There's an interesting article here that discusses three main reasons that girls get out of gaming as they age.  The first is disqualification where gamers view games such as simulations,narratively forced games or ones that deal with emotions as non games.  They are viewed as boring or too easy to play so they are not "true" games

The second is the social hierarchy that perceived games as belonging to boys only.  Girls feel like they are unfairly judged by guys if they see them as gamers.  Either they are just sex objects or that weird girl in the corner who has no friends.

The third reason is marketing.  Marketing, like Kate Upton's breasts, are seen everywhere, but where are the advertisements that appeal to females?  Where is the marketing for narratively focused games?

It's certainly an interesting read.  What do you guys think?  Should the industry change or shift? Is it impossible to do since the industry will almost surely follow the money (games with guns, burly men and half naked chicks)?

My sister was sort of a gamer through me but she only ever played a handful of games.  No, that wasn't true to begin with.  I guess to begin with she played most of the same games I played.  Like on our Chinese knock-off Atari 2600 we both played all the games we had.  She was better than I was at a large number of those.  She also liked quite a few games on our Chinese knock-off NES like Super Mario Bros. and some space shooters etc.  As she got older she lost interest but there were still certain games which had an irresistible draw on her.  For example she confescated my gameboy for months to play nothing but Tetris.  I could never beat her high scores either.  After that the games I played just looked too complex and/or too violent or scary to her so she kept losing interest more and more.  The only game she asked me to have a go after that and which she got into quite a bit (until she started a family etc) was Guitar Hero.  She quite enjoyed that and asked me to play quite often but she never got too good at it.  She didn't enjoy playing anything harder than the medium setting for most tunes.

Any other female gamers I met were also mostly gamers by proxy because of their boyfriend/husband/brother etc.  These are just my observations.

More female developers are the answer like the Skies of Arcadia all woman dev team.

Try her on New Leaf?

The only thing I'll read with the word "unlearn" in it is Shakespeare.

Marketing is the least of the concern. I mean who ever complained about not being marketed to?

Many women have "gamer" brains and will continue on, just as male gamers do.

I do see however how it would be difficult to relate to an industry that is predominately male focussed, and when it is focussed on women it is only in a navel gazing manner (just like that article).

Imagine if a hobby was simmilarly obsessed with how gay gamers thought about gaming etc... It'd me not only weird, but patronizing.

apologize if any of this comes off as overly negative, I have limited time to type.

Good point GG, a lot of what is considered to be male attitude, historically channeled through warfare and later competitive sports, can be easily simulated in videogames.  Many feminine interests are much less competitive and thus harder to fit into the mold of what a videogame is/should be.  But look at things like WiiFit and Brain Training.  Those games transcended gender and age because they didn't lean heavily on competition or graphic depiction of violence.  But many didn't see those as being true games, adding to the articles argument that games are 'a boys thing'

But Aspro makes a good point too, or at least he might have if he had had more time to type it out.  There are many female gamers as well, who play the same kinds of games we do (well, not me, I mainly play non-violent kiddy stuff).  However, that is seen as atypical, not because of how those women feel about it themselves, but because society doesn't agree that being overtly competitive is a trait that fits with how women are perceived to be in our society.  Perhaps if society in general would acknowledge that women can be just as competitive as men, women in games would be portrayed more accurate and lifelike and less as sexualised objects out of economical beliefs.  Overly curvacious temptresses could scare away a large portion of the market, ie. the female gamers.  But that's a vicious circle really.

As for comparing this to 'gay gamers', I think that doesn't hold water.  Gay people have been ignored in games up to a point in time where being gay had already been more or less accepted in the western world.  So they have not been subjected to being depicted in a cartoonesk way.  They were either not included in games at all, or were depicted as normal people, who just happen to be gay.  Which is exactly what they are.

My sister played games I played the only games I played that my sister didn't like where RPGs but she did play Fable 3 since it came with her sons Xbox 360.

My mother the only games she use to play were 2D Platformers and Puzzle games. The main reason she quit was the transition to 3D. The latest game my mother played was Rock Band.

According to most statistics plenty of women play videogames, so some of the posts in here seem a bit weird to me, and ignore the games they play and the women themselves. If we want to act like mobile gaming, facebook games etc. do not exist, then maybe that's part of the problem of not being inclusive.

I also disagree with the premise that Triple A gaming and the lack of female creators is an issue in this context. Triple A developers make games for a different market to facebook, casual, browser and mobile game creators. There's no need for either market to change, if everyone is in fact getting their share of content; if from slightly different places. That said, if there was a wider range of Triple A content there would be less segregation, but it wouldn't necessarily make a huge impact on how many women play videogames. Just how many we see playing videogames.

Female content creators being a requirement to make entertainment attractive to females is false: the vast majority of female-focused media that is successful with females in any medium (including gaming) is not created by women. There are plenty of reasonable reasons to want more female content creators, but this (creating a product attractive to women) isn't one of them, and discounts the creative abilities of both men and women: Amy Hennig writes great stories and characters for stereotypical men.

gamingeek said:

Mobile games are of poor quality. Is it okay for people to play shit because it's cheap and easy to access, with no bearing on its quality? At least buy a portable FFS. Anyway this thread is about women who used to game who now don't, either at all or not as much. It's not just about measuring the number of females playing smartphones and saying: see, no problem?

The triple A part could have been worded better, as it does appear to be ignoring the point of the thread. However, my broad point is this: you say you want more women involved in the videogaming community. Well, women are playing games. Some of them probably even played games that you wouldn't dismissively refer to as "shit" when they were girls, but no longer do. Given there are a lot of women playing games, rather than trying to alter an already successful market, wouldn't it be a whole lot easier (probably just as hard in reality, but at least you could actually practically try to do it) to simply try and include those people in the community? This is actually directly addressing one of the points raised in the OP: "The second is the social hierarchy that perceived games as belonging to boys only." I mean, that statement in and of itself is defining games as something extremely limited, and therefore excluding many women who play videogames.

The creators bit directly relates to the thread. I don't believe it would help matters much at all. The women in Triple A gaming make games marketed towards men. It wouldn't make any difference if all of them were women. They still want successful careers and money with as little risk as possible like anyone else.