Video games need to provide a way for women to have a deeper experience with the characters. 'Don't trivialize the importance of the emotional experience,' she said. The fact is, she said, female gamers are concerned with more than just exciting visuals and flashy surfaces. Not surprisingly, in a largely male room, only a few women raised their hands.īut simply sexualizing the male characters wouldn't necessarily do the trick, Ray implied. 'Who would be willing to play a character that looks like this?' she asked. These 'sex object' images aren't going to appeal to the average female gamer, Ray said.Īs part of her presentation, Ray included a slide of some half-dressed, highly sexualized, and anatomically perfect male Calvin Klein models.

The female characters are also dressed in sexually explicit clothing and placed in sexual poses, whereas the male characters aren't. While it's true that both male and female characters display the common heroic traits of being young, strong, virile, and fertile, Ray said, only the female characters display physical traits humans get when they're ready for sex: partially open mouths with large red lips and heavy eyelids (or 'bedroom eyes'.see the screenshot from the upcoming Virtual Hottie 2, above). Ray pointed to the typical video game heroine: overly endowed, highly sexualized, and all but naked.īut 'male characters are just as exaggerated as female characters, and women just need to get over it, right?' Ray asked.

Most video games, Ray argues, are like bad boyfriends-they're too involved with their own male sexuality to even try to crack the female sexual code.

In her address, Ray, author of the book Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market and a longtime spokeswoman for female gamers, offered up an explanation as to why women make up less than 10 percent of the gaming population. Or so says Sheri Graner Ray, a game designer for the last 16 years, a veteran of Sony Online Entertainment and the Cartoon Network, and a keynote speaker at the Sex in Video Games conference, held here last week. SAN FRANCISCO-It's not that women don't understand video games it's that video games don't understand women.

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