"I'd Like to Have a House Like That": A Study of Adult Female Players of The Sims.

This article examines the practices of adult female gamers who play the videogame The Sims, and its successor The Sims 2, focusing on the motivations they have for playing, the context in which they play and their notions on the gendered nature of videogaming in general, and the possible digital skills they think they might derive from playing this game. For this research project 23 face-to-face depth-interviews with female gamers between the ages of 17 and 59 were conducted, and an additional 34 female gamers were interviewed by email. It is concluded that this group of female gamers do not play the game to engage in any form of competition, or to experience arousal, but rather to relax, enjoy the specific challenge of the game and engage in a fantasy-world. Most women have no contact with other female gamers, apart from the women they communicate with online. We have shown that through playing the game a group of participants had learned how to structure information on the computer and look up things on the Internet, and we conclude that playing a videogame can indeed influence someone's digital skills. We have demonstrated that with selecting a group of women who play one particular game-title, it is possible to isolate a particular type of female gamer and we may thus conclude that within gaming literature it is no longer feasible to consider women gamers to be a homogenous group. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]