Between Barbie and Life is Strange: the History of the “Girl Games” Movement 2

This feature is part of our special series on History and Games.

In 1996, a game was released that would change the course of gam­ing his­to­ry. You might think this game was Super Mario 64, Diablo, Pokémon, or even Resident Evil. But the most impor­tant game of 1996 for any­one inter­est­ed in women and gam­ing was Barbie Fashion Designer, which out­sold indus­try titans Quake and Doom,1 and in doing so, proved to indus­try pro­fes­sion­als that girls liked to play games. There were games for girls before Barbie Fashion Designer – Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins point to devel­op­er Sanctuary Woods’ 1994 release Hawaii High: the Mystery of the Tiki as being the first girls’ game in exis­tence2 – but Barbie was the first to prove truly suc­cess­ful. I would like to make the spec­i­fi­ca­tion at this point that I am only dis­cussing games that were designed explic­it­ly for girls, or games that were pop­u­lar with a female audi­ence. There have been “game grrlz”3 since there have been video games. Girls and women are not a mono­lith, and for every girl who was drawn to Secret Paths in the Forest, there was a girl drawn to Quake.

The ini­tial girls’ games move­ment of the 1990s was a great time to be a girl (full dis­clo­sure: I am just about the per­fect age to have enjoyed this magic moment in his­to­ry). Due to the suc­cess of Barbie Fashion Designer, small inde­pen­dent com­pa­nies like HerInteractive and Purple Moon were allowed to thrive, releas­ing orig­i­nal games designed specif­i­cal­ly with girls in mind. Unfortunately, Barbie cast a large pink shad­ow; larg­er game pub­lish­ers were only inter­est­ed in cheap Barbie clones.4 As a result, the girls’ games mar­ket became sat­u­rat­ed with ter­ri­ble licensed titles, a trend that con­tin­ues today. A Google search for “games for girls” turns up games about play­ing dress-up, putting on make­up, or the gen­er­al cat­e­go­ry “beau­ty” – still, 20 years later, falling into the Barbie assem­bly line.

Purple Moon closed its doors in 1999. Although its games were well researched and playtest­ed, they couldn’t meet the sales num­bers need­ed to keep the com­pa­ny in busi­ness. Publishers feared that kind of fail­ure and didn’t want to take risks on games for girls that didn’t fit the mold, nor did they want to spend much money on the “pink” mar­ket.5 Industry pro­fes­sion­als were only will­ing to spend small amounts of money on low-budget licensed titles, which the audi­ence didn’t like – licensed games, mean­ing games based on exist­ing intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ties like Barbie, Disney Princesses, or films, don’t often play well. The crit­i­cal fail­ure and deri­sion of Superman: The New Adventures for the Nintendo 64 (col­lo­qui­al­ly titled Superman 64) is a per­fect exam­ple. A good licensed prop­er­ty is not enough to make a good game, espe­cial­ly when the copy­right own­ers are mak­ing most of their money from the orig­i­nal con­tent.

Sheri Graner Ray, author and for­mer HerInteractive employ­ee, calls the peri­od after Purple Moon “pink poi­son.”6 The dearth of true orig­i­nal, qual­i­ty con­tent explic­it­ly for girls caused games like Nintendogs, Neopets, Animal Crossing, and The Sims to grow pop­u­lar. These titles weren’t explic­it­ly designed “for girls,” but they fit the bill of the types of games girls pre­ferred per Brenda Laurel’s research: games con­tain­ing “mate­ri­als for nar­ra­tive con­struc­tion,”7 with inter­est­ing char­ac­ters and inter­est­ing rela­tion­ships, and room to explore a world.8 Although games like these got girls play­ing, their pop­u­lar­i­ty with girls and their dif­fer­ence to other titles of the time, like Pokémon or Mario games, caused them to be unpop­u­lar with boys, and heav­i­ly crit­i­cized. Boys, who gen­er­al­ly pre­fer more aggres­sive play,9 didn’t under­stand the appeal of a game like Animal Crossing, in which the play­er makes friends with ani­mals in their vil­lage, picks fruit, and catch­es insects. Animal Crossing can be played for as lit­tle as 15 min­utes, since much of its play involves check­ing in and keep­ing up with the neigh­bors. In an era when games like Final Fantasy VII, a game that takes 40 hours or more to fin­ish, were wide­ly pop­u­lar, a game that encour­ages such short stints seems ridicu­lous; how could any­one be prop­er­ly enter­tained in such a short time?

