What’s all this casual gaming about?
To some it boils down to the differences in men and women. There is no denying that more than half of casual gamers are female, maybe more than 2/3 or even as much as 3/4. So do casual games tell us what women are like?
A good series of books on the differences between men and women are the `Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus` books. I learned quite a bit from these about how we differ in our needs, our perceptions, our way of behaving, our emotional style, etc.
I’m generalizing here, but one major point I learned from the books is that women have a much longer, gradual, smooth and stable emotional life. They don’t just suddenly decide to do something and then do it on the spot. They build up to things, and only when they’ve built up to something and reached the peak of that buildup, only then do they start to actually do the thing they were building up to, and they don’t just suddenly launch into it, they gradually ease into it. And they don’t just change to something else once they’ve done that thing, they gradually ease out of it.
A woman might be talking in such a way that men might think means they’ve completely moved on from something, when in actual fact it is just one step along the road. Women might sound like they are apologizing only to still continue to tell you the ways you did something wrong afterwards – because they really haven’t finished moving through the emotions yet. They take longer and their responses along the way come in spurts, not all at once. And when they finally really have moved on, they *really have moved on*, and are in a different place now, where the past topics are irrelevant. Women can’t stretch to being ready before they are, or to going backwards a significant distance.
Women flow and blend and transition gradually and over longer periods of time. A woman needs time to get ready for things. It’s not so much that there is a need to spend 15 hours getting ready to go out, but that time is needed to get ready emotionally for being at the point where they can let go of what came before and ease into what is to come.
You can’t shock a woman either, with sudden abrupt changes or something unannounced. They are more easily startled. They tend not to be or to like aggression or violence because those things epitomize sudden change. A woman is typically more sensitive to change and experiences small subtleties as if they are big changes, requiring a gradual progression of subtle change in order not to be overwhelmed.
Also because women tend to build up to things, you have to be aware of when they have built up to something and are ready, because if you then delay or hold them back it is just as frustrating for them as trying to push them before they are ready. When they are on the money and it’s time to go go go, it really is time, right now. They can neither stall easily when they are ready, nor speed up to become ready before it is time. Women have an intrinsically enhanced sense of when is the right time, and pretty much anything that men would like tends to be too sudden, insensitive and rejecting.
A man can make a decision to do something on the spot and then do it immediately. For example, I can suddenly decide I am ready to go to bed right now, in the shortest most efficient time possible, simply climb into bed and go to sleep. Now. Not later. Not in 30 minutes. Men do not need time to build up to something. They go immediately and directly right to the subject at hand. While women prefer a gradual, subtle, indirect form of communication, which gradually expresses the full emotional content over time, men cut to the chase.
When a woman says it is time for bed, that means it’s time to start easing into bed, and it could take half an hour or more of gradual rituals and talking and progression – what seem like little distractions, little chores, little things that must be done, such that even when in bed it still isn’t time to sleep yet, and even when seeming to have decided to sleep, that still isn’t the end of it. It just takes time. This isn’t a bad thing at all, it’s just very different to how men are.
With men, efficiency and quickness and action and intensity and suddenness and skill and decisiveness are all important. Whether it be social stereotyping or genetics or evolution or whatever, men and women are just wired differently.
Typical game makets in the past catered largely to younger males needing lots of stimulation and action and utilization of skill. These games are still popular today, but it isn’t just men that games are being targetted at. These kinds of games are not popular with most women. They are too rough, too violent, too competitive, too fickle, too disturbing, too shallow and too unemotional. The female audience is quite a different breed.
So now we have this movement towards what is being called `casual gaming`, although if we really be honest about this, for the most part it really should be just called `games for women`. Yes, there are some parallels between women and `being casual`, but you could both say that a) it’s not just about being casual – it’s about catering for women, and b) it’s not just about catering for women, it’s about being casual.
I think that right now there is still much confusion amongst a predominantly male game-development community, as to what it is that women want and like. I think there are many unfair stereotypes out there, trying to guess at what women would like or what they are into, treating them as a weaker sex or belittling their intelligence. Of course, some people are doing a great job of respecting the other gender, but I think there is still room for improvement.
Let’s look at the ways in which the `casual` analogy maps to how women operate. Due to a woman’s more gradual approach to preparedness, you could say that it would be unwise to create a game for women that requires them to master the game quickly, or that pushes them too fast. This can and has led many to think that we should therefore slow the game progress down, ease off on the pressure, and make the entire game `more relaxed`. But I think this is missing the point.
