Self fulfilling marketing cycle? More likely representation.
Boys (even (especially) 30-40 year old boys) are targeted by the marketing for certain titles, so they fund the vapid cycle of deinvention that comes from genre conformity and franchises.
Making a war game? Make the player feel manly. Making a fighting game? Have women in revealing clothes.
So much money is invested in this cycle that we see other game types (broadly and lazily labelled "social", "casual" etc.) as inferior, yet - with no sense of irony - we train a generation of male gamers to settle for a 6-hour session of trigger-squeezing followed by 15 months of gradually declining multiplayer repetition. Incidentally, what about stigmas for male Peggle addicts, and what exactly is not "social" or "casual" about a 10-minute burst of Halo 3 multiplayer?
Moreover, the lack of in-game representation across all non-white non-male demographic groups is a direct & logical cause of this lack of engagement, not just for females. On the other hand, social games with space to design a character, or "nurturing" games (== god sims without the warfare?) allow true first person engagement, not first/third person mimesis, and "casual" games may lack any characterisation at all; no sense of alienation, no empty vessel to fill, just a game to play.
Boys (even (especially) 30-40 year old boys) are targeted by the marketing for certain titles, so they fund the vapid cycle of deinvention that comes from genre conformity and franchises.
Making a war game? Make the player feel manly. Making a fighting game? Have women in revealing clothes.
So much money is invested in this cycle that we see other game types (broadly and lazily labelled "social", "casual" etc.) as inferior, yet - with no sense of irony - we train a generation of male gamers to settle for a 6-hour session of trigger-squeezing followed by 15 months of gradually declining multiplayer repetition. Incidentally, what about stigmas for male Peggle addicts, and what exactly is not "social" or "casual" about a 10-minute burst of Halo 3 multiplayer?
Moreover, the lack of in-game representation across all non-white non-male demographic groups is a direct & logical cause of this lack of engagement, not just for females. On the other hand, social games with space to design a character, or "nurturing" games (== god sims without the warfare?) allow true first person engagement, not first/third person mimesis, and "casual" games may lack any characterisation at all; no sense of alienation, no empty vessel to fill, just a game to play.
Read the Virtual Census (http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/5/815), don't ask an audience of game consumers. What do we know?