Cerise Magazine

During the Christmas season of 1996, the game Barbie Fashion Designer sold over 500,000 copies, flying off the shelves faster than the high-profile first-person shooter Quake. Before this unexpected success, many game developers had discounted the possibility of women or girls actually wanting to play games, with some believing the female population was somehow adverse to technology. Some game developers, eager to capitalize on Barbie’s success, were spun into a frenzy.

While being driven by market forces, this phenomenon allowed female-centered discourse to be taken seriously for the first time in the history of the gaming industry. The discourse and games that followed became known in the industry as the “Girls’ Games Movement,” based on the fundamental idea that girls were essentially different from boys and therefore needed games that reflected this essential difference.

After the success of Barbie Fashion Designer, it became clear that girls might actually be interested in computer games and could potentially serve as an untapped market. Prompted primarily by the idea of financial gain, many established software companies started putting money into grants so that research could be undertaken to establish what girls really want in games.

At the same time, educators and feminists were concerned with the gap in technological savvy between boys and girls. During this time, The National Science Foundation predicted that by 2010, a quarter of American jobs would require a technical understanding of computers, with higher paying jobs requiring even greater technological literacy. This was considered a major problem since boys, who were spending more time with the computer playing games, would be more prepared to enter these higher paying jobs in the future.

Realizing that games might be a way to help girls become more comfortable with computers and technology, educators and feminists also set out to figure how to get more girls to play games, albeit with a less capitalistic goal than the larger software companies. The money that became available from larger software companies allowed the girl-oriented entrepreneurs to start up their own companies and conduct the research necessary to figure out “what girls really wanted.”

Researching What Girls Want

One of the best known start-up companies at the time was Purple Moon, founded by Brenda Laurel after she received a grant from Interval Research, a company owned by Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder. She set out to create games especially for girls, reasoning that “if boys think that a product is for them, and they play it and don’t understand it, then they trash it. Then the girls can’t really enjoy it or feel proud because it’s been trashed.”

Laurel felt, like many others working within the girl games industry, that girls needed special attention, because focusing on gender-neutral games automatically assumed a male perspective, with masculinity being both the positive and the neutral in our culture. After all, many of the games that were on the market at the time would probably be considered “gender-neutral,” but were created primarily by male developers who were creating games from their own perspectives and cultural assumptions without necessarily questioning their own gendered position.

Laurel therefore set out to value what girls found interesting and include those attributes in her games at Purple Moon. Though Laurel never laid a direct claim to the term feminism or feminist, her motivations and goals reflected goals associated with the feminist impulse to seek out women’s experiences in order to balance out male-dominated cultural production. In order to achieve this goal and reflect girls’ experience in her games, Laurel had to conduct thousands of hours of research and agree to Interval’s stipulation that she would make games that went along with whatever the research suggested, “even if that meant shipping products in pink boxes.”

The market research that was done as part of the girls’ games movement was intensely focused on finding differences between girls’ play and boys’ play, rather than addressing similarities or proposing other reasons for differences among individuals. The research also made blanket generalizations about “girls” as a collective whole, rather than analyzing the complexities within the overarching category of “girls.” For example, in a study conducted by Cornelia Brunner, Dorothy Bennett, and Margaret Honey on “Girl Games and Technological Desire,” the researchers interviewed only 24 participants, yet came to overarching conclusions about men and women and how they viewed technology. These conclusions were based strictly in dualities with no caveats or exceptions. They created a chart listing the dualities they observed; “women see technology as a tool,” whereas “men see is as a weapon,” “women want to use it for communication” while “men want to use it for control,” “women talk about wanting to explore worlds” while “men talk about using it to exploit resources and possibilities.”

Those are just a few of the many dualities listed as a conclusion from the adult section of their study. The researchers came to similar conclusions after studying the responses of forty-seven children participants. They also put forth generalizing conclusions such as this one: “Girls do not just want to get rescued, they want to do the rescuing—without having to abandon femininity to do it.” This kind of research reflects a prevalent “different yet equal” attitude that simplifies gender differences. Without questioning the cultural causes of this gender normativity, this kind of research and these broad conclusions reinforce a sense of gender difference based in biology.

