Girls and Games...

[Xanadu84]

Lets take a, "Easy" game, a friendly beginners game that is simple to pick up. WoW. Lets find a screenshot.

Spoiler

Hell, I'm experienced with the interfaces of games of all types, and even then, that screenshot just looks arcane. I mean, I've played games dating back in their original form to the 1950s, and I could work out the details piece-by-piece, but I couldn't necessarily do it quickly. That UI is a mess.

Aye, but if you've taken the time to level that character up you'll know what every single button does and where it is without thinking.
I'd agree with you if they just plonked you in a game with a hundred different spells an expected you to figure it out, but they start you off with two or three and build it up.

And that's the point. WoW is accessible to many of us because time and slow introduction to these mental heuristic has internalized how we interface with these games. This learning happens both within the game through leveling, and through a history of gameing where you adopt understanding concepts like skills, damage, mana and the like. It's much like how all of us can speak at least one language fluently, but if you look at how complex a language is to learn, it is absolutely shocking how complicated it is to do something we do without even thinking. For us gamers, WoW is like reading a Goosebumps book, we know what it is saying without much effort, and what it is saying is pretty straightforward. For a non-gamer, WoW is like a goosebumps book written in Chinese (Assuming you don't speak Chinese), the core may be straightforward, but getting at the basic tools to interpret that message is incredibly difficult. For various social reasons, women are less likely to have developed these tools. But gender is not the proximate cause.

 

[dangitall]

Just my opinion, but in parts of our society video games are still considered a "boys only" activity, especially for my Asian heritage. My peers only see boys playing video games as "normal", if a girl, a grown man, or a grown woman plays games it is not "normal", thus discouraging girls from playing games at a young age.

Everyone struggles when they pick up the controller for the first time. For girls it's still generally later than boys.

 

[purplecactus]

I'm going to add my voice to the 'it happens to everyone not familiar with the controller' crowd. Gods know the first time I picked up a PS2 controller I was all over the damned place. I thought I'd never improve, so start playing games on the PC, which I found easier. Next time I pick up a controller it's for the PS3 and while I'm still not great, I don't game on consoles regularly enough at all, I stuck at it and got better.

As most other human beings, gender aside, are apt to do.

 

[purplecactus]

-double post. Why it keeps doing that remains a mystery to me-

 

[CaptainMarvelous]

Ehh, already been explained but I feel compelled to add, I've played games since I was a teeny tiny kid, I'm friends with a girl who only started at my behest so I usually backseat game when she's got the controller.

Currently, every high-score i have on Lollipop Chainsaw she's annihilated and I'm now stuck frantically trying to work out how she's that much better at it than me.

So, think it might be context sensitive.

 

[Blow_Pop]

Just for fun I wanted to introduce my girlfriend to CoD, and she had serious coordination issues, even after playing for a solid hour. She could not move and aim at the same time or she would get too confused and end up spinning the camera around aimlessly.

I have this problem. Which is why I don't play shooters on console. I can do decently on PC since move, aim, and fire are different and don't require me to move this stick this way and this one that way and try to simultaneously hit this button. ANY game that requires me to do something like that, I can't do and I've been playing games for years. Do I think it's because I'm a woman? No, because I know women who are amazing at shooters on consoles. Do I think it's something about me personally? yes. yes I do. I also have a bit of coordination issues in Portal as well when I have to go through different portals and shoot portals whilst I'm falling to get where I need to be. But it isn't necessarily a coordination issue. My coordination outside of video games is great. Just inside video games is where it gets screwed with. I think it's simply just some people aren't meant for shooters. Because I know men who have the same or similar problems.

hell...I learned playing FPS on a mouse and keyboard...and really I find using a game pad as frustrating as fuck

I second this

 

[Professor Idle]

I got my nan to try playing Crash Bandicoot on the ps1 once. We were both cracked up as she failed about ten times trying to jump past the first obstacle the game threw at her.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Controls take time to learn, even though I've been gaming for 22 years, it takes me a day or two to fully get the controls mapped to my thought patterns and finger movements so I don't have to look at the controller.

Now I will mention that my mom stopped playing video games when they went 3D. She would always say that she just can't play because everything in such games is like a maze and she gets lost to easily.

After that, I've always wondered how she ever lived and got around in the real world.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

I got my nan to try playing Crash Bandicoot on the ps1 once. We were both cracked up as she failed about ten times trying to jump past the first obstacle the game threw at her.

That reminds me of my grandma playing the original Mario Bros. 20 years ago.

With the knowledge I have of gaming today, I think my grandma was unknowingly predicting the motion controls.

