General Discussion

CNN.com has this article running in their technology area about women gamers and about how more and more are joining school programs focusing on game development / design.

(CNN) -- On a Tuesday night in a San Francisco nightclub, Torrie Dorrell makes a very personal revelation to the gathered crowd: "I'm a full-on gamer, and my husband hates me."

"Cassie" is one of the characters who occupies the online world of "The Agency."

In fact, Dorrell spends so much time gaming, she has risen to the level of "officer" in a "guild" playing "EverQuest 2" online.

More and more, husbands and boyfriends are playing second fiddle to computers and consoles as 38 percent of gamers are female, spending an average of 7.4 hours a week playing, according to the Entertainment Software Association.

Dorrell isn't just one of these female gamers, she also works in the industry. As the senior vice president of global sales and marketing for Sony Online Entertainment, she has made a career out of her passion for games.

"Women are out there in significant numbers playing MMOs, action games, first-person shooters," Dorrell explains. "What is lacking in the equation are women behind these games."

In an effort to balance that equation, Dorrell and her colleagues at SOE have created G.I.R.L., Gamers In Real Life, a scholarship program to attract more young women to careers in game development.

"Go to any video game convention and it appears quite obviously that there are more men than women in the industry," says Courtney Simmons, public relations director for SOE, who helped spearhead the G.I.R.L. program at the company's San Diego headquarters.

Click here to read the entire article.

I don't like this topic. I remember 20 pages long "why men play girls" on wow's forums and stuff like that. In my opinion this can only end in a sexist debate.

 I lol at mainstream news sources when they report on games.

 Female gamers will come when they want to but you won't see a mas samount of them until video gaming is mainstream I think but we'll see what happens.

I'd be willing to bet there are more hardcore female gamers out there than people think, simply because we don't feel the need to scream to the world:

"Hey I'm a hardcore female gamer!"

Before I married my husband I usually put at least 40 to 60 hours a week into gaming on top of a full time job, now I still put in a good 15 to 20 hours a week into gaming on top of raising 2 kids and taking care of my husband, fortunately for me, my husband is also pretty heavy duty into gaming.  We have an agreement I don't do anything during the day when I'm home with the kids that I can't get up and walk away from the computer/Xbox 360 to take care of the kids for, and I don't play anything rated above Teen on the Xbox 360 because of the kids when they are up.  I enjoy the challenge of gaming and I have a blast at it, I play a lot of different stuff, I play WoW, SWG, HGL, Cabal, Diablo II, Halo 3, Orange Box, Lost Odyssey.. those are the games I am playing right now, there are more that I would love to play as well.  I enjoy playing Rock Band with my husband that I am really really bad at that one.  Even our 2 and 5 year olds play video games on the computer and the Wii, though I don't let the touch the Xbox 360 yet .

Originally posted by pussaykat

I don't like this topic. I remember 20 pages long "why men play girls" on wow's forums and stuff like that. In my opinion this can only end in a sexist debate.

hmmm... funny you would pull the sexist card with a name like yours .. just an observation

Originally posted by Billr00

Originally posted by pussaykat

I don't like this topic. I remember 20 pages long "why men play girls" on wow's forums and stuff like that. In my opinion this can only end in a sexist debate.

hmmm... funny you would pull the sexist card with a name like yours .. just an observation

oh yeah... forgot about that.

EDIT: Technicly that name was 99% kitty and 1% trolling. I love my cat.

I heard a term once for female gamers,  while I so not agree with it,  it is a term out there.   Female gamers = Unicorn, wow they are attractive an alluring,   if you get to close, they will gore you to death.

Whil;e I do not agree with that, I have found many female gamers that hold there own and I am willing to group with anytime,  it is an old term that is out there,

The female gamer topic has been talked to death.  In my family we are 5 female gamers to 2 males.  Women gamers are not the mythical holy grail. 

What I do like to seeing in this article is the drive to put more women behind the games.  So many games I'd like to play but hate being forced to play the hero of the adventure as a male character.  Look at the newest Star Wars game coming out with that great technology, all the vids showcasing the leaps in technology, and yet a player has no choice but to play the main character, the hero of the story, as a male.  90% of the single player games are written for the males to play male characters.  I think the only good famous game that forced anyone to play a female character was Tomb Raider.  

Originally posted by E1io

 I lol at mainstream news sources when they report on games.

 here's the giveaway: On a Tuesday night in a San Francisco nightclub...

On Tuesday nights a Real Gamer would be hunched over their keyboard on a Raid, not at some club.

I question her credibility when she says she's a Real gamer.

I guarantee ye, as the Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing for Sony Online Entertainment she has ZERO time to herself for Anything, let alone dozens/hundreds of free hours to spend being a serious gamer. 

Likely this guild she's an 'officer' in is one of those in-house Staff guilds that are mandatory for management and she's on the roster as one of the officers along with the VP of Shipping and Receiving and a bunch of other execs who've never logged in after character creation.

Mostly this was a sales and marketing PR job given to CNN to say "I'm a female senior executive at a big name company and I play games".  Nice message if you're trying to pump up game sales (which duh is what the senior sales and marketing VP would do) but it's not necessarily the truth.