[C Elegans]

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Originally Posted by Aegis I would definitly argue that as a point for attracting female gamers. If anything, I would say that does more to advertise to male gamers, especially when considering the image and appearance of these femme fatales. Though they may be wearing more clothing than the typical female video game personality if they are the hero, they are more often than not still shapely, and oozing of attempted sex appeal. A classic example is Tomb Raider.

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Originally Posted by dragon wench I think this may well be the case in some instances, but in others I am not entirely sure. What I mean is, a lot of the Asian marketing for games I have seen projects very "cutesy," almost child-like images of girl heroes...

I have to agree with DW here, that it varies, partly depending probably on cultural differences and partly depending on what games we are referring to.

Polls and "market surveys" show that more girls than boys play video games in several Asian countries, so there must be something in the game marketing and/or game culture, that attracts at least as many girls as boys. However, I have not seen any surveys for Asia where the games are split according to genre. For instance, I read a market survey from the US that said boys tend to play more action games (they used "Grand auto theft or whatever it was called as example) whereas girls and boys played The Sims equally.

In Asia, I don't know if gender distribution varies from game genre to game genre, but something I noticed when I was in China last year was that there was a lot of marketing for action games with girls as protagonists. These were not games like Tombrider, one of the games I saw most advertising for featured a young girl going around on skateboard in city-environment. Whether this game attracted more girls than boys I do not know, it is pure speculation from my part that there might be a connection between marketing of certain game types and more girls playing. There are many games in Asia that are not released on the European or North American market. But who knows, maybe all the girls in China were playing CS?