Wednesday 11 October 2006

Pic of the day: Two girls for every boy? (City of Heroes.)

Women conquer online games

I recently saw an article claiming that far more women than men play online games. 64% of online gamers are women, it says, which is very close to "two girls for every boy", as the old song goes.

If the claim seems outrageous, the comments are hilarious. Men come up with the strangest explanations: Real men don't take surveys, it must be men claiming to be women, this can't be science because I don't see them at the Internet cafe...

The real explanation is far more prosaic. Online games are not just massive fighting games like EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot or City of Heroes / City of Villains. When a girl visits another girl's Animal Crossing to exchange fruits, that's online games. Board games are played online mainly by women, and are very popular. And virtual worlds that are more like chat rooms than war games, such as Second Life, are heavily dominated by women.

I find it amusing that so many of my fellow men seem to think only our games are real games. It is kind of like when many men feel that lesbians cannot have sex since none of them have a [male reproductive organ]. It is as if things that are too different from our experience are not quite real.

That said, there are also a growing number of women playing "manly" games. City of Heroes has a pretty large female population, for instance. Of course, you can't see on the characters what gender the player is. But there are some telltale signs. For instance one day when I was not at work, I played around what is breakfast time in the USA. It was very easy to get on a team, but the downside was that one or another of the players would suddenly announce: "Kids woke up" or "hubby is up" and then hurry to disengage from the battle and log off. I imagine a lot of secret female gamers playing in the night, afraid of being discovered.

It is definitely some time since being a woman and playing EverQuest would guarantee you getting married and interviewed in the nearest large newspaper.