SOMETHING FOR THE GIRLS

Some Freewheeling Thoughts About Why We Gotta Get More Videogames for the Girls Who Don't Play Videogames

Many mysteries unfold as we consider the weird status of women in the videogame world, all of them – the players, the creators, the developers and producers, the critics and the fictional characters. How did all of the newly hatched second-wave feminists, who seem to have had their eyes so firmly on the prize for the last 20 years of the 20th century, let a culture-defining industry/creative medium grow up in front of their noses to be All About The Boys –again? Maybe it’s not actually all that mysterious as to how it happened, but I think a lot about how - for both the industry and the players it serves - the evolutionary current could be turned around, to let the girls in -- fully and completely and profitably.

As most strangers who let me talk about myself for more than a few seconds know, I was one of the first kids on my block (well, one of the first 20-somethings in my social whirl) to own a personal computer in the mid-1980s and use it for both work and life. But I have come late to videogaming. I had my passions invested pretty deeply in other aspects of 1980’s and 1990’s American popular culture while a slightly younger crowd – my friends’ little brothers and sisters, in fact – were starting to play videogames seriously (or just relentlessly, but it was usually our parents who made the distinction). I remember that many affluent, educated young adults were beginning to have access to personal computers in the late 1980s, and it was starting to be a common thing in that crowd to have some engagement with videogames, but it was the kids of the world who were still in high school at the dawn of the era who were diving in head first. While that first generation of gamers was incubating, even those of us on the sidelines were noticing that the culture of videogames was embracing the same geeks and nerds who had always stood out from the pack of Popular Kids – the kids who didn’t play sports, who were socially awkward, and who were usually bored with school and caught up in their own imaginations and slightly subversive literature and entertainment, like sci-fi and fantasy fiction. As soon videogames hit the scene, the smart kids had found their sport.

And as I observed the kids that were gravitating toward videogames, it was hard not to be aware of the migration of a sub-subculture, the misfits among misfits -- the geek girls – to an analogous status in the newly digitalized realm of geekdom. Boys had historically had the run of the arcades and the roleplaying-tabletops, but now the digital revolution landed all the Mary Sues and Eowyns on a slightly lower status: now the nerdboys were excluding their female counterparts even more from tech and CS than they had from sci-fi and fantasy and arcades and other pre-digital geek passions. The male side of that subculture started to make its way into the glorious mainstream as videogames proliferated because suddenly the world needed IT, and the overarching sensibility of the videogame culture matured to be distinctly geeky – and distinctly male. Which is not to say that women are not welcome -- as players, consumers, fictional heroines and as developers -- but in so many instances they seem like begrudgingly honored guests, as cameo appearances; they are models of heroism and accomplishment as so judged by the overwhelming preponderance of their male colleagues, in-game and out.

So much of what we have studied this semester about Game Design has been about identifying the qualities and quantities that go into the games that are deemed successful – both critically and financially – and learning to see our own ideas through the “lenses” (as Professor Schell famously calls them) of those many considerations. But in examining the complex and often contradictory formulas and conventions, as well as the exceptions and the iconoclasts, we don’t often get to really look at why so many “good” – even great -- games are not well-liked among female players and that the game-playing population is still overwhelmingly male. I am convinced that there are answers to the What Do Women Want question that lie in identifying what they don’t like, and convincing the game industry to be brave enough to let those models go when designing for a female audience.

I have been trying to catch up and keep up with the history that I lived through without even knowing it. I’ve been exploring the subject of women’s gaming by reading and watching videos by scholars and industry experts who started focusing on missing the Little Girl market -- from Brenda Laurel’s work in the 1990s to the recent press surrounding the new Tomb Raider release, starring AAA videogames’ only female protagonist, as well as continued reports of persistent industry doubts about the viability of such heroines in the marketplace. I haven’t seen much about Games for Grown Women. [If you, Reader, think of some recommended reading on these topics I would be grateful if you would please pass it on…] Female writers like Rhianna Pratchett and Susan O’Connor are migrating to television and feature films, where at least they acknowledge a female audience’s sensibility as being different from that of boys and men (and market their content accordingly, and well). That first generation of geek girls and girl gamers have daughters now – do they see their mothers playing? Well, maybe Facebook and casual games, perhaps, but there is little to attract a sophisticated working or home-making woman to immersive narrative games, and thus include them in the central hard core game community – or encourage them to find a core of their own. They are a huge, lucrative market – “Oprah’s Audience” and the game industry hasn’t figured out how to reach them. Do they simply not want to play? Are they not comfortable in computer culture – or in the videogame culture? And yet plenty of second and third generation of female players are paying big consumer dollars to buy immersive virtual experiences that use combat and conflict to fight bosses and wars that do not represent any kind of meaningful game challenge to them because – I believe – this is all that’s out there. The geek girls are still being allowed to sit at the table only if they eat what’s being served.

