[Air-l] casual games

[Casey O'Donnell]

I'm studying game development in the context of the "game industry',
so a bit of a different arena.

However, a friend of mine named Shira Chess in Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute's LLC program is studying online games with particular
interest in gender and age. She's actually found that even more
"hardcore" games like World of Warcraft (WoW) or City of Heroes have
significant female populations, you often just have to know where to
look for them.

The other piece is that casual games can also attract a significantly
older demographic as well, hence her interest in age.

Given the difficulty establishing rapport virtually, she would
probably have more luck contacting people in person, explaining her
research, and asking folks to refer others to her for a kind of
snowball approach to finding people to gather data on. For the most
part people I know have focused more on getting in touch with people
in person by finding gamers in real life and then contacting them
virtually.

Shira has been trying to decide how to handle casual games, so if
you'd like to contact me off list, I'd be happy to pass on her contact
information. She probably also has some pretty significant insights as
far as methods for getting in touch with folks.

Best.
Casey O'Donnell

On 1/18/07, Bonnie Nardi <nardi at ics.uci.edu> wrote:
> I think this is an interesting area of research as apparently a lot of
> women in this age group play, subverting the stereotype that games are
> for young(ish) males.