A new, longish article on Game Girl Advance talks about the future of women gamers. It focuses specifically on the future of women console gamers, and I'd like to submit that this is the primary flaw of the article. Put more simply, I'm suspicious that the future of women gamers is bound to the future of console gaming.

That's not to say that the future of women gamers is wholly unrelated to the future of the console market (for example, several of the comments attached to the GGA article point out that the XBox in its current form factor may never appeal to women). However, I do think that the focus on content over form may cloud our perspective on the real issues surrounding women and games.

Here's a quote from the article that will provide more clarity.

Having watched many women play puzzle games, I can't believe that they are just idling their time, waiting for the right PS2 game to come along to rescue them from Cubis. Rather, casual games seem to offer the right gameplay experience, commitment, and duration to appeal to a wide variety of players, including but not limited to women.

Among the women (35 - 55) I've spoken with who, these are the types of games they say they play (NOTE: for now, this is an unscientific sample. Not everyone played every type of game):

When I look at these categories, the commonalities I see have little to do with platform or content. Many are played on the PC, but often in very different forms (Solitaire is a Win32 app bundled with the OS; Age of Empires is a 3D game with specific hardware requirements). Some require considerable time (EverQuest, AoE), while others can be played and forgotten in a matter of minutes (Bejeweled, Wheel of Fortune).

I'd like to offer this provisional suggestion. All of these games do have two rough properties in common that might prove helpful.

The first of these is somewhat self-explanatory, and I suspect it's a prerequisite of any game on any platform that might appeal to a mass market. The second is a bit squishier. Here are some of the kinds of direct relationships I have in mind:

I don't intend this list to serve as a coherent taxonomy, but I think they suggest a different kind of vantage point on the problem of women gaming and mass market gaming, beyond the usual suspects of marketing and product content.

One possible objection surrounds the idea that play allows us to separate ourselves from the material world, to provide moments of freedom from it (as suggested by Brian Sutton Smith, among others). One might also point out that that all play involves the assembly and disassembly of Huizinga's Magic Circle, or the time/space boundary of the game. All that notwithstanding, how active or self-aware is that passage into the magic circle? Is part of the key to broadening the reach of video games bound up in the actual passage of the player into and out of the game, and how much that passage represents or accounts for real human experience.

Here's a quick, rough example: plenty of games embody a real or fantasy world without appealing to women players or broader-market players. Consider EA's Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers game. This is an innovative game in many ways, but the main problem with them is that they only allow the player to fight. LOTR is an unabashedly mass-market property, but the game foregoes the motivations that lead the characters into conflict. Contrast LOTR:TT with EverQuest or even Deus Ex, in which the player motivation is more directly tied to the way in which the player enters the game.

Here's another question that I'll ask but not comment on: How important are shorter-term game experiences (say, 2 - 5 hours instead of 40 - 100) to a broader market?

One final comment: I think that we ought not to focus solely on Grrl Gamers or people who self-identify as gamers. There's nothing wrong with either of these categories, but a true mass market wouldn't require its consumers to privilege games over other kinds of behavior. How many of you wouldn't call yourselves movie-goers?

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