英国女性对手游的态度分析

Stephanie Rennick1· Seán G. Roberts2 Received: 7 January 2025 / Accepted: 5 August 2025© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025 Abstract This study investigates the barriers to playing video games that women face. Despite gaming being a traditionally male-dominated pastime, 51% of women now game in some capacity compared to 53% of men. However, women are still lesslikely to play some genres and often face discrimination. A survey of 1000 people in the UK who identify as women andwho play mobile games revealed that they experience negative emotions around playing video games: A third experiencedguilt about taking time to play games and 1 in 6 kept gaming a secret for fear of judgement. There were also unexpectedassociations in the data: Women who look forward to playing aremorelikely to feel guilty than those who do not, andwomen who feel proud of their gaming achievements weremorelikely to keep it a secret than those who do not. We relatethese patterns to theories of gendered attitudes toward leisure time and argue they are rooted in women feeling excludedfrom gaming culture. We suggest the implications for game makers and game scholars, including the potential benefits ofbroadening the perception of who plays video games, who games are for, and what types of games are available. KeywordsGender roles· Gender role attitudes· Computer games· Mobile games· Gaming· Guilt· Leisure time·Gender inequality· Smartphones· Telephone surveys· Mobile phones A brief note on terminology: in relation to our study, weuse “women” to mean people who identify as women. Whendiscussing other authors’ work, we use “men,” “women,”and “people of other genders” to refer to those people whowere designated that way in the context of their studies;similarly, we use “female” and “male” in accordance withhow they are used by those other authors. Not all studiesoffer definitions of the terms used and may use them differ-ently from each other. The games industry in the United Kingdom was valued atalmost £8B in the latest market valuation report (Purdie,2024), with over £1.5B in mobile game sales in 2023. A2024 survey of over 3600 UK participants aged 16+foundthat 36% of female respondents (and 34% of respondentsoverall) had played mobile games, up from 20% in 2019(Clement,2025). Although the number of women playingvideo games continues to increase, their representation var-ies between different genres, platforms, and gaming activi-ties (e.g., Le Ngoc,2024). Previous research, as outlinedbelow, has suggested multiple barriers to women’s play andparticipation in video game culture. However, there are fewstudies that provide evidence for these barriers in a broadsample of UK women who play mobile games. Barriers to Play Casual Vs. Core Games One reason that women might be reluctant to consider them-selves ‘gamers’ and fully participate in the gaming commu-nity is that the sorts of games that they are assumed to play,and that are marketed towards them, are viewed as less cen-tral, less serious, and less important than those chosen byand designed for men. There is a commonly drawn distinc-tion within the gaming community between ‘causal games’and ‘core games’ (or ‘games’simpliciter) (Chess & Paul, 2019; Paaßen et al.,2017), along with a “subtle devalua-tion and blatant feminization (Vanderhoef,2013, p. 4) of theformer. Industry efforts to separate the two markets “haveworked their way into the gaming subculture, furthering thestratification of gamers by gamers” (Hanford,2018). TheGlobal Gamer Study of 2023 found that women players aremore likely to identify as casual gamers than men (44% vs.28%, Le Ngoc,2024, see e.g., Shaw,2011), though there aresome casual genres that seem to be played equally by menand women, such as puzzle games (Eklund,2016).How best to cash out the distinction is contested, but that women may not be aware of the range of games that areavailable: another impact of marketing strategy.At the same time, decades of assumptions about gender and gaming (Eklund,2016) have fed into additional barriersto women in the form of hostility from the gaming commu-nity. This includes the sexualisation of female video gamecharacters to serve the presumed straight male gamer, lim-ited representation of women in games and gaming culture,and harassment and sexist abuse (e.g., Bustos-Ortega et al.,2024; Fox & Tang,2017; Nakandala et al.,2017). Vulner-ability to this harassment may increase for women whenmoving from casual to core gaming spaces (Chess,2020),creating an atmosphere that might make women feel likegames are not “for them.” casual games are often free or cheaper than their ‘core’counterparts, can be played in shorter bursts, are thoughtto be easier to learn, and can be (and often are designedfor) lower-powered hardware such as mobile phones (Juul,2012; Ramirez,2015). It is commonly assumed that womenplay casual games rather than core games (Chess,2016;