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DiGRA
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The authors argue that statistics showing women playing as much as men obscure important differences. They point to classification shifts that count women who play card or board games as gamers.
This paper, presented at the DiGRA 2005 conference, examines how gender shapes girls' and women's relationships to computer and video games, with particular attention to identity, access, and playful engagement. Its central thesis is that computer game-based learning initiatives risk deepening girls' existing disadvantage in computing, and that research on gaming has been too quick to dismiss gender as a meaningful variable. The authors argue that educational game design is typically treated as technologically neutral, despite the lack of attention to girls' perspectives in the development of such projects.
The authors contend that aggregate statistics showing women playing as much as men obscure important differences. They point to classification shifts that count women who play card or board games as "gamers," which allows gender to be folded into homogeneous data on players. When analyzed by genre and time spent, the data suggest men play action and role-playing games for roughly twice as long as women, indicating that video game playing remains predominantly male territory. Exceptional cases, such as the all-female Counter-Strike community highlighted in media coverage, are cited as misleading signs of progress.
The paper's empirical component is a pilot study of 36 participants, aged roughly 12 to 23 with one exception in her late thirties. The authors report that girls most often played card games, tetris-like games, gender-appropriate titles, and simple board games, typically alone, and that girls who played more masculine-coded games usually did so with male companions. Many women described their gaming as inadequate or incompetent in ways the authors view as unconvincing, and they reported stopping play around age 14. Racing games emerged as the one genre widely played across participants. The authors also note that economic factors and social context, including who asks the question and in what setting, shape the responses girls and women give about their gaming.
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