The Boston Globe

SEEKING TO BROADEN THEIR APPEAL TO WOMEN, COMPUTER GAME MAKERS ARE TRADING THEIR CHARACTERS' COMBAT GARB FOR DESIGNER CLOTHES. THEY'RE CREATING WORLDS IN WHICH HUNGER AND DEATH DON'T EXIST, BUT SHOPPING DOES.

TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION MENLO PARK, Calif. - When looking after her three boys and running a fledgling Web-hosting business got to be too much last summer, Michelle Valentine slipped away into one of her other worlds. After choosing one of the many personas she had created for herself, Valentine, 32, threw invitation-only parties in a rented villa, splattered friends in paintball matches, and sought hidden treasures in scavenger hunts.

"It's kind of an escape from reality," she says of her new computer game, a virtual world called There, "because you can be just about anybody."

While video game companies have long coveted female customers, the gunfights, sporting matches, and epic adventures that have persuaded boys and men to spend money on such games have shown limited appeal for girls and women. But a growing number of software developers are realizing that, by reexamining their definitions of what a video game is, they may finally be able to tap into that elusive demographic.

Online worlds that resemble reality, like the Sims Online, are leading the pack. A growing number of interactive software titles - still mostly for the PC, not consoles yet - are trading elves for realistic characters, cloaks for designer clothes, tanks for dune buggies, and weapons for shopping carts, in an effort to draw players of both sexes.

"If we build a place women love, guys will show up," said Tom Melcher, chief executive of There Inc., a video game start-up based here. "The reverse is not true."

Becoming the latest addition to the pool of online games that seek to draw as many, or more, women as men, the company's game, also called There, was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.

The 80-employee start-up, backed by $33 million in financing, has spent four years building the online world. Users can design their own characters, called avatars, that can sit in hot tubs, surf the skies on hovercraft, chat, and express emotions. The company is registering participants in a public beta test on its Web site, www.there.com.

The Sims Online, which Electronic Arts Inc. put on sale last month for $50, is highly structured and closely mirrors real life; its avatars need to sleep, use the bathroom, and eat. There's characters are much less demanding. The game is more like instant messaging with context and activities.

"It's more like Club Med than the real world," said Darla Marcomb, 38, a controller with a health care company in Fremont, Calif.

Hunger and death don't exist in There. But shopping does. The start-up last week announced partnerships with Levi Strauss and Nike to make their apparel available in the game, so players can dress their avatars in the latest styles.

During a private beta test last summer, Valentine, of San Antonio, Texas, charged $20 on her real-life credit card in exchange for Therebucks, the game's currency. She used the Therebucks to buy clothes for her avatar and furniture to decorate the villa she had rented to host friends who were also testing the game.

"It's like a chat program, but then it has so much to offer," she said.

Melcher acknowledged that he is unsure how There will change as more members join, and the conflicts that inevitably arise in online communities begin to unfold. There members can choose to permanently ignore other characters who bother them, and throw invitation-only parties, trivia contests, or discussions in their virtual homes.

But Lynn Johnson, a 44-year-old aspiring graphics artist in Huntsville, Ala., says she has been impressed so far by the people she has met in There. She has since taken some of her There friendships offline, visiting with other beta testers from Oklahoma, Florida, Pennsylvania, and California.

"It's a lot like going to a club and meeting new people," she said. "It inevitably leads into real-life phone calls."

The social interaction is an important part of the new wave of gender-neutral games. Nearly 60 percent of the players of the Sims Online, an Internet-connected version of the series that it is the best-selling PC game of all time, are women, said a company spokeswoman. Electronic Arts will begin its first console-based Sims game, for Sony's PlayStation 2, tomorrow.

Second Life is an online, virtual-world game under development by Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based start-up that includes Mitch Kapor, the founder of Cambridge's Lotus Notes, among its investors. About 40 percent of its initial testers are female, said Robin Harper, senior vice president of marketing and business development. The attraction, she said, is the tremendous flexibility for creating and modifying characters, buildings, and other elements of the world.

"Women are social, women are creative," said Harper, who was an early executive with Maxis when it developed the first Sims games. "They appreciate the opportunity to use a computer to connect with other people."

She added: "No one has ever been terribly successful when they have gone out deliberately to appeal to women."

Broadening the appeal becomes even more important as video-games publishers seek respect from Wall Street. After two years of soaring sales and stock prices, the $9 billion industry realized during the holidays that it still has a lot of growing up to do. With the exception of their leader, Electronic Arts, every major game publisher released disappointing earnings and lowered their forecasts for this year, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.

To be sure, some women are rabid players of the same games that men love. Libe Goad, the 29-year-old cofounder of GameGal.com, a Web site with game reviews and stories about the industry, spends her days snowboarding virtual slopes, orchestrating gangster-style assassinations, and hunting human prey in shoot-em-up games. While playing Grand Theft Auto 3: Vice City, the blockbuster game from Take-Two Interactive Inc., in her Manhattan apartment, she fields complaints from her female roommate.

"There's no magic formula to creating games that women want to play," Goad said.

But Goad says her female friends often fail to see the appeal of the games she plays. Indeed, the Interactive Digital Software Association, a Los Angeles-based trade group, says that the person who plays the most video games in seven of 10 households is male. International Data Corp., the Framingham-based research firm, pegs the number at closer to eight of 10 and says it has changed little over the last few years, suggesting that the industry's torrid growth has been fueled by attracting more of its core audience, not women.

"I think there's going to be a wall eventually because there's only so many 15-year-old boys or 21-year-old men that you can sell to," said Schelley Olhava, an IDC analyst.

Publishers recognize the need to broaden the user demographics. Only a few years ago, Megan Gaiser, CEO of Her Interactive, which makes PC games based on the Nancy Drew detective books, often fielded questions about why the company was making games for girls. Now, she said, publishers are instead asking how to make games for girls.

"Everyone is looking for that ingredient," she said. "It's clear that the market is here, the market is growing rapidly, and people want to get on the bandwagon."