WOMEN, GAMES, AND WOMEN'S GAMES

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Summer 2005 by Sweedyk, Elizabeth, de Laet, Marianne

It is this culture that sets games apart from other types of technology and other types of media. Gaming culture is unquestionably a male domain. It is "male," as in the opposite of "female." We mean this in the sense that the culture dichotomizes gender to the extreme. Conventional "real" games imagine gender as two fixed and stable categories that stand in stark contrast to one another. As a consequence, it is hard to conceive of the relation of games and gender without resorting to stereotypes. "Real" games value "victory over justice, competition over collaboration, speed over flexibility, transcendence over empathy, control over communication, and force over facilitation" (Bruner, Bennett, and Honey). And with gender so dichotomized, men become the norm, while women default to being the "other"(Consalvo), the "ab-normal" (Tarvis).

It is not easy to be the other. Still, women do choose to venture into the world of gaming. The women in our class, for example, do play "real" games. They play these games in spite of the fact that most of their girlfriends do not, in spite of the scarcity of female avatars, in spite of hackneyed portrayals of women as objects to be rescued, in spite of the fact that they do not normally fantasize about going to battle in a chain-mail bikini. Women venture into the world of gaming in spite of the constant reminders of their otherness. They do so because they love playing games and, especially, because they love to play "real" games (Taylor). What is not clear is whether these women can be, or want to be, full citizens of the gaming culture - a culture in which they are configured as the other by definition, by exclusion, and by default.

GIRLS' GAMES

In 1996, Mattel released Barbie Fashion Designer, which sold more than a million units. By gaming culture's standards Barbie was not really a game and, most certainly, it was not a "real" game. Nevertheless, it had a profound effect on the industry. It suggested that, contrary to conventional wisdom, girls would play on computers. The games industry responded with a "pink" games movement, scrambling to turn out games that would appeal to girls. None of these games were able to reproduce the success of Barbie. Within a year or two the industry had backed off, deciding that ''Barbie was a fluke," and that girls would not play computer games after all (Graner Ray, 2004).

Barbie was indeed a fluke: the popularity of Barbie Fashion Designer reflects girls' interest in Barbie - not their interest in computer play. But to conclude that girls - and by extrapolation women - will not play computer games would be too hasty. Rather, we should ask why girls did not want to play these particular games. It might be that these were just not very good games. In trying to build games that would appeal to girls, "pink" game designers construed girls' games as the opposite of boys' games (Glos & Goldin). Emphasizing justice over victory, collaboration over competition, flexibility over speed, empathy over transcendence, communication over control, and facilitation over force, these games may have lost some of their tension, their challenge, their edge.