Technology

How technology is shrinking gaming’s gender gap

When you imagine the typical gamer it’s all too easy to slip into the traditional stereotype. The image that probably comes to mind is of a male player, aged in his 20s, whose only human interaction is spending time with other, identical, players in their own rooms doing exactly the same thing. But the reality is that this is a view that’s as out-dated as girls liking to play with dolls while boys play with toy soldiers.

That’s because video gaming and its various off shoots are now almost as popular with women players as they are with men. So now might be a good time to reassess many assumptions about gaming in general – and this is almost certainly something that games developers will have firmly in their sights if they want to grow the market. The causes of this increased female participation in games are many and various and, together, they have created the perfect storm in which more and more women are becoming involved.

While some have reasoned that a key driver behind this has been the sheer ubiquity of gaming devices, the reality is rather more nuanced than this.

As far back as 2018 the use of games consoles and PCs for video gaming was being overtaken by mobile devices. Faster broadband speeds, ever more powerful cell phones and tablets and an increasing number of games available, generally for free, were the key drivers behind this. The fact that mobile games started to be generally available to download for free proved to be the biggest draw for new players, especially as console games grew more and more expensive with their developers trying to claw back the high production costs involved in creating ever-more sophisticated games.

Whereas playing the old-style console games needed to be scheduled into a day’s activity, the mobile games that were emerging tended to be quicker and easier to play. Best of all, they could be played whenever and wherever there was a wireless network. The speed and convenience steadily started to attract more women to play, starting to take gaming away from what had been a strictly male domain.

A further motivation that may also have started to attract women’s interest in games, and particularly those with children, may have been the moral panic that was growing about the younger generation’s gaming habits. For many, it may have been a question of trying to learn about the appeal of gaming so they could better understand why their children are so keen to play them for so long and so often.

Branching out

As well as video games, other sites that started to attract more and more women players were online casinos. These, too, had previously been a male-dominated activity but now so many started to be available via mobile devices it opened them up to a far wider group of players.

It’s taken another technological breakthrough to make these even more popular with women and that has been the advent of live casino games. And it’s easy to see why, 777 Casino offer players the chance to live stream games to their device, making it the ideal gaming option for those with a busy lifestyle. There’s no doubting that the stylish tables, the ability to play while relaxing and the interactive nature of these live casino games has dramatically increased the number of female gamers.