Designing & marketing games for female players

Over at Joystiq, they have a roundup of a panel held at SXSW on "getting girls into the game". Actually, it was a nice step away from a lot of typical talks on women & gaming. I admit that I've been roped into writing more than one piece on my thoughts - as a gamer with boobs - on "women and gaming" or attracting more women to gaming. Like a lot of people, men and women alike, writing on the same subject, I tend to yowl that just because I'm a girl doesn't mean I need games made for or marketed towards me & the fact that I don't like playing Halo has nothing to do with me being a girl, just that I don't like first person shooters. Etc. etc. It all seems horribly cliched at this point & I think it did when I was writing it, too. I think it's the nature of the subject matter: none of us are saying anything that hasn't been said before in a thousand different forms by at least a thousand other people.

Anyways, the panel (and Joystiq's commentary) had some good points:

The majority of game publishers and developers are male, and when they try to make games for female gamers, they use things like focus groups and research numbers. As a result, they usually miss the target and develop games for them that suck. Then the games don't sell, so the publishers say, "Well, women don't play games."

They conclude a lot of this is more a marketing problem than not having a market or product problem. I just wonder when the industry is going to finally hit the target between two extremes of "women don't play games" and "they need games designed for them." Shouldn't people just concentrate on developing good games in general that everyone would like to play? ... And there I go, falling into the cliched girl gamer commentary trap again.

SXSW: Getting Girls Into The Game: Designing and Marketing Games for Female Players [Joystiq]