There's been a hubbub about the dearth of girls' computer games, but not much headway bringing them successfully to market - Barbie Fashion Designer notwithstanding. Meantime, games for boys - i.e., all games - continue to proliferate. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat attempts to address this discrepancy with a cacophony of theoretical essays, interviews with industry professionals, and editorials by prominent female gamers.
Much of the theoretical material questions and backs up current assumptions with research on how girls interact with computers, how they play, and which features they're drawn to - including, not surprisingly, nonlinear and nonviolent adventures, fashion, relationships, spaces of one's own, nurturance, and fuzzy animals.
But the meat of the book is found in interviews with girl-game pioneers such as Brenda Laurel and Heather Kelley, as well as with mainstreamers Nancie Martin of Mattel and Lee McEnany Caraher of Sega. Here you get an idea about various developers' approaches to synthesizing the research and breathing it into actual products. The end sometimes justifies the means: If a pink box sucks a girl into a game, so be it.
From the feminist camp, Suzanne De Castell and Mary Bryson wonder whether catering to such culturally sanctioned desires is "producing tools for girls" or "producing girls themselves." Outspoken gamers like Nikki Douglas of GrrlGamer and Aurora of GameGrrlz take the vanguard to task, insisting it's more valuable - and fun - to shoot boys on their own turf.
It's an unrelenting din, but this handful of women thinking seriously about gender and gaming agree on at least one thing: Girls need access to technology early on, something boys already take for granted. Though the book fails to forge a singular idea of how girls' relationships to computer games should look, the forces are gathering.
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins: $35. MIT Press: (800) 356 0343, mitpress.mit.edu.
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