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T A B L E__T A L K

Can online discussion actually change people's minds -- or does it just dig us deeper into argumentative positions? Come debate in Table Talk's Digital Culture area.

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E.D., phone home!
By Scott Rosenberg
Esther Dyson talks about Microsoft, the Net, Russia and more
(12/09/97)

Technocracy in America
By Andrew Leonard
A review of "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" by G. Pascal Zachary
(12/08/97)

The 21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Take the 21st Challenge: Rename software! Win prizes!
(12/05/97)

Let's get this straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Kiddie porn -- the enemy everyone can agree on
(12/04/97)

Interface this!
By Scott Rosenberg
A review of Steven Johnson's sharp critical manifesto, "Interface Culture"
(12/03/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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_______T H E__G I R L - G A M E jinx

COMPUTER GAMES
TARGETED FOR GIRLS ARE
STORMING THE
MARKETPLACE. WHY
HAVEN'T THEY FOUND A
PLACE IN THEIR
CUSTOMERS' HEARTS?

BY ELIZABETH WEIL

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The 1997 Computer Game Developers Conference, held earlier this year in Santa Clara, Calif., featured five sessions on computer games for girls, all of which were packed past fire code. This was not like past Computer Game Developers Conferences. Previously, discussion of computer games for girls consisted of some punk with a $100 million company saying, "Girls don't like our games? Well, good!" This year, when a staffer pinned a "session full" sign outside the final panel on "What Do Female Game Players Really Want?" a riot nearly broke out.

The trouble started with a Microsoft man proclaiming, loudly, that he was being denied access to the only session that mattered -- the only session geared at opening up a new market. Then the 30 or so shut-outs stormed the conference room.

Inside, decorum did not resume. The stragglers lined the windowless walls. They gaped as the '70s-feminist moderator (who was sure she knew what girls wanted) knocked heads with the frustrated industry vets (who clearly had no idea). The moderator wrote on the white board: "Female players want games that are social, games without gratuitous human violence, games that make them feel." The vets skewered her maxims as offensively neat.

A woman in the back corner raised her hand. "Excuse me, but I'm a woman and I'm antisocial."

Next a guy from Columbia Tristar Online suggested: "Couldn't we just rename this session 'How To Create Games for Somebody Other Than a 14-Year-Old Boy?'"

Finally, a designer with unruly brown hair slammed two fists on the table. "You want to know what female players would really like?" she said. "It's like this eighth-grade girl once told me: I would like it if it was good."

No one left with answers. No one left feeling good. Afterwards a few women stood cross-armed in the atrium, griping about the fact that few conference attendees seemed capable of making eye contact with a female, let alone capable of making an interactive experience to engage, wow or otherwise entice one.

But the issues surrounding the creation of computer games for girls are far more complicated than that. Over the past few years, two attitude-altering events have occurred. One, the gaming industry severely overextended itself in the adolescent boy niche, filling store shelves with look-alike products. Two, between October 1996 and March 1997, a game called "Barbie Fashion Designer" sold half a million units to supposedly technophobic little girls.

No one quite expects the girls' market to rival the $1.8 billion boys' market. Still, what we're seeing now is the adolescence of the gaming industry: The boys spent their formative years shunning female players, doing their best to make them squirm. But now they're having second thoughts. The cooties have subsided -- they see the appeal of girls.

Postures are shifting on the female side as well. Several girl-oriented companies have emerged over the past three years. Some are led by women, like Girl Games Inc.'s Laura Groppe, who didn't notice until recently that the boys were into some serious and lucrative fun. Others are run by longtime gamers like Sheri Graner Ray of Her Interactive.

Meanwhile, at least one pioneer of the girl-game cause has recently given up on it. Heidi Dangelmaier publicly took on the boys two years before anybody else -- but as she now sees it, the girl game is a doomed enterprise. The terms are all wrong. To label a product for girls implies that it's not for everyone who values intimacy, expression, depth of feeling -- all the things girls want. And to label a product a game implies that it's derivative and lightweight -- as if software that enables intimacy, expression and depth of feeling wouldn't be a revolution in and of itself.

