The Great Divide

I loved Clint's article, actually. I thought he was pretty correct in a lot of the parallels he drew with Viking culture, and if we don't stop being expansionist and set down roots and start including more people in our community, we're going to continue excluding [consumers]. I think to some degree that's true, and that's what's starting to happen right now.

Well, we get a lot of press because it's a good story, and that press draws... any girl that's interested in the industry is gonna figure that out and contact us. But it is as it's always been: the hardest ones to find are programmers... I think 47 per cent or something, the number of women in the Eighties in computer science, and that hasn't done anything but steadily decline. So that's a huge problem.

And game designers now. I mean, game design is changing, but traditionally, forget about it, it was a problem finding either males or females who were good, because it's a totally esoteric skill. "Do you play a lot of games? Can you deconstruct them in your head to some degree? Alright, you're hired."

So now there are schools, and a number of good ones in Vancouver, that are outputting game designers. And I talk to a lot of their girls, grab a coffee probably two or three times a week, and they all come to me and say, "You know what I discovered in game design school? I discovered I'm an excellent project manager." And I say, "Forget about it. We're all good project managers. Go for design, go for design, go for design. You will be sought after. Figure it out; figure out what girls want and go for design."

So we're starting to see an up-swell in that. But the other thing is that the ones we do find are dedicated. I mean Jesus Christ, you have to be tenacious to have stayed in it and learned the skill well, right?

I don't think there's a complete absence, but the mechanics that women intuitively dig are non-obvious. I think that's the thing that everyone is struggling with the most. For sure, narrative always comes up; women love a good story, they love a good narrative punch alongside the game they're playing. So there are things we already know.

When you look at the visceral thrill of shooting and what it gives men, looking for the equivalent of that in women is non-obvious

Kirsten Forbes

But, again, when you look at the visceral thrill of shooting and what it gives men, looking for the equivalent of that in women is non-obvious, and I believe it's going to be more subtle. I believe women, just through evolutionary traits, deal in subtleties. Our survival skills are not about getting rid of the enemy; our survival skills are much more complex than that. And in my life I've worked with a ton of women and a ton of men, and I can tell you that the women are more difficult. They are.

I use persuasion as an example. That's something women are incredibly good at: persuading people with our words and our thoughts and our bodies... and how do you translate something like that into a mechanic? If that's something that we're good at and gives us a visceral sense of satisfaction, then how do we turn it into gameplay?

Whereas shooting. I don't think guys stumbled on shooting in the videogame industry and were just like, "Oh, lo and behold!" I think it was completely clear from the beginning - that was the killer thing to do, right? Yeah, and the nature of modern gaming devices and how connected they are does open up opportunities for some of these new, more social qualities to form the basis for gameplay.

I think there are different levels to what you can offer, and what we've seen is a fairly superficial offering where, in the absence of truly understanding what women want in terms of game mechanics and connection, what we're getting is a female wrapper around a game that's really designed for men. And with some degree of success: I think the best example that I'm aware of is Sorority Life, which was in fact a Mafia game that was rebuilt in a number of weeks and shipped with some pink fluff and some blonde chicks and it's done reasonably well.

But while that works to some degree it's not going to, in my estimation, really build the gaming community, and really contributing to that aspirational goal of finding out what it is that women connect with when they game. I love the way Kristen describes it, which is when you feel like a rockstar because you've nailed the game. What is it that we can deliver that will make women and girls feel that way? More than just appealing to them with what I feel is quite a superficial solution.

I mean, thank goodness for Facebook for opening a lot of women's eyes to some form of gaming. It's almost like training grounds that we'll benefit from as we innovate on it.

And if there's this mythical checklist of things that women connect with, then certainly some of those games are checking off some of those boxes, right? It's just that there's a whole bunch of other boxes that haven't been explored that thoroughly and haven't yet been checked off.

Well, I'll tell you one thing, we don't want to contribute to the construct that there's some big gender divide in videogames. We're very careful about that, and the way we handle that is we go incredibly vertical, and age is an enormous differentiator - probably bigger than gender. So we take vertical slices of the audience that are very carefully defined: 14 to 16 year-old girls who own an iPad, who are on Facebook 3 times a week, who have this amount of disposable income, and this kind of education, etc, etc. And that's where you really start to narrow down with the mechanics.

One common denominator that has been observed in women - and this is not to the exclusion of men, it's just something we see in women all the time - is the desire for their gaming and their entertainment to have practical applications in the real world. For all elder people, particularly, the idea of exercising your brain and memory games is very compelling.

Or in someone else's life. The ability for a game to have some kind of positive outcome that carries on is really compelling for women in that age group as well.