More and More Women Getting Hooked on Video Games

July 25, 2007 (KABC-TV) (KABC) -- A busy mom who doesn't have a lot of free time, Francie Brown fits the typical profile of an exploding segment of the population, the female gamer.

"I find that I have this window of like half an hour, 45 minutes before Nick comes home from school, before I have to pick him up, and ... you know, some people knit," Brown said.

When she's not shuttling around her six-year-old son, Brown's in front of her computer screen, engaged in one of the growing number of games geared toward so-called casual players, who are mostly female.

"It doesn't carry on. It's not waiting for me. I can do it whenever I want. It's not a task," Brown said.

And that's exactly what today's busy soccer moms are looking for, say gaming experts. Statistics show that more women age 34 to 55 play casual games than teenage boys and young men do on consoles, according to the International Gaming Developers Association.

"You usually have an image of an 18-year-old geeky guy who's really heavy into fantasy or heavy into sort of very difficult game play like Madden or anything like that, instead what we have is games that are really, really fun to play, you can pick them up, you can play on your PC, and have a really good time," Robert Nashak, general manager of Yahoo Games, said.

Nashak says that women now dominate the casual games market. As a result, video game publishers are working hard to target their games to women. Unlike adventure and fantasy games, developers are finding that competitive and non-confrontational casual games appeal to more feminine tastes.

One game that attracts women is Red Rover's word game called Scrambled. It's casual and straightforward, and it's just the type of game that women love.

"Women are ... typically not interested into going around shooting other players, as a guy might be, and so they are more interested in, sometimes, spatial relationships, using vocabulary knowledge or word knowledge," Robert Nall, a game designer, said.

Long Beach resident Lillie Green's relationship with gaming is anything but casual. Even with a full time job, she manages to play video and PC games more than 40 hours a week.

"I came home last night, I played from 4 until probably 11:30 at night," Green said.

Green plays casual games like Bejeweled on occasion, but most of her time and money is spent on traditional adventure-fantasy video games.

"There's the challenge, you know, you want the high score, or the highest score, it becomes competitive," Green said.

As competitive as the race to win that growing female market share in the multi-billion dollar gaming industry.

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