MMOG’s and Females

Nalates · **Posted:** Thu Jan 27, 2011 2:37 am

One of the female gamers that writes for Second Life and Blue Mars, Iris Ophelia, just had an article on females preferences in MMOG’s published. The female market is a market segment getting lots of consideration. Companies are trying to figure out how to appeal women. Guys were easy. Make the women with exaggerated shapes and skimpy clothes.

See: 3 Big Mistakes MMOs Make That Alienate Female Gamers
World of Warcraft is an example used. The number Iris Ophelia uses for the female part of the WoW game community is 16%. In Everquest II it is 40% female.

See: Gender Swapping And Socializing In Cyberspace: An Exploratory Study. (2008)
Iris looked at the study and framed her article in the context of what she disliked in MMOG’s. Primarily being stuck in an outrageous body or limited in role playing class because of gender.

The study has interesting vales on stats like:
Number of times per week a person playes.
How long a person plays per session.
How those numbers divide up by gender.
Interesting gender swapping numbers.

Study: 64% of Online Gamers are Women (2006) I suspect that number has changed in the last 4 years.

The women finding love in the World of Warcraft (2010)

…women finding… wrote:

And this is where the fun begins. Guilds are often known for their interpersonal intrigues — feuds and flirtation are the order of the day in many. Throw some girls into the mix and geeky gamers — not famed for their social skills — would be forgiven for getting their joysticks in a twist. (They don’t actually use joysticks — WoW is played on a computer keyboard, but you get the picture.) While most female gamers say they love the competitive element of the game, the social aspect is equally important. Women say they can catch up with friends, flirt and even find love in this virtual world. It’s like Facebook. But with dragons. And swords.

Average Social Gamer Is a 43-Year-Old Woman (2010)

So… there is a lot more going on in games than some players think. The challenge is figuring out which parts of the social aspects and character editing fit into Uru’s context and whether Uru should change.

Gahlen · **Posted:** Thu Jan 27, 2011 6:27 am

This is intriguing material; Hussain and Griffiths in particular come up with some thought-provoking findings on correlations between gender and online behaviour (and the whole interesting gender-swapping phenomenon), although they seem to me to stop short of pushing their conclusions very far. (And I had to smile at the cheerfully naive use of the word "feminist" in Phoebe Frangoul's piece in the Sunday Times.) A strength, alleged or real, of these studies is of course their ability to draw on empirical data ("64% of players…" and so on, even with breakdowns for specific games). Do you (or does anyone) know if we have any statistics at all for MOULa or previous incarnations of Uru Live, beyond raw account and login numbers?

Nalates wrote:

I suspect that number has changed in the last 4 years.

Why?

MMOG’s and Females

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