Your mom plays Xbox 360 games

Insert obligatory "yo' momma" joke here.

Great article! I have a feeling that "Mrs. P" is quite above average for most mom's out there; I know that mine goes only to about Big Brain Academy on the DS without being completely flummoxed by the complexity/control of most games. But who knows, maybe I should let her try Condemned and see if she has a hidden self as a vagrant bludgeoner :) . I'd like to see this same article but with the Wii; money is on the outcome that she will enjoy it more.

Yeah, I think Mrs. P is above average for most moms. I can't get my wife to try any of the retail 360 games but she loves the XBLA retro and card games.

I know my mother would never touch a video game.

My girlfriend on the other hand has become a different astory. She is the casual market these companies need to appeal to. She has always shied away from video games because they were too complicated to control. Once controllers had more than 3 or 4 buttons, it just got to be more of a chore than anything.

This same girl now has her own DS Lite, and actually has more of my games on her person at any time than I do. She's addicted to everything from Phoenix Wright to New Super Mario Brothers. Games like Katamari Damacy and Guitar Hero have her hooked just as well, with their simple, intuitive concepts.

An intersting excerpt at the end of the book Power-Up delves into the reasons girls don't like games. In particular of note was that girls don't like games where they have to repeatedly fail within the learning process, and that girls don't want to spend hours upon end on an "unsolvable" problem. This makes a lot of sense when you think of the games that usually draw women, and casual players in general, in.

Anyone can get somewhere in a game like Solitaire. That's why it has such universal appeal. Games like Tetris and Katamari Damacy have the same effect. These are the games that will expand the market. Games like Super Monkey Ball that anyone can pick up and at least make some headway in. They don't have to be easy games; We all know how insane Guitar Hero can get; but the games have to have the kind of system where anyone can feel some sort of accomplishment right away.

There's tons of casual gaming dollars to be had, my girlfriend can attest to that. These companies just need to put a little more effort into garnering that money. Nintendo has the right idea; Microsoft is on the right track, though not at the same level; Sony, I'm waiting to see if they can garner that newly-covetted demographic, though the price point isn't going to help them in that area. I'm looking fforward to more games to play with my lady though so, this all works out well for me.

and each time a bell rings an angel gets its wings! That's such a nice story, Moms that enjoy hyper violent games and are "graphicwhores"

"I think strong dramatic elements, like story and visuals and music, would be a bigger draw to older generations than unique gameplay mechanics or what have you." Holy shit that's why the arcade business it dead! adults don't go anymore because games are using unique gameplay to attract people when they should have been continue to use Super expensive graphicboards to run Ridge Racer...

Somehow, This mom contradicts what the current trends show, Give her a choice between a PSP and a DS all she would be all over the PSP. She should be called from no on:

"HARDCORE MOTHER"

@Petrie:

I've experienced the same thing with regards to the magical powers of the DS Lite; it too has transformed my girlfriend into a gamer. In a lot of ways, I see her transformation as exactly what Nintendo has been strategizing as of late: simple, accessible games, and a low price and you MAKE your own market. She has never owned a video game console and the only games she ever really played were SMB on the NES (her brother's no less!). That all changed when I let her try out Animal Crossing: Wild World, and I couldn't get it back to smack some bitches down in Metroid Prime for about two hours.

Next day, she emails me an invoice from Lik-Sang (found the site herself) for a Pink DS Lite. She has animal crossing, and the New SMB, and just got tetris and Mario Kart for the thing now.

I felt like I saw Nintendo practically printing money; not taking it away form anyone else, but more like tapping a private well of marketshare. It was amazing.

Hey thats awesome. I got a 360 in Novemeber, thinking that me and my bro would be the only ones using it. My mom and dad are now heavily addicted to Bankshot Billilards and Hextic. They have unlocked the most hardcore acheivements for those mundane games, but hey, at least they play!

I've tried countless times to get my mother to try out Brain Age and it's not working. Heck, even my Dad tried to get her to try it. To date, the only games she's ever tried are Tetris (NES), Donkey Konga, and Karaoke Revolution. However, this is the same woman how still doesn't know how to get the DVD player "on the screen."

Like Petrie, my fiance falls into the casual gamer market. I bought her a DS when it came out and it's without a doubt her most cherished system. Animal Crossing is without a doubt her favorite, and she's put countless hours into NSMB, Feel the Magic, Nintendogs, Yoshi's Touch 'N Go, Warioware, and Brain Age (for Sudoku alone).

However, she is compelled to play other games but simply can't do it. She really wanted to love Luigi's Mansion, but struggled using the dual analog setup. On the flip side, she loved Mario Sunshine, but I noticed she NEVER manually used the camera. And if she did, she would need to stop Mario, and then spin it around to where she wanted it. Zelda is another series she adores, but she can only progress so far before she gets frustrated. She also digs characters and story. Oddly enough, she's actually been hanging around as I've been playing through Psychonauts (usually she walks away and does something else). She told me she thinks it's great, but knows that "she could never do it." Based on her previous game experience and Psychonauts sometimes iffy stage layouts, she's probably right, and it's a shame.

I'd come up with some sort of ending statement for this, but Petrie said it best. There are women out there willing to play video games, they just can't be as intimidating as most of them are now.

