A game to seduce women buyers

Here comes a video game with a lust for violence and sex.

But it’s targeted to women, not men, and based on a pop-culture phenomenon with wild appeal to that audience.

In “Desperate Housewives: The Game,” some of the byplay between characters features the option of smacking people on impulse. And the sex, while visually tame, is embellished with the kind of racy dialogue that propels the TV show.

For the video-game industry, “Desperate Housewives,” made for personal computers and brand-new in stores, represents the latest gambit to attract women buyers who have little history of playing anything on a PC besides solitaire or short puzzle games.

“Even the women that already play games have this sense of what we call gamer shame,” says Ismini Roby, co-founder of the Web site WomenGamers.com. “They don’t perceive that other women play or are into games.”

But the “Desperate Housewives” game is ideal for changing that, she says.

“Now they’ll have something that a lot of women are admittedly into,” Roby notes. “It offers women a chance to talk about a game without feeling like they’re talking about something juvenile.”

Other notable attempts include “The Sims,” a hit series of lifestyle games from Electronic Arts about managing characters’ daily activities, and the Nancy Drew mystery games from Her Interactive, which have a niche among mother-daughter players.

Buena Vista Games is hoping the $20 price tag for “Desperate Housewives” will make it an impulse purchase for some consumers, including men buying it for women.

The game, which carries a Teen rating (13 and older), starts with players creating a new housewife who has a husband and son and has moved to the show’s setting, Wisteria Lane.

That housewife, who has memory problems from a vaguely described accident, begins interacting with the signature TV characters: Susan, Bree, Gabrielle, Lynette and Edie.

Although it fast becomes obvious there’s a large-scale mystery afoot – something’s just not right about the housewife’s hubby, for instance – the game also uses lifestyle elements to tap into a certain “Desperate Housewives” psychology. Women who test-played the game during its development sometimes showed less interest in the plot than the secondary opportunities to slap or seduce characters.

That makes perfect sense to Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

“If you reduce ‘Desperate Housewives’ to its haiku level, it’s probably about the assertion of power by women in ways that aren’t normally shown,” Thompson said. “What games like this suggest is that perhaps video games will become new audience testing tools.”

The single-player game relies on basic controls – almost nothing more than point-and-click with a mouse. The ambience is enhanced by having the narrator from the show, Brenda Strong. But sound-alike voice actors were used instead of the show’s stars, and the new housewife is voiceless, “speaking” only in text.

Some of the game’s side aspects, such as shopping trips to buy clothes for the new housewife, divide the fun into small bursts of time – an accommodation that research shows as particularly important to women.

Players even can use the Internet to receive printable coupons for real products in the new housewife’s click-and-open mailbox.