|
|
By
Rebecca L. Eisenberg
Gamasutra
February 13, 1998
Originally published in Ms. Magazine,
January, 1998.
|
|
|
 Features
Girl
Games: Adventures in Lip Gloss
You
are Rockett Movado, about to begin your first day of eighth grade at Whistling
Pines Junior High. Your one concern is that you don't make a "mega blunder
" on your very fist day -- "that would be really choice."
As you sit on a bench in the school yard next to a freckled girl named
Jessie, three of your future classmates arrive, their noses high in the
air. "Ho-hum. Another year with Jessie ... I wonder if she got any more
interesting over the summer?" the tall blonde one laughs. Jessie looks
shaken, but after the clique passes she asks you if you want to walk in
with her.
Do you (A) turn her down, because you are "not ready for sidekicks yet";
(B) go with her, since she's better than no one; or (C) stay put, since
you are too scared to move. You click (A) to turn her down (after all,
the popular girls don't like her!) and are immediately confronted by yet
another dilemma--a redhead wearing the same skirt and tights as you! Now
you've really blown it!
Welcome to Rockett's New School - the first in a new slew of computer
games aimed at the "hard-to-reach" market of pre-adolescent girls.
Armed with research they say proves girls don't like the "overtly competitive"
games that "boys like", and fueled by the success of Mattel Media's CD-ROM
game Barbie Fashion Designer last fall, new companies like Purple
Moon, the maker of Rockett, have come onto the market to attract
the dollars of young girls.
But these "girl games" offer little hope for greater gender equity in
the gaming world. By focusing on popularity and fashion--even if this
is what some girls want to focus on--the majority of them reinforce the
very same stereotypes they purport to combat.
The Problem With
Rockett
Rockett's
New School is a "choose your own adventure" game--a common type of
software in which each selection you make determines what scenarios will
follow. But unlike most games of this type, Rockett's choices advance
no plot--they merely affect how well Rockett gets along with others. At
the end of the game, Rockett has no score or resolution--she stands alone
outside the girls' room, with only her "girl message getter" answering
machine to check into. In the second of the Rockett series, Tricky Decision
(due for release this spring), Rockett gets to choose between "two cool
parties, same night."
Purple Moon's other CD-ROM, Secret Paths in the Forest, follows
a similarly aimless route. Also point-and-click, Secret Paths claims
to help girls resolve their problems--like sibling rivalry, body image,
handling parents' divorce, going to summer camp, or losing the soccer
championship--by means of searching for hidden crystals and turning them
into "magic necklaces."
Both products are marketed with an extensive line of optional merchandise:
colored crystals and Adventure Friend dolls (some of which come free with
the software), perfumed and fruity-flavored lip gloss, Jonathan Martin
Girls backpacks and baby-tees, and subscription offers to Girls' Life,
the magazine "packed with real-life advice on everything that matters
most to girls...friends, family, school and guys, clothes, skin and hair!"
With six billion dollars in sales, the game market is immense. Purple
Moon will sell its wares in major department stores and software outlets,
advertise on national television during Friday night programs like Sabrina,
the Teenage Witch and distribute sample copies of its CD-ROMs to half
a million households. Through this "innovative marketing strategy," it
claims, "girls win by finally getting the meaningful interactive entertainment
they deserve."
But are "Friendship Adventures" focusing on popularity and clothing really
what girls "deserve?"
They are what the "average girl" wants, insists Purple Moon founder Brenda
Laurel, who as an employee of Interval Research Corporation (a high-tech
marketing strategies think tank funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen)
spent four years researching what kind of computer games girls want to
play. The research, which is based on 1100 interviews with girls and boys
in "friendship pairs," their teachers and camp counselors, and video arcade
managers, was later dubbed by Purple Moon "the first comprehensive profile
of girls."
Laurel's main finding is that girls and boys play differently. According
to her interpretation of the data, girls compete horizontally and boys
compete hierarchically; girls assert social influence and structure relationships
while boys seek to dominate and defeat. She also says that girls gain
social status by affiliating with some people and excluding others, and
boys gain social status by achievement and physical domination; girls
want multi-sensory immersion, discovery, and strong story lines, and boys
want speed and action; girls succeed through development of friendships,
and boys through elimination of competitors. While girls play "to explore
and have new experiences, with degrees of success and varying outcomes,"
boys, Laurel's research contents, play "to win."
