Andrea Meyer: Women Want to Gather
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in SAZ-News in September 2007, with an English translation by Sybille Whitehill; Meyer has updated the article for this publication.
Let’s start with data from 2006 from the Friedhelm Merz Verlag website: “To a crowd of 151,000 visitors, as well as hundreds of journalistic teams from press, radio and TV, 730 exhibitors from 31 nations presented their products in an exhibition area of about 43,200 square meters, and SPIEL ‘06 with ‘Comic Action’ proved again its unique position in the convention environment scene.”
Now a change of scene to the 2006 Computer Games Convention in Leipzig, which, according to Tagesschau.de, drew a record 185,000 visitors with 503 exhibitors from 31 countries. While that total was two thousand higher than in 2005, Tagesschau.de reported, “the fair organizers clearly missed their target of more than 200,000 visitors.”
Are these events unique? Impossible to compare? Certainly, the attitude of the respective industries toward these “visitor records” is incomparable. In Essen at least every second exhibitor laments how crowded it is (despite relatively unchanging total sales figures from year to year), whereas the computer game business goes on aiming high. If we can trust the press coverage, the most important subject in Leipzig was how to tap new target groups. The companies are aiming at women and elderly people; they want to get away from the fixation on the 12- to 29-year-old boy or man who – besides school and university – fights computer battles for hours and massacres aliens or mere human opponents.
This intention has seemingly led to its first successes: According to a survey done by the Leipzig Institute for Market Research by order of the fair organizers, 52 percent of the visitors in 2007 were older than 20 years; in 2006, it was 45 percent. In 2007, a fifth of the visitors were women (in 2006: 17 percent). How old are the visitors in Essen on average? No idea. How many women, and how many men come to the Gruga halls in October? Who is supposed to know that?
Goal vs. Path
Years ago, I asked visitors to my BeWitched Spiele website to tell me their opinions on this subject: “Do women play in a different way?” The approximately 30 responses were very different; however, the prevailing tenor of the men was that they could not see any difference whereas a few women said that they definitely observed differences between women and men concerning their playing behavior and preferences.
I have personally held the theory for a while that men (with the usual exceptions that such stereotypical statements implicate) tend to be oriented to the victory of the game, that is, to the goal, whereas women more frequently pay mind to the atmosphere and the path. A survey conducted by Prof. Dr. Sabine Trepte from Hamburg in the context of the research project, ”Girls, women and computer games”, supports this tendency in the field of computer games; it turns out “that women would rather look for the challenge in the course of the game and are less competitive since feedback at the end is irrelevant to them ....” In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the game developer Kirsten Forbes adds another aspect: “Physiological studies show that men react to everything that explodes and makes noise. Women are not interested in ‘action.’ They love emotions, relationships, and complex plots. Women like cooperative games.”
In my opinion, men are more often willing to “work their way through” longer, more complex games, whereas for women, the quick playing fun and the friendly get-together takes center stage more frequently. In an article on Looki.de (that’s no longer available), Jamila Peters observes similar tendencies in the field of computer games: “It must be admitted that they are patient indeed, the men. Whereas most women seem to lose their interest or their nerves quickly if a game doesn’t work as they want, men develop almost endless patience in dealing with virtual beings. Operating a game may be as complicated as it may get – nothing keeps them from learning it without a minute of no ambition.”
Back to board games: according to my observations, easy rules – best of all, self-explanatory, i.e. intuitive ones – are more often demanded by women; they often have less patience to listen to rule explanations than men. That may indicate a lack of practice in dealing with rules; it clearly speaks for making game rules easier.
Women, by the way, do more “multi-tasking” than men while they are playing, that is, during the game they communicate about events beyond the scope of the game. For this, they are sometimes reproached for “not taking game playing seriously!” – but maybe it’s more the case that they take playing seriously as a social event but not as a competition with the goal to win.