What might make a good “woman’s” game, then? If I knew for certain, I’d be making it. But I keep coming back to the same ideas and questions as I play more and explore more, and read about and speak with women who play – or want to play – videogames:

THE ARTISTIC

If immersive game worlds are capable of steeping a player in a fantasy setting, why are there so few games created for players who see their fantasy selves as other than Action Hero? There are many women gamers who take great pleasure in performing the traditionally (formerly?) male-centric activities that are offered in games because they are being challenged as players – by the concentration, coordination, “twitch,” study, and strategizing that is needed to succeed in a game. But if you asked those women whether gameplay satisfied their fantasy aspirations – “if you would do anything in a game world, what would it be?” – I can’t imagine all of them would acknowledge that being a Warlord or a Mage or a Black Op agent or even a Tomb Raider was their innermost secret dream. To get women to understand and accept the psychological transference to the form of an Avatar, and willingly relinquish enough control to allow the computer to guide her/compete with her, we have to make the idea of transformation appeal to her true fantasy self. Sure, I’ll shoot a virtual automatic weapon or crossbow and bleed lots of pixel blood to stay in the game – I’d even use my superpowers to save the world if that’s what I had logged in for -- but I’d be even more excited about being able to do a double pirouette or seduce a handsome Jedi with my wit and charm, so sue me.

In class we’ve been learning about the limitations of the physical game mechanics, how interaction sits more effectively “below the neck” – where men seem to respond more viscerally to adventure and conflict than do women -- and need for active “verbs” to drive a videogame narrative rather than static conversation or the reflective inner-monologue “states” of feeling and thinking and deciding. But what do women want to be, and why can’t we create physical manifestations of those fantasies? As writers and AI designers learn more about how to convey emotion and intellectual/personal conflict within the constraints of interactive storytelling and 3D graphics, I hope we can see efforts to dramatize relationships between characters and between character and environment that reflect conflict and competition and survival and adventure in exciting gameplay other than manipulating characters in simulated combat.

I believe that women are more attuned to theming than men, and require more of their environments than archetypes and familiarity. That “processed grunge” texture that seems to upholster every battlefield and dungeon and space station post-apocalyptic 3D set piece in gamedom? What if it came off and virtual worlds were allowed to be beautiful? I can’t be the only woman who would never want to leave a world that looked like Bioshock’s Art Deco city of Rapture, before the flood. The setting don’t have to be dowdy or family-fun or cutesy or Scary Faerie to be appealing; there are plenty of environments that women find attractive in their everyday lives – which is not to say that women’s games should be set in supermarkets and office cubes, but that women seem to enjoy the incongruity of finding magic and dream-fulfillment in a real-world setting, or in a fantasy world of the past or present or future that accepts and cherishes their individual real-world self. Women have traditionally had a happier relationship with fantasy in our culture – there’s seldom shame in a little girl’s desire to play Princess Dress-Up, or to bottle-feed a hard plastic babydoll, but seeing your 10-year old son do those things might be cause for some guilt-provoking anxiety. Many women retain their relationship to fantasy well into adulthood -- in the fiction they read, the passive entertainment they seek out. Men “into” fantasy have only found their place in mainstream pop culture in the past 30 years or so, by my reckoning – years that oh-so-nicely coincide with the embrace of game culture. Let’s ask women where they go to in their dreams, and let’s set our games in those places, and find out what women want to do there. Excitingly themed puzzles and mysteries are attractive to women, of course, but I am convinced by my own observations that it will be the interactive, personalized storytelling and a roleplaying mechanic that most simulates performance that will draw women into epic games. Every woman wants to star in her own story, and I believe performance itself – the “acting” of the role by an Avatar that she identifies with completely – will be enough of a game mechanic to offer a woman for her entertainment dollar and create a new business model if the concept is carefully – yes, expensively -- crafted and marketed.

