According to Professor Jesper Juul, a distinguished expert in video game studies and the author of A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, typical casual players are willing to commit small amounts of time and resources toward playing video games and dislike technically complicated games.
That is true. The 2016 China Gaming Industry Report found that the number of female hardcore console gamers is approximately a quarter of the male gamers. A bigger market with male hardcore players means that game designers would recruit more males, which can limit the opportunities for promotion among female employees.
"In terms of professional ideal, there aren't too many females who could get a sense of achievement from positions as game designers," said Robert Yang, an employee at gamebau.com, a game company that does mobile game promotion in Latin America. About a third of the employees at gambau.com are women.
The situation often gets worse as soon as female workers get pregnant since most of them have to leave their company voluntarily or get fired.
"Bosses are rarely willing to pay a female staff who is going to deliver a baby or who is taking her maternity leave," wrote a game developer in an article at zhihu.com.
Improving female participation
"There are quite a few females in our company," said "Xiaopa," a female employee at Paper Studio, a game company that is well-known for its popular product Miracle Nikki.
A high portion of the staff is female, which is considered an exception in the gaming industry. This model follows market rules and benefits from both the transformation of the game genre and the increase in female game players.
There has been a tendency toward a rise in the mobile game market with an annual income of more than 80 billion yuan.
According to the 2016 China Gaming Industry Report, 92 percent of the new games that entered the market in 2016 were geared toward mobile devices, making this game genre the most important and active, followed by browser games with 6 percent market share. It's crystal clear that public preference has changed from console games to mobile ones and from hardcore games to the casual genre, creating a much larger population of gamers and benefiting girls who prefer non-hardcore games.
It is unquestionable that females entering the market could not only bring changes to the male-dominated gaming world but also create more job opportunities for women. To further improve gender diversity in the gaming industry, technological skills such as coding and design should also be taken into consideration.
Fortunately, more attention has begun to be paid to supporting women who want to learn coding and game design. Take the website learntocodewith.me as an example; it was created by a self-taught coder, Laurence Bradford, who wanted to help females learn how to code. Another example is an NGO named Women in Games (WIG) whose mission is to help create a gender balance in the gaming industry. By offering resources and job opportunities to females, it aims to double the number of female employees in the gaming sector within 10 years.
By the end of 2016, the total income of the Chinese video game market reached more than 165 billion yuan with 0.56 billion players, according to the 2015 China Gaming Industry Report. Instead of pure entertainment via games, it is very necessary for everyone to improve female participation in the gaming industry so as to change the gender ecology and to transform how women are represented and treated in the sector.
Games could make our world better, and the world belongs to everybody.
"I believe there will be more women in the gaming industry," said Yang.
