Game design and woman player

Published on September 16, 2004 By oneofus In Gaming

A white paper about woman in gaming industry (caution, 1,8 Mb PDF) Link says (among other things) that women enjoy games in a specific way.

**What a surprise! They enjoy most of the things in a different way than men - but that's another subject.**

Specifically, it says that the situations where You lose a life and irreversibly lose some abilities or achievements can force a woman to stop playing altogether. Can you not agree? There's nothing more irritating than losing a life and having to replay half an hour (or more) to come to the place where you lost it, probably not managing to get all the upgrades/abilities/coins/whatever on the way that you managed the first time.

I think it's not a "woman's way" but the problem with game design. There are games where asking a player to perfectly complete a specific sequence of moves is acceptable - I'm thinking platformers and such. But when an adventure, RPG or something of that ilk forces you to save a position only in a specific place that's just plain wrong. That sort of games should be about exploration of new locations and discovery and solving of complex problems devised by the programmers. And when You explore a place once and solve a problem the first time, the next time it's just hassle and lost time. Don't the programmers know it?

Probably they do, but if they decided to act sensibly most of the games would be much shorter and people would complain about low 'value for money'. This way, the bad players get the 'value for money' and the good players get the shorter but more enjoyable game.
And the intelligent people who are maybe not so good players get fed up and leave. Is this third group composed only of women? I don't think so.

Comments

LDiCesare

on Sep 17, 2004

I agree with you that losing too much can get one fed up with a game.
I would like to see a game where if your character dies, then the next character you create evolves in the world of the first character: Completed puzzles are completed, etc., and you will eventually find the corpse of your previous character, what killed him/her, and can try to face it again. A bit like the bone files in NetHack, but in a game with a story (if you don't know, bone files are files of the level where you died, with everything that was there - plus your ghost and some curses on what you wore).

oneofus

on Sep 17, 2004

Nice system (didn't play NetHack), but that way the player would still have to play quite a long time to get to the state he was in (abilities, equpiment etc.) when he died. And this is what I'm arguing against.

LDiCesare

on Sep 17, 2004

That's partly why I like turn based games, since you can usually (auto)save every turn, just in case of crash or stupid mistake. A game that would save the whole game history and let you restart from anywhere would be even better.

oneofus

on Sep 18, 2004

I can agree with that - and I also like turn based games. Saving anywhere could make the game much easier but it's much better than a save point every hour or so.

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