Pogo: The Games Are Short and Women Plentiful

I've always been skeptical of studies that say women are the fastest growing segment of the video game playing market. But, after a visit with the folks from Pogo, I've seen some convincing information. Pogo.com, a free, ad-supported casual gaming service, and Club Pogo, a premium subscription ($5.99 a month) service, seem to be attracting women like flies to honey. And the reason seems to be simple, quick, and pretty gaming experiences.

I stopped in at Electronic Arts' offices (they acquired Pogo a few years ago) the other morning, and Beatrice Spaine, Pogo's Senior Pogo Marketing Director, told me she'd give me the proof I needed to see that the site's claims of having a 75 percent female audience were accurate.

Eleven am Eastern Standard Time: I didn't think it was prime gaming time for anyone, but we found 173,000 players online and 9,000 playing a game called WordWomp, where you make words from a collection of letters. It looked like a game I'd give a 10-year-old to beef up their word recognition skills.

A quick scan of the screen names confirmed that these were women (or men who liked women's names). Beatrice told me that 51 percent of the women are 35-years-old or older and they spend an average of 102 minutes a day (!) on the site.

It's not just at Club Pogo, either. An AOL Games study found that women age 40 and older, when they go online, spend a longer time playing games than men or teenagers do. And Yahoo! Games caters heavily to a female audience.

Word and puzzle games were most popular with the women over 40, with 49 percent preferring them over casino (27 percent), arcade (16 percent), trivia (7 percent), and sports (1 percent) games. The 40-something women were also more likely to take their online gaming friendships offline (21 percent).

What's the appeal? On sites like Club Pogo, the games are short with a low barrier to entry. Many of them are traditional board, card, or word games that women are familiar with in the real world. You can revisit the game and play again and again without have to relearn rules or readapt to new situations.

Most of the games are untimed, so speed is not the primary component of the play. The games have a friendly, inviting look; some use avatars created by the players. A chat tool lets you strike up a conversation with the other players and there are plenty of rooms to reserve to play with friends at a specified time. There are family oriented puzzles, and you can accumulate tokens. The subscription service offers a safe, calm community to choose from 110 games (30 of which are exclusive to Club Pogo). Word and puzzle games are incredibly popular, followed by card and casino games; many, like Solitaire, that can be played alone. Less popular are the arcade, trivia, and sports games.

Of course, there's a growing number of women gamers who don't want to be pigeonholed as recreational gamers with simpler pleasures. You can find them debating the depiction of sex and violence in the hardcore games at Women Gamers.

There is something distastefully stereotypical about this notion of gamers who aren't motivated by the speed, complexity, and competitive challenge of the traditional gaming world that attracts men. But after watching 9,000 (mostly) women womp their words for awhile, there's no denying there's something to the stereotype. What do you think? Do women really have different attitudes about online game playing than men? Are you a game playing woman? Let's let them know about what's really going on out there.