The Nintendo Wii, released in 2006, became a haven for girls’ games. The Wii’s mar­ket­ing and launch titles, like Wii Sports and Happy Feet, were designed with fam­i­ly play in mind. This brought girls back into the gam­ing mix, if only on this one plat­form. However, as is com­mon in the his­to­ry of video gam­ing for girls, the Wii also became a locus for poor qual­i­ty licensed titles. Disney Princess, Barbie, Monster High and Nickelodeon prop­er­ties (iCarly, Hannah Montana) dom­i­nate any store’s Wii sec­tion. The Wii, although adven­tur­ous for its time with its motion con­trols, was not accept­ed as a seri­ous con­sole due to its lack of larg­er main­stream titles and inabil­i­ty to com­pete with its brethren, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. In terms of graph­ics, the Wii boasts 480p res­o­lu­tion, where­as the Xbox 360 and the PS3 fea­tures 1080p res­o­lu­tion, and in terms of devel­op­er sup­port the Wii gets left behind as well. Although Call of Duty: Black Ops was released for all 3 sys­tems, it sold 1.37 mil­lion units on the Wii, com­pared to 12.62 mil­lion on the PlayStation 3 and 14.59 mil­lion on the Xbox 360.

2006 brought women and girls Cooking Mama, an orig­i­nal title for the Nintendo DS. Like Animal Crossing or Nintendogs (also for the DS), Cooking Mama was not devel­oped specif­i­cal­ly with girls in mind, but it was extreme­ly pop­u­lar with them. Handheld sys­tems (video game sys­tems like the Gameboy, DS, or PlayStation Portable) are anoth­er sec­tion of the game indus­try where games for girls were allowed to thrive. The Gameboy Advance fea­tures games from prop­er­ties like Barbie, Disney Princess, Kim Possible, Hamtaro and the Powerpuff Girls. This trend con­tin­ues with the lat­est Nintendo hand­held, the 3DS, and with smart­phone gam­ing. The Imagine series of games, fea­tur­ing titles like Imagine: Babysitters and Imagine: Salon Stylist, are incred­i­bly pop­u­lar and are devel­oped for sys­tems like the DS, 3DS, and Wii – gaming’s pink hubs.

In 2009, the Facebook game Farmville was released, ush­er­ing in an era of games that could be played on Facebook or on a smart­phone. The tremen­dous suc­cess of Farmville led to dozens of games in a sim­i­lar vein – busi­ness sim­u­la­tion games and city sim­u­la­tion games, with titles like Bakery Story or Tiny Village and cute graph­ics. It is dif­fi­cult to men­tion smart­phone games with­out men­tion­ing Candy Crush, reign­ing King (pun intend­ed – Candy Crush was devel­oped by King​.com) of match-three games. Like Animal Crossing, most smart­phone or Facebook games can be played in short inter­vals, in between other respon­si­bil­i­ties or dur­ing some sort of down­time – a bus ride to school, for instance.

The crit­i­cism of games women enjoy by “real gamers” con­tin­ues to this day – the deri­sion thrown at Gone Home (2013) for being a “walk­ing sim­u­la­tor” or the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Life is Strange (2015) as a “teen girl self­ie sim­u­la­tor” are clear exam­ples of this phe­nom­e­non. Labeling the entire genre of smart­phone and Facebook games “casu­al” cre­ates a con­de­scend­ing dis­tinc­tion between “prop­er” games and “improp­er” games – games that men play, and games that women and girls play. This divi­sion stretch­es so far as to cause women and girls, who may be incred­i­bly pro­fi­cient at Candy Crush (2012) or Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (2014), to choose not to con­sid­er them­selves play­ers of video games, since these types of mobile games are not count­ed. I spoke in a col­lege class in 2014 and asked the stu­dents (most­ly women) who in the room played video games. Two or three raised their hands. I respond­ed with “Who’s played Candy Crush or some­thing like it?” and almost every hand in the room went up. The local­iza­tion of girls’ games to con­soles like the App Store, DS or Wii fur­ther solid­i­fies this bar­ri­er – “real” gamers own PlayStations or Xboxes, “casu­al” gamers own Wiis and DS sys­tems.

The clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Gone Home as a “walk­ing sim­u­la­tor,” a deri­sive reac­tion to its mechan­ics, is inher­ent­ly sex­ist. A year after the release of Gone Home, a playable trail­er for a new Silent Hill game, titled PT was released on the PlayStation store. PT and Gone Home have sim­i­lar mechan­ics: in each game, the play­er explores a house to dis­cov­er clues about its inhab­i­tants. The play­er can unlock new con­tent by deci­pher­ing clues and per­form­ing actions in spe­cif­ic orders. There are no true puz­zles in either game, so they are sim­pler than a game like Myst, which is of a sim­i­lar playstyle and huge­ly pop­u­lar. But PT was clas­si­fied as a hor­ror game and wor­thy of play, and Gone Home was clas­si­fied as a point­less walk­ing sim. This is because PT is intend­ed to scare the play­er, and Gone Home deals with explor­ing a rela­tion­ship between sis­ters.

