Fortnite Females: Towards Gaming Diversity

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When it comes to video games and gender, only one quality has really persisted since the popularization of both arcade and console gaming - boys and their toys. Virtual play has always been seen as a male-oriented activity and especially so today with the development of international competitive stages. The recent GamerGate debacle erupted on this underlying tension of female rep in gaming. Luckily, today’s gaming landscape is far more developed than how the industry looked even 5 years ago, with more emphasis on unique genres (i.e. puzzle, adventure), mobile apps, and overall “casual” gaming have nurtured a new generation of women and girls that enjoy and embrace gaming culture.

Though, that development is highly skewed. Again, most the female growth is more weighty in casual and non-competitive options like simulators, interactive dramas, puzzles, and role-playing games. As you move down the diagram seen below, there seems to be a clear inverse correlation of competitiveness and appeal to the female crowd.

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Much of this makes sense instinctively - Males are more likely to immerse themselves in highly competitive and/or time-consuming media. It isn’t rare to find male gamers who has sunk 1000+ hours into Counterstrike or World of Warcraft. I myself don’t want to even attempt to calculate the number of hours invested into Diablo 2 in my high school years and my PS4 in general since purchasing a few years back. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m simplifying a highly complex social and mental chasm into a binary situation, but to put it simply, men are overwhelmingly prone to more intense and competitive experiences when it comes to gaming.

I won’t go deep into why I think this is the case. Like most differences in the actions of various groups, it’s a layered and intertwined reasoning with several complex components including historical marketing techniques, the spatial transition of gaming from arcades into living rooms, and the social and chemical makeup of the the two sexes and what they gravitate towards as distinct biological organisms. I completely disagree with the regressive and reductive perspective of confrontational pundits like Anita Sarkeesian that it is simply due to “sexism,” but I’ll save that for a potential future post. Gaming is just another context that clearly outlines different preferences for different sexes.

But there seems to be a growing exception, one that is obviously betrayed by my title. The unique quality of Fortnite - its randomized characters (which I’ve talked about before), short-form format, low-barrier for initial learning, overall vibrancy - is attracting the typically disinterested female community into its fold. Most excitingly, we’re seeing major female streamers play the game on Twitch and YouTube, even subsequently playing in major tournaments like Summer Skirmish hosted by the developer EPIC itself.

Part of this phenomenon is the nature of the game, the other is the popularity of it. Right now, Fortnite is the most-played competitive game with 10s of millions of unique players logging in each month. It might have breached the 9-figure count last month with the launch of it on Android and the Nintendo Switch. This opens tremendous opportunity for non-male players and streamers to diversify the viewing and commentating experience of the title. It’s a no-brainer for non-dudes to shakeup the status quo and bank in on the tremendous excitement in viewership and revenue.

As such, we’re seeing major internet celebrities like Pokimane and Valkyrae becoming very proficient at the game and almost posting Fortnite-exclusive content since being introduced over the last several months.

I believe this will have great implications and impact on nurturing a more welcoming and dynamic player base for a part of the gaming community that has for various reasons turned off our female counterparts. Hopefully we see more of this commingling in the long-term and with future titles.

Ok, enough of this post before it becomes seemingly fanboyish. Steem on!