For these reasons, Laurel concludes, girls need "friendship adventures,"
boys need "action games." And, because "historically, the industry has
defined games based largely on boys' interests and play behaviors," Laurel
spun off Purple Moon from Interval to create a separate market niche for
games designed with girls in mind. Her stated goals are nothing if not
ambitious: "If Purple Moon is successful," she wrote, "we think that we
can do for girls and technology what Title IX did for girls and sports...[that
is] open the floodgates and transform the role of technology in girls'
lives" via a line of software and merchandise under several brand names
aimed at girls ages 8 through 12.
Laurel's perspective does raise the point that our violent and combative
society undervalues the qualities of cooperation and relationship-building.
But her games do little to teach girls about true friendships. The characters
range from shallow and self-absorbed ("A face without makeup is so un-chic!"
says Nicole) to cliquey and cruel ("It never hurts my status as part of
the popular crowd to be seen with Chaz!" Steph brags).
Furthermore, in her quest to design games that are "intrinsically meaningful
to girls" by addressing "their most important needs and interests," Laurel
discounts the possibility that boys learn techniques for success in the
business world--including competitiveness and drive for achievement--from
"action games." Depriving girls of that training will not change the way
the economy operates; in fact, it will more likely serve to perpetuate
the sexist status quo.
Experts in the fields of sex equality and socialization agree. "This is
just another example of the tawdry history of sex difference research
that is driven by stereotypes and results in reinforcing those stereotypes,"
says Dr. Barrie Thorne, Professor of Sociology at U.C. Berkeley and author
of the definitive text Gender Play. According to Thorne, who has 20 years
of experience studying play patterns of girls and boys, "most researchers
are now focusing on variation among girls, and among boys, and on areas
of commonality, rather than on simplistic claims of dichotomous gender
difference."
In other words, if we truly want to integrate girls into the technological
and gaming worlds, we need to focus on destroying the stereotypes that
keep them out. "Given that computers are so integral to the high-paying
math and science employment opportunities," Thorne says, "It is tragic
that a profit-motive is driving so much of this product development. These
developers, who claim to be working in the best interests of women, are
dressing up the stereotypes they reinforce in a demonstrably false mantel
of science."
Sharon Presley, Executive Director of Resources for Independent Thinking,
a Northern California non-profit educational organization, echoes Thorne's
sentiments. "The gender differences that these companies point to are
not supported by the research. Perpetuating the idea that girls are good
and nice and boys are violent does a disservice to us all." Why would
girls buy these games? "At that age, it is important to fit in, and gender
identity constitutes a big part of one's self-esteem," says Presley.
And thus is born a market of girls behaving in gender-"appropriate" code,
pulling pastel boxes of software from pink-colored shelves.
Do Girls Play Games?
For
the millions of women who grew up playing video games like Space Invaders,
PacMan, Frogger, Pong, Tetris and Centipede,
the "fact" that girls don't play games should come as quite a surprise.
It comes as no less of a surprise for the game companies.
According to Lee McEnany-Caraher, vice president of corporate and consumer
communications of Sega of America, the manufacturer of the popular Genesis
and Saturn console game systems, more than half of all American households
have some sort of video game console, and, in approximately 40 percent
of those households, girls are the primary players.
Says McEnany-Caraher, "The other day I asked a seventh grade class, 'Who
has played a video game?' Every student raised their hand except for one
boy, and the class was pretty evenly split--74 girls, 76 boys. I asked
the girls, 'Who has brothers?' Only half raised their hands, but every
student had a video game system in their home."
Sega deliberately designs games that appeal to the broadest possible audience.
It's most popular, Sonic the Hedgehog, was designed for universal
appeal across age and gender and a recent release, Enemy Zero,
stars a heroine with the voice of a singer from the popular all-female
rock band, Luscious Jackson.
Sony Computer Entertainment, manufacturer of the Playstation game console,
takes a similar approach. According to Andrew House, vice president of
marketing, some of the Playstation's most popular games are the ones that
have shown "crossover appeal."
Tomb Raider, for example, which involves a female protagonist named
Lara Croft, has sold copies into the millions and was named Game of the
Year by several top game magazines. In Tomb Raider's rich landscape,
Lara runs, scales mountains and skyscrapers, drives a 10,000 hp motorcycle,
and shoots dangerous animals with a gun in each hand as she explores the
mountains, valleys and oceans in pursuit of stolen treasure. Lara Croft's
unnecessarily busty figure has led to some complaints of sexism from feminists,
but others insist there is a certain appeal to having a traditional male
hero in the form of a female character, one who attracts female players
without repelling the male market.
