Rapture

Just wanted to add to my previous post. I had delineated a pattern that I see occurring all over the web, where companies end up ruining web sites when they try to make a profit off of them. Now imagine how much more profitable those companies would be if, rather than destroying a site with payment methods, they instead improved the functionality of the site through their influence? Passive cash generation still works, and sometimes it's better for a company to run a web site well and have lots of people visit it rather than trying to leach out a profit as soon as possible. It's about web influence, and that's what will matter with these companies in the future.

Anyway, we were assigned to take a look at this girl Danah Boyd. Well, she looks girlish, but she's still like 30 years old so I guess she's not in the league of our class. She's written some pretty cool papers, but I like this one the best. Read it now? I wonder- if this depth perception issue is supposed to hamper girls' performance gamewise, should they still have a handicap in non-twitch gaming? In example, will a female inherently be worse off at Counter-Strike, but have a level-playing board in an RTS scenario? It'd be fun to do research in this area, but god would it be hard to set up controls and find a good group of people to perform this experiment on.

You'd need a large group of both boys and girls, all with no prior video gaming experience, but with the same amount of drive (that's what Boyd meant by the socialization aspect- males are inclined to want to fight/win in video games, so it seems) to beat the games at hand. Not sure how you'd act out the experiment perfectly either. Everyone has their own learning curves. I guess you'd just need a large enough sampling that the extraneous variables would filter out.

Perhaps video games themselves aren't the best way to test this. Maybe depth-perception oriented tests would more suitably find our answer. Yet, would this really answer the question of why the world's gamers are very predominantly male?

Marketing-wise, such research could have a great impact on the video game industry. A smart publisher would ask its developers to design towards not a girly aesthetic but towards a female-oriented gameplay, taking into account the research's findings. Not to say games shouldn't cater to both males and females always. I just believe that the market for female gamers has yet to be fully exploited- though successful efforts are finally starting to be made.