Evolution
As is generally known, evolution is always the one to blame when something can’t be explained another way. In the weekly paper ZEIT, the game developer Gano Haine said, “Men play differently from women…. Men hunt and women gather.” Game developer Kirsten Forbes also observes this evolutionary approach to games. She explains, “Women love to gather. They pick up everything in a game that they consider possibly useful for later. They pack and sort things well.… Gathering items is like puzzling or ironing. Women are obsessed with that.”
I would add, “Women are obsessed with gathering, sorting, structuring, and acting.” If you have ever seen with how much enthusiasm some women build beautiful landscapes in Carcassonne and trade like crazy in Settlers of Catan – beyond any requirements for winning – you know what I’m talking about. Some serious players have despaired more than once of a female player who traded with somebody just to be nice and, in doing so, became a “kingmaker” directly or indirectly.
Where Are the Women?
Forbes adds in her interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “Women want a playing character that they can identify with. Unfortunately, the female characters often look very martial. They wear heavy suits of armor – under which, however, the nipples still show through. Men like that; to women, however, this is more repellent. They’d rather play with non-human characters.” Nevertheless, the research project mentioned above found that a high percentage of women and men, if they can create characters, choose an avatar – i.e., a playing character – of their own gender. In short, in most cases, women have female avatars, and men have male avatars – to which they, I would like to add, assign those features that seem to be useful for the game, no matter whether these features are considered more male or more female.
Beyond this, similar things apply to positive, likable characters in a game. Jamila Peters writes about this: “Women like games with something little and incredibly cute in them. Of course not completely; but the more cute a character is, the more it is accepted by women. Why is that so? On the one hand, this probably relates to the scheme of childlike characteristics that women respond to more than men; on the other hand, another attraction – good-looking characters of the other gender – is not provided by the game industry. At least, I can’t think of any game whose male main character could be called attractive by me, not even in the least. Since women tend to take what they can get, they are content – to a large extent, even gladly – with the knobby little adorable being of whatever kind.”
This situation is similar in board and card games, whether it’s the dog in Fearsome Floors that has already moved some female players to change their color or the cute animals that Doris Matthäus puts on paper. Who, however, is interested in the guy on the box of Portobello Market? Or the characters on other game boxes?
Who Am I?
I claim that women who play board and card games are provided few positive characters with whom they can identify. I’m talking about female characters in the game with features that are worth striving for. Impulsively, Ludmilla Patina in Kreml crosses my mind. She is, by the way, the only female politician in the game; for this unique feature alone, she is one of the first characters to die or be banished in almost all of my game playing sessions. So, unfortunately, I (and most of the other female players) get into a predicament since Patina was always somewhere on my list. Several times, while noting my favorites, I found myself asking whether I should dare to list Patina, but my hope for the double bluff – that other players might think I would think that I cannot list her for the reasons I just mentioned, so I can list her – was almost always disappointed. By the way, the game with the most possibilities for identification that I know of is Funny Friends. Even if I don’t get at all close to winning, I’ve always had a lot of fun in the games I’ve played by acting out an alternative life.
For me, protagonists who have a negative connotation are, for instance, Mary Chip in Vegas, who floats over the board in a pretty brainless way, or … hmmm …. that’s already it – since there are so few female protagonists in games. Interestingly, the characters that a player can identify with have often been created for male players in passing. They are offered self-concepts like the “Knight,” “Trader,” or “Spaceman,” mostly with male attributes and graphics. (And here I’m not even talking about the fact that game rules usually mention only male players – “Spieler” – but not female players – “Spielerinnen.") If any female characters are more than gameboard decoration, they tend to be sexualized beings with a bust above average and a waist below average that look as if they would be knocked over by the next gust of wind.
Where are they in our games, the lusty women and dwarf women, the witches and seeresses? Do they not exist because our history books don’t give any account of them? Our history books, written by men for men? Several “herstory” projects verify that they definitely existed in former centuries: the autonomous women, responsible for themselves, with whom the Church, etc., did not want to deal.
