Kat Stamoulis has earned permission to play video games. "She's a good student," says her mother, Maureen Stamoulis. "She's got other interests."
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
By Jose Antonio Vargas Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 25, 2004; Page A01
Choices: a machine gun, a handgun, a shotgun, a grenade. What's a 14-year-old girl to do?
"You use them at different times," says Aikaterini "Kat" Stamoulis, a sophomore at Magruder High School in Rockville, her eyes focused on the video-game screen. She's playing Time Crisis 3, a point, shoot and duck spree set in the Mediterranean that allows her to keep changing weapons. She's also a big fan of the House of the Dead 2 and Grand Theft Auto 3, the latter of which features a smorgasbord of violent endings in a fictional place called Liberty City USA.
Martin Tran, who stands to Kat's left one afternoon at Dave and Buster's in North Bethesda's White Flint Mall, looks surprised. "Girls don't like video games," he says. "They just don't."
Tran's perception fits the popular notion of the video and computer gaming industry as testosterone territory -- 61 percent of players are male. The characters in the games are almost all male and the marketing, as embodied by PSM ("the world's #1 PlayStation Magazine") with its "10 pages of your favorite game girls," is pretty much boys-only. Just where girls and women fit into the world's fastest-growing entertainment industry -- $7 billion in game sales last year -- is still an open question. Kat Stamoulis, for one, thinks it's a missed opportunity.
"Some girls like cars," she says. "Some girls like shooting games. They should gear their games toward boys and girls. Wouldn't they get more money that way?"
Schelley Olhava, a senior analyst with International Data Corp., a research firm in Mountain View, Calif., agrees. "For long-term growth, the industry needs to figure out how to get to the female demographic. But look at it this way: Who are making the games? Men. They design what they want to play. Whenever you see a TV show or read articles about the games, who are being shown? Men. Though we have data that says: Yes, women are playing games, and they're playing all kinds of games."
Nearly two-thirds of the female demographic using games is 18 or older, according to the Washington-based Entertainment Software Association (ESA). That number includes computer gaming and video gaming in which players use consoles such as Xboxes or PlayStations connected to their TVs.
Women make up 39 percent of all video and computer gamers, and industry analysts say the bulk of that percentage is computer gamers "on the run" -- say, women on their lunch breaks, looking for something fun and quick to do. Besides those "casual gamers" such as Amy Ellard, a 15-year-old high school sophomore from Potomac who plays Mech Warrior on her Xbox, are the "hard-core gamers" like Melissa Allen, a 32-year-old epidemiology specialist from Chesterfield, Va., who plays the Sims on her PC. In a week, on average, Amy spends "four hours at most" on games, Allen more than 10 hours. On a recent Saturday, for example, Allen started at 6 p.m. and called it quits at 2 a.m.
ESA President Douglas Lowenstein says strategy games -- card and puzzle games at Web sites such as Zone.com and Realarcade.com -- are attracting women to the gaming industry in droves. But, he says, "the percentage of women and girls in the 'passionate' gaming category is significantly less than the percentage of boys and men."
Lowenstein continues: "I think the industry is really not doing a great deal right now, from a marketing and creative standpoint, to accelerate the adoption of games by girls and women. . . . It's shortsighted."
