Trigger Happy
industry as a whole is not meeting their needs and not taking their interests and preferences into account. Given the enormous buying power that women have and will continue to have, this is a shortsighted mistake,” according to one writer.40
So what kinds of games do women prefer? The Japanese women polled preferred games with good characters—the lovable personalities of Crash or Parappa. But since many men also liked these games, we can really infer nothing about the difference between men and women. The informational arrow is pointing the other way: it tells us about the commercial success of certain aesthetic decisions made by game designers themselves. A game with good characters could appeal to everyone; but a game with characters that are bad (boring, unlikeable, stereotyped) won’t on this evidence appeal to women any more than it does to men.
So what of future developments? By far the most radical suggestion is that those women polled by CESA simply seem to have some higher—and at present unfulfillable—expectations. This is borne out by the survey section entitled “The Image of Desired
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40 Doctor K, of the Website for female videogamers, http://www.womengamers.com/.
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