More generally, since when do male and female authors allow anybody to dictate to them which characters should appear in games or books? Philippe des Paillieres has proven with the Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow that a man can also be a seeress – a coveted role, by the way. But still, in some sessions, a player hesitates over whether the dead male seeress automatically becomes a “seer” when he refers to that player, the male in the female role. The same thing happens with the High Priestess in The Three Commandments: In every other round, a (usually male) player will refer to the person defining the commandments as “High Priest,” even though the rulebook speaks exclusively of the High Priestess. A situation going the other way around is rarely encountered.
What does this mean for board and card game designers, whether male or female? In my opinion, a first step in game development must be to define the target group(s) of your own game. Then it is essential to find out their preferences in terms of a desirable self-concept in the game. Difficult? Maybe. Impossible? No. But doing so requires you to leave the solitude and privacy of game design, as well as the small world of the playtest table. It entails observing reality and analyzing what it means to put yourself in the position of your own creation’s target group. That is work. It has little to do with mechanisms and mathematics, but a lot to do with human beings and marketing. Is this the company’s job? Certainly. Is this also the author’s job? Yes! I believe that here we have the real innovative potential of our industry. Will it be tapped? I definitely hope so since – to use language of comics – I want less Daisy Duck and more Magica de Spell!
Posted by Andrea Meyer on Jan 28, 2009 at 02:00 PM in Columnists, Articles, Etc., Articles / 1607
Want more posts like this one?
to Boardgame News to keep the game goodness flowing!Comments:
To comment, you must register with BGN.|
Strangely, Merz Verlag seems to reprint the same paragraph following each Spiel, updating the nnumbers as needed. That same webpage shows the following data for Spiel 07: 148,000 visitors with 758 exhibitors from 30 nations. I don’t have the 2008 numbers in front of me, but they were in the same ballpark. The 150,000 visitor total is an impressive figure, one that always gets a reaction from non-gaming folks, yet it’s been the same number since I first started attending in 2004. The Games Convention in Leipzig, on the other hand, drew 203,000 visitors in 2008, according to a press release on the organizer’s website. That’s progress and growth that Spiel has not seen. Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Jan 28, 2009 at 03:25 PM | #
|
|
I couldn’t possibly contest this point - and as James Brown once sung “It’s a man’s man’s man’s world"- and much can be done to change this perception...but how? Surely the first step is to see a greater amount of “realistic” female characters in a game, or perhaps a game with ALL female characters in a heavy euro game setting, forcing men to take on the role of women in a game. How well would a game like that fair in a male driven hobby like boargaming? I fear I would not want to know the answer here. To me, game pieces, or characters in most games, are largely androgynous in my mind. In some games, I am a train, or a noble, or a car driver, or a diety, or a business person...could be male..or female right? - but I am a man - It takes a bit to step back and see the obviously male geared hobby that we all participate, women and men alike. They biggest time I notice this trend is in game rules - we, gamers, are most always referred to as “he”. I play games with quite a few women, including my wife and my sister...I am curious as to their reactions on your findings. This is certainly food for thought. Posted by tom moughan on Jan 29, 2009 at 10:36 AM | #
|
|
Thanks for a very interesting article. As is often the case with articles that address gender differences, I’m never quite sure what to make of it. It would be very interesting to see good quantitative data on women’s participation rates and preferences in gaming. From the pictures of the Spiel attendees, for example, one certainly gets the impression that women are present in nearly equal numbers. At the same time, one often hears the complaint here in the states that it is hard to get women into gaming in the same numbers as men. While I recognize that one has to be careful of anecdotal data, I have to say that the major thrust of the article doesn’t match my personal experience. I game almost exclusively with women: my wife, two sisters, two sisters-in-law, and my mother-in-law, in various combinations. The three friends of the family that play with us occasionally are all women as well. About the only other men I get to game with are my brother-in-law, who will play with us about half the time when his wife does, and, very rarely, my father-in-law. Among all of the women, I’ve never noticed any particular