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Finding the Computer's Feminine Side

By Hilmar Schmundt

A video games trade fair in the German city Leipzig is targeting an important new demographic for the industry this year: girls and women. But female fans are still largely a mystery to game developers.

It's a quiet Sunday afternoon, but Doreén Dahlke from the northeastern German town of Wismar is busy fighting the bad guys. Normally she's a mild-mannered train conductor, however, today she's sneaking around a corner to raise her machine gun and mow down an attacker.

The battle, of course, isn't real. Dahlke's hobby is playing video games and all the action is taking place on a computer monitor. She meets six other young women from her "game clan" maedchenblu.t -- German for "girl blood" -- three times a week to play Counter-Strike, a popular first-person shooter computer game. They jokingly refer to themselves as "gamer chicks." In the male-dominated world of computer games, women are a tiny minority -- which means they get a lot of attention. The next public appearance for Dahlke and her fellow Counter-Strike players will be at the Games Convention, the Leipzig video games trade fair that opens to the public on Thursday.

Until now, things couldn't be noisy and flashy enough at Europe's largest gamer convention. But the style of the fair has been softened up a bit this year. The organizers are venturing carefully into unexplored territory: Computer games for girls and women. There's certainly plenty of potential considering only about one out of eight convention visitors was female last year.

And that's increasingly being seen as a problem. Sales in the video games industry have slackened recently. Many customers are holding back until the new game consoles Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii hit the market at the end of this year. And so game producers are eager to find new customers to bridge the gap.

Chatting instead of shooting

There is enormous room for growth in computer games for female fans, which is why the Games Convention is going after them. Chatting instead of shooting could easily be the motto of many booths in Leipzig this year. Games like "My Animal Hospital" and "Animal Crossing" invite visitors to indulge their inclination to pet, nurture and daydream -- in the very place where it used to be all about butchering aliens.

The female side of things has even been given a special section of the convention called "GC family," where exhibitors offer presentations with titles like "Media for Strong Girls," "Swapping Roles? - Games for Girls" and "The Witch's Cauldron." The German magazine Mädchen ("Girls") has sent a roving team of promoters and advisors. And an instalment of "The Dome" -- a music show aired by Germany's private TV network RTL2 -- is also there to draw young girls: 90 percent of the show's viewers are female. So it's only fitting that Will Wright, the inventor of "Sims", should hold the keynote address this year.

Because if there is such a thing as a woman's computer game, then surely it's Sims: More than half of the game's players are female. The idea behind Sims is simple: Cute characters that resemble Barbie dolls go about their unspectacular everyday activities. They eat, make love, sleep and go shopping. You'll look in vain for flashy special effects -- and it's just the lack of action that draws female fans. Crudely competitive games are considered hard to sell to girls and women, despite the fondness passionate players like Doreén Dahlke display for wild digital combat.

But the industry is still having a hard time adapting to the new customer demographic. "Many so-called girls games have a bad reputation -- and rightly so," says Heather Kelley, one of the best known female game developers. She's been working on titles for women for years. "Most producers are male and difficult to motivate. They can't really be bothered to develop a game for their niece or daughter. And when they do, the game is usually full of dumb clichés. The budgets are also often much lower than those for men's games," she complains.

Learning curve for the industry

The industry will have to learn to think differently if it wants to reach the female customers of the future, Kelley says. In her experience, girl gamers display three characteristic features: Girls prefer to play in groups rather than alone, as products like the karaoke game "Singstar" show; girls prefer to play gentle games like "Nintendogs", which involves caring for virtual canines; and they like to play during their spare moments or when they're going somewhere, explaining the popularity of the mobile mini console Nintendo DS, which has users who are 44 percent female.

Studies by the US market research firms Yankee Group and Parks Associates confirm the trends identified by Kelley. According to their information, there is one market segment where female customers actually outdo their male counterparts: It seems that playing games on mobile phones is a particularly female hobby. In the United States about 60 percent of the people who play games on their mobile phones are women.

That's the good news for the games business -- but Yankee Group and Parks Associates have bad news too. Not only do the women playing games on their mobile phones devote little time to their hobby (only 15 minutes at a time, on average) -- they also don't like to spend money on it. They tend to play pre-installed games rather than purchase new ones.