“All the computer games that were available at the time were of the violent type – war games and space invader types. There were no games that everyone could enjoy” – Toru Iwatani (Lead Designer of Pacman)

In 1988 Nintendo conducted a survey of their NES console’s player base in the United States of America, the results stated that 27% of the console’s users were women. This is a statistic that may not shock many people, but in order to illustrate why I think this statistic is strange, I will ask you to consider the reaction that you would have if I told you that 27% of cinema goers were women, or that 73% of Spotify users were men. This is something that I always found bizarre, while things have changed hugely since the 1980s, video games still have a strange relationship with certain demographics. A study of game playing demographics from the Pew Research Centre stated that 48% of US women reported having played a video game, but only 6% identified as a ‘gamer’, compared to 15% of men. To understand this, I believe an examination of recent history is in order, and may illuminate some interesting trends.

 

The Entertainment Software Association of Canada has conducted a study of the demographics of the Canadian video game industry for many years now, one of the statistics included is the gender ratio of game players. The percentage of female players grew steadily from the first study in 2006 until 2008, which coincides with the peak of popularity of the Nintendo Wii and DS. The Wii’s intuitive motion controls were an easy access point to a medium which had become increasingly more complicated, with the NES’ four button and directional input set up seeming quaint in the face of Sony’s dualshock controller’s pair of clickable analogue sticks, d-pad and ten buttons, excluding the home button. This is not to undersell the utility of more complex controllers, but it is worthwhile to bare in mind that for newcomers, doing what you want the character to do is far more intuitive than press F to pay respects. A 2009 article in the Telegraph estimated that there were 11.7 million women playing games on console in the United States and that 9 million played games on the Wii. A trend shared by much of North America and Europe. The same article claimed that there were 33 million male Wii users, so we may assume that the remainder of female gamers likely played games on either handhelds or on web browsers.

 

There is a noticeable decline in the percentage of women playing games between 2009 and 2011. Many may attribute this to the Wii’s waning popularity as the ‘fad’ died out, however, I would caution against under estimating the effect the 2008 financial crash may have had on the Wii’s slow decline in sales. For its casual target audience, a €250 upfront fee for a box that almost exclusively plays video games can become harder to justify with mounting financial pressures. What was required was a device that could play games intuitively, that people had to own irrespective of their will to play games.

 

2012 was a year of explosive growth for the mobile industry with Apple selling 37 million iPhones in the first quarter, compared to 17 million in the final quarter of 2011. The ESAC data correlates with this, with the gender ratio spiking to a level that has remained consistent ever since. Many people have gravitated to mobile devices free from the stigma of console game investment. On this platform more accessible forms such as the match three puzzler exemplified by Candy Crush and drop in-drop out competitive games such as Words with Friends of Mahjong have taken off. The audience for these games skew female, which aligns to mobile game’s 51-49 female to male demographics. Only games such as Clash of Clans and Castle Crash flip this demographic split. This raises the question, why are games with violent themes more popular among men and low intensity puzzle games among women? (I obviously exclude Words with Friends as that game is serious business!)

 

For the answer I am going to refer to… yes, more statistics. At first glance there would seem to be a correlation between genre and gender. A 2017 study by Nick Yee found that 69% of match-3 players were women and 93% of first-person shooter players were men. This suggests that more generic diversity could lead to greater engagement with console gaming from women. A theory as old as Pacman, which used themes of eating to distance itself from the more violent fair of its day. with Animal Crossing New Leaf, an example of the all too small slice of life genre boasting a 56% female player base on a system (3DS) with a 31% feminine install base. This is not the whole picture however.

 

While Yee’s study provides some compelling evidence for this generic split there were outliers. 48% of Dragon Age Inquisition players are  women, as opposed to the 26% average for Western Role-Playing Games. 27% of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate players are women, compared to an average of 14% for open world games. Fortnite also bugs the trends with over 27% of its audience being women compared to the 4% average for tactical shooters and 7% average for first-person shooters as reported by the Yee study. This shows another key part of building engagement. In Fortnite, players can buy skins of all genders, and if the player does not buy any skins the game will cycle through characters of varying body types genders and ethnicity. Dragon Age is a game which allows for customization of the players character including their gender, and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate features a woman as its co-protagonist. This suggests that representation is important. In video games the player embodies a character and people will tend to gravitate toward a character that they can relate to. I am not saying that all games require a gender selection option, but diversity is never a bad thing, and in a world where the ways in which gender is expressed are changing so rapidly, the ability to do so within our media can be empowering.

 

These games are some of the most popular games of our day, which shows that diversity does not impede success, but that success is a product of diversity. Whether you seek to invent a new genre like Pacman, or a new identity for ‘gamers’ such that a term that delineates between players and non-players becomes obsolete, I cannot wait to see how this medium can diversify and touch new people in the future.