preferences in games that I would have ascribed to gender. A wide variety of games including Settlers, Puerto Rico, Ra, Power Grid, Condottiere, Mission: Red Planet, and many others have all been popular at one time or another. Agricola and Kingsburg are the two games in heavy rotation lately. Interestingly the only game we’ve tried that drew almost universal pans (much to my sorrow) was Arkham Horror, a game that actually does have strong, but not especially masculine, female characters available as avatars. My concern about trying deliberately to design a game to appeal to women is that I think it is likely to fall into the same trap as “educational games”: it won’t end up being a very good game. I think if a game is designed first and foremost to be fun (a word with a thousand contradictory definitions, I realize), it is much more likely to be enjoyed by players regardless of their gender. Still, I freely acknowledge that I could just be blinded to the issue since I am male. I’d be very curious to hear what Valerie or Melissa might think. Thanks for a thought provoking article! David Posted by David Lund on Jan 29, 2009 at 12:19 PM | #
|
|
There’s much I agree with here, although I suspect that the Settlers example (trading when unnecessary) relates more to casual and inexperienced gamers than to people that are really familiar with the game. I definitely play for the experience, and don’t feel that I have failed in any way if I don’t win. Unless my husband beats me, of course - that is just wrong *g*. I have noticed, lately, that we (almost) never play the “Jill the Ripper” set in Mystery Rummy 1: Jack the Ripper - it’s pretty safe to assume that those cards are being discarded. Is it because she is a woman? Because the cards are pink? Not sure, but that seems to support the Kreml example. (Test data here was the 7 or so games we played while on holiday - that meld was never played). Anecdotes suggest that games like Agricola - constructive, strongly themed, engine-building games may go over better with women, particularly with “non-gamer” women. Perhaps the underlying story there makes more sense on some level, or is more familiar, than “You’re princes, in Florence, and you’re building buildings” or “you’re simulating continental drift and trying to stop your dinosaurs from dying out” (despite the cute dinomeeples). I haven’t tried it widely but I suspect that Thebes might also be a women-friendly game. Of course, it’s not just the theme that’s important but also the mechanics. I like Andrea’s “gathering, sorting, structuring and acting” list. I’d add trading, as well. Even themes are not easy to identify, despite the many strong women in history. There’s a real risk of seeming to be patronising - this game is about finding the PERFECT PAIR OF SHOES. I think California (which I have not played myself) suffered from this somewhat. Where are Boadicea (Brittania? Maybe other wargames?), Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, even Mme de Pompadour (actually, she is given equal importance to the King in Xavier Georges’ Royal Palace)? Is there a game about the *women* in Arthurian legend? They appear in Shadows over Camelot, but the players themselves are knights. How good would it be to take on the role (and private agenda) of the Lady of the Lake? Why not a pick-up-and-deliver game about building the Eleanor Crosses? Perhaps we need to look to history and the many roles that women have played, to find new themes and inspiration. To David - I agree that there are dangers in designing to a particular target group - but there are definite benefits in considering that group and, as Andrea argues, acting to include them in the game experience. They don’t need to be women-only games, but women-friendly games - with female characters that female (and male) players can relate to. As for finding female characters without armour-piercing nipples? We live in hope! Posted by Melissa Rogerson on Jan 29, 2009 at 08:00 PM | #
|
|
I’m curious also why the choices for many female characters are often the male fantasy stereotypes (or the evil female types) but rarely equal-only-female characters. Is it the designer’s choice, or the publisher’s? Then again, if groups are more heavily male dominated (or exclusively male), there is the cultural pressure against playing a male playing a female character (no matter how shallow that role is explicitly “female"). Personally, I always wondered why there wasn’t a more even representation of female roles in a lot of games to try to open up the market a bit. Similarly to how the Wii opened up home console ownership to non-gamers by presenting games that didn’t require well honed skills with a lot of mysterious joysticks and buttons and dedication of time to understand a game’s internal rules. Since many characters we play are thinly written to begin with, this doesn’t seem like it should be a problem, but the female characters we do get obviously are not helping the perception of sexism. It does seem like something that would be trivial to fix with no real downsides that I can see. The written rules situation is a mixed bag for me. While it is assumed rules speak to a male, I don’t really think it’s that noticeable if a rulebook completely replaced “she” and “her” instead of “he” and “him”, but attempts to alternate genders are annoying and detract from reading the rules. However, if examples are given by using player names and there are both male and female characters in there, would that make this less of an issue? Is there an angle that I’m missing, since I clearly am looking from a male’s point of view? Posted by Matt Lee on Jan 29, 2009 at 10:22 PM | #
