First off, you may not have noticed if you’ve been reading this site through an RSS thingy, but I’ve redesigned deirdrakiai.com to make it less ugly and hopefully easier to read and navigate. Do have a looksie, if you haven’t already, and let me know what you think!

Additionally, to commemorate this momentous occasion, I’ve written a new Flash gamelet. It’s a brief meditation on the subject of individuality versus conformity, packaged as an interactive children’s book, which I call The Little Girl Nobody Liked. It should take no more than five minutes to play through, so check it out… and also let me know what you think!

There’s been a little storm erupting over Twitter regarding EA’s announcement of their new Charm Girls Club IP and corresponding line of “EA Girls” products, which suffer from pretty much all the issues that Michael Abbott so succinctly wrote about in a semi-recent Brainy Gamer post. Essentially, the vast majority of “girl games” promote a shallow, crass consumerist worldview that’s every bit as dangerous as the violence we see in games played by boys of the same age — perhaps even moreso, since said consumerism tends to be brushed off as perfectly normal and harmless. After all, you look at the magazines on the shelves and the TV shows and movies being targeted to young girls, and it’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it? EA and co. are just giving these young girls exactly what they want… aren’t they?

Obviously, I can’t speak for everyone, but considering that I, unlike the majority of folks who work on these sorts of games, [1] actually used to be a pre-teen girl, I’d say my opinion’s got to be at least somewhat valid. Thus, here’s what I’d do if I were somehow given an opportunity to write a game for pre-teen girls.

But wait! There’s more…