As GIRLS play into the WII hours

It's Wii night at the Burguieres house in Bethesda, Maryland. On the living room TV, virtual versions of Jan Burguieres and her twentysomething daughters Ally, Elizabeth and Tory are playing baseball via the Nintendo system atop the set.

It used to be that this all-woman crew wouldn't fit the standard image of the video game consumer.

But the perception of gamers as mostly men isn't true anymore. Women and girls make up 40 per cent of the gamer population, according to the Entertainment Software Association, the video game industry's trade group.

The Burguieres sisters grew up playing video games. Ally, a 25-year-old grad student working on a PhD in linguistics at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, says she sometimes felt shut out as a kid when boys started to play or talk about video games.

But she says that may have changed, thanks to the widespread appeal of the Wii and music games such as Guitar Hero.

“Women are now being treated as members of the gaming community,'' she says. “In my generation and before, girls didn't feel accepted.''

For years, the video game industry spent its marketing dollars on trying to get guys excited about the latest sports or shoot-'em-up title.

It was generally assumed that women and girls weren't interested.

Changing times

But this started to change in 2004, says industry analyst Michael Pachter, who works for the investment firm Wedbush Morgan Securities, when Nintendo launched its DS portable game system, named for its dual screens.

Its features stretched the notion of what a video game is — and who might want to play it.

In an early DS game, players took control of a virtual puppy. To pet it, players rubbed the touch-sensitive screen; to train the dog to sit, players spoke into the device's built-in microphone.

Nintendogs was a hit with both genders and suggested to the industry that it was time to take note of games that appealed to a wider audience.

“That's when we started to get more girl-oriented games,'' says Pachter. “Before that, there had been the occasional Britney Spears game but they weren't marketed much.''
Today, half of DS users are female, according to Nintendo.

Game publisher Ubisoft has been courting this market with games designed to appeal to girls between 6 and 14. Themes for those titles include figure skating and fashion design.

Helene Juguet, senior director of marketing at Ubisoft, says the company is still learning how best to appeal to girls. She believes one day the distinctions between what the company offers as “girl'' games and the rest will fade.

Blurring boundaries

Could be. Some girls and women are already picking up the game controller and trying out titles that are usually thought of as strictly for guys.

Virtual-world games have always had more women players than other games, says Yvette Nash, who works as an international producer at the game studio EA Mythic based in Fairfax, Virginia.

That's because they are as much about collaborating or just hanging out as about going on adventures.

Having a diverse group of players can improve missions. “When you have a healthy mix of guys and girls, it helps with the tactics,'' Nash says. With women on the team, “there's a lot more of ‘have we thought this through?'''

One of the final frontiers for women and gaming might be those competitive online action games in which players try to blow up, or “frag'', their adversaries.

The tone of the trash talking in these games can scathe even the most thick-skinned player — guy or girl. So Microsoft, with its Xbox 360, has started a club where women can play together online, away from the testosterone-fuelled chatter common in matches for action games.

It's a “kiddie pool'' for girls and women who enjoy playing but want a more relaxed environment, says Christa Phillips, 39, better known in the Xbox online community by her handle “Trixie''.

Aggressive challenge

Outside the kiddie pool, some serious women gamers are starting to take on men in a growing number of tournaments that pit the best players against each other.

Morgan Romine, 27, a resident of Irvine, California, is the captain of a Ubisoft-sponsored all-female gamer team called Frag Dolls and plays shooter titles such as Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for several hours a week to stay sharp.

At this point, she is used to hearing guys tell her to “get back into the kitchen'' or worse when she battles online — but
it just makes her play more aggressively.