Games For Girls: Let’s do it right, for once!
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.
Focus, above all else, on story and characters. As with most of my pet projects, this would definitely be a game about people rather than things. Most “girl games” are already like this, but on a very superficial “omg popularity contest!” sort of way. I’d like to take this a much deeper level, dealing with themes such as bullying and ostracism, parents getting divorced, the death of a loved one, pressure to succeed academically, moving to a new city (or country), falling in love, and I’m sure you can think of plenty more. Because, y’know, pre-teen girls actually go through these sorts of things, and it’s important for them to have something to relate to on this level. I know it was for me and my friends.
Pass the Bechdel Test. This means having 1) at least two girls who 2) talk to one another about c) something other than a man. In other words, the game should be about girls, rather than merely featuring them as sidekicks or love interests. This goes without saying.
Have girls doing things that are actually empowering. When I was that age, I was a sucker for books and movies about being the only girl on the football/baseball/hockey team. There’s just something enormously satisfying about proving you’re just as good, if not better, than all the boys, and I don’t think it applies to just sports, either. You could be the only female warrior in a fantasy setting, or, say, the only female hacker in a sci-fi setting. An even better variation on this theme is having an entire team of girls doing something un-stereotypically girly.
Deal with sexuality in a mature, matter-of-fact manner. It would be really awesome for there to be a video game equivalent to Judy Blume books. ‘Nuff said.
Have protagonists of many different shapes, sizes, and colours. That’s right. Stop giving girls self-esteem issues by insisting that the only thing worth being is white and skinny. I mean, seriously.
Don’t be afraid to include some educational content. I was twelve years old when Titanic hit the theatres, and all my friends were fascinated by it. Though at first it seemed like they were really just there for Leonardo DiCaprio, they soon wound up amassing enough trivia about the real Titanic to fill a whole history class report. In short, girls do care about the real world, not just “girl world”. Including history, philosophy, classic literature, science, and math as story elements might just whet a budding geek girl’s appetite to study these things in greater detail.
Speaking of Leonardo DiCaprio, where are the cute, non-threatening boys? Okay, so this may not be the most feminist thing to highlight, and it is a tad heterosexist, but the one thing I notice about girl games that I never see in other media aimed at girls is a complete lack of teen boy heartthrobs. No wonder girls don’t play games! Of course, in all seriousness, it would be rather nice to have male characters in games who actually know how to treat girls and women like human beings, unlike certain overbearing, possessive jerks that pass as love interests in other stories. Yes, I’m talking to you, Edward Cullen from Twilight!
Anyway, these are just a few of my ideas. Do you have any others to add? Let me know!
- This is just a guess, unsubstantiated by actual data, but informed by the fact that most of the game industry consists of teh menz. ↩
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I don’t have anything to add at the moment, just YESSSS times a million to all of this!
Now you know how I feel about “boy games”.
It is unfortunate though, that the the media embraces this shallowness. I guess it keeps society under mind control.
Thanks for this post, Deirdra. I’m pretty critical of most if not all of the ‘games for girls’ currently in the market, and have been thinking for a long time what I would do if I got the chance to make a game for girls, or at the very least a girl-friendly game. Most of the things I came up with are on your list, and there’s a few items that I hadn’t thought of or hadn’t weighted as importantly.
One of my ideas is for a JRPG with a strong female lead character. A lot of the points you list in your post are there: ample cast of supporting characters, some of which are potential love interests for the protagonists depending on the player’s choices throughout the game; strong story revolving around the protagonist’s struggle in a male-dominated society, living up to others’ expectations, search for a role model in the absence of a mother figure, love and betrayal, building friendships and relationships, responsibility, and so forth.
The only doubt I have is that the game is rather systems-heavy (combat systems, management systems, inventory and equipment, loads of other stuff). Would this be off-putting to younger girls? I personally disapprove of the generally dumbed-down experience I see in most games aimed at girls, but then, I’m not a teenage girl, so I don’t know if I’m looking at it wrong.
I’d be very interested in knowing what you think on the subject.
Also, I’d like to know if you’ve played Persona 3 and 4, and if you have, what would you think of a game with similar mechanics but with a girl lead, and a more girl-oriented experience (ie, working in a bunch of the points you list, rather than making the game about the traditional Persona themes).
