A Love Letter to 'Girl Games'
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And that franchise is The Sims.
Despite the fact that there has been a huge industry push in the last 10-15 years to make a game that draws in tons of female players, there has been no new game in the franchise other than the safe but ultimately unambitious Sims 4.
I've heard a ton of complaints about players about how much better, more complex and featureful the Sims 3 was (and that game was a glorious mess), and Maxis themselves have acknowledged this. I think there has been a sequel in work at some point in time, that promised to bring back the complexity, which has been cancelled unfortunately.
So in a nutshell, despite all the rage around this question, the industry somehow doesn't even make the games that are known to do well with a female audience.
Another example would be Stardew Valley, or Undertale, which had a huge female following (and sales to match) but had to come out of the indie scene, because all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse at making things that appeal to women than either companies that existed before, or random indies coming from outside the professional world.
> Despite the fact that there has been a huge industry push in the last 10-15 years to make a game that draws in tons of female players
Ultimately its poor marketing. They want to make Call of Duty and get that audience, but also get girls to play Call of Duty. Instead of making a game with mass appear to both boys and girls.
Or admitting that there's just no such thing as universal mass appeal
Universal implies more than just 50-50 split between sexes, imo. It's an impossible standard to reach for any consumer product
I.e. the FPS players could embody the military forces in a complex society where more RPG players are doing the diplomacy and strategy, others are playing in engaging "home front" social environments, someone is off doing city-planner/factory logistics stuff, etc. There could be some deep-diving, dungeon-crawling sub-games within all these realms, but also more casual modes too.
But, crucially, it is all tied together in a unified simulation so that these different player groups are actually steering a coherent story and state space for the shared world. The outcomes of diplomacy, warfare, industry, trade, local social groups, etc. should all have impact on each other.
To be honest, I'm mostly a solo FPS player. The immersive feedback loop is pretty much the whole draw. I would be open to a broader range of story/plot genres if they could provide this satisfaction. I don't need the "shoot" part of FPS, just the first-person part where my real-time, 3D movement and perspective gives me agency, objectives, and entertaining experience.
I naively imagined some game universe that could integrate multi-user input to adjust or build the story in a shared fashion. Like some kind of crowd-sourcing variant of a procedural generator. So your high level strategy would go through the filter of people like me trying to enact it.
But, I didn't really thinking about the real-time aspect of coupling user interactions. I wonder if there is some kind of statistical simulation model that could bridge these worlds with latency masking. I don't need a continuous 24x7 real-time simulation. I just need a coherent state model during my session and preferably some coherent story for how the sessions connect together...
I might have been thinking too literal with my examples. One could possibly make it work with some sort of averaging of people's play. I can't say what that might be like. I've not played online since Battlefield 2 except a bit of friendly Stellaris (which didn't go well).
A good strategist makes the outcomes of individual battles predictable. That makes it terrible for unit players.
I used to play Planetside 2 with a very organized group. Winning was fun at first but you were ultimately a cog in a well oiled machine so it got old fast. It probably got old even faster for the other players who were just trying to play a regular fps.
At the same time, it's not realistic to aim for that level of appeal with every game. Most games are going to aim for some sort of niche, just like any other media.
But there is probably no way to release an Assassin's Creed or Call Of Duty that is going to appeal to women as much as men. That's just not a realistic product goal imo.
Games need to know their audience, and franky they have been very successful targeting young men for decades. My take is that most times they try to target "both men and women" they flop. There are rare exceptions like Baldur's Gate 3 that seem to reach everyone. But it's rare
Modded Minecraft is really cool these days.
> Another example would be Stardew Valley, or Undertale, which had a huge female following (and sales to match) but had to come out of the indie scene, because all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse at making things that appeal to women than either companies that existed before, or random indies coming from outside the professional world.
Boomer shooters also came out of the indie space. Survival craft hits? Generally indies. There's plenty of genres that, for whatever reason, have been largely ignored by the biggies.
