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Nintendo - Wii Got Girls. - View Post

Wouldn't surprise me, Happy. However, I do disagree with the idea that male and female gamers have largely identical tastes. It's stereotyping, but it's accurate stereotyping, to point out that girls are relatively less interested in more violent games and relatively more interested in exploration-oriented games. They tend to be less competitive and they tend to prefer environmental challenges to intelligent (that is, man vs an intelligence) challenges.

To take a rather simple example, look at two fantastic games on the same console - Mario 64 and Goldeneye. Does anyone really doubt that Mario 64 had a higher percentage of female owners than Goldeneye?

I'm not saying that female gamers don't respond to quality, and I agree that Barbie games are a result of a tremendous misunderstanding of their tastes, but there are always going to be games, even non-sexual ones, that we can sensibly speak of as targeting a male audience.

My personal understanding of this is that there are two types of games - those that appeal almost entirely to males and those that appeal to both sexes. Something like Mario 64 or Nintendogs is gender-neutral, though social factors could drive male gamers away from Nintendogs, while something like Goldeneye or Gears of War is really only going to be played by males. We don't yet have games that are more popular with women; this is mostly because men's interests go beyond women's primarily in competition, which is easy to build a game around, while women's go beyond men's mostly in social relations, which have only recently been a focus of games.