In Seattle last month, game developers and executives gathered in Seattle for the Casual Connect conference, where they discussed the state of casual games. Casual games are typically online games, short computer games, and mobile games that do not require a long time commitment to play. Some of the best-known examples are solitaire, Minesweeper, and Bejeweled.

A recurring topic of discussion among casual game developers is Women Game Players. When casual games are taken into consideration, adult women make up more than half of all video game players by some measures. And when looking at only casual games, most authorities say their audience is predominately female by a shot.

Robert Norton is managing director, North America, of King.com. King is a casual game site, but the company also powers other online game portals, such as Yahoo! Games. According to Norton, 65 percent of King.com players are women. And the majority of them are in their 30s and 40s.

King.com has a strong list of licensed products that helps the company reach this demographic and continue to expand it. For example, there's a game based on the popular television game show Deal or No Deal. Moreover, the company invests in television advertising, specifically on women's cable channels.

At the Casual Connect conference, King organized a panel of five female game players, aged 34 to 71, to speak as a kind of informal focus group to the audience of game developers and executives. The panelists were chosen after an open call for volunteers was posted on the King.com blog; several volunteers were asked to go through an application and interview process, and five were selected to speak. In other words, the panelists were somewhat self-selected from a group of already active and involved King.com players. None had worked in the game industry professionally.

I spoke with one of the panelists, Crie Kohlman, over the phone a few weeks after the conference to find out more about her experience

Kohlman is an at-home mom in her 40s. Between her and her partner, there are seven children, four of whom still live at home. The kids have a handheld game consoles, and the family only recently got a Wii (it was still in the box when I spoke with Kohlman). The get a limited number of screen hours per day for television and game play.

Kohlman mainly lives off retirement benefits she receives from the military, and she suffers from fibromyalgia. She lives with a constant but fluctuating pain that sometimes limits her to a wheelchair and other times affects her so minimally that she can walk five miles. Although she hasn't thoroughly discussed this with her doctors yet, she told me that playing games is extremely useful form of pain management.

Is There an ‘Average' Female Game Player?
Robert Norton noted that the average game player puts in about seven hours of play time a week on King.com, but Kohlman and the other panelists said their averages are closer to five or six hours per day.

When she rolls out of bed in the morning, Kohlman flips on her laptop before she even starts a pot of coffee. Then from 7 a.m. until about 2 p.m., the computer is on. "I'm not gaming that whole time," she said, "but I can guarantee you that if I'm in tournaments, I'm checking on them."

When I spoke to Norton about what kinds of takeaway ideas came out of the panel discussion, he homed in on the early morning game time. "It was very interesting that they talked about playing in the morning, before getting their cup of coffee," he said. "Most people said they spent about two or three hours in the morning before starting their day."

He added that he was interested in thinking about making games like television programming to suit different times of day. If the demographic that watches The Today Show and Good Morning America is the same one King.com is reaching to play games, maybe King should make games specifically to be played during the early hours of the day, when stay-at-home moms and nine-to-fivers in their 30s and 40s have an hour or two to themselves.