Welcome to the Friday Free-for-All, where just about any gaming topic, particularly one related to Star Wars: The Old Republic, is fair game. Discussion is not only encouraged, it’s highly desired! A recent newscast on BBC sparked an intriguing–and spirited–debate on Raptr this week. Bryony MacKenzie reported in her piece that female gamers may outnumber male gamers by the end of 2013. Ms. MacKenzie noted that smartphones and tablets have brought a lot more women into the gaming community. Does that mean females will outnumber males playing SWTOR by the end of 2013?
Who will play more SWTOR, men or women? (1)
Now, the Raptr community is not exactly a scientific sampling, but the respondents brought up some interesting and/or controversial observations, depending on your viewpoint.
- People who play only Facebook or phone games aren’t viewed as ‘serious gamers’.
- Some women, particularly those who play first-person shooter games, are uncomfortable revealing their gender due to gender trolling.
- Gamers (male and female) are noticing a definite increase in the numbers and percentages of female gamers.
The idea that phone games ‘don’t count’ because they’re not ‘complex’ enough made me laugh. Pac-Man is a smartphone app now, but when I played it on the Atari console back when rocks were soft and dinosaurs still roamed the lands, I spent hundreds of hours playing it. Did that make me a hard-core gamer then? Does it make me a casual gamer now? No. Basing a game’s worth on how many bytes it contains or how long it plays is less important than how avidly it’s played and how long people spend playing it. I know a lot of people who play Angry Birds or other casual games while they’re waiting in line at the grocery store or sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. It sure beats reading a six-month old, dog-eared, ratty copy of Prevention. I have a good friend who’s logged more hours in Farmville than I’ve logged in SWTOR. I wouldn’t call her a casual gamer anymore than I’d call myself a casual gamer. We’re hardcore about our gaming, regardless of the platform.
These birds are pretty angry that you appear not to take them seriously. (2)
The business reality is that the casual game market is exploding. These games are incredibly popular, whether someone plays them a few minutes a month or hours a day. Gaming companies are here to make money, and they’re going to create games that are going to provide them the most profit. Smartphone and iPad games are very profitable. In a Nielson study released in early 2009, the top 6 games played by women were all casual PC games, with Solitaire topping the list. What were the top six games for men? The same exact casual games. The percentages were slightly different, but the games were the same.
Gender-based trolling and sometimes blatant sexual harassment still occur in online games. It appears to be at its worst in the FPS genre. This drives down the number of women not only playing the genre, but also the number of women who are willing to admit their true gender.
Someone forgot to notify me that I needed to turn my X chromosome in for a Y. (3)
We still hear ‘there are no gurlz on teh interwebz’. Women still get annoying whispers in game about genitalia, marital status, and any number of other unsavory topics. I’ve been stalked in game, been asked if I’d have sex with them, saw one guy lay his avatar down under mine to pretend to look up her skirt, and fielded inquiries about the size of my breasts. I’ve had the burning desire to retort, “They’re the size of cow udders after having 2 kids. How big are your testicles?” The only reasons I defer is that a. I don’t want to get banned, b. I don’t want to get accused of child solicitation if the player happens to be a minor, and c. at heart, I’m really not that kind of a gal. Still, moderators and community managers need to get better control of this kind of problem. We need to be better at reporting it, too. Moderators won’t know there’s a problem if we don’t tell them. By the way, what’s good for the gander is good for the goose. If females sexually harass other gamers, they deserve a ban just as much as males do. Controlling harassment will make gaming more attractive to all players, not just women.
The number of females playing MMOs like SWTOR is increasing. When Nick Yee did his research on demographics in MMORPGs in the early 2000′s, he found females represented between nine and twenty percent of players, depending on the game. A journal article in 2009 showed that women make up 40% of all gamers and 20% of Everquest II players in particular. The percentages were based on surveys done in the mid-2000′s and game data from Sony. On average, however, women logged more game hours than men. The percentage of female MMO gamers continues to grow as females continue to enter the market.
Are you a Girl Gamer? Does gender even matter anymore? (4)
Will female SWTOR players outnumber males by the end of 2013? Probably not this year, but women are entering the game and the MMO genre in increasing numbers.
Next week’s Friday Free-for-All will tie in to this week’s discussion. We’ll discuss the question “When you play SWTOR, are you a female gamer, male gamer, or simply a gamer?” Post here or tweet me @JaeOnasi.
Image sources: (1) playmob.com, (2) play.google.com, (3) FARK.com, (4) power.tv,
TORWars Podcast #152: The Terrors of Nuturing the SWTOR Community
If you are a female gamer, I want to marry you.
Be proud! Female gamers are way cooler then male gamers. There is no reason for a stigma. If anything a reason to keep quiet is all the marriage proposals you will get (see above).