Women’s sense of “performance” seems to me to differ dramatically from that of men. I have observed in Virtual Worlds and in social media interaction that women like to perform for each other and with each other; they like to see that others Bear Witness to their story – be the other a cleverly programmed NPC appreciator, challenger or collaborator or a sentient audience. This may mean that the first-person shooter – the game’s perspective, not necessarily the shooting mechanic – is less attractive to women; we like to watch ourselves – ask any man who’s been trapped between a woman and a mirror. I feel a third-person environment – the attitude and mechanic of the game, more than just the camera position – will be a crucial gesture to inviting women in. I observed that for the female players I met in Second Life – obsessed and passionate as any action-adventure game player, truly -- being in it in the abstract will be enough, if the authenticity and magic of the Virtual World is transporting enough. The “playacting” itself might very well be the game mechanic – the transference of the inner dreamchild of Jane Doe to that of the Jane Austen heroine seems to be to offer the magical spot where a woman will be helplessly immersed in a game fantasy and will go where it takes her.

There is so much fascinating work being done in Interactive Fiction, and storytelling engines are being developed at a mad pace. But my (admittedly shallow, but deepening daily) exploration into this world confirms what I have been expecting: the narratives that are clearly aimed toward women and a “literary art-game crowd” (I call these people NPR Gamers, and I am proudly one) are dull and arty and self-conscious, more about the play than the player. Is the problem that the commercial mainstream is so much more able to produce more engaging, imaginative, and just plain betterstories? Where are the really, really high-quality, witty, literary, interactive game equivalents that are not about combat, geared toward smart people of both genders -- the non-passive entertainment analogues for the classic screwball comedies, the blockbuster rom-coms, the period costume dramas, even the made-for-TV melodramas that have captured the imaginations and entertainment dollars of audiences for a centurt? Has the lowbrow vs. highbrow cultural divide been so misaligned in gaming from the beginning that it’s impossible to turn around? There are plenty of arguments that interactivity robs the creator of the necessary control to hone these types of stories, but I hope to discover otherwise. I believe the stories are just the wrong ones for the female audience, and no one in Big Money game development is willing to take the risk that I’m right.

THE COMMERCIAL

In the great yawning maw of hunger that is This Culture’s consumption of content, the videogame market – ever-changing, ever being re defined -- seems to be desperate for anything new. And yet the Developers on All Fronts have left unaddressed a huge chunk of market share and I believe it is because they keep using the same models, and those models have no exact mirror image in women’s desires. If , for example, sports are [X] to men , what is [X] to women? What provides for the majority of modern women the same ardent fandom, obsessive content consumption, and identity-definition as sports do for men? Of course there are many, many women who follow and play sports fervently, but not necessarily to the exclusion of all sorts of other passions that are primarily seen as “female” – and that is the side of the female fan base that the videogame industry has not seemed to know how to address.

For the girls and women who identify as Geek, some of the choices are obvious: the playscapes that were created to reflect the identity of being an outsider. There have been very few Geek Girl heroines in pop culture who excel at being who and what they are in ways that just so happen not to involve fighting, killing, shooting, and generally being physically confrontational – or being in some way a neat mirror image of what men find satisfying to accomplish. Lara Croft could be Larry Croft without much effort when it came to survival and weapon-wielding, although she might sigh with a bit less remorse upon vanquishing a thug or shooting a deer.

The games being marketed to women (as few as there may be) don’t acknowledge the culture of women and girls that has been forged in the crucible of the Internet, much the same way the geek-culture has flourished – and it isn’t necessarily a You Go, Girl or mass-market Girlpower, so much as it is a gathering of the Smart Chicks. Like so many formerly underground, deviant, avant-garde, or fringe groups that profilerate in these New Media Days and find their way onto the mass market radar, we Smart Chicks just never knew how to find each other before. Are we as big in number as the groups of ordinary Janes who like a little Facebook and cat pix, who play casual games? Who knows?! We have no idea how many of us there are because we are JUST beginning to connect in a way out of the general “Women” category, through blogging, commenting and taking part in online “smart girl” conversations. So if you’re a Smart Girl of Any Age in today’s culture but not a Classic Geek/Gamer Girl or a Disney Princess, who are you and what do you want to be? I believe the answer will become clearer as the 21st century presses on and the Internet identifies more and more subcultures, and creators, marketers turn their radar in new directions. With luck, game studios and publishers will hire women from these communities to develop for their own, much as the fledgling game industry sought out its core from the Uncool lunchroom tables of the past and we’ve watched the Uncool become the Rockstars of the New Age.

I am actively seeking an opportunity and the means to test these theories, and hope to spend some of my remaining ETC time trying to prove that it’s not the medium but the message that’s keeping so many women out of the clubhouse. If the big money Game Industry could just be brave enough to trust that What Women Want is known only to women for a reason, there would be more women doing the Secret Handshake in game company offices right now.