Women hold future of mobile gaming

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: Robin Taylor grew up playing marathon nights of Crazy Eights, backgammon and chess with her parents. Today when the 45-year-old Brockton, Mass, mother of six, can spare a moment, she loads a round of solitaire on her BlackBerry phone.

“I just want to keep my mind going,” Taylor said. “I do 10 things at a time.”

Cellphone solitaire doesn't take the 100 hours that full-fledged electronic fantasy games can require, but cellphone carriers and game publishers are betting that those five minutes could turn gaming on cellphones and PDAs into a billion-dollar industry. While the action-heavy console world of shooter games and buxom babe warriors appeals to many men, women are driving about two-thirds of mobile gaming revenue by playing classics like Tetris and Mahjong.

Women make up 59% of all consumers who play games on cellphones, according to Parks Associates, a research firm. And they drive more than 60 % of the revenue in almost every genre of mobile games, according to research firm Telephia Inc. The exception is in action and adventure, where men are the chief players.

Game marketers say the cellphone's ubiquity and casual nature make mobile gaming popular among women, who are less likely to shell out several hundred dollars for a console like the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox. Some mobile games are free. Others can cost from $3 to $9, and the payment model varies widely. Some games require a one-time payment or subscription.

“The console is about people who come home from work and stay up until 3 a.m. shooting things or killing people,” said Jason Spero, vice-president of marketing for mobile game company Digital Chocolate. “But on the phone, people play for two to five minutes at a time. You have totally different design parameters, and it's much more mass-market because everybody's got it in their pocket.”

Several of the top mobile games are vintage arcade titles like Pac-Man, so users already know the rules. By comparison, large-scale fantasy games can call for hefty strategy guides explaining the minutiae of imaginary worlds and can take days of uninterrupted playing for the most experienced gamers to win. For now, simple classics like Tetris, Bejeweled, and Mahjong top the mobile gaming charts.