Why don’t women try online games like DarkOrbit?
There’s a popular misconception floating around out there that women just aren’t all that interested in online gaming. The fact of the matter is that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s certainly fair to say that male players outnumber female players, but the female players are out there.
So the question is why more women don’t play games and why it’s such a male oriented hobby. One theory is simply that games have traditionally been directed at men, or more specifically, at boys between the ages of eight and eighteen. It’s not that video games just aren’t for girls, rather, girls just haven’t really been given the opportunity to jump in. If you think of male-friendly video games for kids, you think of some of the classics like Contra, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. If you think of female-friendly games for kids, you think of shallow games about fashion design and baking, games that really sell girls short on what they want to do for fun.
This has been turning around with the advent of online gaming, though. With massive multiplayer online games, we’re seeing more and more women entering the fray for the customizable experiences offered by games like World of Warcraft and browser games like Dark Orbit, and for the social aspect of the game. Furthermore, the makers of these games typically respond to their own demographics with their service. If the people at Blizzard or the makers of Dark Orbit see a spike in female gamers joining up, they might expand features and aspects of the game that appeal to women.
The day when women make up a good fifty percent of all online gamers may still be a ways off, but there are a lot of female gamers out there, and online games have gone a long way towards bridging the gap. If you play any online game be it a shooter, an MMORPG or a real time strategy game, you’ll probably run into an all-female clan at one point or another, and sooner or later, women will be such a dominant presence in online gaming that they won’t even need to form special clans to make that presence known. It should be interesting to see how developers respond to the expanding demographic in their products and services.
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