It’s crazy to me that WoW exists but I think there won’t be a WoW 2. But who knows i was wrong about this with StarCraft as well and StarCraft 2 has turned out OK
Anything they would add in a sequel is just added to the existing game.
Face it, AAA studios just can't do open world and can't do decades-long development cycles, they always immediately lose the plot beneath super-irrelevant graphics, platform deals/restrictions and other crap that's mostly openly detrimental to gameplay and ease of access.
That they insist on treating game development as movie production is my running hypothesis.
Rimworld also has non-inconsiderable female following, but only because it's a) very mod-friendly and b) in continued development for more than 10 years already. Its attention to relationships and interpersonal stuff also helps.
My GF, daughter and me all play Stardew Valley but we play it wildly differently. It is a farming/relationship simulator for them and some kind of capitalist min/max farming and mining simulation for me.
But yes, the Sims 3 and the 700 add ons are all heavily in their rotation, they make me look like a gaming amateur if you go by hours logged.
Me on the other hand 'yeah I forgot about those two and need to check them out'. My back catalog is quite deep at the moment so I am trying not to buy anything until I play what I got.
That is the thing about suggesting games to someone. It is tough to do. Even though you wildly like the game others do not.
I really like certain directors, but not everything they make.
I know there are some that can enjoy something based on a single aspect alone, but I imagine most are like me. Then again, it's possible I'm the weird one.
Corporate interest is primarily financial, anything beyond that is unfortunately all too often only (financially motivated) virtue signalling.
Basically the same reason many other genres (e.g. roguelites) are dominated by little indie studios.
The real successor to an old AAA series is the new series made by people who played it as kids.
So by greedy capitalist standards, these companies are falling short of what they want to do.
I agree that it is weird that there hasn't been a AAA attempt to unseat it. You'd think that it'd be a safer bet than yet another hero shooter.
Asking for AAA game studios to make something else is like asking a pizza shop to start making burritos. Sure, you can ask. But really, you should just make your own rather than trying to convince someone else to do it for you.
As a "serious" gamer, dismissing (and other dismissable games like smartphone Monopoly) makes sense, but if the topic is "girl games", dismissing them is a mistake. I don't have official stats, but based on women around me, they're very popular, with several saying they're addicted to it/them. So what if they're not Baldurs Gate 3 or Stardew Valley. While we want a depth of discourse deeper than "make GTA6 but in pink" in order to actually appeal to women, leaving out a popular genre with women as Ann address of study because they're insufficient complex while trying to study that area seems shortsighted.
You have a particular experience.
I am not a girl, I do not play games.
The women I know who play games, none play games like that.
We'll even play co-operative games of Barony, and Borderlands; but those are more that they want to spend time with their Dad. Likewise, I don't think they'd ever have picked up Castle Crashers or Kingdom Rush if I hadn't played those games in front of them and with them.
I think an important undertone in many of the games that appeal to them is that they're primarily focused on solving a puzzle and telling a narrative through puzzle resolution. Only one daughter is particularly fond of the doll dressing aspect of some games, and there are dedicated Android apps for that specific niche. Neither is particularly interested in playing first person shooters or epic CRPGs, unless it's done with my involvement. Also important is the presentation; there's only one game in those that I listed which is in any way presented with modern realism, the rest are _clearly_ stylized in a more playful manner. But maybe that's a reflection of their age?
Video game distribution is insanely low friction. Last month the best selling game was Resident Evil (6m copies) and right alongside it you have a Slay the Spire 2 (3m copies) which is made and distributed by like... 15 people maybe?
I definitely don't think I could make a better game for women than women, so hopefully more girls get into playing and making games. It is definitely one of those areas where you have an opportunity to stand out from the 10,000 games that come out every day.
If I "retained" masculine interests, it's because I still enjoyed them, even after I no longer felt pressure to act like a man.
