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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

Also of note : according to http://gamegirl.blogfaction.com/article/107252/top-7-statist... and http://www.grabstats.com/statcategorymain.asp?StatCatID=13 nearly 40% of video game players are women.

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Yes, but 82.5% of female gamers are 18 or older, and they're more likely to be playing Bejeweled and such. The relevant time period here is during pre-college years, and the relevant video games are generally the ones that actually require the latest (or some recent) generation of hardware.

Casual games typically don't make you think, "Can I run this?" or "How would this be better if I had better hardware?"

While totally conceding the part about younger players being more likely to be spurred into comp sci by video games I do contest the hardcore games as a gateway drug theory. I think the thing that pulls kids in is the creativity of the games and the effect that the game has on them. So a fun casual game in my opinion would have the same pulling power as the latest version of crysis. fwiw this is subjective and I dont have any data to back this up.

One further point - maybe the 40% number is a recent phenomenon and it will take time for it to translate into more women entering computer science.

> I think the thing that pulls kids in is the creativity of the games and the effect that the game has on them.

This is absolutely what pulls kids into games. What pulls kids into knowledge about computers is the realization that better hardware means they can play "better" games. This means they wind up with a pretty good conceptual map of computers at an early age. That gives them a huge advantage at programming over someone who just sees computers as a black box.

>That gives them a huge advantage at programming over someone who just sees computers as a black box.

Nowadays most videogames are played in consoles, which are effectively black boxes (except for some very experienced hackers).

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