ON A ROLL: A model dressed as computer game heroine Lara Croft plays on a Sony Playstation built into the interior of a car

Frag Dolls. Game Girlz. Babes With Attitude. Da Valkyries. No, they?re not the latest queens of pop, but the Charlie?s Angels of video gaming. These are the groups of women who have successfully infiltrated the testesterone-powered world of multiplayer action gaming. And they can kick ass as good as any guy in web shoot ?em ups.

If you are male and are blasting your way through Quake, and meet any of these clans online, you?ll know better than to think of them as mere babes invading your turf. If you do, you might just get ?fragged? ? annihilated in a hail of cyber gunfire.

While women have long belonged in the online games genre, most of them were typically attracted to strategy and puzzle games. Though overall, about 40 per cent of video and online game players are female, according to the Entertainment Software Association (the trade association of the entertainment software industry in the US), their numbers were significantly smaller when it came to action games ? those first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Quake and Quake II.

No longer. Now, mailing lists and women-only websites are offering gaming news, editorials, articles and reviews ? all written from a woman?s perspective.

The No. 1 PC Adventure franchise last year was The Nancy Drew game series. The year-to-date ranking places the super sleuth at the top of the charts, ahead of popular wizards, hobbits and crime investigators.

Studies have found that women, when they go online, spend a longer time playing games than men or teenagers do. Cyber games are replacing TV, books, films, or exercise for 44 per cent of these women, according to a recent survey by AOL Games/Digital Marketing Services. Another survey charting the attitudes of Swedish mobile users noted that more women play mobile games ? men prefer the news. This trend was also revealed in the US where a study found that 58 per cent of mobile gamers are women. There are now even scholarships for women to achieve more female representation in the game development industry.

The action is hotting up here in India too ? in December, 2004, the gaming community Fragshack organised a gaming event at Crossroads, Mumbai. The main focus of the event was to encourage gaming among women in the city.

Earlier, in the run-up to the ?Olympics of Gaming?, the World Cyber Games held in Bangalore in 1999, over 30,000 gamers had registered. Among them was then 21-year-old Huda Masood?s team. Masood, a hard-core gamer, describes the gaming industry?s response to its growing female audience as ?incredible?. Masood, who studies at Bangalore?s Institute of Dental Science, had said in an interview that she arrived in ?boyland? accidentally. ?I had gotten out of a bad relationship and was clueless about what to do. I started hanging out with a bunch of boys who constantly talked in Counter Strike (game) lingo. It was pure curiosity and boredom. Then I found I had a knack for it and every time I got a kill the other team would berate the guy who got killed by a chick!?

Traditionally, games have been aimed at men. When game developer Sheri Graner Ray (currently the content lead for Sony Online Entertainment?s Star Wars Galaxies and one of the leading experts on the topic of gender equality in games industry) attended her first Game Developers Conference in 1992, she was one of just a handful of women at the event. That year, she delivered a talk on women and games. ?They said, ?Why are we even bothering to listen to you? Girls don?t play games!? But UK-based researcher Aleks Krotoski, who brought out a white paper on women in gaming finds that the situation is changing. ?The technology has got to a point that the product that is being made is more interesting to women,? she said.

With so many women proliferating the ranks of the industry, the game design landscape is changing subtly. It is taking note of the trends that repelled would-be women gamers, and the kinds of things females looked for in games.

Admittedly, old-timers feel that there?s still a lot out there to discourage female action players (see box right). Women still lag behind as far as game developing goes. To address such problems, a women designers conference was held as part of the Games Developers Conference (GDC) last week in San Francisco. In an interesting metaphor for the state of women in the videogame industry, a session, ?Attracting Women into Game Development,? shared a room with another one. Several times during the round-table format discussion, the voices of the men in the other session were so loud it was difficult for the women to hear anything at all.

When it comes to the future of women in FPS games, Leann Pomaville, head of Da Valkyries website, is optimistic but practical. In an interview to the San Francisco Chronicle, she said, ?The industry is still driven by men who market to male teenagers because that?s who buys the most games. But I think that as time goes on there will be more and more women online. Changes will come eventually.?

?What needs to change,? elaborates Masood, ?is the attitude of men, and women. Some men think women can?t play games, that it?s not their territory. I want them to stop making fun of the guy who gets killed by me because I?m the girl. And I want a lot more women to come and play. And they better play good! Otherwise they?ll get hooted off.?

The way we’d like them to be

nKrotoski argues that more and more games are being made that appeal to both sexes. Among the ones singled out in her study are the Legend of Zelda, The Sims, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. “It is an example of how to make a game for a female market who don’t like to die,” she said. The advantage is the lady who doesn’t want to meet an untimely end — or a sticky end — can actually rewind time.

Recommended Options

• Role-playing games: Final Fantasy
• Narrative adventures: Legend of Zelda
• Easy to pick up driving: Colin MacRae Rally
• Puzzle adventures: Prince of Persia-The Sands of Time
• Quick-fire arcade puzzlers: Tetris
• Life simulations:The Sims

Source: Elspa white paper on women in gaming

It’s all in the game

“Boys’ club”

First, women are not encouraged as much to seek a career in the game industry because it doesn’t seem as traditionally stable as other tech companies such as Oracle or IBM. While more schools are incorporating game design, programming, and art classes, few women are signing up, either because of intimidation or neglect from teachers.

“Who’s to look up to?”

The lack of female role models is another key point — both in the business and in playing itself. Younger women felt there wasn’t someone to look up to. On women’s mailing lists, there are many posts that say, “I didn’t play Fable because there wasn’t a female character to play.”

“Winning’s not done”

Sometimes women get teased pretty badly if they go online with a female name. “Especially if you’re winning,” Masood says she’s found, “they harass you in a strongly sexual way.”

“Is that really me?”

Also, most games don’t portray women in a healthy or attractive way, at least to women. For instance, games are usually created by men who create hypersexualised, unnaturally big-breasted women scantily dressed in G-strings and high heels, which aren’t necessarily the kinds of characters women want to play. “I think there is a very simple answer to what women want in the games they play,” says a post from a woman who calls herself KythaCat on the mailing list, Women in Gaming, “and it is the same as what men want: Good games that catch their interest. Trying to make a game that will appeal to all women is as misguided and patently idiotic as trying to make a game that will appeal to all men, which no games company tries to do.”