Now you think that maybe I’m weird or something but I also like tactical simulations, stategy games, RPGs, and survival horror. Sometimes nothings better after a hard days work than to fight a couple of WW2 battles or blowing away a mess of zombies.

My wife likes strategy games and RPGs, which means everytime I get a new final fantasy she always ends up beating it before I do plus she always stomps me when we do a multi player strategy game.

But really, I love all simulation type games, with business sims being my very favorite. The Rollercoaster Tycoon series has been a neverending source of amusement, partly because I’m so good at making it work for me, and partly because it allows me to experiment. Can I get an all high-intensity coaster park to work? Lets try it out! The only simulation type games that don’t get me going are the kinds that require too much micromanaging. I like to micromanage some, but if I can’t sit back and drink my soda and just watch it go, that’s dull. Oh and I liked the Monster Rancher series because I was so good at making champion fighters. And I liked the Harvest Moon games (except for the lame ‘dating sim’ aspects) also because I was so good at running the little “farm” and the aminals were cute. Especially when you’d accidentally whack one with a farming tool, good stuff.

Contrast all that cold mechanism with the most popular genre of game out there, the RPG. I just can’t get into most console RPGs because they seem to be based around The Hero’s relationship with Token Woman. How utterly boring, I don’t really care what the shallow backstory has to say about their undending love, it’s dull and unimaginative. And yet, male gamers I know eat that junk up, with a spoon! Those games seem to be “about relationships” a whole lot, but I don’t know many women who get into the relationship aspect. Maybe I don’t know enough women though.

If I owned a video game company, I’d put you on the marketing team.

-cheers

It wasn’t so much about the relationships or communicating, it was about being in a position of power to control and/or destroy lives. Similarly the rest of the SIM-series was attractive to me for that reason. Build a tower. Kill the tower. Build a city, destroy it with aliens.

Marketing unfortunately relies heavily on stereotypes, but the problem is that the geek-girl community is one that has played video games NOT marketed towards them since they came out. Hell, I remember how pissed off my male friends were when at the end of Metroid, the main character revealed herself to be female. That was COOL to me. That said, while I think there is a market for “pink” video games, I don’t think it hits the market for girl-geeks in general. Its just another way that corporations are trying to target “girl power” as a commodity, when they don’t really know what “grrl power” actually is.

-Molly

This is the second article on this topic I’ve read recently that started off talking about “women” then went on to only address teenage girls, incidentally. I understand that they’re probably focusing on that specific demographic at the moment, but it’s unsettling to me that there appears to be no difference in this context between “what women want” and “what 13-year-old girls want,” and that there is very little discussion about what adult women are looking for in games. (And would it kill them to actually, oh, I don’t know, find some actual women who game to talk to for these articles, rather than presenting some out-of-touch male department head as the authority on “what girls/women want”?)