I played Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, and preferred beautiful/cute games before I realized I was trans. I probably would have played more if I didn't care about my friends calling me a f--. I also like plenty of "guy" things but so do plenty of cis women. I had this exciting period of trying all sorts of new things when I came out and I'm only just starting to see what I truly enjoy when I don't worry about the opinions of others.
Why would it be misguided? There are plenty of works that are created by women that appeal to men (Harry Potter, Animorphs, Full Metal Alchemist), so I don't think there's anything wrong with men trying to make something that appeals to women.
Make art that is truthful and your audience will find you.
I think they are saying 'make something that appeals specifically to you as the creator, and it will resonate with some people out there'.
I personally agree that this seems top result in works I enjoy. (As evidenced by behind-the-scenes content or interviews with creators espousing a similar philosophy.)
> I definitely don't think I could make a better game for women than women, so hopefully more girls get into playing and making games.
Some of my favourite game designers and authors are women. I don't think a creator needs to share the gender, sexuality, or ethnicity of their target audience in order to make games that appeal to that audience. They need to _observe and listen_.
Rebecca Heineman comes next; again, the games she worked on were massively influential upon me.
I have much respect for Amy Hennig, who pushed narrative gaming to new levels.
Kim Swift is responsible for _hundreds_ of hours of time lost to multiplayer games with friends of mine.
There's good odds most gamers of my age have played, and enjoyed, something worked on by Sheri Graner Ray.
Honorable mention is Corrinne Yu; I started following her career with passive interest when she was hired at 3DRealms, I expected she had the potential to be the next John Carmack.
Also lesser known because due to a trademark dispute, all sequels and the VGA remakes of the series were renamed to Quest for Glory.
I deeply enjoyed that whole series in my childhood, even despite how weird the voxel-based art in the fifth game was. IIRC, I learned the "razzle dazzle root beer" cheat in Hero's Quest before I learned the Konami code, and, with the help of my dad, even learned how to hex edit my save games in Quest for Glory 2.
This is interesting, as my five year old daughter loves Pillars of Eternity. That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.
She absolutely adores the simulation games (Avatar World, Toca Boca World etc) which leads me to believe that she'd love the Sims. I wonder if I can get them on Switch?
She has Animal Crossing, but there's a lot of text there which she isn't yet comfortable with.
Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a *game* there...
> Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a game there...
A large part of the problem here is that folks believe that "game" necessarily implies goals and mechanics.
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/game
> 1. a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other
vs
> 2. activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
Lots of folks see it as definition 1 (cooperative is still a contest against some non-player), whereas your girls seem to be operating under definition 2.
The equivalent to your statement from the other side of the fence would be women that deride male competition.
At the end of the day, we likes what we likes. Doing fun things is the fullest definition of a game. So the application of the priciple looks different depending on what the people enjoy.
Both types of software plausibly "are video games" but can take extremely different forms, and their appeal may diverge wildly—someone who likes one to an extreme, may have zero interest in the other. Others may like both sorts of play, but not regard them as interchangeable (i.e. if what you're wanting at the moment is an e-sport, a visual novel may not be any amount of a satisfactory substitute, even if you like visual novels).
We tend to draw a "toy/game" distinction (with games perhaps being a subset of "toys", but still its own sub-category, anyway) with physical objects to divide those with built-in goals from those without, and that seems to serve us well, but we've not translated that to the digital realm very well (and maybe we shouldn't, I dunno)
Funnily enough, PoE is the game I've been needling my eldest to try for _years_ now. The PoE games are fabulous CRPGs that I've played through twice each, myself; I expected that she would love the mix of puzzle solving, narrative, and strategy. But it just didn't hook, for whatever reason.
> That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.
Oh, well, yes. My kids love watching me play whatever game I'm playing. That's different: they are choosing to show interest in my interests in order to spend time with me.
