Here Come e GamerZ

Here C e the Gamer

“All the computer games that were available at the time were of the violent type – war games and space invader types. Th ere 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. Th is 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. Th is 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% identifi ed 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.

Th e Entertainment Soft ware 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. Th e percentage of female players grew steadily from the fi rst study in 2006 until 2008, which coincides with the peak of popularity of the Nintendo Wii and DS. Th e 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. Th is 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. Th e 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.

Th ere 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 eff ect the 2008 fi nancial 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 fi nancial 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

A New Mode of Expression 2012 was a year of explosive growth for the mobile industry with Apple selling 37 million iPhones in the fi rst quarter, compared to 17 million in the fi nal quarter of 2011. Th e ESAC data correlates with this, with the gender ratio spiking to a level that has remained consistent ever since. Many people have gravitated to mobile devices free from the stigma of console game investment. On this platform more accessible forms such as the match three puzzler exemplifi ed by Candy Crush and drop in-drop out competitive games such as Words with Friends or Mahjong have taken off . Th e audience for these games skew female, which aligns to mobile game’s 51-49 female to male demographics. Only games such as Clash of Clans and Castle Crash fl ip this demographic split. Th is raises the question, why are games with violent themes more popular among men and low intensity puzzle games among women? (I obviously exclude Words with Friends as that game is serious business!)

Th e fi rst time I ever used camera mode in a video game was probably Little Big Planet. Th e game would set up photo booth opportunities and considering most of the fun of the game was in designing the most ridiculous costumes for your character, I tended to do silly poses and take a quick snap. Th ese pictures would be saved in some fi le and I doubt I ever looked at them aft er they were taken. Both the XboxOne and PS4 have photo modes. One of my brothers would take pictures of his Minecraft farm to show his friends at school and the other liked to take ones of his scores on Call of Duty. I never considered there being much more to it than that, aft er all, you weren’t really taking ‘pictures’, just screenshots of whatever you focused the perspective camera on. Th en a few years back I attended a Comic-Con in my city. Th e marketplace was full of artists of all diff erent types of mediums from oil to crochet and I stopped at a booth with some particularly beautiful prints. Mass Eff ect’s Normandy in a silky star background was one that particularly caught my eye. It was the fi rst time I’d ever seen screenshots being sold as photography prints, albeit heavily edited. It was as impressive as it was intriguing. Video games have transcended into an art form themselves, from the highly stylised to the hyper-realistic. In an age where photo documentation is second nature, an artifi cial world doesn’t remove players from that desire to take a quick picture of the beautiful or sentimental. From being immersed in a fi rst-person narrative or visiting an impossible real world location, photos are being taken. Developers have taken notice and now more and more games are being released with photo features that mimic actual cameras. For the answer I am going to refer to… yes, more statistics. At fi rst glance there would seem to be a correlation between genre and gender. A 2017 study by Nick Yee found that 69% of match-3 players were women and 93% of fi rst-person shooter players were men. Th is suggests that more generic diversity could lead to greater engagement with console gaming from women. A theory as old as Pacman, which used themes of eating to distance itself from the more violent fair of its day. with Animal Crossing New Leaf, an example of the all too small slice of life genre boasting a 56% female player base on a system (3DS) with a 31% feminine install base. Th is is not the whole picture however. While Yee’s study provides some compelling evidence for this generic split there were outliers. 48% of Dragon Age Inquisition players are women, as opposed to the 26% average for Western Role-Playing Games. 27% of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate players are women, compared to an average of 14% for open world games. Fortnite also bugs the trends with over 27% of its audience being women compared to the 4% average for tactical shooters and 7% average for fi rst-person shooters as reported by the Yee study. Th is shows another key part of building engagement. In Fortnite, players can buy skins of all genders, and if the player does not buy any skins the game will cycle through characters of varying body types genders and ethnicity. Dragon Age is a game which allows for customization of the players character including their gender, and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate features a woman as its co-protagonist. Th is suggests that representation is important. In video games the player embodies a character and people will tend to gravitate toward a character that they can relate to. I am not saying that all games require a gender selection option, but diversity is never a bad thing, and in a world where the ways in which gender is expressed are changing so rapidly, the ability to do so within our media can be empowering. Th ese games are some of the most popular games of our day, which shows that diversity does not impede success, but that success is a product of diversity. Whether you seek to invent a new genre like Pacman, or a new identity for ‘gamers’ such that a term that delineates between players and non-players becomes obsolete, I cannot wait to see how this medium can diversify and touch new people in the future.