I've encountered the situation many times where I'll find out one of my female friends doesn't play video games. I'll ask why, and—disregarding the people who just don't like to spend time cooped up indoors—it'll usually end out that she's just never been introduced to a game she's enjoyed. Upon introducing her to a game or two in the genres more traditionally targeted at women, she'll be just about as likely as any of my male friends to gradually evolve from there into an avid gamer: one for whom "gaming" is now counted among their serious hobbies; one who might be excited to dedicate a weekend to full "hardcore" engagement with a new game.
In other words, for these ladies, it was 100% a market education problem: the companies making these products weren't managing to make their target audience aware of them.
¹https://mediakix.com/blog/mobile-gaming-industry-statistics-...
Some people play games; but some other people are only addicted to spending money on slot machines. The kind of mobile "game" you see Super Bowl ads (or, really, any TV ads) for are almost exclusively actually just slot machines at their core, with any game mechanics being tacked-on afterthoughts.
(If you wouldn't let your own children play a given "game", and your intuitive reasoning is the same as why you wouldn't let them wander freely in a casino—then you probably should mark such titles down under the "casino" tally, not the "games" tally, no?)
Importantly, the audiences for these two types of... experiences, let's call them—are mostly non-overlapping sets of people. Plenty of people are addicted to these slot-machine apps but would never play an actual "game", no matter how casual it was. They're not in it for game-mechanical "fun"; they're in it for variable-scheduled dopaminergic rewards. And, vice-versa, the more of an experienced "gamer" someone is—the more actual games they've played (where even FarmVille with all its dark patterns is still a game)—the more they'll have a taste for actual fun brought about by game mechanics, and so the more clearly they can intuitively feel that these slot-machine apps aren't providing such "fun."
Once you take these slot-machine non-games and their mostly non-gamer audiences out of consideration, then things do line up the way I described: there are no game companies targeting women bothering to spend much on advertising.
(There are, however, plenty of games without gendered targeting that have AAA ad spend. Pokemon, for example.)
You can add time pressure; things that only appear once you've found other things; hybridize the mechanics with those of other genres, like adventure-game-like puzzle minigames to combine or use objects; etc.
In some sense, any game where progression is gated by a threshold of gathered collectables—and where the hard part is detecting the collectable, not navigating to or otherwise retrieving the collectable—is a hidden-object game. Pokemon Snap is a hidden-object game—the objects are shot compositions. The Ace Attorney games are hidden-object games—the objects are literal evidence, but then during the trials they're evidence+opportunity pairings. "Hacking" games, where you detect vulnerabilities to exploit, are hidden-object games. Trade-war or Elite type games (i.e. inefficient-market exploitation simulators) are, on an abstract level, hidden-object games. :)
And, of course, games in other genres can employ hidden-object mechanics, too. Platform games have special coins in out-of-the-way locations, where the challenge is just inferring that that was a visitable place to begin with. RPGs have treasure that shows up as little often-hard-to-spot motes of light on the field rather than big obvious chests. Etc.
Also, IMO, Puzzle Environment is (hopefully) non-gendered, but I've never seen stats for it.
I saw an interesting video last year where they used toddlers young enough to have no visible gender and they got in babysitters to help the toddlers play with toys. They gave the toddlers random gendered names and clothes. They then asked the babysitters what they think the kids's favorite toys were.
In almost every test the babysitter handed the kids the toys associated with the gender they thought the kid was from the name and not what the kids actual gender was. They then went to comment that the perceived genders toys were the kids favorite.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
They only had a stronger preference because the boys didn't play with the cuddly toys as much.
A subtle but important distinction.
This is similar to studies that show women's favourite colour is actually blue. But what gets reported is that they have a stronger preference for pink, because, compared with men, more chose that and that somehow gets into the consciousness as "girls prefer pink over blue".
Okay, so either men liking guns, heavy machinery, and videogames more than women comes from a inherent, biological difference between men and women, or it all comes from a huge, complex social construct that has been cultivated and dominant for centuries. Which one is it, then?
A lot of little boys are hyper as fuck, and I don't think that's a social construct. I think that's just how little boy bodies tend to produce energy: in excess.
Also, a good description for most games might be "twitchy." I think these two line up.
But in answer to your question, Nature vs Nurture: the answer is always both, but far more nature than we'd like. When we hit the cyborg/embedded computers line, that's when I think it'll be 50/50.
With the home console revival and growth of PCs, games were marketed primarily towards young men as the default demographic. There's also the fact that what's considered for men vs women can vary drastically depending on whether we're talking about the US, Korea, Japan etc.
Because we're well past assumptions and have significant amounts of hard evidence that point towards relevant structural differences in the brain along gendered lines and behavioral differences that manifest at the earliest ages.
This is also not an American style documentary where things are taken out of context or efforts made to entrap researchers or anything like that. It's just regular interviews on both sides of the argument alongside giving each side the opportunity to express themselves as well as their views on research that tends to run contrary to their own personal views. But all in all this ultimately serves to greatly emphasize how tenuous the appeals to a social construct are when contrasted against the other option.
It goes without saying, but all episodes are of course also subtitled in English.
Those are ones I can name without Googling from games before 2000. If you think there haven't been female playable characters in video games, you weren't paying attention.
You mean Tanya? Cha-ching!
It still seems to be mostly marketed at boys. Looking at the itunes store page, first item is a video with running, shooting, fighting, racing cars and burning armors. Second photo a mosaic, third fighting armors, fourth a robotic cowboy, fifth ninja like armors. https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/roblox/id431946152
Both genders might enjoy, but wouldn’t there be more content and more optimization towards boys play style ?