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Texas Tech: Gamer Girls: More females flocking to video games
(U-Wire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge)
UWIRE-11/17/2008-Texas Tech: Gamer Girls: More females flocking to
video games (C) 2008 Daily Toreador via UWIRE
By Tina Arons, Daily Toreador (Texas Tech)
LUBBOCK, Texas -- They are female gamers, hear them roar.
Computer and video games often are considered a male-dominated
activity, but studies report an increase of gaming among females - a
trend that some researchers believe may continue as more pre-teen
female gamers continue to play as they grow older.
Mary Parnell, a senior biology major from Rowlett, said she began
playing "World of Warcraft" in middle school and has been playing since.
"I wasn't good at sports, because I'm really short," she said,
shrugging. "Gaming has strategy, and I'm better at that."
According to a 2008 report by the Entertainment Software Association,
the video and computer game communities combined consists of 40 percent
females - 2 percentage points higher than the previous year.
The report found women age 18 or older represented a greater portion of
the game-playing population than boys 17 years old and younger - 33
percent compared to 18 percent.
Parnell, who waited almost four hours in line Thursday for the midnight
release of WoW's new expansion, said she enjoys the social communities
such as guilds in massive multi-player online role-playing games.
"I don't tell people I'm a girl, because people don't care," she said.
"I'm just a member of the guild."
Celia Pearce, the Experimental Game Lab director at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, said in an e-mail that massive multi-player
online games "arose from a socio-cultural primordial soup that was
particularly heavily dominated by males.
"The first games of this genre were invented on college campuses by
computer science students who had access to mainframe computers,"
Pearce said. "These games were heavily influenced by the tabletop
role-playing culture, which is a direct descendent of war-gaming and
miniatures."
She said young male players tend to focus on achievement and combat,
while women focus on social aspects such as guild management and
community building and creativity.
Emma Foster, a sophomore dance major from Dover, Ark., said she began
playing video games with her two brothers when she was about 10 years
old.
"I always thought about gaming as an interactive book," she said. "It
takes you away from reality and social norms."
When she worked at GameStop, Foster said, her co-workers introduced her
to computer games such as WoW, which she still plays.
"At first I said no, because I didn't want it to take my life away,"
she said. "It's easy to get sucked in and disrupt my sleep time, but I
have a lot of self-control. I know when there are more important things
to be done."
Foster said she has attended LAN parties where the ratio of female to
male gamers was about one to 10, and she occasionally has met players
on WoW who do not believe she is a girl.
Sometimes she feels intimidated when male players challenge her because
of her gender, she said, but she does not feel the need to prove
herself. She plays games for the social interactions, not necessarily
the competition.
Nick Yee, a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center, studied
several aspects of gaming and found that men were 50 percent more
likely to select achievement as their primary motivation for gaming,
whereas women were about 50 percent more likely to select a social
motivation.
Foster said she enjoys video games because she can play with her
friends side-by-side. With online games she can connect with friends
who do not live close by or meet new people.
"I'm not talkative outside my group of friends, but it's easy to
socialize in games," she said. "You have the option to chime in or not."
Pearce said research suggests the real impact in terms of gender can be
found in research about MMORPGs vs. 3-D virtual worlds, which refers to
a world where avatars perform activities similar to people in the
real-world.
"Barbie Fashion Designer" was the first mega-hit in the mid-90s girl
game movement, she said, and "The Sims," with its "prolific skinning
community," has a very high percentage of female players too.
Women seem to appear in equal if not greater proportion in virtual
worlds such as "Second Life" and "There.com," Pearce said. In less
publicized games, such as the science learning environment "Whyville,"
the female players consist of 60 percent of players who are mostly
pre-teens.
Charts put together by the PlayOn group at the Palo Alto Research
Center show a disproportion between games and virtual world. WoW is
about 25 percent female, while "Second Life" is split down the middle.
"So I really think there is something significant going on when you see
the female percentage participation doubling in one genre of world over
another," Pearce said. "It will also be interesting to see if things
shift as the current generation of tweens comes of age."
##30##
((Distributed on bahalf of U-Wire via M2 Communications Ltd -
http://www.m2.com))
((U-Wire - http://www.uwire.com))
Copyright ? 2008 U-Wire
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