Exploring Female Preferences Within Game Design

Stone, Kathrine Midtgaard

4. term

Medialogy, Master

2018

2018-05-31

100 pages

This thesis explores how games can be designed to appeal to the female audience. Research suggests that the current way of designing games often neglects narrative, deep characters, and emotional content. Most games focus on creating goal-related tasks, such as collecting, navigating, or shooting, which are components that are mostly preferred by themale audience. Therefore, this thesis explored which game components appeal to women through empirical data collection and through existing literature by using the Exploratory Research Approach. A number of design components were identified and used to develop three prototypes that focused on various design components. Three qualitative tests with women, who do not usually, play games, were conducted, to explore the identified components. The findings indicated a number of design features that are important to focus on when designing games that target the female audience. By following these design guidelines, it might be possible to design innovative games that potentially can attract a new audience, such as women with little prior gaming experience.

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