Abstract

144 Boiano, Borda, Bowen, Faulkner, Gaia, & McDaid
with a selection of women gamers who indicated that favourite titles include “role
playing” games like the Final Fantasy series/Square Enix, narrative adventures like
Legend of Zelda/Nintendo, and life simulations like The Sims/EA/Maxis (Krotoski,
2004).
Female gaming Web sites provide an additional channel for this interaction to
be translated with the submission of gamers’ own created and customized avatar
images, articles, online discussions, and Web logs. In the August 2005 edition of
WomenGamers, for example, gamers were invited to rank the top female avatars in
online and computer games on the market, and for the same month in GameGirlAdvance,
there was a debate on types of combat that may or may not be acceptable
to young adult gamers.
Such communication tools assist further in the development of strong female identity
through community dialogue, and can substitute for the absence, in real game play,
of equivalent, strong, female models or roles. Similarly, they permit users to take on
an avatar (their own or others) and make sense of it through a variety of social and
personal “stories” beyond the gaming environment. Again, the option for anonymity
and the nature of interactive Web facilities (e.g., chat rooms) allow users to meet
relatively independently, and to retain a given social identity in the process.
An elementary design principle shared in both GameGirlAdvance (Pinckard, 2003)
and WomenGamers is the importance of identifying and defining the target audience
and their interests, capabilities, and contexts of use of the Web site, and not
least, the incorporation of appropriate tools to support this (Sørensen, 2004). Here,
of course, it must be remembered that the female gamer audience is not a fixed
or universal category, but can be highly variable with respect to its genres of play
and/or technical interests or capabilities (Cherney & Weise, 1996; Groppe, 2001;
Taylor, 2004).
Therefore, the presentation layer should equally identify, and take account of, the
issues of relevance and interest of its target audiences (Culp & Honey, 2002). The
range (genres) of content or sets of functions/applications must be designed to appeal
to the spectrum of interests of the female gamers being targeted (Ray, 2003).
The use of up-to-date news columns, articles by a mix of well-known gamers and
member contributors, and real-time communication tools on the Web sites would
appear to fulfil some of these broad requirements.
With regard to the overall interface design, the principle of “less is more” has been
adopted by the two women gaming sites in question, to a certain extent. The design
of the entry points or interfaces immediately seeks to do two things to optimize
social interaction and identity: (1) at the presentation layer, enable community
identification by active use of associative images and text and (2) at the task layer,
enable participation among the targeted groups through prominent discussion areas.
There is also the inclusion of a platform approach to the access and use of other
applications and functions, including online channels for exchanges between users
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