The world could use a few more romance video games.
Oh heavens, the controversy. Let’s trust this publication’s readership is too intelligent to moan, “Oh gawsh, what a girl thing to say,” but maybe the sexists have a legitimate counter-argument here. Romance readership? Women. Romance viewership? Women. With pizza-covered adolescent white-male stereotypes running rampant through video game culture, do companies have any financial room to aim towards a probably female gamership?
A million times yes. Women make up 47 percent of all gamers, according to a 2012 study by the Entertainment Software Association. Even better, women over 18 make up 30 percent of the community while only 18 percent of gamers are boys under 17. The stereotype is so broken it’s not even money.
With that out of the way, here’s a bigger hurdle: what the heckz0rz is a romance video game, and why would any gamer, irrespective of gender, care about playing it?
Read the rest at Insertquarterly.com. As you know, this blog's all about fiction and adventures, so let's talk about fiction and romantic storytelling in video games! Hurry up, head on over!
Oh heavens, the controversy. Let’s trust this publication’s readership is too intelligent to moan, “Oh gawsh, what a girl thing to say,” but maybe the sexists have a legitimate counter-argument here. Romance readership? Women. Romance viewership? Women. With pizza-covered adolescent white-male stereotypes running rampant through video game culture, do companies have any financial room to aim towards a probably female gamership?
A million times yes. Women make up 47 percent of all gamers, according to a 2012 study by the Entertainment Software Association. Even better, women over 18 make up 30 percent of the community while only 18 percent of gamers are boys under 17. The stereotype is so broken it’s not even money.
With that out of the way, here’s a bigger hurdle: what the heckz0rz is a romance video game, and why would any gamer, irrespective of gender, care about playing it?
Read the rest at Insertquarterly.com. As you know, this blog's all about fiction and adventures, so let's talk about fiction and romantic storytelling in video games! Hurry up, head on over!
Romance games in Japan have been popular for ages. The so-called "visual novel" is like an interactive book combined with a video game, and some are popular enough that they get turned into manga and anime series. There's also the ever-popular dating sim, which is so popular among certain US audiences that fans import them and painstakingly translate them.
ReplyDeleteI say it's high time that the genre came to America. A few indie gaming companies are dabbling in story-based games (I write for a life-sim called Academagia, for eample) but I think they could get big.
Besides, there's one tried-and-true way to get guys to play the romance sim: Reward them with some T&A ;)