How do we get more women gamers to play Civilization games?

[Apexnexius]

Serious Thread

I have been thinking about this since I bought Civilization 1 back in 1992.

Then later on Will Wright released The Sims 1 (year 2000), not quite a strategy game, but something close to it - a simulation game.
And the women flocked to it en masse !
Family members, friends, friends of friends. It almost seemed as if every woman had either tried The Sims or were actively playing The Sims.

But where are all the Sid Meier's Civilization girl gamers at?

How do we get them to participate?
How do we welcome them to the best strategy games of all time?
Are we intimidating them somehow? Unintentionally gate keeping them?

If you too have given this some thought, please feel free to share your thoughts.


Maybe if there were some famous female Let's Players on YouTube or Twitch playing, perhaps that would start turning the wheels?

[colostmy4]

Get the men and boys to stop playing? Or to have "Pump Up The Jam" as part of its soundtrack.

[ACS36]

It has more to do with how women are raised in society than it has to do with the game or content creators that surround the game.

Civilization all ready has many female leaders to play as and that's about as far as it needs to go to include women. They could create a few scenarios based around women heroines, but really, nothing more should be done.

The other reality is that strategy games like civ aren't nearly as popular as other genres to begin with. The only real agenda should be wider mass appeal, there really isn't any significant reason to target women in this case.

Barely anyone watches twitch streams of civilization. It's just not that interesting to watch and gets old quickly.

[SLG]

You really can not tell how many men or women play the game.

[chronoss2008]

unless they put there spyware back into this game that is

[Scamper 📎]

maybe women just don't really wanna play civ 6, and your example of the sims doesn't help, because the two game series just don't have enough in common at all to warrant mentioning. The sims is a casual life sim, whilst civilization is a competitive strategy game about history

[gdshore]

Actually, my wife played Civ. I thru Civ.III she took one look at Civ. IV and said too much war and never played any of the subsequent Civilizations since.

[SLG]

Really what was the purpose of this topic? Like I said, unless they say what gender they are, you will never know the numbers. Is this about the multi-player mode?

[line]

Women play civ. it's just that she prefers to stay silent when they read the multiplayer chat

[Lucky_Star_Fan]

Why would this be important? Do we need to get more girls playing with GI Joe instead of Barbie too? People should play games they like, we shouldn't make games to attract people who are not already interested. That is artificial and almost certainly compromises the game's established nature.

[Enigmatic]

Originally posted by scamper:

because the two game series just don't have enough in common at all to warrant mentioning. The sims is a casual life sim, whilst civilization is a competitive strategy game about history

One is more a sandbox. The other is pretty set.
Maybe Civ needs more sandbox elements. While leaving the 'competitive' setup for old time fans who like to play that way.

[KingKickAss]

I think its pretty ironic because Civ already is that kind of game.

[Playzr 🐵]

It's because women tend to be more socially inclined where as men tend to focus on things rather than people. This isn't the case for everyone but it is clear over the broad spectrum. Similarly women are more inclined to get a job that benefits from social interaction where as men are more likely to work on some machine like a computer.
When it comes to the two games in the example, The Sims is very much a social game and you can definitely compare it to a doll house compared to the action figure call of duty games men tend to prefer.
With Civilization I would assume women are less likely to want to dominate other civilizations or go to war compared to men. It is not a question of whether women can do what men do and vice versa, it is a question of interest and desire. I'm sure a factor of this is society and the roles men and women play even today, but even in a very equal society there's definitely a natural inclination. We're not necessarily equal, we have differences, but what's important is that we're equally valuable.

[colostmy4]

It's not unusual for a game to try to appeal to a certain demographic. Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider games was created to appeal to a female demographic. I would say this game has done similar to try to draw in a female demographic as well as certain racial demographics. There are those out there who want to feel inclusive in the gaming experience. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but it is how such industries operate.

[Catalytic]

Originally posted by Lucky_Star_Fan:

Why would this be important? Do we need to get more girls playing with GI Joe instead of Barbie too? People should play games they like, we shouldn't make games to attract people who are not already interested. That is artificial and almost certainly compromises the game's established nature.

