Here Come the Gamer “All the computer games that were available at the time were of the violent type – war games and space invader types. There were no games that everyone could enjoy” – Toru Iwatani (Lead Designer of Pacman)
In 1988 Nintendo conducted a survey of their NES console’s player base in the United States of America, the results stated that 27% of the console’s users were women. This is a statistic that may not shock many people, but in order to illustrate why I think this statistic is strange, I will ask you to consider the reaction that you would have if I told you that 27% of cinema goers were women, or that 73% of Spotify users were men. This is something that I always found bizarre and while things have changed hugely since the 1980s, video games still have a strange relationship with certain demographics. A study of game playing demographics from the Pew Research Centre stated that 48% of US women reported having played a video game, but only 6% identified as a ‘gamer’, compared to 15% of men. To understand this, I believe an examination of recent history is in order, and may illuminate some interesting trends. The Entertainment Software Association of Canada has conducted a study of the demographics of the Canadian video game industry for many years now, one of the statistics included is the gender ratio of game players. The percentage of female players grew steadily from the first study in 2006 until 2008, which coincides with the peak of popularity of the Nintendo Wii and DS. The Wii’s intuitive motion controls were an easy access point to a medium which had become increasingly more complicated, with the NES’ four button and directional input set up seeming quaint in the face of Sony’s dualshock controller’s pair of clickable analogue sticks, d-pad and ten buttons, excluding the home button. This is not to undersell the utility of more complex controllers, but it is worthwhile to bare in mind that for newcomers, doing what you want the character to do is far more intuitive than press F to pay respects. A 2009 article in the Telegraph estimated that there were 11.7 million women playing games on console in the United States and that 9 million played games on the Wii. A trend shared by much of North America and Europe. The same article claimed that there were 33 million male Wii users, so we may assume that the remainder of female gamers likely played games on either handhelds or on web browsers. There is a noticeable decline in the percentage of women playing games between 2009 and 2011. Many may attribute this to the Wii’s waning popularity as the ‘fad’ died out, however, I would caution against under estimating the effect the 2008 financial crash may have had on the Wii’s slow decline in sales. For its casual target audience, a €250 upfront fee for a box that almost exclusively plays video games can become harder to justify with mounting financial pressures. What was required was a device that could play games intuitively, that people had to own irre spec tive of their will to play games.
Words By Sam Hayes
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