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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.