Video game distribution is insanely low friction. Last month the best selling game was Resident Evil (6m copies) and right alongside it you have a Slay the Spire 2 (3m copies) which is made and distributed by like... 15 people maybe?
I definitely don't think I could make a better game for women than women, so hopefully more girls get into playing and making games. It is definitely one of those areas where you have an opportunity to stand out from the 10,000 games that come out every day.
Why would it be misguided? There are plenty of works that are created by women that appeal to men (Harry Potter, Animorphs, Full Metal Alchemist), so I don't think there's anything wrong with men trying to make something that appeals to women.
Make art that is truthful and your audience will find you.
> I definitely don't think I could make a better game for women than women, so hopefully more girls get into playing and making games.
Some of my favourite game designers and authors are women. I don't think a creator needs to share the gender, sexuality, or ethnicity of their target audience in order to make games that appeal to that audience. They need to _observe and listen_.
Rebecca Heineman comes next; again, the games she worked on were massively influential upon me.
I have much respect for Amy Hennig, who pushed narrative gaming to new levels.
Kim Swift is responsible for _hundreds_ of hours of time lost to multiplayer games with friends of mine.
There's good odds most gamers of my age have played, and enjoyed, something worked on by Sheri Graner Ray.
Honorable mention is Corrinne Yu; I started following her career with passive interest when she was hired at 3DRealms, I expected she had the potential to be the next John Carmack.
Also lesser known because due to a trademark dispute, all sequels and the VGA remakes of the series were renamed to Quest for Glory.
I deeply enjoyed that whole series in my childhood, even despite how weird the voxel-based art in the fifth game was. IIRC, I learned the "razzle dazzle root beer" cheat in Hero's Quest before I learned the Konami code, and, with the help of my dad, even learned how to hex edit my save games in Quest for Glory 2.
This is interesting, as my five year old daughter loves Pillars of Eternity. That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.
She absolutely adores the simulation games (Avatar World, Toca Boca World etc) which leads me to believe that she'd love the Sims. I wonder if I can get them on Switch?
She has Animal Crossing, but there's a lot of text there which she isn't yet comfortable with.
Funnily enough, PoE is the game I've been needling my eldest to try for _years_ now. The PoE games are fabulous CRPGs that I've played through twice each, myself; I expected that she would love the mix of puzzle solving, narrative, and strategy. But it just didn't hook, for whatever reason.
> That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.
Oh, well, yes. My kids love watching me play whatever game I'm playing. That's different: they are choosing to show interest in my interests in order to spend time with me.
Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a *game* there...
> Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a game there...
A large part of the problem here is that folks believe that "game" necessarily implies goals and mechanics.
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/game
> 1. a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other
vs
> 2. activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
Lots of folks see it as definition 1 (cooperative is still a contest against some non-player), whereas your girls seem to be operating under definition 2.
The equivalent to your statement from the other side of the fence would be women that deride male competition.
At the end of the day, we likes what we likes. Doing fun things is the fullest definition of a game. So the application of the priciple looks different depending on what the people enjoy.
Both types of software plausibly "are video games" but can take extremely different forms, and their appeal may diverge wildly—someone who likes one to an extreme, may have zero interest in the other. Others may like both sorts of play, but not regard them as interchangeable (i.e. if what you're wanting at the moment is an e-sport, a visual novel may not be any amount of a satisfactory substitute, even if you like visual novels).
We tend to draw a "toy/game" distinction (with games perhaps being a subset of "toys", but still its own sub-category, anyway) with physical objects to divide those with built-in goals from those without, and that seems to serve us well, but we've not translated that to the digital realm very well (and maybe we shouldn't, I dunno)