is a real-life game and she’s a real person…though that would be interesting…

42

I read somewhere that when Namco asked Toru Iwatani to research a game for woman, he came to the conclusion that the one thing that all women enjoyed was a passion for eating, so he made Pacman,

43

I haven’t managed to put my two cents in on the Fat Princess thread, but as for girl games:

I’ve played computer games since I was about six. The elementary school I started in taught us LOGO and as I recall there were a few green-screen games available to help us get comfortable with computers. This was over twenty years ago, mark you.

We got a home computer about two years later. My father let me pick up a few games (“Don’t tell your mother”) from Sears (the only place that sold software in the early 80s unless we wanted to drive to San Francisco) and I chose Jeopardy!, The Crimson Crown, and Ultima 5. I was a big Tolkien fan and a swords-and-sorcery type kid, so my tastes ran that way for a long time. They still do, but not solely.

I look for a good story, but I learned fast that long and ponderous dialogue does not work well to make it happen. Books and computer games don’t and shouldn’t write dialogue in the same way. I loved, loved, loved the Baldur’s Gate series: in my opinion they had the right combination of dialogue and story and apparent ability to affect the world. A particular plot-thread in one of the games involves the discovery of an ancient and long-dead god through the course of a few unconnected quests (as I recall, at least. They might be sequential, but I don’t think so). Is the god really important to the plot? Not so much, but it gave a real sense of a world that has more going on in it than just the plight of the Chosen One, aka You.

Outside of RPGs (and their twin brother Adventure Games, which is more or less an RPG where you don’t choose the character – I LOVED Mean Streets and its sequels and wish the developers would throw another Tex Murphy story out there), I do like action games like Lara Croft, Prince of Persia, and Grand Theft Auto. Frankly, I loved the Tomb Raider games precisely for the jumping around and looking awesome doing it, not to mention jumping and shooting, jumping and running, shooting, jumping, and running…

I’m acceptably good at FPSes and really adore Half-Life and Portal, but I don’t seek them out. I try, but the love isn’t there. Something about the Bioshock demo left me cold, actually… you’d think I would love it, but as beautiful and moody as it is and as much as I sincerely adore the aesthetic, I can’t seem to get my feet unglued from those rails. And I actually LIKE FINAL FANTASY X.

Simulations are where it’s at. I just lost an entire day to Dwarf Fortress and I can lose several to Sims 2 when a new expansion comes out. While lots of the fun is in building the house, I actually prefer the tougher simulation aspect of juggling it all to make it run.

And then of course, there’s the MMOs – I enjoy World of Warcraft, but I’m careful about rationing my time to prevent my ass from growing into my seat. I love City of Heroes and avoid it for that very reason. Tabula Rasa is surprisingly fun. I miss LotrO and will hop back in as soon as I can afford that lifetime membership.

Above all, I need at least one of two things to play a game and enjoy it:

  • It must have an excellent story, preferably one I can feel like I’m affecting.
  • It must have variety of gameplay. I actually LOVED the social and crafting systems in Vanguard because it gave me something to do that wasn’t slaughtering yet another boar and it made crafted items that much more precious.

I think this is why WoW is so popular. There’s a great big story bubbling under the surface of all those cartoony graphics, and most quests can be completed quite easily and simultaneously. My common quandary runs something like as follows: “I’ve just killed fifteen deer! Perfect, now all I have to do is go back and I can log out… oh wait, I’m in the right area to get boars. Four more boar livers and I can turn that quest in… hooray, those two quests made me level! I’d better get my abilities before I log off and ooh, that guy’s finally got a quest for me! Well, perfect opportunity to just try out that new spell; it’s just a kill 8 quest, I’m sure it won’t take long…”

Then I see the sun rise. :frowning:

ETA: Oh, and I hated the demo for The Witcher. It’s not that I can’t play a woman, though I prefer to. It’s not JUST the really rampantly objectified female characters or the fact that they can be collected like trading cards. It was the women AND the stupid damned bishie haircut AND clunky controls on the PC in my less than humble opinion AND bad voice acting AND bad dialogue. Why do you do this to me, Bioware? :mad:

44

Eh? The Witcher was produced and made by a Polish company CD Projekt RED STUDIO* (and is, in fact, their first game). They just used a (heavily modded) version of Bioware’s proprietary Aurora Engine, which is why you see their logo. Bioware actually had nothing to do with the game at all. (And FWIW I never got through the game either, for various reasons)

*The all-caps is actually part of the title, not for emphasis.