Dangelmaier's Manhattan office floats on the top floor of a building on 32nd Street and Lexington Avenue. The loft has a shiny bronze floor and cool blue walls. The windows span 270 degrees. Visitors, upon walking in, often feel an ashramlike calm. Dangelmaier, however, feels no such peace. "Why isn't the product fresh?" she laments. "Why isn't the product elegant?" Her eyes seem to move closer together when she gets worked up. "I'm just so fucking tired of all this sterile righteous stereotypical girl stuff. I've had to dissociate myself from that."

Dangelmaier is 33, artsy, a scientist by training and unafraid of critique. In 1993 she published a groundbreaking article in the influential newsletter Digital Media. She demanded to know why, with half a billion girls aching for computer software, the industry had never made an intelligent effort to create products to meet their needs. The following year she leveled the charge again, this time in person at the Computer Game Developers' Conference. As she expected, the gaming community reacted with a firestorm of personal and professional attacks.

"What all these new girl products should have done was open up different ways the interactive medium can integrate into our free time and our social time, and instead what's being produced is just really cheesy and petty." Dangelmaier flings open a set of French doors and steps out onto the 18th-story deck. As she sees it, no one's thinking beyond electronic teen magazines and after-school specials. No one's cracked open a whole new form. "What needs to happen is for girls games to get out of the realm of gender and into the realm of design."

Dangelmaier walks to the deck's railing, stares across at the Chrysler and Empire State buildings and proceeds to share her own design insights -- most fundamentally, her belief that the history of the gaming industry is the history of how things evolve in an inbred male niche. When "Pong" booted up the market in 1974, videogames were not a boy thing or a girl thing. When "Ms. PacMan" hit the arcades in 1979, gender issues were no big deal. Nobody lost any quarters when, in the late '80s, the percentage of female videogame players started to decline. But in 1992, Dangelmaier decided to ditch her computer science Ph.D. program at Princeton to "lay my head into this sucker." She wanted to find out why girls were walking away from games, and why the game makers didn't seem to care.

Dangelmaier wangled herself a desk at Sega. She spent two years poking into play patterns, sex typing, software trends, and marketing, and what she concluded was stunningly simple: The gaming console itself was gender-neutral, but personal priorities -- the priorities of the young male gamers working in the industry -- dictated the products being made. "It's really basic," Dangelmaier says, downshifting her voice from passionate advocate to logical theorist, moving back from the edge to the deck's interior and sitting down on a wicker couch. "If you have to explain why something's fun it's not going to get funded. So I might come up with some game that's really exciting to me" -- one that pushes female hot buttons -- "but in order to get it produced, some boy of tech had to look at it and say, 'That's cool.'"

Thus boy bosses green-lighted boy-oriented projects because those were the ones they understood and liked. Myopic maybe, not nefarious. Still, the trend had consequences few thought to predict. Within a matter of years, gaming hardware started adapting to fit the titles boys preferred. Then, as now, more games were played on video consoles than on PCs. Then, as now, fighter titles -- bleed-and-twitch, as they're called -- were all the rage. Bleed-and-twitch games required quick response times and minimal storage. To hone the genre -- to create really sublime diversions for boys -- platform memory was sacrificed for speed. "Why don't game machines have memory?" asks Dangelmaier. "It's a choice. You don't need it for any response games."

All this leads up to Dangelmaier's point: Response games do not fulfill everyone's entertainment needs. They do not fulfill the needs of almost all girls. They do not fulfill the needs of most non-adolescent males, who along with most females, tend to prefer constructing things -- relationships, block piles, Barbie fashions, whatever -- as opposed to blowing shit up. "And guess what?" she says. "You need memory to run those other kinds of software." PC hardware, of course, has memory. The extension of the gaming industry onto the computer desktop has changed the technical landscape -- but not the industry's boy orientation. So ends Dangelmaier's parable of the gaming industry and the narrow niche: A small group of hard-core male gamers indulged their sense of what was fun to do, and eventually that's what the hardware could do best.