It's happening in record numbers. Busy professional women are shutting the doors of their offices or bedrooms to spend private time playing online games. And Cara Ely, creative director at Seattle's I-play and originator of the company's popular Dream Day Wedding series, knows why.
"Women with jobs and families spend their whole day juggling things that don't go the way they planned," says Ely. "But in the gaming world, you're clearing boards, you're matching things, you're taking things out of chaos and putting them in order. It's so satisfying. Over and over, women tell me, 'I play when I really need to relax.'"
Statistics may not have the same insight Ely does, but they do bear her out. A 2008 study from Source Harris Interactive shows women account for 67 percent of the $2 billion "casual gaming" industry (defined as electronic games targeted to a mass audience, rather than toward hardcore gamers). The average female gamer is 36 and plays four times a week; she prefers online games to television. According to the Casual Games Association, she is three times more likely to purchase games than a man.
And no matter where she lives, she's likely to be playing a game created by Ely, one of the first women in the United States to work in a senior game development position. Yet she remains an anomaly: recent figures put the rate of female developers at only 6 percent.
Perhaps the industry should take note. Back in 2004, officials at Oberon Media, the New York-based parent company of I-play, reviewed the stats and realized it was marketing to a mature female audience with a team of seven or eight young guys. So they brought on Ely, a former talent agent who had gotten into gaming as an associate producer at Sierra Online. The developers taught her the basics then let her loose.
I-play's offerings in 2004 were typical of the time: ocean quests, space adventures and puzzles. This was fine for the woman who enjoyed traditional gaming, but in order to break out, the company needed something else, a game that would appeal to their target audience (women ages 35 to 55) in a brand new way. Ely's first assignment: bring ideas to the table.
"So I pitched a game I called Dream Day Wedding," she laughs, remembering her colleagues' skepticism. "But here's the rationale I put in that document: there are a lot of women who love hardcore games. Shooting, racing, that kind of thing. But those women were already being served. I wanted to create the kind of online game my mom might play."
What Ely designed was a game like no other on the market: a canny blend of the choose-your-own-adventure books she'd loved as a child, an attractive couple (Jenny and Robert), plus a series of choices and tasks the player must complete to help achieve the perfect wedding, then mixing in quirky plot twists reminiscent of a Nora Ephron movie.
"I envisioned something with classical music, very funny, very light," says Ely. "There's always a happy ending, but along the way, there are 'wedding crisis levels' that the player herself gets to set. The bouquet might be destroyed just before the ceremony, or the wrong dress is delivered and it's a nightmare Elvis extravaganza gown."
Despite misgivings (the original team at I-play worried Dream Day Wedding would alienate the 30 percent of its consumers who were male), the company released Ely's first Dream Day game on February 14, 2007. It immediately went viral. To date, the series—Dream Day Wedding, Dream Day Honeymoon, Dream Day First Home, Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan and Dream Day Wedding: Viva Las Vegas (a sixth title will be released in early 2010)—has resulted in more than 60 million downloads at $19.99 apiece.
And sales continue to soar. This success may be partly due to the recession, says Nancy Kiss, marketing manager for I-play. Women on a budget can download a game and play numerous variations for roughly the price of three movie tickets.
"With the last couple of releases, we've begun to hit the 25- to 35-year old market," Kiss says. "That's a segment with two million new brides each year."
Ely herself is 38, and while she does play online games, her tastes tend to run more toward Artist Colony, a simulation (or "sim") game she developed that involves mystery, estranged family members and a competition among players to create the greatest works of art.
But of her brainstorms, it is Dream Day Wedding that has so far made the biggest mark. Which is fine with her.
"I'm not some girly-girl," Ely says. And this much is clear.
She is a savvy businesswoman who spotted an empty niche in a booming marketplace. So she dreamed up the perfect product to fill the gap.