In general I agree, but there could be a valid context. For the sake of discussion, let's assume the OP is a developer who's looking at the video game market and trying to find a way to expand the appeal of his game beyond the traditional predominately white or Asian male audience. He sees an opportunity in attracting female gamers as a way of boosting revenue and references games with brought cross-sex appeal like World of Warcraft that have successfully appealed to women. If you can expand the appeal of the game, you could make more money selling it - clearly, a valid reason to pose the question.

The serious answer to such a question is to understand that what appeals to men and what appeals to women, broadly speaking, is different. Psychology has elucidated many of these differences. Modern politics has tried like hell to erase them and pretend as if they don't exist. What are they?

* Disclaimer here: anytime you talk about archetypes like this, it has to be understood it is not an absolute difference. It's more of a 70/30% preference. With any population, you will find men who like "female" things and women who like "male" things. So take the woke extremist arguments and stow them. They're useless in this discussion. No one needs virtue signaling or white knighting when trying to actually understand the real world which will always differ from their ideologically driven dystopia. /disclaimer

Men tend to be more attracted to things, women to people. So if you want to appeal to women, you tell stories. You build characters in your game with depth and complexity, and reward players for engaging with that. I mentioned World of Warcraft. It is highly story-driven. Both its casual and it's end-game content have extensive integration into a large, multi-pronged, and continually updated story of the world in which they play. That world features many female characters, both good and bad, which are developed in depth, have long story arcs and plot twists that make you wonder what they might do, or why they might behave in one way or another. While men tend to approach the game as a math problem, solving for the highest power or most efficient build, women copy someone else's build and use it to play through the parts that appeal to them. The myriad minigames broaden that appeal.

Applied to a 4X game like Civ, we've actually seen significant efforts to do this over the years. A big one is redefining the win condition and broadening it beyond domination (win by militarily conquering all other players) to include science, religious, cultural, and other victory conditions. Civ has also worked hard to showcase female leaders, going so far as what is sometimes called "forced 50%" where Civ will pick seemingly minor leaders over more prominent male ones just to maintain a 50:50 male:female ratio of leaders when it doesn't fit historical norms at all.

What could Civ 7 do to expand on this?
* Flesh out the diplomacy system and make it more intuitive, more interactive, and more important within the game. The complex human component of this type of negotiation is thought to have a more feminine appeal.
* Improve the world congress and integrate it better into the diplomacy system. Create actual negotiations to drive which topics are discussed in the mechanic, and allow trading or negotiations to try and settle votes ahead of the formal vote.
* Improve the spy game. This isn't an explicitly female concept, but intended to use the spy mechanic as a bit of a catch-up mechanic and a snowball prevention mechanic. What this does is lessen the focus on "solving" the math problem to advance fastest which tends to have a strong male appeal and give players more options to remain competitive, playing the way that appeals to them.
* Continue to include non-domination victory conditions. I would add an economic victory condition that focuses heavily on trade and maintaining peaceful relations, even while dominating the luxury goods on the map.
* Continue to offer a wide range of leaders with a broad scope of focus regarding which victory condition to pursue, and include women in each: some who like war, some who like religion, culture, science, etc who are viable and competitive. They should include warmongers like Tomyris or Gorgo, builders like Vicky and Cleo, traders like Dido and Wilhelmina, culture-focused leaders like Kristina, etc because if you try to stereotype and pigeonhole women instead of being authentic, it'll have the opposite effect.
* Avoid "mathy" mechanics, or design the UI in such a way as to make them intuitive and easy to understand.

Lastly, one of the biggest pathways for women into gaming is in playing games with male family members, friends, or partners. Building a game with strong multiplayer support and functionality is key here. Embrace those situations where a group of friends wants to get together and kill a few hours playing together and make that experience smooth and enjoyable.

Ultimately, a 4X game is still going to strongly appeal to men. That's just a function of the core concept of the game: exploring, building, conquering, etc. It's also a core fact that all computer games are essentially a math problem to be solved, and math tends to be a more male-focused realm. But by providing enough layers of game play that add a human experience to the math problem, by making the mechanics less "mathy" and more intuitive, they make it more welcoming to female gamers, and in which they see themselves taking part and having fun, a game developer could tap more strongly into that market.

[BDFarmer]

Why do you need to get more of anyone to play Civ. Let people be and do their own thing. The more someone tries to get me interested in their thing, the more I resist. I know what I like, not you.