A few weeks back someone asked me an interesting question. One I couldn’t answer straight away, and I’m still not sure if I actually can, but I’ll give it a shot. “Are there computer games, games with sex in it, that would also appeal to a female audience? Or are these games solely the domain of male gamers?
There aren’t any “regular”computer games designed specifically for women, besides maybe a few puzzle & Mahjong games. I guess the same applies for most other specific audiences. There’s still an “idee fixe” that only young males between 14 and 30 play games, besides younger kids of course. When you look at games for children, it’s interesting to see that quite a lot of them are designed specifically for girls. So maybe things will change in the future. When these female gamers grow up and demand their share of digital entertainment.
We do know that there are quite a lot of woman who enjoy computer games. They dig those small puzzle games, like Mahjong, Yahtzee and Tetris. But also story driven titles, like those typical point & click adventures. Another very popular genre among women are mmorpg’s, like Everquest, Lord of the Rings Online or even World of Warcraft. When you evaluate this short summary, it isn’t hard to distillate the things woman like in a computer game, right? I know I’m generalizing here, but female gamers tend to look for:
- Social interaction
- Story driven games
- Short games ( to play in between, kill some time etc..)
An other aspect that’s not even mentioned yet, do women actually want to look at sex, virtual or not? I guess the general consensus is yes, if… there’s more involved then just genitals sliding in and out each other. If there’s some sort of story and it’s filmed within a tasteful setting. If we apply both ( gaming demands & watching sex ) to the current sex games on the market, it gets hard, really hard, to mention even one title. So let’s look at games that come close, or at least cover a few of the aspects mentioned above.
A game that covers the human interaction, and puts sex within some sort of social perspective, would be Red Light Center or maybe even Second Life ( Second life is not a typical sex game, but there’s a lot of sexual interaction going on ). I know both games are played by women, although many women you will encounter within the gaming world are actually males ( something that’s called cross-gender, but that’s a whole other topic ).
An other title I need to mention is VirtuaGuy, a male stripper on your desktop. Although its more a gay thing, it could also appeal to women I guess. ( I know it doesn’t have any of the things female gamers look for, according to my own conclusions, but playgirl is also still out there somewhere… )
A game that’s known to be played by women ( about one third of the people that buy the game are women ) is Lovechess. I asked one of the designers of Lovechess, Steven Manschot, if he has a clue why.
“I guess what women, but also men, like in our game Lovechess is that the sex is set within a wider perspective. You play chess, and sex is your reward. Secondly, the whole scenery is tasteful and not overly explicit. There’s also another aspect that’s maybe worth mentioning, many couples play Lovechess together, on the same computer or online. We also know some couples play it when they are separated for a while, or as foreplay.”
I guess it must be the social aspect again, I can’t imagine chess to be a very feminine game ( the local chess club in my hometown doesn’t have a single female, but maybe it’s differently in other parts of the world ). The typical simulation games with sex in it , like Virtual Hottie or 3d Sexgames can be skipped by women, they are more like virtual porn, very straightforward and explicit, solely for a male audience. Erotic computer games a scarce, and when you narrow it down to “Games for women” there isn’t much out there. My best guess would be Red Light Center, mainly because it’s embedding sex within a social frame.
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