Girl Gamers at MacWorld

The first presentation of the Users Conference that I attended was this morning’s Vision Track presentation on the relationship between Web 2.0 and e-Learning. One of the things that speaker Nick Floro talked about was that educators can use gaming, especially interactive gaming platforms such as Second Life, to engage students who are used to dividing their attention amongst multiple things at once. (He explained how you can create classrooms in Second Life and use them to present video materials in a sort of online virtual interactive classroom).

In this part of his presentation, he cited a statistic that there are more female gamers than male gamers between the ages of 14 and 20. It’s hard to believe since the gaming world is so often dominated by men but he swears that it’s true. (I’m going to hunt around for the source of the stats later on tonight.) There’s definitely been an increase in female game players but I’ve never been sure how involved they get as compared to their male counterparts, especially in the multi-player games that are popular today.

Here at MacWorld, women do seem to be showing off their gaming skills over at the MacGames Pavilion. I wasn’t sure about that at first because while I was over there playing EVE Online yesterday, I was the only gal actually playing any games. There were a couple of women hanging out and watching the guys that they were with play some games but no other women were getting in on the action. I peeked my head into the area today and was happy to see that there were a couple of girls getting their game on. Yay for the women of MacWorld!!