Women and girls of today are more tech savvy than ever before and research shows that they currently make up over 52% of Internet users and 70% of casual online gamers. Why then, is the game industry still producing computer games that primarily target males ages 13-25?

With this tight focus, game developers are not only sharply limiting their possible total income, but they are losing sight of the bigger picture. The games industry is currently growing faster than the target market. To keep the industry strong and growing, game developers must start looking at expanding their market, which means designing titles that are accessible to the female audience.

Successful entertainment industries have sustained growth for decades because they have considered the diversity of their audiences. Today’s blockbuster products, be it movies, recordings or books, are most often the ones with elements that directly appeal to many market sectors, while containing very few barriers to access for others. By understanding the issues and barriers connected to gender, the game industry can benefit from a similar growth strategy.

Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market addresses issues that help designers and developers understand the real differences between how the genders approach and resolve conflicts, and what their entertainment criteria and responses are. It also explores the differences in reward systems, game play preferences, and avatar selection criteria, and how these issues all apply to game design, regardless of genre. By understanding these differences, designers can apply this knowledge to the traditional genres that make up the contemporary computer game industry and begin tapping the future market. Perhaps the real question developers need to be asking themselves is, "but what if the player is female?"

KEY FEATURES
* Provides guidelines for designing games that reach a larger market without compromising quality
* Includes useful insights into gender factors in game development and how they can be addressed
* Details the differences between male and female entertainment criteria and reward systems, which can apply to a variety of technology and entertainment fields
* Adds vitality and diversity to the gaming industry

Best book on game design

I loved this book. I learned how to write a game proposal.
There were a lot of thought provoking ideas on how to make a
game that isn’t just geared to pre-teen boys.

Best book on game design

I loved this book. I learned how to write a game proposal.

There were a lot of thought provoking ideas on how to make a

game that isn’t just geared to pre-teen boys.

Best book on game design

I loved this book. I learned how to write a game proposal.
There were a lot of thought provoking ideas on how to make a
game that isn’t just geared to pre-teen boys.

Important subject - poor analysis

Graner Ray raises an important topic: how game designers can create games that appeal to women as well as men. Unfortunately, her advice is simplistic and poorly motivated. This is a summary of what I take to be the most important suggestions the book has to offer:

- Don’t use stereotype or hypersexualized avatars
- Provide a well-designed tutorial
- Don’t force the player to resort to confrontational resolution of conflicts, provide non-confrontational options
- Females only respond physically to emotional and tactile input, males only by visual input - so include an engaging back-story in the game
- Males prefer punishment for errors in a game, females prefer forgiveness
- Females want non-zero-sum (mutually benefitial) game designs
- Males want to conquer the computer, females want to work with the machine - so don’t include hidden benefits that you have to "explore" the interaction space to uncover (e.g., hidden combos in fighting games)

The research results quoted are, when not of questionable quality, often taken out of context. Graner Ray also has a tendency to generalize from isolated anecdotes, which doesn’t help. Another problem is that much of the research is dated: some of the games research quoted is from the 1980s and is surely not relevant today! Because of its publication in 2004, the book does not foresee the cross-gender success of titles such as World of Warcraft, and it only consideres the North American market: Europe and Japan are ignored altogether.

Game designers that wish to expand the market for their products to include women probably won’t have much to gain by reading this book. Since they already have the necessary motivation, they will acquire more relevant information from well-executed market research and focus group testing than from this book. The book may be an eye-opener for game designers who have never considered women as potential buyers, though.

Female gamer and designer here

I have spent quite some time in the industry, designing games - as well as playing them. During my time in the industry, most of the women I worked with were in HR; very few were in game development.

Which made arguing my point with the men I worked with rather challenging, since the ratio of men to women at work was so much greater, and I was frequently told, "women just don’t play games." Which I knew to be patently false, as there were and still are several online forums and sites run by women gamers. There just weren’t that MANY of them at the time, so no one was interested in giving a player a choice in gender.

