It’s taken a while, but with a Wii bit of technology and some really pretty casual games, publishers and big money advertisers are gearing up for the push towards games for women. But wait a minute. Where are these women gamers?
If one can come away from the recent Blogher07 in Chicago with just one lesson, it is that when over 700 women congregate, there’s money to be made.
HUGE money.
You can tell from the swags alone how much a woman is appreciated just for being there. Fashionably green chic notebook carrying totes. Green-tea skincare products encased in a posh faux leather box. A manicure kit here. A plastic martini glass there. Aprons. T-shirts. DVDs and stickers for your children. Yogurt. A carrying case. Another duffel bag.
No IT conference in the WORLD (no, not even E3) can match the variety and quality of some of the freebies that have been given away here, all for the sake of squeezing in some mindshare, a modicum of thought from the Greatest Consumer of All Time: A woman.
I went as a Mommy Blogger because the Gamer Mom in me felt a little out of place in a sea of sundresses and espadrielles. This was, after all, a conference for women and advertising that I’d prefer to spend an hour farming for shards in the Outlands than in the passionate discourse of exclusion/inclusion politics in the blogosphere might not have earned me the many new friends I’ve since made.
Still, these are women who have come to learn how to improve their blogs’ traffic and page ranks, or in the words of Blogher co-founder Joy Des Jardins, get more ‘Google juice’. Women who have come to learn the finer points of better web design. To improve blogging efficiency through better workflow tools. Surely, most, if not all, of these women can get their geek on, at some point. And if so, they and I, Gamer Mom, are no different.
The fact that women love technology is not something the world readily accepts as truth. The business of tech, the making of it, is still considered male-dominant, and perhaps accurately so. Many people believe this of computer games as well, but this is far from the truth.
After all, even Blogher07, a blogging conference for women, has a SecondLife presence.
Seattlepi.com’s Todd Bishop’s recent coverage of Casual Connect reveals that women make up 74 per cent of the paying audience for casual games, whereas men make up only 50 per cent of the non-paying casual-gaming audience. Sure, your teenage son and his friends, your husband and his friends, may have cornered the market on Halo 2 asskicking, but that games are a male domain is fact that is rapidly becoming fiction.
The Entertainment Software Association website has some gamer data that you may be surprised – even shocked – to discover:
The average adult woman plays games 7.4 hours per week. The average adult man plays 7.6 hours per week. Though males spend more time playing than do females, the gender/time gap has narrowed significantly. Whereas in 2003, males spent an average of 18 more minutes a day playing games than did their female counterparts, in 2004 they spent only six minutes more each day doing so. Females spend an average of two hours more per week playing games now than they did a year ago.
As for online gamers, 58 per cent are male, whereas a close 42 per cent are female.
Furthermore, women age 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (30%) than boys age 17 or younger (23%).
Bear in mind these stats may be two years old or more.
If blogging, a comparatively new phenomenon when compared to gaming, can bring women together, what of casual gaming? Will a ‘GameHer’ ever be in the horizon of women-centric tech conferences , thus drawing the attention – and money – of big brands, tech and otherwise?
Only – and only if, all 74 per cent of them give credence to their hidden passion and confess to the dorky love they share, with their boyfriends and husbands and sons, for video games.
Only then, can we truly take on the world.
Filed under: Facts and figures, Gamermom says..., Gaming news and views, blogher07
