Girls Don't Game.
There are so many myths about online gaming out there, I could write posts for days on all of them.
For the sake of my sanity (and yours) I will limit this particular post to just 1- who knows, maybe it will turn into a series later. But for now, we will start with my personal favorite: 'girls don't game'.
Would you like to take a guess at how much of the gaming population is female or identifies as female? Go ahead, throw a number out there, there are 95 reasons why your guess is better than what the current industry thinks it is. Despite the actual data that is freely available, there are still game designers and developers out there that are operating on the belief that women make up a whopping 5% of core gamers. That is not a typo. Five. Percent. Our games are being developed on that bias.
In reality, women make up almost half of the US gaming population (Clement, 2022).
In Asia, that number, in 2022, is closer to 43% (Yokoi, 2021). In India, the number of female gamers is up to 42% (Krishna, 2022). So then why is it, that we live in an age where even though half of the consumer base for gaming is women, we are only seeing 5% of games with a female protagonist? To make matters worse, those few female leads are generally hypersexualized and are either in desperate need of a man to physically save them or are just there to serve as a love interest (Yokoi, 2021). Sound familiar? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for looking hot in my transmog, but that should be my choice, not something forced upon me by a developer.
So now you know about women in front of the screen, what about behind it?
IRL (in real life) 84% of the executive workforce in the gaming industry is held by men (Women in Games, 2023). Aside from the executive branch, women make up only 24% of the entire industry (Yokoi, 2021). The math doesn't work here... if women make up half of the gaming population, then why are we only represented in a quarter of the entry level gaming industry and a fifth of the executive gaming branch? It sure isn't for a lack of trying.
Alright, so we've established that women are gaming; well, what are they playing?
In 2017, 23% of all players in World of Warcraft were women. For me, personally, it is interesting to note that this number was short of the 36% average for other MMOs (Yee, 2017). I have my own suspicions regarding that number as we were midway through the Legion expansion but I will spare you the details. In other games, women made up 27% of Assassin's Creed players, Dragon Age: Inquisition clocked in with 48% of it's population as female gamers, and Star Wars: The Old Republic rounded out at 29%. It also seems that women prefer High Fantasy MMOs over Sci-Fi MMOs and while men tend to game for competition and motivation, women tend to game for completion and fantasy (Yee, 2017).
You may be asking yourself why any of this matters.
The answer is simple, when your supply (gaming) does not meet your demand (women), you have a shortage. In a world where gaming is expected to be a $219 BILLION industry in 2024 (Krishna, 2022) a shortage is not good for anyone. So what exactly is the point of this article? That's simple too. Girls do game. We may play for different reasons. We may want different things. But we can be just as good (and sometimes better) than our male counterparts. Wouldn't it be nice if we were just acknowledged and treated as such.
References:
(Yee, Nick. 2017) Beyond 50/50: Breaking Down The Percentage of Female Gamers by Genre. https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/#comments
(Clement, J. 2022) Distribution of Video Gamers in the United States from 2006 - 2022, By Gender. https://www.statista.com/statistics/232383/gender-split-of-us-computer-and-video-gamers/
(Yokoi, Tomoko. 2021) Female Gamers Are On The Rise. Can The Gaming Industry Catch Up?https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomokoyokoi/2021/03/04/female-gamers-are-on-the-rise-can-the-gaming-industry-catch-up/?sh=2ba81425f9fe
(Krishna, Swapna. 2022) How Indian Female Gamers Are Driving the Growth of the Industry. https://now.northropgrumman.com/how-indian-female-gamers-are-driving-the-growth-of-the-industry/
(Women in Games. 2023) History (HerStory). https://www.womeningames.org/about-us/
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