Times have changed, and many games offer up male and female characters, so it’s rather easy for a woman to play a decent, strong, female character. I believe that there are more female gamers today than there were, say, 10 years ago. Perhaps that is because the younger female generation is getting turned onto computers instead of make up, clothes and popularity contests like they were in my generation. Then again, perhaps I’m just reflecting upon my own personal experience here.

I’m not sure I believe the 70% ratio (women to men) where "causal online gamers" are concerned. I am still quite a gamer, and do not experience that ratio in any of the MMOGs that I play. I feel that the number is more like maybe 15% F/M, as that is what I’ve experienced over the years - I’m being generous here, too. (Does that percentage include Pop Cap games, perhaps? Online card games? If so, that’s a completely different beast.)

All in all, I do feel it is important for there to be games that allow both genders to play strong characters of both sexes. There are girls out there who game, and they deserve to have games available that allow them to create and play what may very well become a strong role model for them - as for many of us, our characters are simply an extension of ourselves.

Brass Tacks

So many books on game design slide into relatively useless territory: They fail to give the reader concrete things they can do to make better games. Not so this book. It’s got plenty of examples (backed up by research) that can be used when you sit down with your tools and try to make a new world. I think her viewpoint is quite refreshingly mercenary. There’s no femenist rhetoric here. The author is trying to figure out a way for the game industry to reach beyond the traditional male market and thus make more money. Very pragmatic.

The scary thing is that most of the changes she’s proposing to games are relatively non-intrusive and easy to make, as long as designers are involved in the games from the beginning. Good read. Opened my eyes a bit to some issues I never considered before. What if the player is female, indeed.

An insulting and poorly handled treatment of an important subject

It is ironic that a book on gender inclusion would be so insulting to the gender of its target demographic.

Several anecdotes throughout the book cast men as crude, immature, and violent neanderthals. At the same time, it portrays women as nurturing, mature, and sophisticated. If the target market were embittered women with a bone to pick with the opposite gender, the author’s approach would be appropriate. Unfortunately, I find myself disgusted rather than convinced.

I admit that there is some interesting and eye-opening information in the book. However, this information is infested with insulting material and poorly handled and delivered scholarship. In reading the text it becomes obvious how unwieldly good information is when placed into the wrong hands.

The title may as well be: "Catching Flies with Vinegar: How Ugly, Brutish Men Can at Least Appear More Sympathetic to Women in the Sexist, Violent Games They Make."

The book states that women are more comfortable with indirect communication than direct confrontation. If we are to take that into account, what motivates a book that is titled "Gender Inclusive Game Design" and proceeds to insult the male gender again and again comes into direct focus.

A personal account revealing directly the motivations of the author’s feelings and intentions would have been honest and understandable. I would have sympathized. What we get, however, smacks of vendetta while it pretends to objectivity.

Noticing this, indirection then becomes underdstood as a euphemism for lying to both oneself and others.

I never thought of it that way before....

I’ll admit it...I’m a game design student who likes to read and is therefore obviously partial to books related to the video game industry. I have an ever-growing library of texts on many different areas within the context of games. Books on the history of Nintendo, books about breaking into the industry, books about good design techniques etc... I do research online, read industry news, and overall try to read up on what people who are already in the industry have to say about it.

Having said that, I also take the things I read with a grain of salt. You can’t believe everything that you read; as the saying goes. However, I do feel that the best way to expand your own thinking is to be open-minded to what other people are saying. And it is with that open mind that I read Sheri Ray’s book.

I must say, that there were plenty of times while reading where I thought to myself, `wow, I never saw it that way before.’ For me, these are enjoyable discoveries. I like to stumble upon little things that affect the way I look at things. Sheri did a wonderful job of capturing my attention, and providing me with little discoveries about why men and women are attracted to games. I enjoyed her examples and would love to see other authors go in this direction.

After reading her book, I look at games in a different manner now. I pick out the visual stimulus, the inclusion of puzzle elements, and whether targets are moving in an uncluttered field or not. Looking at them now, the games I play have seamlessly included elements that make me enjoy them more.

The things that Sheri points out are nice to have in the back of your mind when thinking about games. Even though many of us will never have a concept that gets made into a game, we might be working on a title that someone else has envisioned and help it move towards capturing a larger market.