Since most companies utilized similar market research when developing their games, the games often simply reflected gender stereotypes. As Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins point out in their book From Barbie to Mortal Combat, “It is no accident…that girls do want their products shipped in pink or purple boxes…such desires are manufactured by the toy industry itself long before the researchers get a chance to talk with the girls and find out ‘what girls really want from technology.’”

The research functioned as a “self-fulfilling prophecy” according to University of Southern California professor Marsha Kinder. “All you are testing,” she explained, “is how effectively kids have absorbed these cultural binaries of gender.”

Most of the games developed during the girls’ game movement simply reflected pre-determined manufactured “girl interests.” McKenzie and Company, a game developed by the company Her Interactive, revolved around shopping and figuring out how to get certain boys to date the playable character. Let’s Talk About Me, a game developed by Girl Games Inc., compartmentalized girls’ interests into categories including “My Personality,” “My Body,” “My Future,” and “My Life.”

Citing a study conducted by sociologist Angela McRobbie, Jenkins and Cassell find it problematic that the personal sphere is consistently rendered as the most important in a teenage girl’s life, which “precludes other forms of social and political intervention and acknowledges only a narrow range of acceptable lifestyle choices.”

Laurel’s Rockette series was in part based around the stereotypical notion that a girl’s ultimate goal would be becoming popular at her school, and included stereotypical girl fears, such as Rockette having a panic attack when another girl at school is seen wearing the same outfit as her. These games didn’t challenge gender construction or allow truly different conceptions of what it means to be a girl, but instead focused on reaching a “universal girl.”

Critiquing the Girls’ Games Movement

Critiques of the Girls’ Games Movement have not been in short supply, with many criticisms stemming from the argument against the existence of a “universal girl” or universal female characteristics. Unsurprisingly, in most girls’ game representations, the “universal girl” is almost always Western, middle-class, heterosexual and white. This was certainly the case for Purple Moon’s games, centered around a white, middle-class character named Rockette, though she had token friends of color (an African-American girl named Stephanie, an Asian girl named Miko, and a Latina named Viva). As the authors of the publication GREAT (Gender Relations in Educational Applications of Technology) point out, “Purple Moon does not only perpetuate the stereotype that girls are only interested in boys, clothes, and being popular, but also perpetuates other stereotypes such as the snobby popular blond girl and the smart Asian with glasses.”

Despite promoting its products as based on a “complete and unique understanding of girls and girls’ play motivations,” Purple Moon clearly did not take into account race, class or other social differences when considering what a “complete” understanding of girls would mean. The belief in a universal girl experience once again trumped a more complicated and complex understanding of gender roles and social locations.

In addition, much of the research conducted during this period didn’t mention the demographics of the participants in their studies, coded with a tacit assumption that the more “universal” gender differences would override other sources of difference. Neither the girls’ game companies nor the researchers conducting market research seemed concerned with including the viewpoints of girls from different classes or racial ethnic groups. The monolithic category of “girl” was the one standpoint from which these companies and researchers gathered their data and created their games.

Despite these flaws, the Girls’ Games Movement did allow women’s and girls’ voices to be taken seriously by the gaming industry for the first time. The success of Barbie Fashion Designer allowed a female-centered perspective to enter the discourse and be taken seriously by the male-controlled gaming industry. The innovation of start-up girl game companies also provided new ways of manipulating computer technology that had not been previously explored. The industry also was exposed to a type of play that fundamentally differed from the games that were on the market at the time; most girl games were non-violent, cooperative, and focused on the intricacies of social interactions and relationships.

However, because there was such an emphasis on providing a “girls-only” space, these characteristics in games became compartmentalized as belonging to girls-only—no boys allowed. So while girls were able to play traditional “boy” games without stigma (and are still able to), boys could not (and cannot) venture into girl games without feeling stigmatized, leaving the socially positive characteristics of non-violence and cooperation as belonging to “girls” rather than existing as human ideals.

