Women in gaming #1 – Why are there so few of them?

And now: What motivated me to write these articles:

1) The article about female players, that stated women can’t achieve such performance in e-sports as men do, because they have a „different brain“. 
2) The leave of my long-time teammate kRAViCkA_ from my team eSuba.ladies and both negative and positive people’s reactions to this fact. 
3) The ongoing „recruitment“ to fill the missing spot in our team eSuba.ladies CS: GO and observed growth of domestic women’s scene. 
4) The report on my fb page for support of female players in the game itself, in which the face of bullying by male players. 
5) Deficiency of any tournament, offline and online, for the female CS: GO scene, both foreign and domestic. 

1) Women and computer games – why are there so few of them?

My whole online-gaming career, (that started about 9 years ago, in my 16, when I had finally technical support to go online – otherwise I play games from an early age), I’ve always heard similar questions, Even I myself have thought about similar questions before. So: Why are there so few women in online games? Are computer games rather a male hobby? And if yes, then why?

A lot of people before me searched for the answers to these questions, and research shows, that the computer games are played by more than 40% of women. Thus, the numbers are not so unequal, are they?!

The problem probably lies only in the type of games most women play. And like every product specifically produced for a particular group (car, that looks like shopping bag for women vs. sports cars for men, romantic movies for women vs. action movies for men, etc.) – this simple market determination functions by computer games as well. They come in various types and each type is targeted on a specific group of people. For example, action, strategy games, and certain types of simulators are being developed primarily for men (Call of Duty, Red Alert, World of Tanks), social  games and certain types of simulators for women (Sims Wildlife Park), and then there are other games, for example for children and younger audiences are developed games with not so high skill-demands that are used to develop thinking and creativity. Logical and card games are then universal for all groups. And even the products target specific audiences, there are also men who drive the Nissan Micra, watch the movie Notting Hill and play The Sims, and there are women driving BMW Z4, loving Expendables franchise and playing CS: GO. And that’s just because your interests are not determined by your sex, but a majority of both women and men have just tend somewhere.

So you can simply explain why when you play Starcraft ,2 Dota 2, or CS: GO, you will meet female player at an estimated maximum of ten percent of (and I probably overrated even this number). This does not mean that women aren’t interested in computer games. It means, that the majority of women doesn not play exactly the kind of game like you, simply because Farmville may be more attractive for them. They may not even know computer games can be played online, and perhaps they do not even know the concept of e-sport, because they didn’t encountered online gaming or e-sport at all. This situation could be changed  by penetration of e-sports in major media. At first as entertainment for a samller circle of people, and eventually even entertainment for the masses, after all, e-sport is a sport too (although, can we speak about entertainment for smaller circle of people? Maybe these pictures from recent European gaming action speak for themselves: IEM Katowice 2015,  ESL One Cologne 2015, Dreamhack Open Cluj-Napoca 2015, Road to Blizzcon Prague 2015)

In my next article I want to answer the ongoing question: „Why there are gaming tournaments divided into women’s and men’s? Is it possible for female players to play like male players?

Hope you’ll like it!

Yours germia!