Women in computing

27Apr/041

Women in computing

re: games for women.

I wonder if the problem lies more with the XBox than with games in general. There are more games for the PS2 and GameCube that seem to be “geared” towards women. I’m not as familiar with PS2 games, but the GameCube has several games that could be considered geared towards women. Animal Crossing (http://www.animal-crossing.com/index.jsp) and Harvest Moon (http://www.hmfarm.com/) come to mind. I know for a while that my wife played our GameCube more than I did when we first picked up Animal Crossing. The Xbox seems geared towards teenage boys almost exclusively.

The irony is that the first computer programmers were all women. Why were they all women? It was during the war, all the male mathmaticians were off fighting WWII. The Army was too busy to wonder if this type of activity was “womens work” or not. The women themselves certainly never thought it was too hard or too boring.

In fact if you go back a little farther it turns out that a woman was responsible for describing Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. In fact the computer language Ada is named after her.

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http://blogs.msdn.com/kclemson KC Lemson

Excellent point on the gamecube, in my own history that’s true, I used to love mario kart and games of that nature. I think xbox is a little unique in regard to xbox live being an opportunity to bring relationships to the console gaming experience, and (stereotypically) that is an area which might make it more interesting to women. It’s so hard to talk about this issue without talking about stereotypes, resulting in the inevitable “But i’m a woman and i like doom so therefore it’s not fair to say that most women probably don’t like doom”