Dissin’ the Women: How Videogame Makers Discriminate Against Female Players

I found a nice site across the pond tonight, the DigiPlay Initiative. Here’s an excerpt from their About page:

The Digiplay Initiative [is] a research collective specializing in consumer research in the areas of digital games, adoption of technologies, online well-being and intellectual property crime. It undertakes commercial and academic research as well as providing online informations services to the research community. It is made up of researchers from the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC) at the University of Manchester and The Department of Psychology at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) in the UK.

The Digiplay Initiative is led by Dr Jason Rutter over at the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition at The University of Manchester, and Dr. Jo Bryce, Director of Research at the Cyberspace Research Unit, University of Central Lancashire. The most recent journal article published by the duo is, “Not much fun: The constraining of female video gamers.” Here’s the abstract:

The growth in video gaming as a leisure practice has not engaged female and males players equally. At school age, females play video games less often than their male contemporaries and the gender differences increases with age. This paper explores the social contexts which contribute to constraining female access gaming. It highlights a ‘career’ approach to video gaming in which females are excluded from an early age, marginalized through their gaming career and have a tendency to leave video gaming earlier than males because of other constraints including time. The paper briefly suggest that some innovations in video games have a particular appeal to female gamers but that this is not a solution to female exclusion from this leisure activity.

The paper shows how game makers discriminate against female players in various ways, and includes reference to research performed by the authors, including ethnographic studies of public gaming events in Great Britain. The paper may hold insights to educational game developers regarding practices to avoid in order to maintain a more equitable playing field.

There is a considerable amount of educational gaming research material on the DigiPlay Initiative’s site. Members can submit papers that have been published elsewhere for comments and future reference, making the site a dynamic online annotated bibliography. It’s a place well worth exploring.

References
Bryce, J., & Rutter, J. (2007). Poca diversión: Las barreras de las aficionados a los videojuegos/Not much fun: The constraining of female video gamers. ADOZ Journal of Leisure Studies, 31. 97-108.