I recommend this book as an eye opener for those of us stuck in our own thoughts about what makes a good game good. While it is not possible to appeal to every market with one game, if we’d like to design a game to appeal to more females, then reading Sheri’s book and doing other related research can definitely move us in the right direction.

Hyper-sexualized Avatars be banished!

This book says what needed to be said to the game industry and their consumers. Those who are just entering the industry will want to keep this book handy during 18 hours crunch times as a guide through the haze of game character portrayal, especially female characters. Like many others, I want to play an avatar game character that is smart, strong, and attractive not some hyper-sexualized, implant poster girl with nipples on her metal armor, thong chaps and cleavage reminiscent of the Michelin Tireman

Most (although this is beginning to change) female avatars are so absurdly depicted that (as this book discusses) if the character were to perform the flips, jumps, and various game tasks, in reality she would be physically unable to. The enormous breasts, for example, that Laura Croft has would have to be carted around in a wheel-barrel just so she could stand upright! I’m so glad that Sheri wrote this book bringing up these very obvious deficiencies in game design - and all so easy to correct and who knows even expand the game market.

Of course who plays for a dose of reality? We all want to get lost in the game, but there are better ways to make games that are less distracting to both males and females. I found that the book’s many solutions were straight forward, simple and yet the kind of ideas that would not diminish the game for anyone.

It is so ironic that whenever someone brings up the topic of `inclusivity’ - be it racial, age or gender there are always those who resist the idea by attacking the `style,’ `presentation’ or some other trivial factor. Don’t shoot the messenger just because the author is bringing up observations that are difficult to hear - read the book if you are looking for constructive ideas that can repair this nagging problem concerning females and gaming. This is the right message, at the right time for some in the game industry that have been wrong about women.

A Key Text

As an instructor, a gamer, and a female, it is a constant effort to educate people about videogames.

People assume that the game industry is populated by a clan of pale, introverted, cave-dwelling males avoiding human contact in favor of glories of the computer screen. In truth, game development and/or design students (and industry professionals)are a group of individuals as diverse as any other industry: there are the introverts, the extroverts, the creative geniuses, and the genius coders. There are individuals of every minority and majority. However there is one exception-it is a fact that there aren’t nearly as many women involved in the making of and playing of games.

What the author, Sheri Garner-Ray, has been able to do with this text, is give an explanation to what has long been considered an unanswerable question-how can the game industry consistently broaden its audience to female players?

The attribute that makes this text key to my instruction is it’s audience-this is a book for everyone. It is written in an extremely approachable manner, using realistic examples and language that is academic without being exclusory. It is a superb blend of quanatative and qualitative psychological analysis and offers an amazing insight for both men and women readers.

A personal example. I have long favored games that many did not consider "usual" for the female player. I do not play sims, or Barbie Makeover (lord forbid) or Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Two of my favorite game series are Metal Gear and Onimusha.

It wasn’t until I read Sheri’s text that I was able to form an objective reason for myself and my students as to why I loved these games. Yes the graphics are visually stunning, but both games also have incredible backstory, opportunities stealth, and Onimusha has great puzzles worked into gameplay.

If readers of this critique wish to know why these different elements make difference, then I sincerely suggest you pick up this terrific book.

My sincere thanks to Ms. Ray for giving female gamers, present and future, a voice.

Must Have for Game Designers

I am a game design student at Full Sail. This book is the main textbook for one of the classes in the Bachelors of Game Design program. This book really illustrates issues that will help any game design. I had my own biased views on the contents of the book. After reading the book, my view on game design changed. I feel that these issues should be implemented within your design. You must be very open-minded when reading this book. Honestly, I think a woman in the industry writing this book is better than a man.

To the "LH" reviewer...
In my own opinion, I do not think that you took the time to understand what you read....if you read it. If you are a designer, I would have been fooled by the immaturity of your review. Try to open up your mind and re-read the book. Additionally, using websites as references is common, therefore, your statement about websites being unreliable is not always true. Next time try to visit the websites that are listed. They are sited for that reason.