Already taken, sorry! You’ll be a fine catch for another lucky lady, however!
I agree, to both the article, as well as the marriage proposal. The female population have been increasingly gaining popularity in online gaming. I recently met a female of an all female guild in SWTOR. If more females joined us ingame, we may be able to stop hearing the males in group complain of “wife aggro”, and have to log off. I am still waiting to hear a woman ingame complain of “hubby aggro”.
Personally, it would be nice to have a wife or girlfriend that also plays SWTOR as well. Maybe then you can duel her to see who has dish/laundry duty or handle the kids. That way if you do have to log off, then she can stay logged in or vice versa.
In the old days, the old saying used to be “the family that prays together, stays together”, but with all the females joining us ingame, we may have to change that to, ” the family that games together, stays together.”
One of the most EPIC gaming experiences I’ve had was playing Beatles Rock Band with my dad, my sister, my hubby, and my kids. Having three generations gaming together in one room and having insane amounts of fun is a memory we all treasure.
I get hubby aggro all time! He generally makes me stop gaming way more often than I do to him. It definitely exists.
Great article!
Well said. My wife got propositioned even though she told the guy she was happily married. I just laughed, but it gets annoying after a while. Beyond that, as I said on that Raptr thread, I find the extensive elitism saddening.
I haven’t quite figured out the elitism, either. I find it curious. It makes me wonder how devs view all of us gamers, too. I know the beancounters certainly stratify us into different groups.
gurls can’t play games. everyone knows this. u have to be a real man to mash buttons on a keyboard! seriously though, all the trolling proves is that there’s a reason for the “sad lonely geek hiding in the basement” stereotype
Well, it took all of a week to get propositioned in guild Mumble.
As a general rule, I don’t tend to advertise online because the situation frequently devolves into a focus on me as a piece of meat versus how good (or bad) my skills are at the game in question. When I go to events such as PAX East, I have noticed a distinct difference in how women were treated by many company reps. I’ve actually gone to a booth with a game I was interested in trying or even once was fully intending on buying because I’d read about the game beforehand and it piqued my interest. A rep finally noticed my presence and approached (I’m not a small person, so it’s not like I’m easy to miss). He finally me, “Are you here buying for your husband or your son?”
My answer in these situations is invariably going to be, “No, thank you, I think I’m going to go buy something from another company’s booth now because you just made a very bad assumption. Have a good day.” Since I don’t like to cause a scene, I typically just leave rather than go to that person’s boss and give them a polite earful about the issue. I did that the last time I bought a car too, because it’s not just a gaming thing.
Thankfully, most of the games I /do/ play tend to have better-trained and more aware staff.
I think it depends on the game genre. Yes, overall the popularity of casual games will push women ahead of men, but certain game genres will still be dominated by men. For example, hardcore FPS and RTS games are still mostly played men. These are games that are more about reflexes than story and socializing. Not that women can’t play them, they just aren’t interested.
We don’t need Olympic-level reflexes in games, here. The level of reflexes needed for any game are easily accessible by either males or females. The reflex argument, therefore, does not hold water.
I have no idea if women will outnumber men in SWTOR. I’m not sure it matters one way or the other.
I do think any blanket statement about gender-determined game or play-style preference is complete rubbish however. Some of the sweetest, most patient players I’ve know have been men and some of the crudest, trash-talking, mob-stealing, ninja-looting, “1337 gamerz” I encountered have been women. Judge people by their own actions and not by the number of X or Y chromosomes you think they might have.
I have never understood the elitism. Women gamers tend to be better at multitasking (due to them figuratively and literally using more of their brains than men). In fact, one of the best healers in my guild is a girl. If she does less than 500k in a warzone, either true other team just is doing crap damage or she is half-asleep. She regularly out heals the next two people put together. There is another girl who regularly out-DPS’s me in fact. And she likes playing with a rum in one hand, so she has serious skills lol.
This of course is not to say that girl gamers play only drunk or tired. Just putting in perspective that they are awesome even when they would suffer a detriment.
I’ve played tired and after drinking rum….
I grew up playing games with my sister, so I’m pretty much conditioned against these sorts of assholery. Sure, our order of genre preference has diverged a fair bit over time, but she still enjoys a good Gears of War 2 marathon when our cousin is in town and kicks my butt seven different ways at Super Smash Bros. Melee (we’re more evenly matched in Brawl after they nerfed her best character).
So yeah, if anyone somehow differently about a fellow gamer on account of gender, it’s because they haven’t been gaming with enough females.
I grew up with 2 sisters. It never occurred to us that we were anything but ‘gamers’. We certainly never viewed ourselves as ‘girl gamers’.
[...] couple months back, we discussed women outnumbering men in gaming here. One of the interesting discussions on Raptr that came out of that was ‘What counts as a real [...]