Women don’t necessarily have to feel relaxed all of the time, it’s just that they take longer to get ready for something, to build up to it. If we just generalize by saying that women’s games must be relaxed and undemanding, we are sort of hitting part of the mark but not knowing why.
Yes a women’s game needs to ease into things and introduce things over time and not require too much difficult skill early on, but that is only because they need that extra time to adjust. Once they have adjusted, you can keep building up the intensity. But this is what many casual games don’t do. They just assume that women would prefer not to be pushed so they never push at all. Making the entire game `more relaxed` and `less involved` and `easy to put down at any time` doesn’t necessarily associate with how women operate.
When a woman is ready to put a game down, she really is ready, having built up to that readiness, and the game should be able to stop right there and then with no questions asked. This is why it is important to be able to pick up and put the game down at any time, not necessarily a short space of time. We know that despite casual games being exitable at any time, many peoply play them for many minutes or even hours at a time. Some surveys have reported an average playing time of between 45 and 90 minutes. So obviously it’s not a matter of the game having to be unvinvolved enough that women can let it go at any time, it’s more a matter of catering for the emotional changes over time.
There are some stereotypes that seem to cater to what women want. That is, that the game should be simple – simple supposedly means a woman can start off slowly, doesn’t have a steep learning curve, and can adjust to it more gradually. Okay, so simple is good to begin with, but does this really mean that *eventually* the game could become complicated and women could still master it just as well as men? Sure, women need to be able to stop playing when they’re ready to move on to something else, but does this have to mean the game has no depth? Or is there not enough time for women to get involved to a depth before they want to do something else?
Another sterotype is that a women’s game should require minimal skill. Women are quire capable of doing things requiring skill. It’s just that perhaps they need more time to complete the skill, so intense vigorous reactions to incoming spaceships is too intense. It’s not so much that women can’t think fast enough, but that they need that extra time emotionally to flow along with what is occuring. They can still perform skills that aren’t so urgent.
I think women are also better than men at multitasking. A man can focus on one thing at a time, whatever is in front of him – that one track mind. He can be right in the action, in the moment, but is not so good at being aware of a bigger picture, or in being able to juggle lots of things at once. I think that women, with their greater range of emotion and awareness of a bigger picture, are better suited to multitasking.
I think this may be why the hidden object games are doing so well – you have to be sort of aware of the whole image at once, able to pull out of the image objects that seem to be hiding, as if searching the whole image in one go. A man would methodically search through all separate parts of the image, trying to cover the ground as efficiently as possible, whereas a woman might be more inclined to subtly sense, intuitively, that *several* object might be in a given area at the same time. Women are great at noticing the subtle. If a hidden object game did not allow you to see the whole image at once, perhaps it would not be so great for women, or if it relied on spacial comparisons which is something men excel at.
There are other types of casual gamers, for sure, I mean, there’s still people who play a quick-to-pickup game in their lunch or break time, games that you can just dive right into and have a quick one, two or three games.
Such *accessibility* provides an open door to make it easier for a game to be a viable choice when there isn’t much time. After all, games are competing for time with many other things in our lives and if you don’t make your game seem playable because `you have to sit down and think about it`, or you can only play it `when you’re in the mood` or `when you’re ready` or `when you’re not so busy`, then those are closed doors to your audience.
So I think overall there is something to be said for the analogy of a game being `casual`, but I also think that a lot of this has to do with how women think and feel and move through life. It’s just not a matter of making a game that some guy would want to play for 15 minutes at lunch, make significant progress, learn lots of skill and come back and restart at the exact same level. Women can’t do that so well. Men can pick up right where they left off because their emotions don’t need to build up to the same level again. For men it’s more a case of `I’m here right now, let’s continue`, whereas for women it’s more like `I need some time to get my bearings and remember where I was`.
I think this is why we tend to try to think that women want a `casual` game, because it sort of closely matches the kind of design choices that are going to have to be made to allow a women to accept a game into her life and have it not step all over her sensitibilities. But it’s not JUST about making the game casual, they should be *casual for a reason*, and that reason is NOT just to `get more people to be able to play it in a shorter space of time without having to get too involved`. Don’t forget about the women!
Perhaps if we create our games to be `like women`, this will suit women better. Perhaps if we stop trying to guess what they would like and actually ask them or learn about them, this would help in our game design. Perhaps then we can better produce games which women actually enjoy and can relate to. A game for a guy is a whole different animal than one for a woman and I think the `casual games industry` is still learning about these differences.
