Game Changers
The Ever-Growing Number of Female Players Is Altering the Video Game Experience

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 14, 2008

You really must do something about your hair," teases Ally Burguieres's mom, referring to the appearance of her daughter's on-screen video game character.

It's Wii night at the Burguieres house in Bethesda. On the living room TV, virtual versions of Jan Burguieres and her 20-something daughters Ally, Elizabeth and Tory are playing baseball via the Nintendo system atop the set. Each of the cartoony game characters have been crafted to resemble their real-world counterparts. Ally's avatar wears oval-shaped glasses, just as Ally does, but its hair is just a little too straggly, in Mom's view.

It used to be that this all-woman crew wouldn't fit the standard image of the video game consumer. But the perception of gamers as being mostly young guys isn't so true anymore. Women and girls make up 40 percent of the gamer population, according to the Entertainment Software Association, the video game industry's trade group. And with game software sales at $9.5 billion last year, companies are paying closer attention to the titles women seek out.

The Burguieres sisters grew up playing video games. Ally, a 25-year-old grad student working on a PhD in linguistics at Queen's University in Belfast, says she sometimes felt shut out as a kid when boys started to play or talk about video games. She says that's a situation that may have changed, thanks to the widespread appeal of the Wii and music games such as Guitar Hero.

"Women are now being treated as natural members of the gaming community," she says. "In my generation and before, I don't think girls felt accepted in that community."

* * *

For years, the video game industry spent its marketing dollars on trying to get guys excited about the latest sports or shoot-'em-up title. It was generally assumed that women and girls weren't interested.

But that started to change in 2004, says industry analyst Michael Pachter, when Nintendo launched its DS portable game system, named for its dual screens. Its features stretched the notion of what a video game is -- and who might want to play.

In one early DS game, players took control of a virtual puppy. To pet the dog, players rubbed the touch-sensitive screen; to train the dog to sit, players spoke into the device's built-in microphone.

Compared with many games that expected a mastery of the controller buttons, the interface was intuitive. Nintendogs was a hit with both sexes and suggested to many in the industry that it might be time to take note of games that appeal to a wider audience.

"That's when we started to get more girl-oriented games," says Pachter, who works for the investment firm Wedbush Morgan Securities. "Before that, there had been the occasional Britney Spears game, but they weren't really marketed much."

Today, half of DS users are female, according to Nintendo. Game publisher Ubisoft has been courting this market with games designed to appeal to girls ages 6 to 14. Themes for those titles include figure skating and fashion design.

Helene Juguet, senior director of marketing at Ubisoft, says the company is still learning how best to appeal to girls. She believes that one day the distinctions between what the company offers as "girl" games and the rest of its titles will fade.

"Eventually, as video games become a medium that is more accepted, the difference will go away," she says. "It won't be a matter of there being a genre that is popular with one gender or another."

* * *

Could be. Some girls and women are already picking up the game controller and trying out titles that are usually thought of as strictly for guys.

Gabriel Ralte, a 28-year-old nursing student from India who lives in Silver Spring, says she likes to play Grand Theft Auto IV to unwind and do things she wouldn't try in the real world.

Ralte had never played video games before coming to the United States, but her boyfriend is a gamer, so she decided to give his Xbox 360 a try. She thought a tennis game he bought for her was pretty good, but she mainly loves GTA. She's now further along in the game than he is.

"To some people it's very weird that I play video games," she says. "When I mention it to my classmates, they're like, 'I can't believe you're actually playing Grand Theft Auto -- you don't look like a violent person!' "

Women have also been playing bigger roles as workers in the video game industry. Yvette Nash, who works as an international producer at the Fairfax-based game studio EA Mythic, says that although there are many more men than women at the studio, "it's not something I notice when I walk into the office."

EA Mythic is scheduled to launch its newest game this week, a virtual world called Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. It's in the same sword-and-sorcery genre as the mega-popular World of Warcraft, in which players pay a monthly subscription fee to take on virtual roles. Nash is in charge of the game's online launch outside of the United States.

Virtual-world games have always had a larger share of women players than other games, Nash says. That's probably because they are often as much about collaborating as a team, or just hanging out, as they are about going on adventures.

Having a diverse group of players can improve missions. "When you have a healthy mix of guys and girls going on a raid, it helps with the tactics," Nash says. Guys sometimes want to run in and fight the monsters without coming up with a strategy. With women on the team, she says, "there's a lot more 'Have we thought this through?' "

* * *

One of the final frontiers for women and gaming might be competitive online action games in which players try to blow up, or "frag," their adversaries.

The tone of the trash talking in these games can scathe even the most thick-skinned player, guy or gal. So Microsoft, with its Xbox 360, has started a club where women can play together online, away from the testosterone-fueled chatter that is common in matches for action games.

It's a "kiddie pool" for girls and women who enjoy playing but who want a more relaxed environment, says Christa Phillips, 39, better known in the Xbox online community by her handle "Trixie." Guys occasionally sneak into the group, the Redmond, Wash., resident says, though they don't usually last long. "They usually act like a dude," she says. "I can usually tell because their spelling is terrible."

Outside the kiddie pool, some serious women gamers are starting to take on men in a growing number of tournaments that pit the best players against one another. Irvine, Calif., resident Morgan Romine, 27, is the captain of a Ubisoft-sponsored all-female gamer team called Frag Dolls and plays shooter titles such as Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for dozens of hours a week to stay sharp. At this point, she's used to hearing guys tell her to "get back in the kitchen," or worse, when she battles online, but it just makes her play more aggressively.

"I really like to win in those situations," she says.

But most gamers, male and female, keep their playing a little more casual.

Back at the Burguieres house, Tory, 24, has won the baseball game with two home runs, and the women have moved on to Wii bowling. Mom Jan, 57, appears to be a natural, pulling off strikes and spares that keep her ahead of her daughters.

"Thank you very much, thank you very much," she gloats after clearing the pins each time, before they switch games again and she skillfully manages to carry her team through a few rounds of Wii tennis.

A little while later in the evening, the women switch to Mario Kart, which Jan doesn't play nearly as well, steering poor Mario off the track and into a virtual ocean. Maybe she needs caffeine.

"Tom, you want to put some coffee on?" she asks her husband, who is catching up with the guys over in the dining room.