In case anyone is curious, she, and a bunch of my other female friends can't wait for Wii.

I also believe Mrs P. is above average, because she's studied the arts and has had a long career in fashion, a rather liberal, progressive and artistic milieu. This puts her in a better place to appreciate the visual aspects of video games (you'll notice she mentions it a lot) and she has a much more open mind about it than some other moms would. I would like to see the exact same experiment with a more pragmatical mother, either a nurse, a school teacher or an accountant.

But I guess the important thing to note in that experiment is that the bigger drawbacks to an audience over 40 are time investment and subject matter (as well as complex controls, but that sort of ties in with time investment). These are obvious, of course, and have been the barriers that casual games and the Touch Generations series have tried to break down and that future games will have to break down in order to appeal to that audience. I always said appealing to older generations wasn't getting mothers to play Grand Theft Auto, but creating games that would appeal to mothers' wants and interests just as Grand Theft Auto appeals to the typical 18-35 male wants and interests. Which, if Mrs P. is any indication, is quicker gratification and decidely less sci-fi/fantasy.

"In case anyone is curious, she, and a bunch of my other female friends can't wait for Wii."

You heard it here first, people - Nintendo isn't for kids anymore... It's for girls.

I chuckled at the Grandma-in-a-Zapper-scope part, since my grandma has an NES, and no NES game collection is complete without Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt

My mom is tech-phobic.

My sister plays GTA: Vice City, Sims 2, and Guitar Hero.

I'm trying to figure out how to get my dad to play Guitar Hero. If I'm an Expert at it, why can't I get him to try?

this is news???

Great article I really enjoyed reading it.

GIrls are infact love the DS. All but one of the girls who I have regular contact with at work love the DS and were close to buying the dsphat from me when I was ready to pick up my Lite.

I remember in college I took my DS to school and girls liked it. This one big breasted latin woman I remember fondly because she always wore skirts and never crossed her legs (damn the shadows, damn them to hell) she was the perfect female body. She loved to play mario minigames and Feel the Magic, just loved it. Very nice girl too and if she didn't have a jealouse football playing boyfriend I would of totally been friends with her.

in my college Democrats the girls like it again. Again a very pretty big breasted woman liked playing the minigames and had lots of fun.

My friend/co-worker put a DS lite on her birthday list for her boyfriend to buy her after she played with mine. A trend I somehow notice is that MARIO and ZELDA games are HUGE with girl gamers I have no idea why.

Usually when the girls at my work go on break they ask for my DS if I have it with me.

SO basically if you want big breasted pretty girls to hang around you play a DS, if you want other young men to hang around you buy a PSP and head over to Brokeback mountian....

I can't imagine how popular Wii will be with girls. Wii Sports just screaming party game, and so is Wario Ware Smooth Moves.

@ xaviertooth

I realize that to some poeple things like this aren't really of interest. and that this is used by some strictly for the at the moment news reason. But if you look up the definition of a blog, this article fits in just fine.

Actually, my mom does play Xbox 360 when she's visiting. Bejeweled+1.

Her eventual favorite game was Condemned. Awesome.

My wife is addicted to Dead Rising right now. Unfortunately for her, she does not get to play too much because of work and crap.

Before this she played a lot of Cloning Clyde and loved that game.

She also likes Hexic.

ps: We are mid-30's and grew up with video games.

pps: I refuse to read an article that is as horrifically laid out as that page is. Read a sentence jumbled up with google ads then click an arrow. Please.

I'm not really one of those girlfriends that was -completely- transformed, as I had plenty of prior experience, but I found that it was in fact Nintendo that was my first "gateway drug", if you will. My boyfriend has been an avid gamer practically since birth, and I watch him play all the time on everything from NES to 360. The ease with which he can pick up almost any game and play through it in a matter of a day or two or less was always intimidating to me. But when I encountered Nintendo, especially in its older iterations, I felt like after I started out with a few simpler games, I was more ready to move into the sort of games he liked to play that I always wished I could (mostly on the xbox). The only one not on Nintendo that did this for me was Katamari Damacy.
Now I, like most of the girls you mentioned, am attached to my DS Lite and my boyfriend doesn't even have a DS yet. Granted I was more of a tech geek than many of these girls beforehand, but I can still say something for the appeal of that shiny little system and its intuitive control scheme.
But you can't go around saying it's "for girls" now. You look at the Wii and sure you see things like Elebits and Wii Sports, but you also see things like Zelda (which, granted a lot of girls like it, is a HUGE nostalgic draw for a lot of guy gamers too) and, on another vein entirely, Red Steel and Metroid. Same thing with the DS.
Violence and guns and action? They don't deter me in the least, and I think it's this blend that intrigues me and pulls me into trying more things: the fact that the same point-and-zap method that I will be using to capture my little energy-critters and toss houses into the nether, I will already know how to use when it comes time to gun down my foes and engage in crazy swordplay. I will already have learned. No constant failure necessary - an element which wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't have work to go to and sleep to get. Curse that.

"At one point, she was being chased head-on by a vagrant. Then, in perfect rapid succession, as he ran close and swung at her, she stepped back, tazered him, and then shot him once in the head with the revolver. She let out a maniacal cackle that made me reposition my chair just a tad farther away."

Awesome.