Video games’ opens in a new windowwell-documented history of sexism shows up in this frustrated attitude of female players who love gaming despite the minimal range of female characters. One panel member noted that she was ”tired of boy games where the girl is rescued and almost always has big boobs. I really think I could help you.” The game industry’s tendency to ignore girl gamers was also a motivation.
For some, it was because they really loved games and wanted to help improve them: “Whenever I play games I always think that this should be better or different. The young women’s comments about why they wanted to be part of this process are revealing. Her Interactive instead assembled a Teen Advisory Panel, and included them each step of the way, from character and story development to user interface design. Many game companies do beta testing: they put together a preliminary version of their game, invite players to give it a try, and make changes based on the feedback they receive. And they played them for the reasons you’d guess anyone would play games: they found them challenging and fun.Īnd then Her Interactive went one step further. Gory first-person shooters like Doom and Quake, strategy games like Sim City and Age of Empires, sports franchises like NBA 96, puzzle adventures like Myst-girls played them all. Notes from focus groups paint an entirely different picture than popular beliefs about girls and games. As it turned out, the girls Her Interactive spoke to simply wanted to play games- lots of games. Her Interactive, however, figured the best way to find out what girls wanted was to just ask girls. They’re such an enigma that most of these articles seem to simply shrug a “we’ll never know!” attitude that ends up focusing on the same set of big-name games and studios. You can almost hear the handwringing when the writers ask “What do girls want?” In these stories, young women come across as deeply mysterious, almost unknowable creatures.
Her Interactive’s archives contain an array of news clippings about the state of game development in the late 1990s. Our current conversations about gender and gaming are nothing new.
ONLINE NANCY DREW GAME SERIES
The Her Interactive archives offer a window into some of the strategies that have made this series so successful. Debuting in 1998, these games consistently make the opens in a new windowbestseller lists when they’re released. Nancy Drew games rarely make it into cultural narratives about gaming, despite the games’ popularity and longevity. opens in a new windowHer Interactive is the company behind the Nancy Drew opens in a new windowgames: interactive mysteries in which the player takes on the role of the famous teen super sleuth and solves complex crimes.
Or so the story goes.ĭigging into The Strong’s opens in a new windowHer Interactive archives provides another perspective on the story of games and girls, as well as games for girls. And if they do, they don’t play “real” games. They explain that women face a lot of pushback and find themselves viewed as unwelcome visitors in spaces stereotyped as “for the guys.” Along the way, the nature of video games themselves comes under scrutiny-characterized as hyper-masculine, violent, and sexist. The opens in a new window New York Times, opens in a new window Rolling Stone, and opens in a new windowthe Colbert Report, for instance, have drawn attention to what it can be like for women in gaming communities. Recently, debates about women and video games have been making the rounds.
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