More Women Than Men Play Games Online

A joint study by Trendstream and Lightspeed Research, which looked at the online gaming activities of US Internet users. According to the study, 42% of women have played an online game, compared to only 36% of men. Also, 28% of women have participated in social games- casual games on social networking sites, while only 22% of men have played social games. 83% of social gamers play on Facebook, and one of the most popular games, Mafia Wars, attracts more than 24 million monthly users. Source: Facebook

According to PopCap Games, more than half of the social gaming population is female. The average age of the US social gamer is 48 years old, with more than half of gamers over 50 and few regular gamers (those who participate at minimum on a weekly basis) under 30. Source: eMarketer

Tom Smith, managing director of Trendstream, has said, “The transformation of the gaming market towards casual social concepts has already changed the way that games are created and distributed...This gives brands a huge opportunity to engage with consumers through casual games much more cost effectively than through other forms of advertising."

Who's Got Game? Apparently, Women

Recent Nielsen Games data released by eMarketer shows reveals that women are catching up to men in both the PC and console gaming arenas.

According to the report, the largest percentage of any group were women ages 25 to 54, who comprise 29% of all PC game players. Women ages 55 and up were 17% of the market, who spent the second-highest number of minutes playing. They were also the third-largest group, behind men 25 to 54. And although many of the top 10 PC games played by women come prepackaged with their computers, online and downloadable games (such as World of Warcraft and PictureKa! Museum Mayhem) made up about half the list.

Women can also increasingly be found playing console games, including the Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Sony PlayStation 3. Women ages 25 and older tended to be more faithful to their consoles than men of the same age.

Est. Today: Virtual Design Studio for Tweens

Est. Today is the latest virtual world targeted towards tween girls. The site was conceived by a husband and wife team that wanted to create an online fashion studio for their 12 year old daughter, and allows budding fashionistas to create, showcase, and purchase clothing and accessories designed by one another. The site provides three distinct offerings, each centered around fashion.

The community component is a virtual showroom, where users have avatars, chat, watch videos, answer polls, try on clothes, and shop for virtual items. The community section also offers a design contest, where tweens can vote on the winning design for a tee shirt. Finalists are displayed in the virtual showroom, and the winning design receives a $200 spending spree. The design studio is a fun, drag and drop tool with enough options to keep tween girls busy. Users can select backgrounds, designs, and accents, and logos. The designs can be saved and incorporated into a user’s virtual closet and even be put into production as a real clothing item. The site also offers a ready to wear shopping section where users can put buy stylish, age appropriate clothing.

Est. Today is a fun, engaging site that will catch the eye of tween girls who have outgrown more juvenile sites such as Webkins and Pixie Hollow, and may even be able compete with the successful tween fashion virtual world Stardoll.

Stylehop Provides Fashion Shopping Engine with Consumer Ratings

At Stylehop, fashion conscious women can shop, rate items of clothing, play games, and earn points that they can use as rebates to their purchases. The idea behind Stylehop is that the most valuable and relevant fashion advice for a woman does not come from New York, LA or celebrities, but from a woman’s fashion peers. Their goal is to become the Zagat of fashion- a shopping engine with robust, filterable consumer ratings.



Stylehop could have easily created a boring, Amazon-like ratings engine. Instead, they created fun, addictive, lightweight social games and quizzes to drive engagement and build the foundation for a robust, ratings-based shopping engine. The games prompt women to provide a five-star rating for each item presented, creating the star ranking data that feeds StyleHop’s shopping engine and allowing it to generate a substantial amount of ratings for a variety of items. Another catalyst to drive engagement is the points system, where women are rewarded for activities like reviewing styles, filling out their profile, etc. The points can be used towards rebates on items purchased through the site. Additionally, Stylehop allows results to be filterable not only by brand and product attributes but also by whom you want providing your five-star rankings.

Disney Launches Pixie Hollow- Social Gaming for Girls

Disney’s Pixie Hollow is the latest social network and gaming site targeted towards girls and pre-teens. Pixie Hollow has a fairy theme featuring the popular Disney character Tinker Bell. On the site, girls can create and customize a fairy, chat with other fairies, play games, and undergo tasks to earn badges for their “Leaf Journal”. Coming attractions for Pixie Hollow include the ability to embark on quests and host “Pixie Parties”.



The risk involved in creating a social network for young girls is apparent when considering what could happen to Disney’s reputation if something went wrong. Moderation and parental controls are therefore at the center of the registration process. Disney offers parents the ability to control chat levels and permissions, as well as the type of content girls can upload. User chat, the most compromising of social networking tools from Disney’s perspective, is extremely restricted. Users can type their own phrases but only using words from the Disney dictionary, or select from a list of pre-approved questions and statements. It's obvious that Disney spent a lot of time working on moderation, both from their own ideas and by taking cues from other social gaming sites like Stardoll. The effort has definitely paid off; PixieHollow's moderation is flawless.