Considering this as well as the other critiques of the girls’ game movement, it would make sense to advocate another game movement based on a wider conception of gender roles. Games are an area where play and performance can be highlighted, so it follows that constructions of gender can be toyed with and exposed in the realm of computer games. Users can step into a role and play with conceptions of gender and what it means to be gendered as a man or a woman. The video and computer game medium has more than enough potential to function as a space where gender destabilization can occur, and in fact, already does to some extent.

Tapping Into a Sense of Gender Rebellion

Some games have begun to enter this realm, exposing how our culture views masculinity and femininity. Perhaps the most well-known game to begin to tap into a gender rebellion sense of theory was Nintendo’s Metroid. The game was a fairly typical “shoot-em up” game, with a fully-armored protagonist named Samus Aran as the playable character. At the end of the game, it is revealed that Samus is a woman. Players were universally surprised at this revelation, since the game was so stereotypically “masculine” and involved “masculine” activities. As one player commented about the game on the Game Girl Advance forum, “When I found out that Samus was a female, it actually made me think about gender roles seeing how I had assumed that it was a guy under all that armor.” Though Metroid was released long before the start of the Girls’ Game Movement in 1986, the game illustrated how even early technology had the capability to play with cultural constructions of gender and how we separate masculine and feminine spheres and transfix gender identities based on bodies.

Since then, there have been a number of different places where constructions of gender have been analyzed through games. A group of independent programmers created a “wad” (a level file) for the popular first-person shooter game DOOM, entitled The Sailor Moon Wad. The wad replaces the dark and gothic setting of DOOM with brightly colored objects like roses, cupcakes, and bunny suitcases from the Sailor Moon universe. In the book Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman note, “Here the implicit masculinity of DOOM is playfully called into question through the addition of an entire system of feminized artifacts.” The juxtaposition provides a way of questioning gendered values and spaces. Such interferences in the world of the game can serve to force players to think and analyze their own gendered behavior and interests.

Similarly, the first-person shooter game Quake invited players to create their own “skins” for players. The game programmers did not include any female bodies on which to map the skins, however. Players who wished to identify themselves in the game world as female had to map female clothing onto the muscular male figure. These androgynous characters, complete with form-fitting outfits and lipstick, became known as “frag queens” and disrupted the social order that demands knowing immediately whether someone is male or female.

As encouraging as these experimentations are, they have been developed primarily by independent programmers and game designers, without the backing or financial resources of larger, established software companies. Because of market risks, it is much safer for companies to market products containing stereotypical conventions of femininity and masculinity. In the case of the Girls’ Games Movement, however, this strategy did not succeed in the market. Many girls felt excluded by the narrow conception of femininity and girlhood and this resulted in most of the girl-centered start-up companies shutting their doors only a few years after they opened.

The Future of Gender in Games

By creating more games that deal with the concepts of gender in a broad sense, more girls, boys, and non-gender identifying children could not only feel included, but could also feel free to play with their own conceptions of gender. This strategy could have widespread market appeal, if the games created were truly inclusive. While these children may not fully understand the dense theory that informs the dialogue concerning gender construction and performance, they could certainly understand a game in which they were able to play and experiment with their own conceptions of gender and what it means to be gendered male or female. As Salen and Zimmerman write, “Games always already play, an activity that explores and expands structures, stretching and re-forming them. In this sense, games are particularly well-suited for modification by players, for the creation of friction between fixed structures and mobile intervention. The concept of games as cultural resistance grows naturally out of what we already know about play.”

With this knowledge of the transformative nature of gameplay, the Girls’ Games Movement can be seen as a missed opportunity to challenge and expand gender roles. The surge of interest in expanding the girls’ game market could have been directed at engaging a more open-minded direction, instead of reinforcing gender-polarized play. If game companies truly want to “tap” into the female market, they need to advocate more inclusive forms of play.

When used in their resistant forms, games can serve as a link between theory and actuality. The player can take what has been learned in a game and choose to use the information to “act” on the real world to promote change, whether it be in his or her own life or in a wider public arena. Games provide a space where players can be in control of their own performativity, which can provide a unique experience in understanding the way that gender is performed and constructed outside of the context of the game. While computer and video games have a superfluous reputation in our culture, they can actually have enormous potential to transform societal conceptions of gender.