WiG 2007: The Big Game abstracts

This year’s programme looks like a real winner! It’s divided into five strands, The Big Game, Performance of Play, Situated Play/ers, Non-Games and Other Players, replete with some great papers and stellar keynotes. Here’s the lowdown on what you can look forward to in The Big Game (Thursday morning):

‘I’d like to have a house like that…’ A study of female players of The Sims.

Mirjam Vosmeer, The Big Game, University of Amsterdam

This article examines the practices of female gamers who play the videogame The Sims, and its successor The Sims 2, focusing on the motivations they have for playing, the context in which they play and their notions on the gendered nature of videogaming in general, and the way gaming might influence their digital competence. For this research project 23 face-to-face depth-interviews with female gamers between the ages of 17 and 59 were conducted, and an additional 34 female gamers were interviewed by email. It is concluded that this group of female gamers do not play the game to engage in any form of competition, or to experience arousal, but rather to relax, enjoy the specific challenge of the game and engage in a fantasy-world. They do not play for social reasons, but instead prefer to play alone. Most women have no contact with other female gamers, apart from the women they communicate with online. Through playing the game a group of participants also learned to structure information on the computer and look up things on the Internet, thus affirming the notion that playing videogames might help the gamer to develop digital abilities. We end by identifying the similarities of women’s gaming pleasures with the enjoyment they derive, according to the media studies literature, from traditional media, such as women’s magazines and soap operas.

Virtual pets: great for the games industry but what’s really in it for the owners?

Shaun Lawson, The Big Game, University of Lincoln

The virtual pet genre of computer game is often held up as a success in terms of appeal for women gamers – Nintendo recently claim (Fils-Aime, 2006) that 22% of Nintendogs owners are female compared to only 5% of players of their other early success for the Nintendo DS platform, Mario Kart (a driving game). What is undeniable is the phenomenal recent success of this genre: Nintendogs for instance has in excess of 7 million sales worldwide. This builds on other successes such as the original Tamagotchi, and the long-running Petz series. Additionally, a large number of both PC/web-based (e.g. Neopets, GoPets, MoPets) and mobile-phone-based (e.g. Kawaii Dogs and MyDog) games are appearing to thrive. Related games featuring virtual creatures – such as Viva Pinata for the Xbox 360, are even beginning to appear on console platforms.

Despite the huge commercial success of such products, fundamental, unanswered, questions remain as to the benefits, companionship, or enjoyment that users gain from owning a virtual pet. It is also unclear, for instance, as to whether different people play, or interact, with virtual pets for differing reasons. There are many recent instances of virtual pet manufacturers claiming that the ownership of virtual pets in some way provides either useful training prior to, or a long-term substitute for, the ownership of a real animal. Both claims are, at present, unfounded, and very few academic papers have examined the benefits of interacting with virtual pets. Isbister (2006) attempts to rationalise peoples’ motivations in engaging with a virtual pet and suggests that the objective is to enjoy the pet’s development as well as its moments of both connection and resistance to the player. In this way she identifies that virtual pets are relatively unique as autonomous agents since they evoke a high degree of time and emotional investment. Subrahmanyam et al (2001) discuss the shift from real life to simulation in the context of virtual pets but merely concludes that systematic research is needed to assess the impact of such technology.

Compared to the scarcity of published work in this area, there is an abundance of long-standing literature examining the benefits regarding health and social status of owning real pets (e.g. Wells (in press)). We are curious to know whether people therefore interact with virtual pets to gain some, or all, of the same benefits that are achieved by ownership and interaction with real pets, or, conversely, whether people interact with them for reasons which are completely unconnected – which would be at complete odds with manufacturers’ claims. Therefore, we are engaged in an ongoing programme of work to compare people’s perceived benefits of interaction with both real and virtual pets. This short paper describes our current findings in analysing the feelings of companionship that owners of both of both real and virtual pets have as measured by questionnaires developed for use with real companion animals. Our participants are drawn from people of both genders and different age groups. We view this work as a further step to understanding the benefits and/or enjoyment that all users might gain from owning a virtual pet.

“Add Women and Stir”: Digital Games and Gender Trouble

Eva Mueller-Zettelmann, The Big Game, English Dept, Vienna University, Austria

Since its very beginnings, digital games have been a male-dominated and male-oriented business. In the earlier years of the games industry, when the typical gamer was aged under 20 and male, game designers attempted to match their clientele’s testosterone levels by producing games high on aggression, man-to-man combat, and female flesh. Since then the industry has not only been coming of age but has also gradually been turning female.
Expanding a fast-paced industry is never an easy task – especially when there has been a longstanding concentration on a fairly small demographic segment. Studios and publishers both experience a constant pressure to create products which will generate the revenue to allow further production. To accomplish that goal, the industry is ever on the look-out for additional customers and is increasingly seen to address a large, but until recently largely unknown, target audience: the female gamer.
So, how has the industry responded to market figures which now suggest that at least one third of game players are women? With a fast-paced, consumer-oriented market such as this one, one would at least expect a serious attempt on the producers’ side to meet their potential new clients’ tastes and – on the basis of detailed market research – to develop a range of genres expressly designed to make female gamers happy. This, at least, is what the laws of the marketplace would suggest. Surprisingly, this is not quite what has happened: While some franchised games (e.g. “Barbie”) and products (e.g. Pony farm games) address younger girls, and some mainstream and family products are surprisingly popular with women gamers (“The Sims”, “World of Warcraft”), the mainstream of the games industry remains firmly focussed on the teenaged male player.

This paper analyses the conspicuous discrepancy between the behests of the market and the industry’s half-hearted response. Concentrating on the hidden cultural precepts at play, the study looks at two games in particular and, taking them as model phenomena, assesses the curious conflict between economy and culture, between money matters and questions of power and (sexual) identity.

With “Super Metroid”, the positive step towards a genuine feminisation of the game via the inclusion of a multi-talented, fully clad female heroine is sabotaged by a truly remarkable strategy of reward. For its male users, “Super Metroid” metes out visual-sexual stimulation and female objectification as a dual reward, while women gamers have to contend themselves with a dire cultural lesson: in a patriarchal context, the successful enactment of the feminine role (in this game, the affirmation of female identity is effected through aggressive hyper-activity) equals female self-objectification and -effacement.

“Die Siedler” (“The Settlers”) is a real-time strategy game which has been highly successful on the German market (it has seen 6 sequels to date). The game involves constructing a settlement, managing resources, warding off attacks and invading enemy territory. Some of its attraction lies in the simulation of hundreds of mini characters in real time. Since not a single one of them is female, it seems little surprising that fans eventually began asking for the inclusion of women characters into the game. The game’s designers responded with what can best be described as a perfect ludic rendering of Elisabeth Bronfen’s concept of “absent presence”. Taking a look behind the scenes, the paper investigates the factors involved in the producers’ peculiar decision before moving on to a general discussion of the dominance of the cultural superstructure over the economic base when questions of male identity and supremacy are perceived to be at stake.