She likes relaxing sandbox games such as "Tiny Glade", story/puzzle oriented games like "Planet of Lana" or "Cocoon", racing games like Mario Kart 8 and Need For Speed (she's awful at it, but she likes it), platformers like "Princess Peach: Showtime!", and will gladly watch me play Space Marine or even help me with XCOM Enemy Unknown (by pointing out enemies). We're currently having a hoot playing "It Takes Two", which is a coop split-screen puzzle platformer.
I think pretty much her only requirements are: "not too scary" and "I can play next to daddy". That's it. Not necessarily just "Girl Games".
One thing I discovered with her is that we both have very low tolerance for "talkie" games with lots of cutscenes where you must skip through all the pointless dialogue. They are very kid-unfriendly (kids want to just play the game and read very slowly anyway, if they can read at all) and, if I'm being honest, also adult-unfriendly. Most games have crap storylines anyway, just give us the gameplay and imply the larger plot briefly, much like Planet of Lana does.
I do wonder if there's data on this, though.
So which is the lesser?
Actually… false comparison. They make skin mags featuring men too.
So let’s try this:
Woman reading a romance book. Vs a man reading a romance book.
One of those is “weird”.
The idea you'd start with comparing porn to a book says enough about how honestly you're coming to this conversation and where your starting point was for what romance novels even are.
I was excited to read the love letter to girl games, but this article is more of a disparagement, as if everything that appeals to women is regarded as trash. There are plenty of things made by women for women that are universally loved. There are shallow chick flicks, yes, and they're not trying to be anything more than they are (I love a lot of them). It seems that the author is the one framing all these things as worthless. Is a game worthless because it never hit the (very competitive) mainstream?
The game mentioned in the article, Consume Me, has 922 written reviews, the majority of which are very positive. It has the description: Consume Me is a semi-autobiographical game that depicts dieting, disordered eating, and fatphobia. In my opinion, the art looks cool and the game looks fun enough, but I don't get the impression it was aiming for mainstream appeal. Why should it? Mainstream games are often addiction traps meant to separate players from their money continuously.
This article needs more love and less disparagement.
Really? Do we live in the same society and culture?
It is not called the "patriarchy " ironically, but literally
Things have improved over my life, but until very recently anything not clearly labeled as "for woman" was absolutely designed for men
Most things "designed for women " were more expensive, lower quality and less available
This article is about the history of gaming, a world where the misogyny has been legendary
However, I think it worth pointing out that gaming in general has always been looked at as lesser. That has eased over time as gaming has gone from a rather small, niche activity to a huge industry, but gaming is still looked down upon. Ironically, as it relates to the article, I've read recently that gaming is top on the list of hobbies that are turn offs women have for men they date.
Slightly unrelated, but the point about tutorials starting with the “basics”, i.e., “making a character move and attack” is interesting. On the one hand, if you have a strong enough grasp on programming fundamentals, it should be pretty easy to take what you learn there and make a “dress-up game”. Heck, a basic dress-up game shouldn’t be any harder than a platformer.
But if you lack that fundamental knowledge and are only interested in games, you need to develop it somehow, and you don’t want to build ‘boring’ console apps; games should be a platform for learning programming. So I agree wholeheartedly with the author: we need more diversity in introductory game programming tutorials!
Of course, that brings us to another can of worms with programming education: Tutorial Hell. But beginners need to start somewhere, and that somewhere should motivate them to continue learning and exploring on their own.
If you are inexperienced and asking for advice on making a game, the most common answer nowadays is to use Unity. That is reasonable advice. Unity is a well established engine, with good tooling, a bunch of tutorials and community knowledge, and can be made to solve almost any problem you throw at it.
However, Unity is oriented around "traditional" games like the article describes: entities moving around in a 2d or 3d world. If your game fits that mold, you can have something up and running within a day; even with no experience. If it doesn't, you are going to need to spend time fighting the engine before you have even the basics of a playable environment.