Note that the above game isn’t a ‘game for girls’, but rather a game which I think (hope) girls could play and enjoy as well as boys.
Definitely. Pink Games pretty much make me want to stab myself in the eyes.
Thinking back to what I enjoyed as a young teenager: I recall reading a fair amount of SF and fantasy (of a kind that wasn’t specifically targeting either gender). I also really liked historical novels with adventure and a light romance plot — stuff like Elizabeth Marie Pope’s “Sherwood Ring”. I was especially interested in foreign or past environments, both the physical environment and the social environment.
As for games I liked at that age: I especially remember playing Plundered Hearts, which, despite its self-categorization as romance novel, actually hits a lot of the same points as the books I was reading: plucky heroine has adventures of physical and interpersonal daring, and does more of the rescuing than the getting rescued, and she gets to wear both the boy pants and the pretty dress. And at the end of the story she gets to pick what she wants next.
What I’d like to see is a game that isn’t expressly aimed at females, but offers a choice of protagonists, and has a great deal of relevance to modern life. My memory of high school and even of middle school was that the girls basically focussed a lot more on practical, real-world stuff. Oh, I knew girls who were escapists (one of them was my best friend and first love), and I think all of us to one degree or another enjoy at least some escapism, so an adventure or dilemma of sorts that goes beyond the mundane would be in order. However, the challenge would be to make the game about choices and consequences in the real world, with a great deal of use of communications, both verbally and electronically, to make the plot move.
Now you know I’m a big fan of The Longest Journey, and I’ve heard some people criticize April Ryan for being not-quite-realistic, but I’m not sure if the problem there is that April wasn’t girly enough, or that April simply wasn’t positive enough. Either way, it seems to have been a problem with empathy; a number of people empathised with April, while others found her to be too unpleasant.
So the challenge would be to create characters that people could read more of themselves into without making it a straight roleplaying game. RPGs are all good and fine, but I’ve become pretty aware of the fact that it’s not easy to tell a coherent narrative without some personality traits grafted onto your protagonist.
On the other hand, perhaps at least some of what RPGs offer isn’t such a bad thing. It would require at least a little energy put into a character creation system, even though I’m not entirely sure how successful these things are at capturing people’s imaginations; I suspect it might be about the number of choices and how personalised people can make their toons, which falls into the problem of spending lots of time and energy on a character modelling system of some sort (even if it’s really only 2D, you still need lots of assets, which makes 3D more appealing) You can cut down the middle and devise a limited but varied series of body shapes and styles, making them iconic enough that people won’t get too fussed about the lack of real time customisation features (WoW gets away with a very cartoonish character creation setup, but even they have had to add customisation features to their game over time).
Okay, enough babbling. I’m supposed to be doing stuff. If any of this caught your attention, drop me a note. I have at least one idea that might be doable for a basic idea; probably not something you would be immediately drawn to, but you might like it, nonetheless.
Thanks for the comments, everyone!
Just want to clarify regarding the “games for everyone, not just girls” sentiments I’m getting: yes, I want to make games everyone can play too (in fact, that’s exactly what I’m already doing!) but I also thought I’d take it upon myself to think of what a good “game for girls” might be, if it existed. In my mind, it would be pretty much exactly like a “game for everyone”, except far more focussed on the experience of girlhood, which I feel is covered very well in other media (see Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and movies like Now and Then) but not so in games.
@Edmundo Ha! And it must doubly suck that “boy games” make up 90% of the industry, right?
@Destral That’s a pretty interesting idea. I don’t play many JRPGs myself (Chrono Trigger is the only one I’ve ever finished) so I’m probably not the best person to comment in this regard; however, I have known many young women who have been fans of the genre. As an adventure gamer, I don’t like dumbing down gameplay either, although I do think there’s a benefit in having a game interface that’s simple to learn but challenging to master. Of course, my biggest concern is dumbing down story and thematic content in games — I think this could be a significant reason why many girls find video games “dumb” after a certain age.
Thank you Deirdra!! It resumes so many thins on such easy and entertainging words I was shocked!!
Cheers from Mexico City!!
