DC Online wants females

DC Online wants women, women gamers that is.  In an article posted by MTV Multiplayer, John Smedley, Sony Online Entertainment president, stated “We are going out of our way in ‘DC’ because we saw that women were really the largest part of the audience for [Batman] Dark Knight.” When the design team was asked about the plans they had to make the game more female friendly, they described plans to feature DC heroines like Wonder Woman and noted that some of their design team were females. Apparently, by having women on your design team, female appealing game features automatically trickle into your game.

You have to wonder just how much the Sony team really understands female gamers. Take this quote from Creative Director Jens Andersen:

Well, we definitely want to make sure that people can participate in the action. Obviously, it’s a comic book game, right? So there’s a lot of punching and stuff like that. A lot of my friends play with their significant other or spouse, and they usually like to play the stuff that’s not so up-front combat-wise; they like to do the healing, the support, the buffing, and that sort of group management. So we made sure that we tried to make that more than just watching people’s health bars on the side of the screen.

Huh? So women play MMOs only as support oriented tag-alongs with their significant others. They’ll leave all that nasty punching stuff to those macho guys while they buff and heal in the back.  That’s probably one of the oldest stereotypes about women in gaming.  Jens keeps going with the stereotypes:

The amount of customization that you get to do — we’re taking a lot of care in terms of like what types of characters and archetypes that women gravitate to when they play — have the cute character, we have the motherly character, we have the sexy character — all the different kind of traits you can kind of choose from and can identify with.

Sorry Jens, the notion that women only play cute, motherly or sexy characters is pretty outdated. There are many women gamers that play rugged, up front types and design their characters to reflect this mind set.

While the plans to include female friendly features into DC Online aren’t exactly impressive, the sentiment is well intentioned. Hopefully, one of the female design members will shake some sense into Jens, or the Sony PR folks will shut him up before he does more damage.

Women do represent a growing group among the online gaming demographic and having a major gaming company try to appeal to this group (no matter how clumsily it is done) is positive. By that token, any attempt at outreach at under-represented groups in gaming is not only admirable but could be smart business.

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