Playing Halo With Girls

Women who play "serious" video games are, regrettably, rare. Sure, you find the occasional person who manages to kick ass without a Y chromosome (My old WoW guild leader was one such example), but given that half the population of this planet is female, you'd expect to find more.

Part of this is gender socialization, of course. Video games are for boys, and that is heavily re-enforced through testosterone-fueled design and marketing. But after sitting down and playing Halo with some wimminfolk, I think I may have identified another culprit: Modern games are hard.

This may seem a strange statement, especially referring to Halo. After all, Halo is the quintessential pick-up video game at all kinds of social gatherings. But then a friend of mine amazed me with her total inability to run and shoot at the same time. This forced me to realize that there is a lot of complexity in Halo that we as males are simply used to.

At the basic level, the game requires you to use two analog sticks and 10 buttons as if they were a mere extension of your body- a skill that took most of us many years to master, by starting with a simple NES/SNES controller and gradually moving up as new systems arrived.

On the next level, Halo requires knowledge of basic infantry combat: things like cover, fire discipline, where to aim your gun, which types of guns are good in certain situations, basic maneuvers like flanking, etc. etc. As with the controller, these are not things that you can intuitively know, they must be learned through practice.

And then there is the top level. Skills like aiming and how to move when under fire or knowledge of things like map layouts and blast radii of explosive weapons. Most of us have already mastered the the lower levels, and so it is only these challenges that we think about. But the female newcomer is likely to be overwhelmed by most or all of this complexity at once. Some persevere, but most will just go hang out with the douchebag playing sugary emotional songs on his guitar (at least he doesn't give them shit for not being able to instantly master complex tasks).

Perhaps there is a reason why simpler games, like Goldeneye for the N64, continue to be so popular; they are worlds easier to pick up and start playing, while still being very fun. I wonder if such a game could succeed in today's market, or if most non-gamers are just permanantly turned off to anything more complex than flash puzzle games.