jane pinckard on "what do women (gamers) want?"

Jane Pinckard, who runs the excellent GameGirlAdvance web site, has a great roundup of the year in video games for Salon.com this week--it's entitled "Gaming and Its Discontents". (Subscription or ad-supported day pass required.) In addition to good analysis of what succeeded and what didn't in 2003, she has an excellent discussion of women and gaming:

Girls do want to play games. Lifelong gamer Souris Hong-Porretta says she has simple requirements for what she wants to play: "Good game play, something that can be picked up by either sex and is fun to play is good enough for me."

But the advertisers aren't looking for her. Robin Hunicke, a gamer-geek-girl getting her Ph.D. in computer science at Northwestern University has been studying video games -- formally and casually -- for most of her life. "Most advertised games tend to fall into the shooter and sports categories," she noted. "I think it's a marketing problem. It certainly promotes the conventional-wisdom stereotypes about games and gamers."

It's an image problem that we run into again and again -- games are for geeks, games are for boys, games are violent. Games are not advertised in magazines that women might read, nor placed in areas where women might come across them. Games are not for women. It's less a development failure than a P.R. and promotions failure.

She sums up with a great coda:

I don't want girl games, I just want what every gamer wants -- smarter games. More meaningful games. Games that relate to other people. That relate to other things. Games that push me off the screen and off the couch.