|
|
One of the main reasons Settlers turned out to be such a smash hit was that it was appealing and very non-threatening to female players without being overtly feminine. It was constructive (as well as being non-destructive) and interactive. That’s probably why it succeeded so well in spite of being more complex than the leading German games of the time. Posted by Larry Levy on Jan 29, 2009 at 10:59 PM | #
|
|
I agree when Melissa says “Of course, it’s not just the theme that’s important but also the mechanics. I like Andrea’s “gathering, sorting, structuring and acting†list. I’d add trading, as well.” Matt says: “Then again, if groups are more heavily male dominated (or exclusively male), there is the cultural pressure against playing a male playing a female character (no matter how shallow that role is explicitly “female")." I wonder why that is so? I mean, there’s lots of stereotypes about men not daring to be “weak” in front of other men, but is it really so simple? @Larry: I agree that “constructive + interactive” is a good path to follow to attract non-gamers or casual gamers. That definitely is a good part of the attraction Settlers gained. It would also partly explain the huge success of Carcassonne, although when those expansions became more interactive it usually meant more aggressive. Anybody have any other examples? Thanks, Andrea Posted by Andrea Meyer on Jan 30, 2009 at 10:18 AM | #
|
|
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a recent gaming experience that is applicable - I recently purchased “Genji” and was intrigued by the reviews I had read on it and what I knew about a theme involving “poetry” and “princesses” and “wooing” with interesting game mechanics—Interesting! Different! right? I could not get the women interested in it because they were not keen on the “wooing women” theme..no surprise there - conversely, I couldn’t get any men to play it because, though no one would say why, they “were not really feeling the theme of it either”. What I can gather is that due to seeing a circle of princesses and this idea of writing poetry, they somehow attribute the game to be feminine. When I did have the occasion to force both genders to play this game (together at times) and they saw what a great game it was...hook, line, and sinker...but what was the hang up? Posted by tom moughan on Jan 30, 2009 at 11:32 AM | #
|
|
One of Days of Wonder’s early games was Queen’s Necklace, a nice little design by the two Brunos. DoW deliberately positioned it to be attractive to women players. The game did not do well, because male players viewed it as too “feminine” and there presumably weren’t enough female players to make up for that. It’s a shame, because the game is good, but you can bet that that’s a mistake DoW hasn’t made since. Even today, I suspect a game like this would be a tough sell. So we still have a way to go with encouraging female participation in our hobby. Posted by Larry Levy on Jan 30, 2009 at 01:44 PM | #
|
|
Andrea, For the college aged male groups in America, those stereotypes are quite accurate for the most part, and while the choice to play female themed characters shouldn’t matter, it still does for those groups. I’ve been fortunate that my play groups have always enjoyed testing and exploring different ideas and play styles without reservation, but it may be because we had a mixed crowd, and we didn’t have the heavy pressure that others do have. I’d add that in particular the Tower and Princess and Dragon expansions flopped quite a bit with many female Carcassonne fans because of that conflict and would refuse to play with those rules if given the choice. It seems that a lot of good games that appeal to both sexes also falls into an area where you are faceless, and not already defined. Settlers, Carcassonne and Puerto Rico have you playing an undefined leader. Power Grid and Ticket To Ride have you as a “company”. In cases like Railroad Tycoon’s Tycoon cards or Arkham Horror’s characters, the division becomes pronounced on both sides. To add to the constructive+interactive idea, San Juan and Race For the Galaxy have been heavily requested by both sexes and seem to connect to the same mentality. Posted by Matt Lee on Jan 30, 2009 at 05:15 PM | #
|
Next entry: Media Watch: Solving Clue to Aid Search for Mines?
Previous entry: Dale Yu: Are You Ready for Some Football?!
