Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
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Trigger Happy
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industry as a whole is not meeting their needs and not
taking their interests and preferences into account.
Given the enormous buying power that women have
and will continue to have, this is a shortsighted
mistake,” according to one writer.
40
So what kinds of games do women prefer? The
Japanese women polled preferred games with good
characters—the lovable personalities of Crash or
Parappa. But since many men also liked these games,
we can really infer nothing about the difference
between men and women. The informational arrow is
pointing the other way: it tells us about the commercial
success of certain aesthetic decisions made by game
designers themselves. A game with good characters
could appeal to everyone; but a game with characters
that are bad (boring, unlikeable, stereotyped) won’t on
this evidence appeal to women any more than it does to
men.
So what of future developments? By far the most
radical suggestion is that those women polled by CESA
simply seem to have some higher—and at present
unfulfillable—expectations. This is borne out by the
survey section entitled “The Image of Desired
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40 Doctor K, of the Website for female videogamers,
http://www.womengamers.com/.