Did violence, poetically, kill the female gamer? The co-founder of Atari and co-creator of small-time game Pong, Nolan Bushnell, says as much. Violence, along with gaming’s shift from short, fun little romps to long-winded epics—I do not have the time to play a 50+ hour game anymore, either—caused females to pack their bags and quit gaming altogether. Quoth the Raven:
I like to talk about [how] 1983 was sort of the break point where games went from casual to hardcore. They got violent. They went long form. The violence lost the women and the long form lost the casual gamer. I actually sort of stuck to my roots, and the console game market moved away.
And, of course, the Wii is the White Knight that will save us all from the oppression of hardcore gaming, re-introducing females to the medium once again.