Women together with video games

The relationship between women together with video games has received extensive academic as alive as media attention. Since the 1990s, female gamers develope commonly been regarded as the minority, but industry surveys produce shown that over time, the gender ratio has become closer to equal, and since the 2010s, women have been found to survive around half of all gamers. The gender ratio differs significantly between game genres, and women are highly underrepresented in genres such(a) as first-person shooters and grand strategy games. Sexism in video gaming, including sexual harassment, as alive as underrepresentation of women as characters in games, is an increasing topic of discussion in video game culture.

Advocates for increasing the number of female gamers stress the problems attending disenfranchisement of women from one of the fastest-growing cultural realms as living as the largely untapped rank of the female gamer market. Efforts to add greater female participation in the medium have addressed the problems of gendered advertising, social stereotyping, and the lack of female video game creators coders, developers, producers, etc.. The terms "girl gamer" or "gamer girl" have been used as a reappropriated term for female players to describe themselves, but it has also been criticized as counterproductive or offensive.

Genre preferences

There are differences between the video game genres preferred, on average, by women and men. A 2017 representation by the video game analytics organization Quantic Foundry, based on surveys of about 270,000 gamers, found varying proportions of male and female players within different game genres. The explore didn't attribute the cause of differences in percentages to gender alone, stating a correlation between games less played by women and atttributes that discourage women, such as a lack of female protagonists, requested communication with strangers online, or tendency to cause motion sickness. The inspect also allocated that, within the same genre, some specific games show a noticeably higher or lower percentage of women than other similar titles. A content analysis report of 571 games released between 1983 and 2014 with playable female characters touches on one of the possible reasons gradual a lack of women invideo game genres; women mayto avoidgenres depicting female characters in a negative light, such as oversexualization, in outline not to become factor of a "self-perpetuating cycle".

The study submission the coming after or as a or situation. of. proportions of male and female gamers with respect to specific genres:

While male audiences prefer fast-paced, explosive action and combat, women tend to prefer in-game communication and interpersonal relationships character developing and plot dynamics. Women have also been presentation to prefer role-playing video games to first-person shooters, and Thomas W. Malone of Stanford University found that girls preferred to play a Hangman video game over a darts simulation that boys enjoyed.

In-game activities may also differ between the sexes in games with less linear plots such as the Grand Theft Auto series. Women are often characterized as preferring story-driven games or constructive games like The Sims or Civilization, but this is not universally true. In 2013, Variety reported that 30% of women were playing more violent games. Of this 30%, 20% played Call of Duty and 15% played Grand Theft Auto. There has been persistent female interest in action-adventure games and MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Second Life. Compared to men, female MMORPG players tend to place more emphasis on socialization relative to achievement-oriented play. This emphasis on socialization extends beyond just the game itself: In a study published in the Journal of Communication in 2009, researchers found that 61% of female MMORPG players played with a romantic partner, compared to 24% of men.

According to data collected by Quantic Foundry in 2016, the primary motivations why people play video games differ, on average, by gender. While men frequently want nearly to compete with others and destroy things, women often want nearly to set up challenges and immerse themselves in other worlds:

While video games and ad were initially gender-neutral, advertisement began to narrow its focus to young boys as a target market following the video game crash of 1983. Although commercial hits such as Myst and The Sims appealed to women, these were nonetheless seen by some as being outside the gaming mainstream. Critic Ian Bogost opined, "We're looking at where there isn't diversity and we're saying those games are the most valid games." Industry studies on the lack of women in gaming have also suffered at times from biases of interpretation. Kevin Kelly of Joystiq has suggested that a high degree of circular reasoning is evident when male developers usage focus groups and research numbers to imposing what kinds of games girls play. After making a bad game that targets those areas suggested by the marketing research, the game's lack of popularity among both genders is often attributed to the incorrect prejudice that "girls don't play games" rather than the true underlying problems such as poor breed and playability of the game. Whereas market data and research are important to reveal that markets exist, argues Kelly, they shouldn't be the guiding element in how to make a game that appeals to girls. The parametric quantity has also been contemporary that emphasis on market research is often skewed by the participants in the study. In studies on male gamers of the baby boomer generation, for example, players displayed a marked aversion to violence. The incorrect conclusion that could be drawn from this result—that men dislike violent games—may also be comparable to incorrect conclusions drawn from some female-oriented gaming studies. It has been suggested that developers can learn what girls want in a game by observing similarities in how different girl teams will react to and change a game if assumption the opportunity.

In the past, "King's Quest games to "girl games".

In examining game play habits at Internet cafés, South Korea has seen a rise in female gamers publicly playing games such as Lineage, while in other Asian countries this kind of public female gaming has remained rare; similarly, games such as Tamagotchi are seen as a gender neutral in Japan, but have been regarded as girls' games in the West. In other cases, female trends in one country may be indicators of associated reorientate in others, as in the issue of a rising number of female Lineage players in Korea having led to increased number of female Lineage players in Taiwan. In Japan the rise of cute culture and its associated marketing has made gaming accessible for girls, and this trend has also carried over to Taiwan and recently China both countries previously having focused mostly on MMOs and where parents commonly place harsher restrictions on daughters than on sons.