Maybe you have an idea for a game that is story driven, where players read a portion of the story, then make a decision about what the character wants to do. If you know what you are doing, you would pick a light novel engine light RenPy, and you'll have your basic game environment up within a day.
Nathan Drake is similarly presented as a hero, but requires a deep psychopathic disconnect from reality to exist as a character.
I would not call her "pathetic" by any means
Perfect Dark N64 commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAo7Vt4X_Ys
In that specific case I think it was a result of the whole show bending almost every gender-presentation toward something less binary, on purpose, but the general tendency to make a woman character stronger simply by increasing her masculine presentation is pretty common and isn't well received by a lot of folks.
Watching the playthrough on youtube its not an unfair assessment:
But I'm a dude, I dunno if it read that way to women who played it.
I can’t find it now, but I recently read a history of CYOA books. There was a discussion about the fact that although they feature a nameless, race-less, gender-less, age-less, etc, “YOU”, the covers almost universally depict a male protagonist.
This was because market research (in the 1970s, IIRC) showed that while girls will buy books with boys on the cover, boys wouldn’t buy books with girls on the cover.
I wonder how true that remains.
Traditionally feminine activities and aesthetics are a wellspring of untapped potential in video games. In Consume Me, your strategy is informed by a collection of cute outfits that offer various stat boosts. Terry Ross’s Sweatermaker is a crafting game inspired by the real process of knitting.
That sounds like the stereotype out of a 1950s commercial that more than a few women I knew would think of as kitsch. I don't even think there is something that gendered for men either, for example some of the more stereotypical cartoonish fantasy or action franchises of the 80s or 90s have relatively little appeal with guys today. And personally I think that's probably a good thing because anything that targeted at a demographic tends to be, to put it mildly not exactly an artistic achievement
I recently saw a video essay by a woman about the surprising popularity of the souls-game and horror genre among women, and the extent to which she appreciated the more 'monstrous femininity' (which you also get in folklore) and I was thinking, maybe you don't get 'chick lit' in games because ironically enough the average gamer now demands more aesthetically mature media than the average reader. You can't make a 50 Shades of Gray game.
[1] https://gamesbeat.com/how-riot-games-wants-to-ensure-that-va...
In my experience there's a substantial number of women who are fans of something like overwatch, but not of actually playing Overwatch. They like the designs and the world, they make fanart and fics and such, but they don't actually play
Now, that might still be a real success for something that is billed as an esport, but if you're trying to move actual copies of your game you have to be aware that there may be a real big disconnect between your fans and actual paying customers
The usual disclaimers apply: I'm not trying to imply that no women play games or that women are "fake gamers" or whatever. This is just my personal observation
I'm the same way with Warhammer 40K. I love the lore, but have no interest in actually playing with the miniatures.
But from the company's sales perspective it's important to recognize the difference between fans and customers
How many games or products had huge social media followings and then flopped hard when they came out? Plenty.
One great thing about multi-media projects (as in appearing in multiple media separately), is that you can like and engage with just part of them.
This idea is trotted out but is really blatantly false when you think of it. Jayne Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility. These books have all withstood the test of time and are considered fine literature but are absolutely feminine. Romance novels are considered less than because they are not good books, just in the sense that Conan the Barbarian is also considered not fine literature despite being dripping in masculinity.
Manhattan, Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally. There are tons of "chick flicks" that are considered great films. Some directors like Catherine Breillat are extremely feminist in their works and well regarded directors with well regarded films in cinephile circles.
And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.
On the other hand for shorts science fantasy is much better off. Apparently anybody who can knock out six pages of romance tends to use somebody else's character development as shorthand and so can only publish to AO3 but if you can knock together a decent SF story in six pages that's worth some cash from a pro or semi-pro magazine. Even pretty hard† SF, which is not a common taste, can shift enough copies of a bunch of shorts to make economic sense.
