Men, women and gaming

When it comes to video games, women are from Vulcan, men are from Kronos.

Some time ago my girl Leen and I played through Black & White 2. It's a 'God game', where you control a settlement of villagers and your animalistic avatar as God. The aim is to take over all the villagers on each map. The joy comes in the open-ended game play. Your power is proportional to how many people believe in you, but you can achieve your goal in two ways.

Leen, being of sugar and spice, treated her followers well, providing for their every need. This led all other to migrate to her village, and she won that way.

I, being a gamer nerd psychopath, took the second approach - conquering opponents through warfare.

Nerd Tangent: Leen and I also encounter this situation while watching Star Trek. She's a huge fan of the episodes where Janeway kicks ass or the Doctor changes his program, while I want to watch the one with the most explosions - and time travel.

Sadly, it all kind of broke down in the last level. In what I assume was a way of building to a crescendo, the last level was a map packed full of enemy villages, who attacked almost immediately amidst a rain of fire and brimstone. It worked well as a pay-off for the style of play I was using. It was a challenging fight.

For Leen however, it sucked. These constant attacks made it nigh impossible to complete the game without resorting to warfare in this last instance.
That's not the game she was playing. It was a disappointment.

I see this kind of thing happen a lot. I was reading a review of Age of Empires online. It's a game with a similar structure but the reviewer paid almost exclusive attention to the warfare elements, saying something to the effect of 'you could win through peace, but why would you?'
That's a fair statement if that's your bag, but what if it isn't.

There's a lot of women out there. The Sims, about as far removed from the graphics-rich, n00b fragging, FPS slaughter-fests many gamers consider to be the real deal, sold more copies than just about anything else. Why? Easy, it appealed to women. If you wanna get rich making games, just appeal to the 50-odd per cent of the population that often gets left out.

I've seen similar experiences playing Dungeons and Dragons. In the games I've run, the guys are bouncing from combat to combat, with everything in between simply filler before they get to bust out their combat machines.
The girls tend to build their characters with combat being somewhat of an afterthought, with their focus more on roleplaying and interaction. Together they make for a balanced game, but it took my a while as a DM to adapt to this, as I was at first firmly in the 'combat is king' dude camp.

I believe this stems for a misunderstanding rather than any sexism of malice. Maybe we could all stand to look at the people across the table/couch/console from us and realise there are differences in interests, as well as reproductive organs.

PS. Happy new year! The above lack of jokes stems from my 2007 brain having been put to bed, and my 2008 brain only now starting to rise. I expect it to come online sometime around February.