Practically every time she would make a jump over a hole in that game, she herself would jump out of the chair. The harder the jump, the higher she would jump out of the chair.

I find it funny these days, but back then, it really annoyed me for some reason.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

I've been a pc gamer for 10 years and ps3 and xbox controllers really piss me off. They perform terribly and I can not for the life of me understand choosing that over a mouse and keyboard. Well I suppose it just comes down to what you are introduced with first at the earliest age.

I think it comes down to just plain preferences. I grew up with both PC and console gaming, and I've always preferred controller gaming. I find it easier to control because there are less extraneous buttons to get in the way, and I only have to be mindful of one control device instead of two.

I played FPS games on the PC first, and I was always a little awkward at them, but when I started playing them on consoles, I got better instead of staying at okay/awkward level of skill like on PC.

Then when it comes to controllers, I think the Xbox 360 controller is perfection, while I find PlayStation controllers to be awkward in setup.

 

[BoogieManFL]

I've been a gamer since the mid 80s and I've played on all kinds of systems. I can get by on console controller, but I'm not good with them. I usually get disgusted and annoyed with them and quit. They are just so grossly inferior to using a keyboard and mouse that I say screw it and go back to the PC. This is reflected by how console games have utoaim levels and PC games that weren't ported from a console almost never do. I don't think controllers are very intuitive, instead require practice.

 

[HardkorSB]

Let me start off this post by saying that I in no way think that girls are any less capable of playing video games than men. I just simply want to talk about something I've noticed and see if anyone has any similar experiences.

Anyways, it seems like anytime I give a woman a controller, whether it be my girlfriend or just a friend, they can't figure out left from right, up from down on the controller. Just for fun I wanted to introduce my girlfriend to CoD, and she had serious coordination issues, even after playing for a solid hour. She could not move and aim at the same time or she would get too confused and end up spinning the camera around aimlessly. It's not just her though; it seems to be most girls I know. I can give most of my guy friends a controller and they get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Do girls who actually "get" video games feel ashamed and therefore fake being bad at them? Do you think men have a naturally better hand eye coordination?

Again, I am NOT meaning to degrade women in any way with this post. Just want to see what people think/if they've noticed anything similar.

Some girls "fake" being bad at games because that way, the guy can help them and it offers plenty of space for relationship development.
I sometimes pretend to be a noob at things I'm familiar with, just so the girl I'm with can help me and we can spend more time together. Girls do that too, you know.

On the other hand, I know a girl who likes to play strip-Soul Calibur and so far, out of the 100-200 battles I had with her, I won 2.

 

[goodman528]

Anyways, it seems like anytime I give a woman a controller, whether it be my girlfriend or just a friend, they can't figure out left from right, up from down on the controller. Just for fun I wanted to introduce my girlfriend to CoD, and she had serious coordination issues, even after playing for a solid hour. She could not move and aim at the same time or she would get too confused and end up spinning the camera around aimlessly. It's not just her though; it seems to be most girls I know. I can give most of my guy friends a controller and they get the hang of it pretty quickly.

I'm a guy. Been gaming on the PC for 10+ years now, and I'm pretty good at strategy games and RPGs, and fairly decent at online shooters too. However, having never owned a console before, I simply can't get the hang of using a controller. The analogue sticks are actually very counter intuitive to use, and it is really confusing to move yourself and the camera at the same time, and the aiming, is simply impossible.

It's not girls. It's actually pretty hard to learn to use a console controller, you just on't realise it cos you are so used to it.

 

[FaceFaceFace]

I think this is the direction the responses are already tending, but that's just inexperience. Has anyone ever tried to get a non-gamer to so much as walk around in a 3D game? Or, worse yet, in first-person with dual analogue? For gamers its all second-nature, but for inexperienced people, male or female, the connection between the weird thing in their hands and what they're trying to make happen in the weird game on the screen is difficult to successfully establish.

 

[AlanD]

I'm male, and have been playing first person shooters since 1992 or 1993 (Ahh, Wolfenstein 3d). I'm not awesome, but I like to think I don't embarrass myself too badly. And I remember my first few console FPS games. They were hell. I went from being a reasonably skilled player to feeling like I was aiming with an Etch-A-Sketch. It took multiple games (Medal of Honor and MoH: Underground), start to finish, before I achieved basic, but still embarrassing, competence.

So to take someone who has never played a FPS, park them in front of a modern FPS, and hand them a gamepad, a device they've likely never used before and which has 15 or more inputs, well, yeah, I'd expect the first few hours to be pretty painful.