† Science Fiction is graded "harder" the more likely that if you ask "How does that work?" about something in the story the author gets as excited as Hank Green and starts explaining details that may or may not just be facts about our universe which they've incorporated into their story -- as opposed to "A wizard did it" or "That's not important". The diametric opposite of the MST3K mantra.
... and actually, wasn't it the case that before the discovery of the "whale" brain-hack to crack open a few (mostly) men's bank accounts, most of the gaming market was women, for broad definitions of "a game", both by player count and revenue?
Even comic books, I'm pretty sure it's only the American superhero-type comics that're mainly "for guys"—if we expand it to include stuff like manga and Euro comics, then the overall audience leans female, right?
Books are overwhelmingly dominated by women.
> And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.
Romance is a poor term because it's used to launder literal werewolf "dubcon" porn under the same label as something like Jane Austen novels. That's probably useful to marketers and for sales, but it makes it impossible to make productive use of the label without further qualifiers for anyone who's trying to actually communicate using the term.
(Meanwhile, yeah, much of what actually sells in that genre [and, again, the term is terrible and overloaded] leans pretty hard into being trash. So does pornhub, or Mr Beast videos, or whatever. So what? It's fine to enjoy them, but it's also fine for folks looking for excellent works of art to mostly avoid them in that search. Meanwhile tons of the modern "literary fiction" and poetry market is by and tuned for an audience of women, in fact I'd be surprised if most of those two categories weren't that, but of course few people actually read lit-fic and especially poetry these days)
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BUT, the post is actually less about all that than about how older "girl games" are missing from game history and ignored in things like game-making tutorials and instruction. I'd venture that "boy games" that are similarly low-narrative and/or lean toward being more of an activity than a game (bear with me on the terminology, I'm not interested in turning this post into gatekeeping "what is a game" but I think you understand what I mean, yes? The distinction is here useful) also get left out (I can think of a few[0]), plus the factor where a lot of these were licensed games, which doesn't usually help. I'm not so sure this is as much sexism as that narrative games and clear, tight, goal-oriented game loops are both major factors in games having artistic "staying power" or influence, and in lending themselves to "baby's first video game" tutorials (the latter, especially, for that), and are both really, really hard to accomplish in a video game without resorting to a lot of the usual stuff (violence, largely). This is fundamental to how games are built which is that...
...games necessarily objectify the shit out of literally everything in them. This makes satisfactorily modeling things like realistic relationships extremely hard, and even the games that do it remarkably well are prone to feeling kinda weird as a result (see also: Action Button's rightly-famous Tokimeki Memorial review on Youtube). This is why a lot of relationship-focused games end up as visual novels, where they can be contained to basically a choose-your-own-adventure book format. It's incredibly difficult to build a game-loop around relationship mechanics, and have it be any good at all. This is how you end up with so many "girl games" on the "wrong" side of the "what actually is a video game?" discourse (ugh): it's really hard to build "proper" game mechanics around a lot of the aspects of those "girl games" that appeal to girls in the first place.
Take a dress-up "game": in the most-minimal form (and a form which does exist in the wild!) you're not looking at something that's much more game-like, apparently, than MSPaint. Try to add a dress-up mechanic to a "traditional" game and you end up with something that's a pretty superficial veneer over bog-standard mechanics (stat-boosting item equipping, or something like the FFX-2 "dress sphere" system) or is purely aesthetic and has no "actual" "game" effects. It might be fine to include those anyway! But they're never going to feel especially integral to the game. How do you make dress-up itself a video game? You kinda... don't. You attach it to a sandbox, maybe, and let the player develop their own game (goals, narrative) with it, just like toys in a toybox. Like The Sims... which was a smash-hit among women. Go figure.
Is a toy box a game? Kinda no. Do the contents become vital components of a game when a child plays with them? Often, yes! What is a game? Do we call what kids do with toys, often, "games"? Yep. Is soccer a game? Is chess? Yes and yes. What do soccer and chess have in common with a girl developing stories around her real, actual dolls and such, and dressing them up different ways? Not a fucking lot, but we may use "game" for all of them.
