The prompt is here: How can EVE Online attract more female players?
What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game. Will Incarna do the trick? Can anything else be done in the mean time? Can we the players do our part to share the game we love with our counterparts, with our sisters or daughters, with the Ladies in our lives? What could be added to the game to make it more attractive to them? Should anything be changed? Is the game at fault, or its player base to blame?
The answer is extremely simple, and it's really the same way that EVE could attract more male players: add more casual content to the game.
EVE is great as a "hardcore" game, but one side effect of that is that it is impossible to do anything "casually" in EVE except perhaps high-sec mining (which I've never done, and which sounds extremely boring). Every isk is earned by blood, sweat, and tears, and you're not going to risk them to just mess around in the current hardcore mechanics. And the only interesting mechanics are hardcore.
What CCP needs to do is to add some content that is more casual. This content needs to be stuff that you can log into and off of instantly without risk of loss. It should have some effect on the larger hardcore EVE world, but that effect doesn't really need to be so large that is unbalances any of the existing gameplay. For inspiration, consider the game mechanics of some popular games that the girls in my life enjoy:
This casual content should be protected from destruction or theft in high-sec, but riskier and more rewarding in low- and null-sec, just like mining. It should involve building, crafting, socializing, and aesthetics. The results of these activities should be public or publishable so that players can visually share their creations with each other and thereby compete.
Finally: the output from these activities should be marketable. Why? So that every "EVE widow" can start to play and make a contribution to her husband's addiction. I don't think my wife would enjoy PVP or "spreadsheets online", but she would like it if she could play casually and make a contribution to my wave of destruction.
Here are some other bloggers who I think are on the right track:
