I'd never go back to the game industry. Low pay, long hours, and a pervasively juvenile mentality that just keeps getting more annoying with every birthday after 17.

If you like doing bare-metal high performance coding it's one of your best chances to test your skills though, unless you're doing lolgames.

Maybe we should just rename the "MembershipIdentityProvider" method to "SuperLaserWeapon"?

I think that's only true in the sense that people always give more cred to products that they, personally, use. It's the same reason that Google = sexy while enterprise software = not sexy. Almost everybody uses Google, but very few people use any given enterprise software package (and when they do, they usually hate it).

If it were just a male/female thing, you'd expect games like SimCity and Civilization to not get geek cred, since their appeal straddles gender lines.

I'd expect Mafia Wars to have mostly male players, and I'd put it in the same category as Farmville, i.e. time sinks with virtually no skill or strategy components.

That's hardly the reason as The Sims which is also played by many women get's lots of cred.

The reason seems more to be that it's not blazing fast OpenGL 3D supernaturalistic advanced strategy/fps type of game.

A lot of people (including me) criticize WoW for being repetitive and mind numbing (grinding), too. I don't think it has anything to do with gender. Also there seem to be actually a lot of women who play WoW?

You can also get a large mix of both. My brother works for a studio that, until recently, only developed racing games for the DS. So they might be working on the next Need for Speed and Barbie racing at the same time.

I'm quite willing to believe this. But then, I played Animal Crossing for a while and that involved mooing, as well (... if I recall correctly). I'm willing to believe a game can be made out of mooing, however I would assert that a Japanese game about mooing is almost certainly better than one owned by shady Russian investors, or whatever Zynga is.