45

Dialogue in my guild last Saturday, as we were getting ready to enter Black Temple. There was another guild (Horde, we’re alliance) preparing for the same instance:

Raid Leader: ok, ready check to see who’s afk.
(a window pops up on everybody’s screen asking whether you’re ready or not, we click dutifully)
Raid Leader, over the voice channel: Helane? Hey girl!
Helane on screen: uhm? oh, I’m here, just busy drooling over the tauren’s shoulders…
Me: ah, you too?
moo jokes ensue, with the guys wisely keeping silent

I didn’t play Horde because Dwarves with Guns had a stronger pull than tauren shoulders, but the Alliance didn’t have anything that yum until Draenei came along :smiley:

Most of my initial and enormous sense of wonder at WoW came from following all the little stories (yes, I actually read quest information), though, not from the pretty graphics. Plus, I’ve always been interested in the Warcraft games but suck at the ones I tried.

46

I’m enjoying The Witcher, actually. Kind of Diabloesque in that it’s pretty straightforward. I like the plot and love the scenery. Even though I’m a girl, I don’t mind at all scoring with the chicks…It’s just a game! I’m actually trying to collect them all. :smiley: I also like how it’s different from Diablo in that you can’t just click 20 billion times in a row to attack.

47

I can’t remember if I finished it or not (if I didn’t, I was on the last bit), but I liked The Witcher, too.

48

My ex-girlfriend really likes Mario Kart, Mario Party, Soul Calibur, and other odds and ends. She’s also a Star Wars nut so she’ll pick up any (good) Star Wars games and try them, usually. She’s a fan of party games and I think she views the gaming medium as something to do WITH people, not as a solo activity. She rarely plays games by herself.

Most other girl gamers that I know have similar interests: The Sims, World of Warcraft, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing.

I’ve yet to meet a girl gamer in my social circle who would enjoy sitting down and playing say Okami, Bioshock, or GTA. That doesn’t mean I’m not looking for her, though. :stuck_out_tongue:

49

I would love to sit down and play Bioshock. I own Bioshock. If only I could figure out a way to not get motion sick from the damned “pigeon head-bob” method of movement with the XBox 360 controller. I feel like I’m standing in the prow of a small boat on choppy seas. Move forward, pitch the camera forward. Stop, camera pitches back. Repeat for about an hour, then quit and spend the next two hours feeling like I’m going to barf.

(Now that I say this, someone will probably come in and give me a perfectly simple solution and make me feel like an absolute idiot for not figuring it out myself. This person will be my new hero. :slight_smile: )

50

I only get motion sick if I’m really tired or it’s first-person moving automobiles (cannot stand the dune buggy and boat sections of HL2), so I don’t know of a solution. I tried Dramamine once, but that didn’t work.

51

You are in the wrong circle. I would love Bioshock…I think the premise is freakin’ awesome…but it is too scary. Okami ranks as one of my most favorite games, ever. I don’t drive too well in GTA but I do like going around and smashing shit up.

And I generally HATE playing games with other people, if only because the people who play are either angsty fifteen year olds or cheaters and player-killers (think Diablo - PK’ers pretty much killed the Battlenett thing for me.)

Look, again, there is no such thing as a “girl gamer” as others have said. There are just gamers who happen to be girls.

52

I love RPGs & some strategy games.

Hate action games, especially when it comes to jumping. Man, I suck at jumping. I do love watching other people play though and will be happy just sitting and watching friends play games online or on consoles. I actually wish my husband played video games sometimes!

I really wish I wasn’t so antisocial/shy because I’d love to try WoW (and other similar games) however I don’t want to do the online thing. I’ve tried it once but got too distracted & intimidated by other people running around and trying to talk to me. Arg! I wish they just had a console or PC equivalent of the online version.

I’m excited about the new Diablo and might try online for that. We’ll see…

53

Wish I could help, but I don’t get motion sickness from much of anything except actually being on a boat. In fact I didn’t even notice any of that when I played Bioshock. I don’t actually own it myself (yet) but are there any settings you can change? One suggestion might be trying to play it on a smaller screen, of course if you only have one TV or it’s a computer version that’s probably not a viable option.

Me too on the other people part. It’s actually one of my pet peeves that games are starting more and more to evolve to the point where a game has to have online multiplayer to be considering a great game. I don’t really want to play with a bunch of people I don’t know: when I play games with other people there’s more enjoyment when I’m playing with friends. Games that are supposed to be played with other people I’m cool with: Smash Bros, Mario Party, Mario Kart…that sort of thing, they’re group games you play with other people. But I don’t want multiplayer tacked on to Ratchet and Clank or Bioshock, I want to play that solo. Thankfully they didn’t do that with Bioshock, but I imagine the sequel will end up having some sort of multiplayer.

And I’m sorry about the “girl gamer” reference. I guess it’s from the fact that I’ve been playing video games since I was about 5. I was born the year the original NES came out, so when I was growing up with games it was considered a “nerdy” and “boy” thing to do. No girls in elementary school wanted to jump on Goombas or hunt ducks. :stuck_out_tongue: But since the technology for games has significantly improved to the point that it’s possible to create so many games to appeal to everybody, not just “nerds”, it’s changed the idea of what a gamer really is.