When we divide the indus­try this way, we do women and girls no favors. If par­ents only buy poor­ly made Monster High games for their daugh­ters, and only for a sys­tem their broth­ers mock, video games don’t seem fun to girls. I have long thought that the bor­der­line unplaya­bil­i­ty of low-budget licensed games has dri­ven girls as an audi­ence away from games, and YouTuber TamashiiHiroka has voiced this opin­ion as well. We need more orig­i­nal con­tent sole­ly aimed at girls, with the same love, care, and fund­ing as the con­tent which is osten­si­bly “for every­one,” but is real­ly “for boys.”

We must be very aware of the way we talk about mod­ern games. The Steam reviews for Cibele, a game about a woman’s first sex­u­al expe­ri­ence, received an over­all “Mostly Positive” rat­ing through the Steam ser­vice’s user-based review sys­tem. However, the game’s page itself is lit­tered with scores of “Not Recommended,” throw­ing the pos­i­tive rat­ing into doubt. This is due to review­ers call­ing it “less of a game a more of a short story,”10 a “fine movie with ter­ri­ble game­play,”11 and “just a short “film” with brief ago­niz­ing­ly poor­ly designed game­play seg­ments.”12 By den­i­grat­ing a game cre­at­ed by a woman for other women, men may suc­ceed in pre­vent­ing Cibele’s intend­ed audi­ence from ever expe­ri­enc­ing it.

If young women con­nect with an expe­ri­ence like Gone Home or Cibele and are told it is a worth­less expe­ri­ence, their emo­tion­al reac­tion is deval­ued. How can we expect women to par­tic­i­pate in this indus­try if they only ever have bad expe­ri­ences with its prod­ucts and half of its audi­ence? It is crit­i­cal for the future of video gam­ing for women to par­tic­i­pate, and that means start­ing with qual­i­ty titles for girls and end­ing with games for women get­ting fair reviews.

According to the Entertainment Software Association, in 2015, 56% of gamers were male, and 44% were female, with the aver­age female game play­er being 43 years old.13 My hope for the future of this indus­try is that these 43 year old women are shar­ing the joy of video games with their daugh­ters, in spaces pro­tect­ed from unnec­es­sary, unfair, and sex­ist crit­i­cism – so that we can ulti­mate­ly have an indus­try that peo­ple of all gen­ders can enjoy.

References

• Dontnod Entertainment. 2015. Life is Strange. Square Enix.
• Entertainment Software Association. “Essential facts about the com­put­er and video game indus­try.”TheESA​.com. 2015.
• Glu Mobile. 2014. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Glu Mobile.
• Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. “Chess for Girls? Feminism and Computer Games,” in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, 328–341. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998.
• Jenkins, Henry. “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back,” in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, 328–341. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998.
• King. 2012. Candy Crush Saga. King.
• Kojima Productions. 2014. P.T. Konami.
• Laurel, Brenda. “An Interview with Brenda Laurel (Purple Moon),” in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, 118–135. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998.
• Mattel Media. 1996. Barbie Fashion Designer. Mattel Media.
• Maxis. 2000. The Sims. Electronic Arts.
• Nintendo. 2001. Animal Crossing. Nintendo.
• Nintendo. 2005. Nintendogs. Nintendo.
• Office Create. 2006. Cooking Mama. Majesco Entertainment.
• Sanctuary Woods. 1994. Hawaii High: The Mystery of the Tiki. Sanctuary Woods.
• Sheri Graner Ray, inter­view, November 16, 2016.
• Square. 1997. Final Fantasy VII. Sony Computer Entertainment, Eidos Interactive.
• Star Maid Games. 2015. Cibele. Star Maid Games.
• Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, “Computer Games for Girls: What Makes Them Play?” in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, 46–67. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998.
• The Fullbright Company. 2013. Gone Home. The Fullbright Company.
• Titus Software. 1999. Superman: The New Adventures. Titus Software.
• Viacom/Knowledge Adventure. 1999. Neopets. Viacom/Knowledge Adventure.
• Zynga. 2009. FarmVille. Zynga.

1. Cassell & Jenkins, 15 [↩]
2. Cassell & Jenkins, 10 [↩]
3. Jenkins, 328 [↩]
4. Graner Ray, inter­view [↩]
5. Graner Ray [↩]
6. Graner Ray [↩]
7. Laurel, 122 [↩]
8. Laurel, 123 [↩]
9. Subrahmanyam and Greenfield, 51 [↩]
10. Steam user Bohimen, November 2nd, 2016 [↩]
11. Steam user Daveva D. Rain, November 10th 2016 [↩]
12. Steam user Madnoir, June 1st 2016 [↩]
13. ESA Essential Facts 2015 [↩]