As a woman who sews, it’s interesting to me that it was made to appeal to women because it touched my soul in a way that no other game had.
I’ve played all manners of games with vastly different gender compositions of player bases from Tarkov and Wardogs to Stardew Valley and Infinity Nikki. Dressmaker is the first game that I feel is both made with feminine aesthetics and skill expression that isn’t gated by preconceptions of what women are capable of. If you go to the dressmaker discord, the dresses there literally have the Mona Lisa painstakingly painted on it using piping.
Most games made primarily with women in mind tend to be simpler because of a circular assumption that women don’t play games with high skill expression and so game devs (who are majority male) will make simpler games. Dressmaker proved that skill expression and complexity is possible and desired even for a playerbase that statistically plays more mobile games.
It’s not patronizing, nor is it as simple as making games not sexist. There are games that you mentioned target men and women, and there are games that target men, but few games that target just women and treat them as competent players.
I’ve had a few thousand hours in games with majority male player bases like R6 siege, League, Tarkov, Battlefield, Tekken, CoD, Wardogs, etc. When I play, it always makes me feel like I’m walking into a men’s bathroom, like I shouldn’t be there even if other guys are okay with it, and most of these player bases are not. Sometimes, it’s the edgy aesthetics, or the fan service, or lack of female character options, or the edgy music and sound effects. The rest of the time, it’s one guy being sexist while the others stay silent. A lot of these reasons are why women prefer shooters like Overwatch, Valorant, Fortnite more than the above.
The fact is that girls and boys are socialized at a young age to like different things or stay away from them, and that will always produce a skewed gender player base for any game. In games with few women, we rarely get to speak up for each other when male players are being sexist, and men don’t often back us up.
Women didn’t have the decades of head start in gaming culture, experience, and exposure to be as competitive as men in most multiplayer games. Hell, I wasn’t even allowed to play video games as a kid. There isn’t enough momentum yet in the gaming world to fix sexism in video games by just making them not sexist.
The solution right now isn’t to eliminate games that target men, it’s to introduce high-skill expression games that appeal to women. The dresses on the dressmaker discord are insanely intricate and difficult to make, yet all of us feel like we belong as a gamer.
To fix sexism in gaming, women need to have our own gaming culture that goes beyond what a majority male game development world thinks we want and are capable of. We need to catch up on decades of video games and consoles being primarily marketed to men, and stigmatized for women.