Poca diversión: las barreras de las aficionados a los videojuegos/ Not Much Fun: The constraining of female video gamers Jo Bryce, Department of Psychology, University of Central Lancashire, UK Jason Rutter, Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition, University of Manchester, UK Published as: Bryce J. & Rutter, J., 2007. “Poca diversión: las barreras de las aficionados a los videojuegos/ Not Much Fun: The constraining of female video gamers”, ADOZ Journal of Leisure Studies, (Boletín del Centro de Documentación en Ocio, Universidad de Deusto), 31. pp.97-108. Abstract: The growth in video gaming as a leisure practice has not engaged female and males players equally. At school age, females play video games less often than their male contemporaries and the gender differences increases with age. This paper explores the social contexts which contribute to constraining female access gaming. It highlights a ‘career' approach to video gaming in which females are excluded from an early age, marginalized through their gaming career and have a tendency to leave video gaming earlier than males because of other constraints including time. The paper briefly suggest that some innovations in video games have a particular appeal to female gamers but that this is not a solution to female exclusion from this leisure activity. The study of video gaming has been informed by two separate research agendas. First, that of the media effects perspective which has tended to examine the potential influence of games in shaping perceptions and practice - most notably those linked with aggressive behaviour. Second, an approach broadly built on tools from literature studies which has seen games (or specifically the organising of image and story on the game platform's display) as objects of taxonomic analysis. 1 What these 1 For overviews of these fields see Bryce and Rutter, 2006b and Kücklich, 2006 respectively.