Digital game adaptations to attract more girls to play

Abstract

Until the early years of the 21st century, games were seen as activities for male teenagers and adults. Gradually, women are gaining representation in the universe of games, but they still encounter difficulties, face judgments, prejudice, and often feel discouraged to play. Games can encourage girls to see technology positively, which can motivate career choice in computing. As the number of female professionals in computing careers is still small, characterizing what girls like or dislike in games can contribute to the increase in that number. Thus, this work aims to propose adaptations for digital games, to attract more girls to play them. To reach this objective, we conducted interviews with girls, to collect information about what they like or dislike in games, and later a triangulation was performed for validation, which used information extracted from a questionnaire. The analysis of the interviews shows that aspects suchas game graphics, the possibility of playing in a group, the reality of the game, and freedom to choose avatars and paths the game will follow are characteristics significantly valued by the participants, regardless of whether they already play games or not. Based on the analysis, this work generated suggestions for better matching games for girls contributing to reducing the gap between men and women in computing careers. Some of the main suggestions address the need to pay attention to how the game will work the interaction between players; the need to provide the gamer constant feedback and rating features suchas ranking, promoting competition, and the insertion of female avatars within the games that are representative and that have physical variations in the characters, in addition to representing women as champions and not just as support for other players.