54

Well, I’m playing it on a 60" screen, so that might be part of it. Funny thing is, though, I don’t usually get motion sick either. There’s got to be another way to move that doesn’t involve the pigeon head-bob. I haven’t really experimented with it yet, but I suppose I should. That game is very cool and I’d hate to miss it because of that.

55

I guess I’m a “casual gamer,” or better yet a “dabbler.” I’ve been playing video games off and on since I had Pong in the early '80s, but it goes in phases; I’ll play a lot of one thing for a while, then nothing for years.

A complete list of all games I’ve played and gotten mildly addicted to in the past decade (all PSII unless otherwise noted):

  1. MarioKart (N64)
  2. GTA Vice City
  3. Lego Star Wars I & II
  4. Katamari Damacy
  5. JFK Reloaded (on an extremely inadequate PC)
  6. Sims II (on the Mac)
  7. Guitar Hero I
  8. Brain Age & Flash Focus (Nintendo DS)

These are the general qualities that attract me to games and keep me playing:

Super-simple to learn.
Progress in increments; getting “killed” doesn’t send you all the way back to the beginning.
Allows for exploring, messing around without a rigid timed element, or…
Self-improvement/self-competition - solve the puzzle, do the calculations faster, get as close as possible to the Warren Commission report, etc.
Graphics and cut scenes are cute, goofy and/or creative.

Absolutely no interest whatsoever in:

  • RPGs
  • complex stories, strategies or characters
  • online or multiplayer play

The main thing is that I pretty much only want to play games when I’m alone at home with nothing else to do (or wish to avoid whatever else I could be doing). Since I’m almost never alone or am distracted by the Dope, the games have been mostly gathering dust for the past year or two.

56

My wife has gotten fairly good at Halo, but isn’t up to the skill level of Rainbow Six Vegas. We have played all three Halo’s together on Co-op. When we have had group games of Halo at our house she is often the greatest competition I have, though I tend to dominate. She really liked, “Viva Pinata”, which fits in with what a lot of people have described above. She was into “Kameo”, until it got to the obligatory (And always boring) squid in the round room level.

57

My favorite games are adventure games and puzzle games. I really love games with a rich world to explore. I think Myst was the first non-puzzle game that really appealed to me. I also enjoyed Sims for quite a while because of that “create your own world and see how it plays out” aspect. I also like World of Warcraft, but not nearly as much as my husband does.

I don’t like games where there is a huge penalty for being “killed”. I played a lot of Super Mario Bros. as a kid, but it’s not the kind of game that would appeal to me today.

I would love to see a good trivia game, kind of like the Buzztime trivia game at bars, for the Nintendo DS or Wii, where you could play with other people locally or online.

58

You know, it’s odd but I’ve never felt that video games were a ‘boy’ thing to do. That might have something to do with the fact that I’ve been playing the things for as long as I can remember, but many of my female friends are also gamers. Jumping on goombas is one of my favourite pastimes :smiley:

I agree about the multi-player bit though. I’m a big JRPG fan, and prefer playing through solo content to competing against others. It feels like games are ignoring the solo aspect of games for the online aspect, even series that previously had loads of solo content.

59

One point of interest here I think is marketing. Girls love World of Warcraft - when I played, it was at least 50/50 if not skewed in favor of more women than men. Yet, other online games just don’t seem to attract us ladies.

My current obsession, Team Fortress 2, I think would appeal to a lot of girls if it were marketed at all. Rather than most first person shooters, which amount to basically deathmatches, there are lots of objectives and specialized roles. If you’re not good at being one class, you’re probably good at another. The dynamic is very much like World of Warcraft without the fantasy and character elements - you need to assemble a working team with the right combination of roles in order to succeed, and there’s just as much fun to be had sitting in the back as a Medic or Engineer and playing support roles. It’s well balanced and fun. I love the game but because it’s a military type game, most chicks won’t touch it. At least judging from people talking on mics, it’s nearly entirely men and boys. Personally, I would never have played it if I hadn’t gotten the Orange Box for other reasons.

I think part of the problem is that game companies are mostly staffed by men and they don’t really know what women want in gaming. Women don’t need things to be cutsey-poo, they do want solid gameplay, but they value some things higher (such as social interaction elements, be it with other players or with NPCs).

60

You know what’s sad? I’ve heard of women who use voice modulators to sound like guys, because they’re afraid of being treated differently if people knew they were female (not that there aren’t plenty of pre-pubescent boys on those things that could easily go either way). Having never experienced the sort of treatment other female gamers have reported, I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around both the idea that some women actually do that, and that some feel the need.

I bet the guys in our guild get frustrated at the annual gatherings. My guild is heavily skewed towards men, and the few girls there are all have SOs, or are underage.