Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 255)

Trigger Happy
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Home Video Game Software,” in which respondents
were asked what kind of games they would like to see.
Girls of 7 to 12, for example, would like “a chatting
game,” while 16- to 18-year-olds envisage “a game in
which a user creates various stories and can be a
leading role.” As with so much else, the potential
success of both types of posited game of course
depends on massive advances in computer artificial
intelligence. (These Japanese women, it seems, would
also prefer to use skills they already possess—say,
those of conversation—in a videogame context, rather
than learn a complex and hermetic set of rules that
applies to one game, or one genre only.)
But dissatisfaction with current videogame abilities
isn’t monopolized by women. Male gamers, too, always
want the next game to be better than the last one, to be
doing something that was technologically unimaginable
six months ago. This often means that they appear to be
happy with a faster, prettier driving game. But is that
really what they want, or is it just what the developers
feed them?
The only thing we can be sure of for the moment is,
reassuringly, that quality will out—that “gender”
differences are dissolved in the face of a truly great
game, such as Mario 64 or Final Fantasy VII (the latter