Girl gamers are a small but vocal bunch, and this year has seen all-girl Quake clans sprout across the Web, women tackle each other in all-female tournaments, and names like Kornelia appear among the top-ranked professional gamers. Speaking for this growing community, the webzine GameGirlz launched Monday as a resource and inspiration for girls looking to play and build multiplayer games. Its creator also hopes to give the gaming industry some much-needed insights into what girls want to see in their shooters.
"If there were more women professionals involved in the industry, it would encourage more girls to play games," says Vangie Beal, aka "Aurora," director of GameGirlz. "Get women involved in marketing: Game marketing is so unfriendly to females that girls don't even want to try playing."
Beal, 22, has a deep involvement in gaming - having headed up the first all-girl Quake clan, PMS. She also works on the Da Valkyries Web site tracking female "warrior" gamers, and as a correspondent for the Planet Quake gaming site. Having corresponded with hundreds of online girl gamers, Beal wanted to take a deeper look into what exactly what was going on for them in the industry.
GameGirlz currently offers "he said, she said" reviews (comparing boys and girls opinions about new games), chat rooms, and thrice-weekly interviews with notables in the gaming industry. Rather than focusing on one game or genre, the site hopes to draw together all kinds of gamers. In the next few weeks GameGirlz will add a "Digital Chicks" section, featuring Internet resources for girls with a focus on technical advice and the "So you want to beat your boyfriend" tips and strategies section. Tournaments are also in the works.
A primary focus of the site is to encourage women to get more involved in the gaming industry itself. To that end, Beal created the "Woman's Spotlight," interviewing women game developers and industry pundits such as Lisa Renninger, managing editor for PC Gamer magazine, about their experiences in the world of gaming.
"You don't see news about women professionals in the industry because it's so male dominated. So it's good to highlight the women and give them some recognition," explains Beal, who discovered that finding these women was difficult at first. "I looked for female names on the staff pages of big game developers, but unless girls are named Mike or Bobby, there weren't that many." And since the women she eventually found via word-of-mouth seem primarily to be in art departments or public relations, she's still seeking a woman game programmer to interview.
By encouraging women to consider gaming-industry careers, Beal is also hoping that the problem of sexism in games themselves will be solved. Most games have "fantasy-in-a-box" female characters who are "supposed to be fighting dragons in a dungeon in a G-string and high heels." GameGirlz hopes to encourage the industry to make more female characters like those in Quake 2, who wear camouflage head to toe and don't even have a belly-button pierce. So far, her approach seems to be working: numerous gaming companies have already approached GameGirlz for advice on how to reach girl gamers.
"Girl gamers have always played, they've always been there. But in the past year their visibility has heightened and it's only getting better and better" due to sites like GameGirlz, says Joe Perez, who helped host the all-female Quake tournament on TEN earlier this year, where 160 women fragged for prizes. "It's helped developers say, 'Hey, these girls can be as good as the men. We should be developing for them too.'"
Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software agrees, saying he hopes that sites like GameGirlz will help make the game more fun for women and ultimately assist in expanding the market. One change id has made for Quake II, he says, is the inclusion of a gender option for the player character in deathmatch. The female model he says "is tough. She wears armor. She looks like she can kick alien ass. But you can tell she's female. It wouldn't be very realistic to have this war-hardened Marine run around in bikini armor or shorts and a half shirt."
