Gender in Gaming

In the last of my critical game studies lectures, the topic of discussion was gender in gaming, focusing on the statistics of boys and girls that play games and who we percieve to play games. As the class consitis of roughly 25 boys and only 2 girls the discussion and overall atmosphere tended to be biased towards the thinking that almost all gamers were boys.

However, when reviewing the official statistics of gamers, we found that the spread was alot more even where almost an equal number of girls played games to boys, in fact the statistics even showed that older woman played more games than teenage boys. This largely comes down to games such as solitaire and bejeweled being hugely popular amongst the older demographic.

Although I agreed with the statistics on the percentage of gamers in each demographic, I hugely disagreed on the amount of time each group was said to play video games. I mainly disagreed with the fact that it said that on average teenage boys played games for roughly 6 hours each week, which works out at about 52 minutes a day. The main reason that I disagree with this is beacuse I play games for atleast 20 hours a week, minimum. I know that me playing games for that long doesn't effect the overall statistic, but almost everyone I know that's a boy, either teenager or young adult, plays atleast 12-15 hours of gaming a week. If it had said that they were young children or a bit older, I would have agreed with the statistics but as they were teenagers, I'd expect the average time spent playing to be higher.

We also discussed who we percieved to be gamers, which sparked an interesting debate on who everyone thought the stereotypical gamer was, in which everyone strongly disagreed that the stereotypical gamer was a an unsociable teen hiding in their parents basement. We all aqgreed that although this may have been the image of a gamer back in the 80's and early 90's when the medium was still trying to break into everyday life, in our current age of next gen consoles and the explosion of casual games, this image couldn't be further from the truth.

We also discussed the role of women within the games industry, where it came as no surprise that more men than women were currently working within the industry. What did come as a surprise however was the difference between the two, for example 95% of the design team was male and only 5% female.

The biggest question that comes to my mind when seeing these statistics is, how does this affect the content of games? Seeing statistics like this helps back up the theory of boys dominating the gaming market as it looks like 'boys making games for boys.' More often than not, the content also helps back up this theory as the articles on the two links below show.

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/114/1143135p1.html
http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/116/1160730p1.html

This was just a quick exploration into the gamingh demographic and I'm hoping that by the time I'm working in the industry things would have changed for the beeter as I believe that more girlsn in the industry and playing games will bring more diversity to games and the more girls that play games will distance gamers worldwide from the stereotypical teenager living in their parents basement.