The term ‘girl gamer’ simply refers to female players who play video games on a regular basis, whether it be video games or role playing games. They play these games out of sheer casual interest or as a professional gamer.   Some of the video gamer girls that are known on the professional level include – Katherine Gunn, Amy Brady and Ashley Jenkins.

Katherine Gunn

Gunn, who is a native of Antelope Valley in California, is known to be one of the world’s top rated girl gamers. She has already joined several gaming competitions over the course of her five-year professional gaming career.  Gunn is a Dead or Alive 4 national champion, and she is also one of the top US female players competing for the famous Xbox sci-fi shooter game, Halo. On the 7^th of October in 2010, Gunn became the WCG Ultimate Gamer 2 winner, where she took home the $100,000 prize money. She also was given the chance to represent World Cyber Games’ , a professional gaming league based in Korea, as a spokesperson.

Amy Brady

Brady is a ten-year gaming veteran who has been recruited to join the famous girl gamer group, Frag Dolls. The team is the first ever female gaming group to earn a ranking on pro gaming tournaments.  Amy is now known as one of the best professional female gamers in history. Amy along with her other Frag Doll teammates are looking to get more opportunities to showcase their excellent gaming talent in other professional gaming leagues, aside the famous WCG. Though the number of professional female gamers is still quite low, Amy is quite optimistic that their population will continue to grow when the society starts to recognize that female players can be at par, in terms of gaming skills and techniques, with their male counterparts. Amy and the Frag Dolls continue to be the voice of female gamers. They are known not only for their outstanding skills in multiplayer games but also for their strong advocacy to raise awareness that video gaming can also be a legitimate and viable career for women.

Ashley Jenkins

Known in the gaming world by the nickname ‘Jinx’, Jenkins was a founding member of the Frag Dolls, an all-American female professional gaming team formed by Ubisoft. She served as the poster girl for all female gamers, traveling the world to compete in various professional video game tournaments. She started playing video games when she was still seven years old. At the time, she confessed that she just do it simply for fun.  When she heard that Ubisoft was forming a team called Frag Dolls, one of the development team staffs told her to apply. And so she did and the rest is history. She became an official member of the team on August 2004, and after 4 years of playing for various tournaments with the team, Jenkins left Frag Dolls in August 2008.

What is The Sims Video Game?

The Sims is considered as a strategic computer game which simulates real-life events and daily activities. It was developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. Will Wright, a game designer, lead the team that had developed the game. Wright was also responsible for the game series called ‘SimCity’.

It was initially launched on the 4^th of February 2000 and has been able to sell over 6.3 million copies all around the world by the 22^nd of March in 2002. With this racking sales record, The Sims has become the best-selling PC game in the history of video games. In February 7, 2005, The Sims has shipped more than 16 million copies worldwide. Seven expansion packs and a couple of sequels have been released since the game’s first launch. It has also garnered several awards which include GameSpot’s “Game of the Year Award” in 2000.

How Does One Play The Sims?

Unlike all the other video games available at present, The Sims does not make use of objectives. Instead, it allows players to make their own decisions and engage in the environment with the non-player characters. Its intended goal is to direct and organize the Sims’ time to enrich relationships, reach job promotions, and attain other personal goals within the game.

Life Stages: In the game, the player has three life stages namely infancy, childhood and adulthood. The sims can die from different causes like drowning in a pool, starvation, disease and others. A Grim Reaper appears after the death of a sim. In order to revive the dead sim, a relative must win a Rock, Scissor and Paper game against the Grim Reaper.

Neighborhood screen and Build & Buy Mode: These are used to allow the player to pause the time and remodel or renovate the lot or house.

Sims’ Lives in a Nutshell: The player has the capacity to instruct the sims in order to interact with the objects found in the neighborhood or the house like the pool, television set or other sims.

Some of the big budget triple A games played by girls include the following:

The Sims

First developed by Maxis and later produced by The Sims Studio, The Sims game franchise is distributed by Electronic Arts. It is a computer simulation game that has been hailed as the most successful and one of the top-selling video game series of all time. Sold over more than 150 million copies around the world, the Sims became the best selling computer game in the PC history. Its success even resulted to earning 5 awards from the Guinness World of Book Record, including ‘the Best Selling PC Game of All Time’ and ‘World’s Biggest Selling Simulation Series’. Due to the undeniable success of The Sims, various expansion packs were introduced thereafter. The Sims 2 and Sims 3 hit the market to conform to the new gaming platforms that came out. This triple A game is released in various platforms including iPhone/iPod Touch, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii.

