Greg Kasavin is site director of GameSpot. No one in his family even remotely likes games, besides him. Don't send your sympathies to [email protected].

　　Sure, it's been an uphill battle to get her to play games with me all these years, but it's been worth it to see her enjoying them when she does. I know that she'll never enjoy games quite as much as I do, but that's OK. I'll probably never get a kick out of reading Vogue every month. Some things are better that way. In fact, if she did enjoy playing games and I had to constantly battle for control of the console, it would probably be a bad thing. While I have always loved racking up a high score and being supercompetitive, these days it seems like baby steps and little victories are the way to go.

　　Games are fun for men, women, and children of all ages. So how come not everyone's playing?

　　I'm pretty sure I'd feel the same way about her if I were making games instead of just playing them, too. Well--then again, if I were making games, maybe I wouldn't care as much as if I were in the business of publishing games in particular. After all, game publishers are aggressively but quietly searching for ways to sink their fangs into the other half of the population, which isn't well-known for its tendency to spend lots of time and money on games each month. But a lot of people seem to be counting on that to change. Put yourself in the place of one of the bigwigs at one of the top video game publishing houses, doing the backstroke in a swimming pool filled with gold doubloons, wondering to yourself, "How is it possible that every man and boy alive owns at least three of my games, and yet women are able to resist?"

　　It's women in particular. Girls, it seems, are just as into games as boys are these days. Recent statistics showed that something like 102 percent of teenagers had played Grand Theft Auto before or something like that. Since games are undeniably a part of popular culture at this point, and since young people are generally hell-bent on trying to be well-liked by their peers, it stands to reason that most people unfit to play M-rated games at some point will go out and try get acclimated with this forbidden fruit that's being marketed straight to them with a nudge and a wink.

　　See? Even in video games, young men and women can't understand each other.

　　True story: I recently got a fact sheet for a game we're about to review that's rated M for mature. Right on the line immediately above where the fact sheet lists the game's M rating, it says, "Target Age: 13-35."

　　But that's a whole 'nother can of worms. I'm talking about why it is that young women get swallowed up into some sort of antigame vortex. We've deduced, anecdotally, that girls actually do play games. So do older women. Ever heard that other ridiculous statistic about how something like half of all game players are actually women? That comes from some other statistic about how more than half of all people playing games online are in fact middle-age women, playing various casual Web-based games or The Sims or something. So where does that leave the counterpart to the much-vaunted and highly sought-after male 18-to-34-year-old demographic? These young women are the ones that are unaccounted for. These are the ones game publishers are trying to get at. But they can't--at least they haven't yet.

　　Today, when a guy goes off to college, he's probably all excited about how he's going to be in a dorm room with a LAN and how he and the other guys will all get together and play Halo 2 while drinking, since they're now all officially old enough to play Halo 2 and they need some new way to feel like they're breaking the rules. But, statistically, it seems that when a gal goes off to college, games are the furthest thing from her mind. She drops her gaming habit, along with her loser high-school boyfriend, and goes off to get herself edumacated-like. Meanwhile, the guy in this scenario just drops out. Later, the two get married and have kids, and the guy pursues his dead-end job to support his family while the gal squanders her higher education, sitting at home and taking care of the children while playing Hearts online. Norman Rockwell would be proud.

　　With so many positive role models to look up to, it's a wonder why more young women aren't interested in games...

　　In reality, people's priorities are all different--that may be the only sweeping generalization that's more true than not. I'm surprised at how much talk I still hear of demographics as they relate to gaming, since I'm pretty sure most game players don't like the idea of being pigeonholed into a category, regardless of whether it relates to their age, their gender, or whatever. At the same time, I can't deny that it seems unusual that there's evidence to suggest that women actually are generally into games, except when they're in the same age bracket that happens to include the greatest number of males playing and purchasing games.

　　People who play games aren't necessarily just the ones with a lot of spare time to kill. Almost everybody's going to have some amount of leisure time in a given week, even if they work 100 hours or more--in fact, the more you work, the more you need to relax and blow off some steam every now and then, and those of us who play games regularly would be quick to report that games are a great way to do that. But just look at how wildly preferences differ even among the most avid game players. Take any of the most well-regarded games on the market, and you're guaranteed to find a contingent of hardcore detractors insisting that those games are overrated, overexposed junk. Given that, is it so hard to imagine why some people wouldn't even bother playing games at all, and why it's unlikely that they ever will?

　　Next Up: The Life, Death and Rebirth of Niche Gaming by Dave Snider