I.T. Girls

Posted at: Thursday 16th October 2003 by Rhianna Pratchett

Only men like PCs right? Wrong. Rhianna Pratchett discovers the differences between the sexes on a hardware level

I think you'll agree that any girl who's prepared to brave an event packed with around 1,000 hardened (and predominantly male) gamers, must be pretty dedicated. However, despite the obvious passion for multiplayer gaming these women have, they still don't have quite the same passion for the hardware inside the PC. Maybe it's just a girl thang, but most women just don't care about what makes it work, just that it works.

This view is even being reflected in the way companies are targeting technology advertising at women, by straying away from the technical aspects. Men, on the other hand, tend to crave the rawer aspects of computer kit: transistors, pipelines, megahertz, bandwidth and so on. Chip porn, if you like.

But while the lasses at i17 demonstrate that women can slug it out with the toughest macho gamers, going nuts with an AK47 in Counter-Strike isn't the only thing that lures girls away from the ice cream. Other games, particularly MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) have proved especially popular with female gamers too. In fact, when it comes to online gaming it seems women are just as keen as men to get their virtual kicks via the Internet. The US market research company PC Data Online pegged the female online gaming figure at 50.4 per cent in 2001, despite the fact that women still make up a small percentage of the game-buying public.

Cal Jones, herself a dedicated player of Ultima Online, a MMORPG that has been going for six years with over 200,000 subscribers, thinks this is to do with the interactive nature of these particular games. 'A lot of women find computer games a bit antisocial. MMORPGs get around this by giving you a social and immersive world. I play Ultima Online because it's one of the most flexible and fun games out there. It has an ideal framework for creating your own quests and plotlines and for an imaginative woman, that's a very seductive concept.'

But although women view computers differently to men, what characterises many of the women we've spoken to is a similar passion for their PCs. The fact that these ladies, like Ada Lovelace, haven't been afraid to get involved in what is a stereotypical male-only environment, speaks volumes about what can happen in the future.