The Fairer Sex and Playing Games

News - Girls, girls, girls - why exactly don't you play nicely with the boys?

The fairer sex has always been a mystery to me, ever since that day in year seven when, along with all the other boys in the class, I was ordered from the room. The girls were having a special talk about “women’s issues”, and we, the snot-faced, shorts wearing less intelligent half of the class were decidedly uninvited.

Today I no longer wear shorts unless absolutely necessary, and my face is clean of nasal mucus almost all of the time. Some of the Mystery of Woman, or MoW, has been cleared up, thanks in part to the pioneering effort of documentary television on the Discovery Channel. But I still don’t get one thing.

Why don’t more women play games?

Before I go on I will say this. I don’t know the answer. It is a multifactorial issue, and not one I purport to be an expert on. What I’m really hoping for here is some debate, some comment. A penny for your thoughts. So please feel free to comment on this article.

I started thinking about this issue when having a recent conversation with my sister. I remembered how, when we were younger, she loved gaming. She even had a SNES. Now she couldn’t tell an Xbox or a PS2 apart. What went wrong? She simply seemed to grow out of them – as our own Keri Stevens says, “Here the fact still remains that computer games seem to be something that girls just grow out of, like Barbies or My Little Pony.”

What my sister disliked so much about gaming was the competitive element. She hated the pressure, the emphasis on score, and the need to “beat” the game. She loved games like Zelda and Mario, because in these games there was less immediate pressure, and you could enjoy and explore the world given to you. She loathed Street Fighter 2 (my favourite game at the time), and in fact thinking back I do remember her constant whining about “giving her a chance” and “let me win, Nicky”, as I reeled off another perfectly executed dragon punch right in her face. Those were the days…