Lately we have had to look at gender in the video games industry and in the gaming community and so our task was to review a female orientated game on a female games site. The game i chose to play was a game called cake mania a flash game that is about cooking cakes for people and selling them off.
The game has fast game play for a cooking game, the player has to make them to the requirements that the people want and then sell them off to the characters that come into the shop. The game is pretty straightforward in terms of complexity and interface where you point and click where you want your character to be in the game.
The game is very interactive, most of the content you buy in the shop can be used, the player has to interact with customers to find out what they want and sell it to them, cakes can be customized with different icings and some can be stored or sold if you make a mistake and have to start again. The conflict in this game is shown in the time limit you have for each customer to get there cake done as quickly as possible failing to do so will make them less happy with the service as shown as a star bar in there speech bubble, if it runs out the character will leave the shop and the player may not acquire the right money to pass the level.
The goal of the game is to collect enough money for the player to pass the level and eventually pass a chapter, this is where the game changes scene, for example your first shop is in a city, once you have passed all the city chapters you move out of the city to set up in a different location and level so your not stuck in the same shop until you complete the game.
The site that hosts this game, games.com also a is a female themed games site, one example are the amount of female games there are on the site, and there are not many male themed games on the site apart from games that seem to be gender neutral. Games.com seems to use quite neutral colors such as white and orange however most of the games it hosts are games that are made for both male and female or games like cake mania that are generally make for females.
The whole theme of this game is for women from the story of the game of baking glossy cakes to the style of how the game is presented, I would have to say that the game is aimed at a young generation because most of the colors of the game tend to be bright and glossed out aiming at a younger generation.
In the survey done by todays gamers national games survey 2009, we can see that from 8-12 and 13-19 years there is a big percentage of girls that seem to play games for example 8-12; 99% of boys play games for about7 to 6 hours while 96% of girls play games for 4 to 6 hours. We can see that there is a market for female games at a young age because there is fairly a large population who do play games.
In conclusion the game is generally a point and click business game that has been made for a younger generation of girls from 8 to 16, its a game that offers power ups in terms of additional cook ware to help the player out, the player's goal is to acquire money to run the business and to pass the level and the goal of the player is to complete all the stages in the game at different locations in the game world, the only real difference about what makes this game a female game to a game a male would play is its about cooking glossy cakes and that the whole theme and color and art of the game is aimed at young girls, you can argue that if you made the game with with a different art style and a different theme and story lets say a game for epic meal time, http://www.youtube.com/user/EpicMealTime#p/u/1/m9FRSghXhDM, you could argue that you would have a male themed game. So i would say that what makes the game a female game is the style of it.
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