Crushable writer Solvej Schou crashed the E3 gaming expo in Los Angeles, and discovered a growing female presence. She also discovered some anti-female behavior despite.

“This is a maaaaaaaaan’s world,” sang James Brown back in 1966, “but it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.”

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3 for short), known to any video game aficionado, distributor, developer or designer as the equivalent of a gaming wet dream, it’s still a man’s world, even with women gamers and game designers on the rise.

This year’s E3, at the sprawling downtown Los Angeles Convention Center June 15-17, boasted 46,000 attendees and a bunch of games ranging from interactive dance and fitness to mind-whirring puzzles that draw female attention. According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the national organization that owns and operates E3, 40 percent of game players are women, and 60 percent are men.

Yet, companies at the expo still market overwhelmingly to (straight) dudes, with reminders everywhere. Busty Playboy Bunnies pose for photos with baby-faced fanboys holding fake guns to promote Mafia II. Guys surround a bikini-wearing lady in zombie makeup lounging in a cage to promote Dead Rising 2. Even Nintendo staffs its handheld DS demo tables with rows of svelte, pretty gals in matching black blazers. Yours truly was jokingly asked by three older guys working at a booth showcasing girl-centric Hello Kitty DS holders if I would take off my shirt to pose for a photo with an enormous Hello Kitty doll. NO!

While the ESA says it doesn’t track the exact number of women attending the expo, ESA new media associate Ashley Christoff says that number is growing, despite the mostly male attendance.

“It grows every year, as the number of women who identify themselves as video game players grows. It’s definitely changed a lot from past shows,” she says. “It’s still more male dominated, just because of the nature of the industry. But we’re looking at an increased number of women who work for game companies, female journalists who cover gaming, and then just gaming enthusiasts who are women.”

Ashley cites superstar game producer Jade Raymond, who heads up France-based leading game developer Ubisoft’s studio in Toronto. Raymond also happens to look like a model. …

With women, Ashley says, casual games targeted to a mass audience are steadily popular. Those include fitness games, puzzle games and brain teasers, plus fashion games, such as Style Savvy for Nintendo DS. But role playing games and more hardcore first-person shooter games normally popular with guys, such as the super bloody Gears of War 3, which now features a female soldier, has been appealing more and more to women.

“Women are just more increasingly comfortable. They’ve grown up as gamers. They don’t see themselves as much as ‘women gamers’ as just gamers,” she says.

At Ubisoft’s massive E3 area, dozens of women – not in bikinis! – crowd onto a stage to shimmy along with the freshly previewed Just Dance 2 for Nintendo Wii. They sweat, they laugh, they do disco moves along to blasting Pussycat Dolls and Ke$ha tunes. It turns out that out of the eight people who designed the game, one is a woman. The game’s main dance choreographer is also a woman. The game involves interacting and dancing with others, as in a real club.

“One of my sources of inspiration was my wife,” says Just Dance 2 creative director Gregoire Spillman. “She does some Swedish exercise. They play loud music, between aerobics and dancing. It’s difficult for her to motivate to go to the gym, for this. I was thinking to create such an activity, but at home.”

Gregoire, in his thick French accent, notes that “every man is half woman.” So getting guys and gals to dance together gets women involved.

“The social aspect is major. To have the lady to ask the boyfriend to dance. It’s a good game for seduction,” he says, grinning. “With this game you can work out, you can compete, you can try to seduce.”

There’s also Your Shape, the newly unveiled, hands-free fitness game developed by Ubisoft for Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 and is set to be released before the end of the year. A motion detection system scans a player’s body, creating a sleek purple on-screen avatar that moves as the player moves. Sebastian Puel, an executive producer on Ubisoft projects including Your Shape, says that out of the 50 designers, programmers and others involved in developing the game, 25 percent are women, including the team’s leader.

“We have more women involved in the industry. Of course, it takes time. Programming attracts more men than women,” he says. “And E3 has changed. The first time I came here, in 2000, it was only men. There are more women now interested in the games. Maybe, very soon, we’ll be more 50-50.”

Arlyne Sanchez, a tiny 28-year-old first timer to E3, looks perky holding onto bags of swag. The game art and design student at Mt. Sierra College in Monrovia, Calif., who got into gaming through her older brother, knows she’s in a male-driven business, but doesn’t care. She’s just pumped to be at the expo.

“It’s like a kid in a candy store,” she says. “I’ve always been fascinated by adventure, action games. The whole Tomb Raider thing for PlayStation. … I have a few female friends who also love gaming. They’re into adventure stuff too. Women love communication. Story lines and emotion, that drives them. It sucks them in.”

Super Scribblenauts, developed by 5th Cell Media to be distributed by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for the Nintendo DS, has cute, cartoonish graphics, with players typing in noun and adjective combos to conjure up objects to solve puzzles. The wordsmith aspect of the game, following up from last year’s hit Scribblenauts, appeals to many women, says the game’s developers. Of course, typing in “curvilinear path,” as I did, may not conjure up much. Damn those GRE words!

The design staff, as with Just Dance 2, consists of eight people, with one a woman, says game producer Caleb Arseneaux. The studio itself has 50 employees, with five of those women, a “really high percentage for a studio of that size,” he says. Two of the studio’s engineers are women, “some of the best we have.”

“A lot of marketing campaigns to women will be like, ‘Hey, you like really simple things that are easy to do, right? That must be what you like.’ A really unique thing about Scribblenauts is that is challenges your mind,” says Caleb. “The response from females in our office, as well as friends and family that come in, is that they have just as much creativity as any of our male gamers, and they enjoy the challenge just as much.”

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Paris Hilton looks sexy in a black leather dress and peekaboo boots at the official opening night of The Pussycat Dolls Lounge at The Viper Room.

Rumor has it that Paris was booed to tears at the birthday party for Christian Audigier’s daughter, Crystal. Prior to the Pussycat Dolls taking stage, Audigier asked the fans if they wanted to see Paris. The room booed loudly and Paris was practically in tears. She left without ever stepping on stage. +5 …

Post from: Crushable