Sept. 26 - Oct. 3, 2005 issue - What do women want? Men have been asking themselves that question since time immemorial. But for the huge male-dominated electronic-games industry, fueled as it is by the high-octane testosterone of adolescent boys, the supposed mystery of female tastes is more than a rhetorical conundrum; it's the key to the future. Is there a place for women (other than as fantasy objects) among the thieves, addicts and whores in the mean streets of the best-selling Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? Are girls going to have fun blasting terrorists, blowing up monsters and clashing with other evildoers in the corridors of first-person shooters like Quake, where you see the universe mainly over the barrel of a gun?

Well, some do. (Since 1997, female gamers have competed for the title Queen of Quake.) But the industry's bias against women players is so ingrained that the size of the current female market is largely unknown. Dan Morris, editor in chief of PC Gamer magazine, says 50 percent of game purchasers are girls and women, but many of those are probably moms buying for their sons. Another estimate, that 10 percent of all gamers are female, is probably low, says Morris. Still, he says, "I can't think of another entertainment sector that's systematically freezing out half the potential market."

Now many analysts think that approach will have to change. Videogame economics are such that companies are willing to hemorrhage money selling consoles like the Xbox and the Sony PlayStation at a loss to build market share, then make money selling the games. But the kind of growth that's needed to make that model work is hard to imagine unless more women are brought into the market. "Whoever takes that philosophical leap—'We're solid enough to appeal to our core, we can reach outside our demographic'—they're going to win out in the end," says Ankarino Lara, director of GameSpot.com, a popular gaming Web site. "Female gaming is the last frontier; 2006 is going to be a milestone year."

The key to that change lies in both evolutionary and revolutionary technology. As broadband Internet access becomes commonplace and portable games link up wirelessly, players are interacting with each other and with their machines as never before. At the same time, experimental games using artificial intelligence raise the possibility that characters on the screen will take on a virtual life of their own. "We're talking about relationships illuminated through conflict," says Chris Crawford, whose career as a design guru goes back to Atari, in the Precambrian era of video recreations.

Indeed, "relationship" is the word that best defines the differing interests of men and women as they enter an on-screen adventure. "Women gamers are very social, very strategic—they like to work together to solve problems," says Charlotte Stuyvenberg, director of global communications for Xbox. "Most designers stereotype a gamer as a guy who sits in a dorm room or office or basement and plays by himself, so a lot of games are designed with that player in mind. But as design and development mature, there are a lot more opportunities to make games more social."

Girl gamers were largely hidden from view until The Sims brought them out in the 1990s. Created by legendary designer Will Wright for Electronic Arts, The Sims had a success with this hitherto untapped female market segment that came as a surprise to game-company executives. "We actually did not realize that women would gravitate to Sims as they did," says Virginia McArthur, a Sims producer. In focus groups, more than 50 percent of the Sims audience are teenage girls. The games have become a laboratory for studying gender roles in what might be called the relationship market.

The Sims games allow players to develop their own worlds from the ground up. "It's a gigantic sandbox," says McArthur. Instead of shooting enemies, you create characters and the environment in which they live from an array of options. The characters have needs—food, shelter, money, utilities—that must be met. "You order a pizza, you're going to have to go to the bathroom," McArthur says. Characters also want and need each other, especially in The Sims 2 and its variants like Nightlife. "They have 'woohoo'," she says. "That's our term for playing in bed."

Boys and men play, too, but not quite the same way, it seems. "We have what we call our deviant players," says McArthur. "I hate stereotypes, but they're usually male, and they like to create chaos." A favorite trick for deviants: putting Sims families in homes with no doors or windows, where they're bound to die. At the other extreme: "a lot of our women we call 'dollhousers'," says McArthur. "They like to build their dream house." That takes time, but when everything in it is working right, "then they can spend all their time socializing." Which means more woohoo.

The Sims came as the videogame industry's first stroke of luck; the second—the advent of "massive multiplayer online" games—followed shortly thereafter. MMO games allow real people to interact with each other—to have relationships, in other words—in cyberspace. Again, to the industry's surprise, girls and women started flocking to the fantasy landscapes of sword-and-sorcery universes like World of Warcraft, sometimes wielding weapons but also inhabiting characters who seemed nurturing, beguiling or bewitching. "The game is very alive to me," says WOW aficionado Debbie Barnaby. "It's not just go here, do this, meet this objective. It also brings out the devilish side" of her character, she says. "In World of Warcraft, I can go out anywhere and play as a rogue, and sneak around picking people's pockets."

The new generation of Xbox and PlayStation consoles have broadband hookups that allow players anywhere to talk among themselves using Internet telephony as they play with or against each other on their screens. Industry analysts see the new connectivity as vital to building the female market. The other concepts critical to women, says Brenda Laurel, a pioneer in the field, are strong characters and narrative. "As early as Zork"—an all-text role-playing game of the 1970s—"we knew that women were playing adventure games and role-playing games," she says.

Today, some of the most creative efforts to incorporate character, narrative and relationships into games go beyond the preprogrammed ironies of The Sims and the chat-room companionship of the Web to embrace the more unpredictable world of artificial intelligence. Characters have lives, ambitions and sensibilities. "We're talking about personality—about the human condition," says Crawford. The algorithms at the heart of a first-person shooter are relatively simple, he says, creating a space to move around in and bullets to fire. But algorithms for real human emotions are more complex and conditional—"subjunctive," as he puts it: not "if X then Y," but "if X then Y, or Z, or many other possibilities."

So far, only one game has moved into this arena. It's a free download called Facade, which its creators, Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas, call a "prototype research project." Although the file is a huge 800 megabytes and only fast PCs can handle it, Stern says the game has been downloaded 150,000 times since July.

Facade's minimalist graphics are the antithesis of those in most modern electronic games. The personalities are what count. "We're trying to appeal to the non-computer geek," says Stern, "people who are turned off by games because they're not about people's lives." He says at least half the downloads are by women, perhaps more. "The experience is like standing on a stage with two improvisational actors who are trying to make a drama happen," says Stern. They're a man, Trip, and a woman, Grace, whose marriage is coming apart. You hear them arguing through the door, but when you enter, they tell you everything is just fine. Soon, "they're trying to get you to take sides," says Stern. "You can help them, provoke them, flirt. A lot of the humor comes in when a player acts crazy or out of bounds"—a deviant, no doubt—"and the characters try to keep the drama going."

To build Facade, the co-inventors have tried to push the boundaries of both gaming and AI, creating emotionally expressive characters who display several different kinds of behavior at once. They've incorporated what they call a "drama manager" to guide the story intelligently based on moment-to-moment interaction among the protagonists and the player, while a "parser" is supposed to understand a wide range of conversational English, sifting out interruptions and distractions.

In practice, this computer-generated theater has a lot of glitches and lags. During our test of Facade, we stood by silently for 10 minutes while Trip angrily asked if we were done flirting with Grace and bossing them both around. If a player is provocative, he's tossed out. If his powers of persuasion fail, then either Trip or Grace walks out. If his advice is good, they have an epiphany, stay together and ask the player to leave. In any case, the drama is structured as "a tight one-act play," Stern says. Each session lasts about 15 minutes. There's no winner or loser. The point is to get involved intensely and briefly.

None of this may tell us anything new about what Crawford calls "the human condition," but it's bringing game makers closer to figuring out what women want. If they get the answer right, then videogames may not only conquer the "last frontier" but open up all sorts of new ones.