If you ask me, this isn't much of a change. See, people talk about wanting there to be more women playing games, but I think the real source of fascination is why women tend to play certain kinds of games.
Before anyone says anything, no I m not suggesting that video game enthusiasm has fucking tiers of worth; people can play whatever games they want. However, it is relevant to acknowledge that there is a world of difference between Planescape: Torment and Bejeweled; and by extension a difference in desire between the people who prefer each respective game.
This has nothing to do with being a "Gamer" or personal worth, but pretending that a person who casually plays the average FPS for a few minutes on a weekend, and the person who spends hours a day working their way through a story driven RPG have the same relationship with video games is ludicrous.
Not everything has to be high art, not everyone enjoys high art, not everyone looks for high art in the same place, but high art does exist and it is visibly distinctive from other works; the creative spark behind Fast and Furious is not the same as the one behind Bladerunner.
I think the usual perception, weather it is commonly accepted or not, is that women don't have the same passion or interest in games as men do, or rather that most of the people who are passionate about games as a medium for artistic expression are men.
I myself, however, would disagree with that sentiment; I've met lots of people, men and women, who play games, but I've only ever met a handful of people really interested in analyzing the art form. Now, it's true that more of these people have been male, but I've met so few that an estimation of percentage would be useless.
The term "Casual gamers" has accumulated a lot of baggage, but it could be accurately defined as: "Someone who holds a mild to moderate interest in games as a form of light entertainment, but has little to no interest in them as complex works of art"
Please do not shy away from this phrase, and don't use it as derogatory term; there is absolutely nothing wrong with being a casual gamer, and the distinction it helps to create is useful for understanding and working within the medium.
It's obnoxious and silly to treat someone differently simply because they have different tastes than you, but it's reductionist and dishonest to pretend that some people don't take games more seriously than others.
At this point, saying someone is a gamer is becoming more and more pointless; games at this point have been deeply ingrained into our culture. We don't call people who watch movies "Watchers", we don't call people who read books "Readers". Making this distinction only serves to make the community that much more navel gazing and insular, and it ignores the important distinctions to be made between individual genres and techniques.
If we want this medium to grow, not only do we have to let more people in, but we have to refine and analyze not only the games we play, but why we play them and how we think about and judge them.
There is nothing wrong with playing games for simple fun, but everyone already knows games are fun. Even when figures like Jack Thompson were in their prime, nobody argued against the fact that games were fun.
We have plenty of fun, we don't need more of it. We need other forms of engagement, we need discovery, thought provocation, even sadness. Too many of us, even those of us who truly love the medium, still do not acknowledge or understand the difference.
We have to stop praising competence as though it were brilliance.