Tomb Raider

This is yet another very popular Triple A video game that caught the interest of many girl players. Developed and introduced by Core Design, the popularity of the Tomb Raider game series spawned a great number of related media that even led to the production of the Hollywood movie of the same name, played by none other than Hollywood’s Lara Croft ‘Angelina Jolie’. Tomb Raider was awarded 6 Guinness World Records, which include ‘Highest Grossing Video Game Movie’, ‘Most Official Real Life Stand-in’, and the ‘Most Recognizable Video Game Character’.

World of Warcraft

With a production budget of $60 million, the World of Warcraft is perhaps the most famous MMPORG that was ever created. Though not specifically designed for girls to play, a significant number of World of Warcraft players are females.

Final Fantasy

With a humongous budget of $45 million, this popular Japanese game featured high-quality graphics that provide a more realistic gaming experience. Final fantasy game series is known to be the most expensive game to ever been created in Japan. Girl gamers fell in love with the remarkable quality and sheer production value of the game. The game sold around 100 million copies and due to its huge success, role playing games, spin-offs, high-budgeted motion pictures and other related merchandise follow suit.

Female video game players prefer playing interactive games (i.e. dress up games, makeup games and cooking games) where they can engage their strategic and problem solving skills. Many girl gamers also dig casual games (such as Peggle or Bejeweled) as well as the very popular role-playing games, like the ‘World of Warcraft’).

If you are an avid girl gamer who is curious about the best selling games for girls, here are some that are worth checking out.

Dance, Dance Revolution

The sale of dance pads was in full swing when DDR came out. This is not much of surprise since many girls love dancing. This music video game series was designed by Konami, a popular Japanese game developer. The game was first introduced in its birth country, Japan, in 1998, and a year after DDR was released in Europe and North America. The game comes with a music library where players can choose what music they want to dance to. The players need to hit the colored arrows shown on the screen by stepping on the corresponding arrow on the dance pad. They will be judge according to their dance accuracy. DDR is basically a game about movement and rhythm in which precision and timing are greatly needed.

Wii Fit

The introduction of Wii Fit in the market was an instant hit to girls. This is perhaps because of the fact that girls are too concerned about how they look and most importantly their weight. To grab the interest of female gamers, Nintendo decided to promote fitness in a video game format, which turn out to be a huge success. Female game players all over the world went gaga for Wii Fit the moment it was released. Thanks to Wii Fit losing weight does not have to be a taxing and daunting task anymore. Who would have thought that staying fit would be this much fun?

Rock Band

Girls love to pretend like rock stars and sing their hearts out just as much as they love dancing. And this is one of the reasons why Rock Band, a video game developed by Harmonix Music System, has become a top-selling game among girl gamers. It offers an excellent multi-player platform where players can simulate a real rock performance by using controllers that are modelled after real instruments for a more authentic feel. Players can take the role of the lead guitarist, drummer, or the bass guitarist.It comes with a tracklist of songs that are, of course, comprised mainly of rock music tracks.

These are just some of the few top selling games for girls, and there are actually more out there. As a matter of fact, more and more developers are producing games that are built especially for girls so be sure to watch out for them!

NPD Group published the report entitled “Girl Power: Understanding This Important Consumer Segment”. It says that young girls between two to five years old mostly play with educational and traditional toys while those aged six to eight mostly prefer playing board games and other virtual world games. They also partake in crafts and artistic activities.

On the other hand, girls aged nine to twelve are most likely engaged in traditional toys but the report says that this specific age group is now changing habits and turning to computer and video games such as those found in the Internet. These may include the games and apps accessible via social networking sites such as Facebook and many others.

Socialization in the World Wide Web is indeed becoming a mass phenomenon at present especially among young people. Young girls not only use their social site accounts just to find friends but also to entertain themselves. Take for instance, in Facebook there are a lot of games from which these girls can choose from—cooking and baking games, fashion designing games, gardening games and even war games.

Though many young teens aged thirteen and fourteen are avid online gamers, the NPD Group report revealed that many of these girls also enjoy messaging and talking on their cell phones and a number of these girls listen to music on portable digital players.

According to NPD analyst Anita Frazier, in spite of the growing popularity of internet games, mobile game apps, and video game designed of the Internet and other technological items, traditional play patterns are still prevalent and popular among girls. She added that more than fifty percent of girls from two to fourteen years of age still play with dolls, arts and crafts because these activities still serve as the green pastures for their personal growth and development. Frazier further explained that in general, girls are social creatures. That is why the increasing reliance and use of social networking sites and websites are only testament to this statement.

The group’s study is based on the survey responses of 1, 541 respondents who have daughters belonging in the age bracket of 2-14.