And I'm kind of wondering why that is. I guess gaming is a male dominated industry that hasn't really reached out to them in any way? Sure, you'll have booth babes and attention whores who will pretend to like video games for money. We were just talking about Jessica Chobot in the Mass Effect 3 thread who's a pretty good example of this. And there are plenty of girls who play cutesy casual games. But I've never encountered a girl who was an actual gamer in the sense guys are gamers where it's a serious hobby. I've never met a chick who played hardcore PC FPSs and RTSs for instance or who knew what a video card was.
I met a few girls in my WoW days who were properly addicted, some of them were on 10-12 hours a day so a few do exist. I am trying to train my daughter and she has her own DS, quite a few iOS games and a vTech kids tablet. She has got a game on the Wii and she does sometimes play the Sega Mega Drive collection on the 360 as she seems to like Sonic. She is nearly 4 so it may soon be time I have to think about getting her a console for her room as I don't want to end up in a situation where I can't play because she is using them in the living room! My wife has a lot of iOS games but doesn't really play anything on the consoles these days, think the last game she really got into was Little Big Planet. She has threatened to get Abe's Odyssey from PSN but hasn't done anything about it. There are quite a few female LP'ers on YouTube and you have to enjoy gaming to get into that sort of thing. There is one called PinkKittyRose who has done perfect runs on all of the classic NES Mega Man games (complete every stage without taking a hit) which is something I couldn't even dream of doing. There are proper girl gamers but they are a lot less common than us.
They do exist, it's just that the're massively outnumbered by guys. I encountered a few girls playing Gears 3 and Black Ops and you should have heard the shit they were getting from the fucking morons you get playing games these days. I lost count of how many kitchen jokes were thrown around and it must be really really annoying for girls to have to put up with such shit all the time. The general mentality of so many people on the internet makes me sad sometimes. I remember an all girl team that played in some Gears of War tournament not too long ago and their team name was "Let's get Gnashty" (the most popular shotgun is called the gnasher). I think they performed really well and Epic liked them so much they named a weekend playlist after them which was basically just a gnashers only playlist. I also think that the content of these games seems to appeal mainly to men such as graphic violence and swearing etc etc. My Mum actually surprised me a couple of years ago when she bought an Xbox 360 and played Fallout 3 a lot. It turns out she also played Oblivion and Morrowind quite a bit and has been playing Skyrim since day one. She actually started a new character on it yesterday because her main one was level 54 and she felt she'd done enough with him for now (although she hasn't done much of the dragon or war storylines). She's also had an iPad for almost two years now and plays games like A Bard's Tale, Backstab, and of course Mahjong. She's actualy the one who got me into Infinity Blade! They're out there, but there's not many of them. As for youtubers you could check out Dodger's channel PressHeartToContinue. She's kind of cute and is really into her games, it seems like she's always going to conventions and such.
Black Ops is the very definition of casual. You're actually just proving my point with that. Although your mom playing Bethesda games is kind of surprising.
I find it funny how you can call one of the most played games of all time casual. Nintendogs is casual. Eye Pet is casual. You should hear some of the people on Black Ops and how worked up they get and tell them it's a casual game.
Compared to real shooters like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty on consoles is casual. Any game where you can press a button and it automatically aims for you is fucking casual. Call of Duty games require no skill to play, which is why they're popular with little kids, noobs, dudebros, and even girls.
Counter strike may not be casual but that doesn't automatically mean it's any good. Likewise casual games can be great games. Angry Birds is decent and that's pretty casual.
I'm an elitist because I like shooters where you have to actually be able to aim, which is the whole point of shooters in the first place? And I'm sure Counter-Strike has outlasted every other online shooter and been around for more than a decade because it's terrible. That must be it.
Call of Duty (as in the first game) on the PC, rifle only servers is where I spent a lot of my time 7 or 8 years ago. Haven't played a CoD game online since.
To be honest I didn't like the normal servers much, too many people just running in with a machine gun and throwing a grenade. Rifle only servers where you got one shot and if you missed you usually died because they didn't was much more up my alley. Also no grenades so it was all about the mouse skilz.
I lol at how you make out that a little auto aim in COD to you seems like that scene from RoboCop where he storms the factory and owns everyone without trying. Think about it, your complaint is that the auto aim reduces the skill required to actually aim at your target (you do still have to be aimeing at them pretty closely for auto aim to take effect) but if everyone has this auto aim then it doens't really give you an advantage ove the other players does it? You still need to use skill to get around the fact that everyone has auto aim. I've seen people doing things on COD that require so much skill I don't even bother. And I never said that Counter Strike was bad, I merely asserted that how casual a game is has absolutely no bearing on how good it is.
It's not a little bit of auto-aim. I've played CoD on consoles. You press a shoulder button and it automatically snaps the irons sights onto the target. There's no skill involved. What you end up with is a bunch of little kids spraying and praying. It's lame. Add to that the ridiculously overpowered killstreak bonuses and it's even worse. I've had a few friends who were console n00bs who tried to get into Counter-Strike. They were overwhelmed by how difficult it was compared to anything they had played on a console. One of them who was really good at Halo had to play for literally like an hour before he got his first kill. He said the difficulty curve going from console shooters to PC was like running into a brick wall. Although ultimately he ended up really enjoying CS and got pretty good at it after awhile. Back on topic, I've never seen a chick play CS or any PC FPS for that matter, which kind of proves my point that they stick to casual stuff.
It seems to me that you're changing the definition of the term casual game to fit your argument. Are you saying any game where you use a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse is a casual game? Or perhaps you're asserting that because a game has auto aim/lock on it can't possibly be considered non-casual? If your definition falls under the first category you're an elitist moron and if it falls under the second you're completely wrong. I present Fallout 3, GTA IV, and Red Dead Redmeption, all have auto aim and all are what many would consider to not be casual games. Or maybe youre saying COD is casual because it's popular but you don't happen to like it? I'm not saying that it's a hard game to play but in order to consistenly perform well you do have to have some level of skill, unlike a casual game.
Yea, I'd say a very large majority of girls that consider themselves gamers are just casuals. And yes, I include that group into the girls that play COD. If you have ever heard them talk, you'd know what I'm talking about. I also knew girls who played WoW, but I'd consider them casuals as well. They would only know one part of the game (pve aspect) and something like WoW would be the only type of real game they'd play. Would you consider that an actual gamer? I wouldn't.
One of the best Druid Healers I ever met was a woman, she was actually one of the best players in our guild. She did pve and pvp but probably more pve as she spent a lot of time in raid dungeons once she had maxed out after each expansion. She really knew her stuff when it came to WoW and so I would have to class her as a proper gamer. She always had fantastic gear and spec'ed herself perfectly for her role in any party.
Yea, one of the top pvpers during the wow pvp tournaments was a resto druid, and it turned out the player was a girl. It isn't impossible that a girl can be a real gamer, but it's just really really few actually are.
WoW scales pretty well in the sense that it can be as casual or as hardcore as you want it to be. If you just stick to pve, WoW can be pretty damn casual.
Fallout 3, GTA IV, and RDR are primarily about completing quests. Shooting is an aspect of those games, but it's far from the main aspect. FO3 quests can often be completed without ever firing a single shot if your skills are high in other areas like speech for instance. GTA IV and RDR are more often about how well you can drive or control a horse than your shooting ability. COD on the other hand is entirely about shooting, except the shooting doesn't require any skill. The game aims for you. I know the dudebros and little kids who play it think it's the most hardcore game ever, but that's mainly because they've never played any real shooters on PC that required actual skill. And not only does it have auto-aim, but the killstreak bonuses give you kills you didn't actually earn.