I’ve been planning this blog entry ever since I began to notice a fascinating trend after the launch of the Xbox 360.  This is how it started:

[Rhoulette’s regular conversation with a male gamer friend]

Friend:  You know what’s funny?
Rhoulette:  Tell me.
Friend:  My wife has been hogging my 360.
Rhoulette:  The same wife who has zero interest in video games?
Friend:  Yeah, that one.  She still doesn’t care about my games.  All she wants to do is play Hexic all day.
Rhoulette:  Well duh!  Hexic rocks and it has lots of pretty colors!
Friend: ... but she’s hogging my 360…

As amusing as it was to watch my friend be conflicted by this budding relationship between his wife and his 360, this instance alone didn’t scream of any growing trends.  Afterall, I know plenty of girl gamers who were first introduced to games when a boring day encouraged them to pick up their boyfriend/husband’s controller, so I wasn’t surprised to hear that one guy’s wife had taken to the 360’s Live Arcade.  But within those first two weeks of the 360 being in homes, I started to hear eerily similar tales:  “My girlfriend/wife is addicted to Gauntlet/Bejeweled/Zuma!”

After considering some of the conditions currently defining the gaming world, this evolution makes sense.  “43% of gamers are women” is a statistic that we girl gaming advocates like to throw around even though it’s explained by the existence of things like Yahoo games.  There are tons of women who love to play these delightful (and often colorful) puzzle games online.  Take that favorite genre, stick it on a console, and those women, and women like them, will naturally pick up the controller and try it out. 

Before the debut of the 360, I had wondered if the majority of women gamers played these games on the computer because of an aversion to gaming consoles (too juvenile, perhaps), or if it was simply that their favorite games were most readily available on the computer, itself being the most readily available platform.  The answer still isn’t as simple as saying that women don’t care what platform the game is on.  We aren’t yet seeing many puzzle gaming females buying consoles to play their games, but at least now we can see that the console itself isn’t an insurmountable obstacle between the average woman and gaming.  I’m building evidence for the argument that if you put a casual gaming female in front of a console that’s running a game she’ll like, she won’t be turned off of it just because it’s on a console. 

Any way you look at it, women are getting used to the idea that it’s okay to play games and there are several industry trends contributing to this progression.  Online games are turning gaming into a social endeavor, which makes any stereotypically solo-male pastime more interesting to females.  Handhelds also open the gaming market to women who are already used to carrying around their cell phones and PDAs, and being able to choose between a few different colors of GBA or DS certainly doesn’t hurt (the instinctual urge to accessorize is triggered by the pairing of X chromosomes).  And beyond converting the women who grew up thinking that games were for boys, our culture has been coloring a new generation of girl gamer who is as likely as her brother is to get a Nintendo DS for her birthday.  You can imagine my delight when a coworker of mine forwarded me these pictures of what was going on backstage at this year’s performance of ‘The Nutcracker’.

Female gamers are going to be a big part of the gaming world’s future.  In the past this declaration would have met all sorts of skepticism, but now the numbers are too real to deny.  Check out this segment from a game industry analysis that explains why 2005 was a record-breaking year:

“Another story for the year is the bigger- than -recognized female market. While our consumer data shows that males are still the biggest primary market, which is certainly important in terms of identifying a core demographic to direct marketing activity and dollars toward, our title level Hits Monitor data shows that for many titles there is a significant female audience. They may not be the primary player in a household, but they are social gamers, playing alongside their siblings, friends, significant others, or children. These gamer-moms, sisters, and girlfriends are very possibly one of the richest targets for industry growth in the coming years.”

Color me excited.  The next time I talk to my friend’s wife, I’m going to tell her to hog that 360 all she wants and if he complains she can tell him that he needs to get used to it.  Studies show that she’s the future of gaming.