... and so we've come full circle from "romance is a shitty term for a genre of books, and often not very useful for communication": "video game" is a shitty term and often not very useful for communication. The game can be what the player brings to a "toy box" that lets them dress up characters and move them around. Maybe it's fair to call a program "a game" if its main intent is to facilitate that, even if it lacks things like a traditional "game loop" or strong extrinsic goals or motivations (which would let us get away with saying that MSPaint could, situationally, be a toy in service of a game, but doesn't belong in even a very-generously-defined category of "video games" itself, should such distinctions matter for whatever purpose we have in employing the term in the first place).
But a video game can also be an "e-sport", on (kinda) the complete opposite end of a certain spectrum. These things have almost nothing to do with one another aside from that they happen on a computer and are supposed to be some variety of entertaining or fun. "Video games" are both those things, and everything in between, it seems. Not sure how useful it is to lump all that stuff under the one term, but so far efforts to carve out distinctions have been poorly-received, so we're stuck with "all these things are video games even though they're so wildly different that very often their fandoms have no overlap whatsoever, on substantial grounds, not just surface appearance or marketing".
[0] Long ago I had this DOS CAD program for kids called, as I recall, "KidCAD". It was entirely useless for any "serious" work, all it was, was effectively a rudimentary line-rendered digital lego set. Leaning into the kinds of distinctions the linked article uses, I think it's fair to call it a "boy game" in those terms, like a dress-up game is a "girl game". It also had zero built-in narrative and no "game loop" whatsoever. Guess how much attention it gets in game history, and how easy it is to find anything about it now? LOL.
I thought I remembered a recent update from one of the various API/engine re-implementation projects (e.g. something like but not necessarily ScummVM, Wine/Proton, or something associated with archive.org's Emularity project) that included a list of new titles that had become playable due to some recent fixes, and among those titles were (I thought) a bunch of Barbie and other low-budget franchise games in that vein. There wasn't any particular focus on these outside any of the other games listed—they were just mentioned in passing. Someone did bring it up in the comment section—maybe here on HN—but searching around didn't turn anything up.
Any ideas?
I'm looking for that blog post, the list of titles, and the short subthread about it that I mentioned not being able to find.
And maybe that's the project you heard about. It's making a tons of progress, lately.
https://dreamm.aarongiles.com/docs/v40/#intro-games
It doesn't list any Barbie titles. It's not the project that I'm thinking of.
...
> The solution is giving people the tools to start exactly where they want to start
Isn't ren'py one of the easiest game engines to use?
Me too! But from a different angle.
The vast majority of gaming focuses on zero-sum resolution. Someone loses or dies so someone else can continue or live.
In my experience as an American white male I have a feeling women would be drawn towards win-win resolutions, or even games that are not so focused on conflict. So taking COD and swapping the bad guys for aliens and the base for a “house” and nuclear secrets for “children” isn’t going to succeed. (And would also be super sexist.)
But really don’t listen to me. Ask a woman.
Video games and technology has always been spearheaded by "autistic" tendencies... There is a certain repetition that autistic people and people with adhd have. Most of those people are men...
Women were never excluded. They just never found much interest in it. Just like it is for chess or motor sports.
The early 90's was heavily painted pink and dolly for girls and camo & macho for the boys.
Games went very hard into the "shoot stuff" genre from get get-go (presumably in part because it's comparatively easy to design and make) and stayed there, and that's also a factor.
But ALSO, yes, the folks making games tended to be male, and so the target audience also tended to be male.
But on the other hand, as more games became available, and especially as mobile gaming on phones became possible, women quickly climbed back up to being about half of the gamers, so it was certainly never about any inherent differences in how much they'd like games so much as just what sort of games different people might like.