Video games for girls
Here is a TED talk from 1998 by Brenda Laurel, software designer and researcher who founded Purple Moon, in which she discusses her philosophy about making video games for young female gamers (via Sociological Images).
I actually owned and played one of Purple Moon’s games, Rockett’s New School, on our old Power Mac back in middle school. Honestly, I found it mildly entertaining while it lasted, but ultimately not worth playing again. It has a plot that you could only deviate from slightly (disappointing given the box’s promise that you’ll “make choices that change what happens”). I never really felt like I did anything — mostly just watched things happen. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t seem like much more than a primitively interactive sitcom.
I may not be a typical female computer user, and it’s possible that other girls loved it. It certainly sounds like Laurel and her company did plenty of research to back up their design. But this video got me thinking: what should video games designed for girls look like?
Now hold on for a second before you jump all over that sentence. Yes, we’re dealing with stereotypes here. Obviously not every girl would like a “video game for girls” just like not every boy would like a “video game for boys” — and this is true of all the other gendered toys out there as well. (To say nothing of the glaringly false binaries!) But, but, but. Let’s accept for a moment that in order to develop and market a product and ideally keep one’s business afloat, one has to think of the big picture, find a large enough target group, and so on. Some level of generalization is necessary.
The Rockett model of girl’s games hasn’t exactly made it to the big time over the past decade, yet female gamers are a substantial demographic. In 2005, a Nielsen study counted nearly 40% of gamers were female, and I’d expect the numbers are even closer to even now. Perhaps the barely-interactive, storybook-type game wasn’t really what girls were looking for after all, and perhaps that “certain flavor of feminist” was right to point out that the premise is kind of demeaning. Sure, girls do think a lot about the social choices they make daily, and do enjoy narrative play, but must their games be so tightly restricted to those stipulations that the ideal game for them consists of helping an eighth-grader navigate middle school cliques? I doubt it.
Look at the most popular games of this year — it’s stuff like Call of Duty, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, Left 4 Dead. We’re on the edge of our seats waiting for the next StarCraft game to come out. Arguably these are all male-targeted games, though females play them too. Regardless, I don’t think that this screenshot (from StarCraft 2) is intended to remind guys of their daily lives:
Most people don’t want to play games that closely mirror their everyday thoughts and actions. Most people, I think, wouldn’t even call such a thing a game. Most of the games we play — board games, computer games, pretend games we made up for ourselves as children — are based on the fantastic, the unfamiliar, the surprising and new. They incorporate elements of the familiar but give us a new context in which to experience it. If they didn’t, why would we play the game? We’d just go out and live our lives, and it’d be equally fun.
I think the question that game developers should be asking themselves isn’t so much “What do girls think about?” as “What do girls want to think about?” And perhaps also: “How does that differ from what boys want to think about?” I suspect that these questions will lead girls’-game developers to reduce the number of huge-breasted heroines and probably also the extent to which games are centered around gruesome destruction of one’s opponent. Change the average level of testosterone in your target audience, and you’re pretty likely to change their demand for such things.
So what would developers replace those things with? I haven’t done the market research, so I can only offer my conjecture, based on my own gaming experience and conversations with friends. Although I enjoy real-time strategy games like Warcraft and StarCraft, and remember really liking some first-person shooter games like Heretic, the aspects of those games I most enjoy have always tended to be the “building” rather than the “battle” ones. I like the parts where you set up a base, get upgrades, or train for new skills. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also love games like SimCity and Civilization. (And hey, maybe it’s my girly nature, my interest in social interactions, that makes me appreciate the diplomacy and public relations aspects of games like these.) I’ve also heard of games more in the FPS mold where, instead of walking your character into another battle, you walk them into a puzzle challenge. That’s not typically my cup of tea but I know girls and women who enjoy it.
At the end of the day, I hope people remember that male-targeted games are currently enjoyed by girls and women, and female-targeted games can be enjoyed by boys and men. I doubt that when they began their long line of Sim games the developers at Maxis were even thinking of a female audience in particular, but I’m sure they had a sizable one even before The Sims. “Video games for girls” don’t have to be all about fashion and parties and make-up in order to be appealing; simply by having a premise other than wreaking testosterone-fueled havoc they are making a major step in the direction of inclusivity.
Comments
4 Responses to “Video games for girls”
Leave a Reply
I just downloaded the Nancy Drew pack from Steam for my two daughters. I am a firm believer that playing video games increases our kid’s chances of success in work/life.
As you point out, it is the design of the game that matters.
As a creator of breakthrough learning games that inspires kids to read, I know people buy the games (ItzaBitza and ItzaZoo – http://SabiGames.com) because the kids find them really fun. Reading practice is just the amazing byproduct. I love this because learning was DESIGNED in, but the GAME DESIGN was NOT compromised.
thanks for this post.
Margaret, CEO – Sabi, Inc. and mom of two
I agree wholeheartedly that game developers (and educators, btw) shouldn’t view “relevance to my daily life” as the highest creator of interest. Fantasy is huge – and that would seem to be a truth generalizable across demographics.
I wouldn’t be surprised if game developers are getting better at courting demographics who aren’t 14-year-old nerdy boys, though. The Wii and the Nintendo DS seem to have opened up gaming to a number of women and girls I know who would never have dreamed of being a “gamer” a few years ago. What aspects of those games are more appealing to women I couldn’t say necessarily, but it seems like a positive development.
The girl gamers I see in forums will often have avatars from “male” video games. The “boy” games can be popular with both genders. Look at Final Fantasy. At least as many girls are into it as guys. Kingdom Hearts probably has a larger female base than male base. Females are more likely, in my opinion, to make Kingdom Hearts fanfiction, for example. Both games are made by the same company. Why the dual appeal? I think it has less to do with a game being “girly” or “boyish” than it has to do with it being complex and diverse. Final Fantasy explores relationships between characters as much as it provides battles and mysterious things to seek. Kingdom Hearts defies gender norms by putting what virtually amounts to a homosexual love story (in all but name) in their game.
But it’s more than just the story-telling – going back to the 80′s and early 90′s, games like Super Mario Bros were not only extremely creative and popular, they were cracking the gender divide. And perhaps the very first video game to attract boys and girls was Pac-Man, which today remains popular in arcades and food joints. As a girl, I was delighted to find out that Samus Aran, the hero in Metroid, was a girl. The game developers in fact took great care not to over-sexualize her, like so many “Lara Croft”s. In more detailed renders of the Metroid character, she seems to be more boob-heavy. But the original sprite is just a robotic character – a being inside a metal cybernetic suit. The game was lauded for breaking gender boundaries.
I think in the end, it’s not a lessening of the “male” qualities of a game that will make it appealing to boys and girls; it’s in not treating anything remotely “female” about a game like a passive thing to be sexualized.
The Wii sports games have done a great job with this. Dance Dance Revolution is also gender neutral.
AND, this will ultimately come about much quicker when there are more girls in the gaming industry alongside the boys.
[...] way of follow-up on my post from Wednesday, here are some interesting tidbits from a recent LA Times article [...]