Following Tomb Raider's success, Sony's fall 1997 line-up includes other
games that have universal appeal--Final Fantasy VII, a role-playing
Japanese anime-style adventure; Intelligent Qube, a three-dimensional,
more-complex version of the puzzle game Tetris, and, best of all,
PaRappa the Rapper, a Simon-says-style "musical" genre game, that
has already sold almost a million copies in Japan (where the consumer
base is said to be 40 percent female) and Europe.
In fact, the best-selling computer software game of the decade is Broderbund
Software's MYST, an immersive role-playing puzzle, that has sold
more than 3.5 million copies since 1993, one-third of which were sold
to females. Similarly, according to PC Data, a market research firm that
tracks software sales, non-violent games like Monopoly, Civilization
and Sim City have often edged out more violent action games like
Doom, Diablo and Quake.
For younger kids' "edutainment" as well, crossover games such as Broderbund's
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego have consistently dominated
sales. (In the case of the Sandiego series, over six million copies
have been sold since the original was released in 1985.)
Most of these games exhibit the very characteristics that Purple Moon
says girls want ("multi-sensory immersion, discovery and strong story
lines") while lacking what she claims boys want (speed and action). All
of which should lead Laurel to an obvious question: could it be that both
girls and boys simply want challenging games with rich graphics and great
sounds?
A Non-Gendered
Solution
All
of the successful cross-over games described above notwithstanding, the
world of games--from developers to characters to players--is still dominated
by males. Why is this so?
We live in a gender-segregated world, with social reinforcement at every
turn. Parents, teachers, and mass media all influence the play behavior
of children. In some families, traditional and progressive, girls may
be discouraged from playing overtly competitive and violent games. And
sports-games like football and hockey appeal more to the children--and
adults--who play the sports themselves.
Gaming companies tend to advertise primarily in media space they view
either as male or mixed like MTV, rather than female-targeted publications
like Seventeen. "We have found that boys are more likely than girls to
buy the games without playing them first," says Sega's McEnany-Cararher.
It seems possible that changing the marketing of currently available games--for
example by advertising in female-targeted spaces with female models --
may diversify the gaming world without resorting to "friendship adventures."
One aspect on which girl-game manufacturers and their critics agree is
that bringing girls into gaming will better integrate them into the world
of technology. The question is: how to attract girls without resorting
to stereotypical social roles?
One non-sexist alternative to gendered games like those of Purple Moon
is offered by Susan Lammers, President and Founder of Headbone Interactive.
Lammers insists on hiring female game developers and creating games with
intelligent and interesting female (and male) characters, such as the
colorful and musical Iz and Auggie Escape from Dimension Q and Elroy Hits
the Pavement. Headbone's collection of 8 CD-ROMs and its game-enriched
Web site serve a 50/50 female/male audience. Lammers's formula is simple:
"If you create a character that is balanced, it can appeal to both boys
and girls."
"Segregating girls' games from boys' sends a very clear message," says
Kate Schram, technology manager of a "cybercafe" that rents out game and
computer time to children. "Instead of telling girls they can do anything
boys can do with technology, it tells girls that they are different, that
they occupy a different--and lesser--role." Schram observes the behavior
of countless kids at play every day and since she herself is one of the
few females in this male-dominated world of high-technology, these issues
resonate with her.
"A lot of times people don't take me seriously because I am a girl. Girls
just are not being given a chance," she says.
Choose-your-adventure click-games offer few of the benefits that competitive,
strategy, and even reflex-oriented games offer boys. Perhaps even more
important, segregating girls' games from boys' games can reinforce similar
segregation in other aspects of life--such as work and school. After all,
"child's play" can be viewed as practice for adult life. In any case,
girls and young women deserve better games that break down gender barriers
instead of building even bigger ones, based on research flawed by outdated
gender stereotypes.
Rebecca
L. Eisenberg (mars@well.com) is a freelance
writer, consultant, attorney and regular columnist for the San Francisco
Examiner, covering issues of technology, business and culture from San
Francisco. Eisenberg lives on line at http://www.bossanova.com/rebeca/.
|
|
|
|
|
