Along with casual gamers, women are the next hot marketing demographic. According to this BBC article the gaming industry is failing to engage women. (Translation: they could be making much more money off of women than they are now, but they don't know how.) Take the pink PS2 for example.  I like the color pink and can be seen around the office in pink sneakers, but I don't think coloring a console or its accessories pink is the answer to luring the softer, curvier sex to the dark and scary world of gaming.</sarcasm>

You know what also isn't going to work? Bratz, dress up games, games with ponies, and the Desperate Housewives game. Sure, it might lure some women to the controller, but those women aren't going to hop from games like those into something like Gears of War. Marketers need to understand that women are regular people who have differing taste in games. Just like there are men who like FPS's and those who like RPGs, there are women who like FPS's, women who like RPGs, and women who don't like to game in the first place. We're not one conglomerate entity that will only play Bejeweled.

So, what will work in bringing more women into gaming? That's a hard question to answer because women respond differently to stimuli.  Personally, I think the industry should stop making such a big deal about women playing games and how to target them, and just focus on making fun games period.  A lot of other gamers I know who are also women have said that they started playing X game because it was fun, not because it had a dress-up section or flower-arranging part of the game.

Yes, there are women who play The Sims, which is  a dollhouse simulator, but there are also girls who play UT and Half-Life.  Different games appeal to different women and focusing mainly on making "girly games" is going to fail at some point. For example, Nintendogs was all the rage a few months back and many girls got a DS to play that game.  How many girls are still playing that game now?  While Nintendogs may be cute, nonviolent, and known as "girly" it doesn't have much substance to keep a player coming back.  The girls have either stopped playing their DS, or moved on to more substantial games like Animal Crossing or Mario Kart.

Instead of thinking of women gamers as a whole separate entity who need their own genre of games, the industry needs to embrace the fact that we are all gamers with a variety of interests.  It doesn't help that all-girl gaming clans are getting more media coverage these days.  While these clans embrace the idea of sisterhood, they're also isolating.  I'm all for playing with the boys and I think assimilating into the general gaming community is easier when one isn't associated with a girl's only club. Women don't draw borders to separate themselves from the opposite sex in the real world, so why should there be a line between us and the men in game land?