PS: I do am a fan of Twilight series, but you’re so right about the Cullen issue, it made me laugh to tears
Deirdra, let me ask you this: I’ve read on Sande Chen’s blog on Gamasutra that teen girls tend to focus more on real life than teenage boys, and you make the point that you would like to see important things like bullying, ostracism, etc, in a game aimed at girls. Both these observations make me think that some kind of ‘teenage girl life simulator’ would be the way to go when making a deeper game for girls than the vapid stuff out there already. In my mind, this game is shaping up to be a life-training game for girls.
The great thing about games is that we can depict difficult situations and demand choices of the player without repercussions. In a sense, you can do things you wouldn’t normally do in real life, just to see what happens. This is largely the appeal of playing the bad guy in the Bioware RPGs, Fallout 3, Fable, or even the main attraction of the GTA series.
So, then, a teenage girl life simulator where a girl can witness and even experience a lot of the negative things they might very well experience in life would allow them to ‘train’ to avoid or deal with these pitfalls, so to speak.
While theoretically it seems like a great idea, I see a couple of relatively big pitfalls for such a game: firstly, from what I know, being a teenage girl is pretty darn tough. Not only do you have to deal with a lot of the problems you mention above, as well as the pressures to fit in, be popular, and so forth, but these situations would also have to be dealt with in such a way as to avoid an M rating from the ESRB and the very possible backlash from the uninformed media (I’m looking at you, Fox News).
The other major problem I see is making the experience fun as a game. I know for a fact that children are cruel, and if a girl is being teased, bullied, and pressured at school, how can that same girl be expected to go home and play a game that reflects the very reality she is living?
Regarding having an M-rating, that’s a very good point. I’m not yet sure how I’d tackle that particular challenge. Apparently, “Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble” had that problem as well, being pulled from a casual games portal for including a near-rape scene, portrayed entirely through text.
My answer to the “fun” part is, like I said, to allow the player to actually do things that are empowering, and also by making it nearly impossible to fail. This doesn’t mean you can’t make the game challenging; in LucasArts adventure games, you couldn’t die, but you could get stuck in puzzles.
It’s also worth mentioning that while a game set in the real world would be cool, it doesn’t mean we have to be limited to it. You can have characters inhabiting a fantasy, sci-fi, or historical fiction world who think and act like real people and are therefore easy for young girls to relate to.
*Nod* I read about Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble, and that was part of the reasoning behind my thoughts on the rating.
I reckon such games would probably be better served not being set in the real world, since shifting the setting away from a realistic setting is probably a good way of letting people know that ‘it’s only a game, it’s not real, just a fantasy parable on important and mature subjects relevant to contemporary society’. Animal Farm is a good example of what I’m getting at here.
Touching on the rating subject tangentially: Do you feel that, when making a game for girls, you are necessarily making a game for their parents as well, or at least making a game that the parents are going to have to approve of? Put differently, do you think parents think differently about the games they buy for their sons than they do about the ones they buy for their daughters?
Depends on the age group, I think; younger kids require more parental influence than teenagers, for obvious reasons. I’m guessing that if buying things with a credit card is involved (which would be quite likely, as an indie) parental permission to buy a game would be even more necessary. As for the “games bought for sons vs. daughters”, I don’t have any hard, fast data, but from my own experience, the rules my parents set for buying games for my brother and I weren’t terribly different, e.g. neither of us were allowed to play violent games. (Of course, it was my brother rather than I who tried to break these rules more often.)
Thanks for a really good post, Deirdra. I don’t have anything to add to the conversation, but I’m paying close attention.
As a data point — my ten-year-old daughter loves the RPG genre, although she hasn’t played too many of them (Radiata Stories, and part of Golden Sun, are the ones I remember.) She even enjoyed Fate, which is mostly a dungeon-crawl with almost no story. She keeps wanting to play a MMORPG, and is frustrated that there aren’t any that are kid-friendly and also run on the Mac.
Currently she’s playing the hell out of MySims Kingdom, which seems to have some interesting sugarcoated mechanics lessons in it — puzzles involving assembling structures and mechanisms from parts.
I remember Plundered Hearts — it was one of my favorite Infocom games, even though I’m a guy and have no interest in generic bodice-ripper historical romance.