Games for Girls

or Women, if you prefer.

several years ago I came across someone else's blog, in which she did one of the classic rants about games being created by males for males, and where were the games for females?

and of course I gave the classic response of "if you want one, make one" -- that really is the surest way to bring about something you want. Complaining about it accomplishes nothing.

In the general case, this is the most classic complaint you see about most any creative/consumptive endeavor. You see it here, you see it with music, movies, magazine articles...

Magazine articles? well, for smallish, single-topic magazines...there are a few writers, they are all free-lance, which means they are not being assigned stories by the editor, they write what they want...and then there are the readers, some of whom will complain something along the lines of "why don't you publish an article about X?" because they want to read an article about X. But they don't want to WRITE an article about X, they want to read it. And of course the editor always responds "how about if you write the article about X? and then we'll publish an article about X" but the complainer doesn't want to do the writing, just the reading, and generally seems to think that the magazine has this room full of writers just waiting to be assigned a story...well, maybe big mags and newspapers work like that...but I imagine they get the same kind of complaints too :)

back to games

it turns out there is a category on Steam called "Female Protagonist" (ok, you can play Skyrim as a "female", but I've done that, and I couldn't detect any differences; I seem to recall Voyager Elite Force 1 allowed you to play as female, and you'd have a different romantic interaction with an NPC (if you chose to) than if you played as male.

So are the "Female Protagonist" games any good? There are 400 games tagged with that label (not clear how/why "Zombie Army" got tagged with "FP"). "Neon Struct" and "Toren" look good, but too many of them look sprite- or anime/manga-based ("Hyperdimension Neptunia"). "Republique Remastered" looks excellent, but it's developed by pros.

How many were created by women programmers? Does that really make a difference? (I'm expecting it would, but in what ways?)

What would you say constitutes a Game for Girls/Women? What are the criteria?

I've put a couple on my wishlist, we'll see if they go on sale during the summer "Steam sale".