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Gamasutra – Study Shows Gaming Gender Equality in Asia

February 22nd, 2006 (Visited 3791 times) Tags:

That’s right — 50% male and 49% female.

The interesting thing isn’t that — rather, it’s that in other territories, females outnumbered males.

We can assume that the survey takers were including web games in that total. To me, that’s a good thing, because considering those games as “not real games” is to my mind a big mistake, and it betrays a bias towards particular sorts of experiences.

Overall, this is also a stat highly revelatory of how much of the current gender imbalance in the “hardcore” games market is due to business considerations like retail channels, media outlets, and other infrastructure that has hardened around a single target audience. How would Katamari have done if it were a freely downloadable game, or playable on the web? How much will the move towards Web 2.0-style “web services” affect the demographics of gameplay? Looks to me like the answer is “a lot.”

Oh, and I am still sick, with congestion moving into my chest now, plus tinges of whatever stomach flu the kids had. No fun.

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Mikep said on February 22nd, 2006 at 6:19 pm:

Walk in to any PC Bahng in Korea and it won’t be a surprise to see high school or college females playing Starcraft (which is still popular here) or Counter Strike. Older women tend to prefer games like Kart Rider (the first game to become more popular than Starcraft).

Tess said on February 22nd, 2006 at 9:04 pm:

Yes, this study did take into account the web/casual games, from what I’ve read elsewhere. I would find this more surprising, except that older ESA domographic statistics put the percentage of female gamers at 43%, and I’ve seen other studies that placed females at greater than 50%, when they take into account the web/casual space. As an industry, our problem is not that women don’t play games. Our problem is that we don’t know how to profit from it. It certainly doesn’t help that our industry has no respect for casual games.

Raph said on February 22nd, 2006 at 10:49 pm:

To me the startling difference was how much the female gamers outnumbered the males in terms of the general population:

In North America, the male to female ratio was 39% to 52%; in Europe, it was 28% to 39%, and in Australia, it was 27% to 53%.

Craig Huber said on February 23rd, 2006 at 4:08 pm:

Sorry to be picky, but 39+52=91, 28+39=67 and 27+53=80, none of which are 100. I would expect a “male to female ratio” to equal 100%, or dang close.

Is there more of a trans-gender game-playing audience than I was aware of, or is someone mistating what the data says? (I didn’t spot a link to the report itself in that gamasutra link: anyone got access?)

Raph said on February 23rd, 2006 at 4:56 pm:

The way I read it was that they did a survey of people, and found that of the people they surveyed, 39% of the males were online gamers and 52% of the females were online gamers, and the remaining 9% are presumably not online gamers.

Craig Huber said on February 23rd, 2006 at 7:55 pm:

Ah, that explains it. Thanks for the clarification…

Tess said on February 24th, 2006 at 1:02 am:

To me the startling difference was how much the female gamers outnumbered the males in terms of the general population.

True. It is pretty staggering, isn’t it?

Well, there you have it. Next time someone tries to tell you that maybe women just aren’t interested in playing games due to some quirk of biology, or whatever, you can laugh along with me.

Raph said on February 24th, 2006 at 7:59 am:

I’ve never thought they aren’t interested — I do think that the mainstream games right now tend to cater to certain learning styles and mental characteristics that are less prevalent among females, though.

I know it’s often an unpopular opinion, but I still stand by what I said in AToF: that there are likely innate cognitive reasons for the gender skew of the hardcore gamer population, and that the same reasons apply to the gender skew of the casual games market.

(All of the above applies also to the age skew in hardcore male gamers, which is sharply downwards; as men age, they seem to start playing and liking games in a pattern more similar to that of females, whom we might use as a baseline because of the relatively invariant curve they exhibit).

I also think that games, via their amazing ability to cause brain rewiring, can change those cognitive processes, if people are willing to give games they don’t like a whirl.

Wolfe said on February 24th, 2006 at 8:21 am:

It appears as if male gamers are more willing to go bonkers on gaming, female gamers have are less common to prioritize gaming higher than everything else.

Meili said on March 2nd, 2006 at 12:27 pm:

I am a female Asian myself but I don’t consider myself “hardcore.” My female friends and I prefer social interaction to whacking trolls with a sword. Also, a lot of gaming happens in internet cafes.

I have tried to explain what internet cafe society here is but I my online Western friends find it hard to understand. One Canadian 14 year old even said it was funny because “omg you go to place and rent some guy’s computer how lame is that!”

In many places internet cafes are there so you can hang out with friends, female generally gamers don’t play alone but come with a group of friends to chat and play with online. Some cafes are pretty bare but others are hip places to be seen at where you can order coffee, cakes, sandwiches, etc. Hence the term “cafe.”

Kristen said on March 2nd, 2006 at 12:52 pm:

Seems like the Asian internet cafe “society” is related to the issues that Danah Boyd talks about in MySpace. The “hip places you describe” sound like physical “public spaces” to see and be seen in as well as one to access all the virutal ones.

Gamasutra – Study Shows Gaming Gender Equality in Asia

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