Yes, we need to ease off on the male-style presentation in games. It might be cool and impressive sudden-gratification eye-candy for a guy to see a snazzy game logo burst onto the scene with dazzling graphics and particle showers. But this is going to be out of place for a woman if it was not built up to previously, and also if what comes afterwards is not similar in its style and intensity. Women need some warning, some time to get ready. Focussing on smooth gradual progression, subtle nuances, a blended unified kind of presentation, will help women to feel more comfortable and safe.
I think women’s games also need to be less specific. For a guy it would be appropriate to create some alien spaceship which you have to accurately and skillfully target with your impressive manly weaponry, but for a woman this just doesn’t meet their needs. If less emphasis is placed on individual pieces of the game standing out noticeably, and more emphasis is placed on gradual changes in the combined overall `feel`, with contributions from a variety of parts working together, then women are going to be happier with it.
Remember also that women are not so competitive. Men identify themselves with rigid well-defined boundaries, perceive territorial threats in each other, and avoid displays of emotion between each other lest it conflict with their sense of rigid manly identity. For women it’s different, women connect with each other emotionally and in other forms of communication. They aren’t so afraid of losing a sense of identity if they blend in with others. They see others as more connected to themselves, and therefore not as tightly confined to separate identities.
Women also do not fight so much with each other in the same way that men do. Men would `get it over with` in a few swift punches, whilst women are much more indirect. Another good book to read is `In the company of Women`, which talks about the way that women interact and how they solve problems and how they deal with conflict etc.
Women can be very indirect with each other. They don’t just confront each other or work through disputes face to face. That’s too intense and too immediate. Instead, women resolve issues very indirectly, behind the scenes, talking to other people about it, gaining a sense of support or power from those who agree with her. In its worse forms this leads to backstabbing, and sometimes I’ve seen this become quite nasty.
To a man this all seems silly, when it’s so obviously the lack of direct honest confrontation that would seem to be able to resolve the dispute swiftly, maybe accompanied by some fists. But women just don’t do things that way, and game designers need to be aware of this.
When a woman is not happy about some other person or issue, perhaps they did something wrong in the game, instead of obviously blasting or punishing them for it directly, there needs to be a more indirect side-effect to the event. And it needs to be something that can be worked through *over time*. You can’t just knock them back a significant distance – that’s too much change too quickly.
This is why casual games try to focus on being supposedly `more forgiving`. The real reason why we are trying to be more forgiving is because if we aren’t softer we will push women away. But maybe this is a man’s solution to women, and maybe women can actually deal with repercussions and conflicts but just not all at once. Maybe reducing the impact and the size of the repercussion is merely shrinking it, when we could be `spreading it around` in a way that is still appropriate for the degree of the problem but able to be accepted and worked through at a woman’s pace and in ways she is familiar with.
The structure of a game for women has to be designed around how she would operate in real life. I think game developers, which to be honest are almost entirely male (because this is primarily something that men really are suited to doing), have to become more aware of how women are different and what their needs are and then from that understanding we can look at all the ways that up till now we have just been creating `guy games` without realising it.
With a predominantly male developer community, making games predominantly for men, without really stepping outside of their own gender identity, we have for a long time just assumed that all games have the same kind of features, the same kind of presenatation style, the same attractions that men like, the same focus on skill and action and eye candy, but this is no longer the case. We’ve branched out into the wider audience, the audience that includes women, mainly, and this calls for a thorough re-examination of what we always assumed was `what games are like`.
We also need to stop our blind stereotyping of women through games, whereby we think that throwing a bunch of `cuteness` at them is going to appeal to them. Cuteness might appeal to them but just making everything pink and trying to make the game theme be ultra feminine is not necessarily a mastery of women’s needs.
We also should stop associating all women’s games with games for children. Yes there are some similarities between making things more emotionally appreciative for women, and more caring towards children, but women are not children. Making a game cuter and friendlier and less violent does not necessarily mean that we’re really appreciating a grown woman’s capabilities and preferences. Some children are boys, remember – there are differences between boy games and girl games just as much as between men, women and children in general.
We as men really are being patronizing to women by thinking that they will just love our idea of what they want, which surmounts usually to beauty, fashion, chocolate shops, being social, and not doing anything too complicated. Women are not idiots and there is more to their interests and capabilities than these loose generalizations. Yes, it’s probably a good idea to have a sense of what a woman likes – jewellery, clothes, makeup, bla bla bla, but to just make everything in the game revolve around these cliche’s is more of a `guys idea of what women want` than to understand where they’re really coming from.
Whether we call them casual games or games for women, one thing is for sure and it’s that if we want to be successful in the casual games industry then we need to understand women better and cater to their style. I think it is still early days for this area of the games industry and there is still more to be learnt and explored.
Pardon me!