Did you know that the majority of online gamers are women? It’s true, as long as you count Bejeweled and Weboggle and not just World Of Warcraft. So why do “Games for Girls” suck so bad? I was talking with a distinguished female professor of CS and she said that they made her nauseous with their horribly reductive and restrictive view of what it meant to be a woman.
When people make a game for girl, it’s usually a bunch of guys programming it, and they are treating women as “other”. Because of the close connection between programming and design, and design and art, let’s connect the idea of how games for girls are with the idea of good art and bad art. In particular, Paul Graham notes that art is good if it is: (a) enjoyed by its target audience and (b) done without condescension to that same audience. Thomas Kinkaid and a lot of other popular-yet-shitty art seems to fail at step (b). It seems like many games for girls also fail at that point. Barbie adventures or whatever is redolent with the Barbie brand which is apparently a lot like crack cocaine to young girls steeped in American culture, but it’s not like the programmers and designers think they are producing something of high quality or respect their audience. They are just screaming “BARBIE” in kids’ faces and the kids are taking it because they have an uncontrollable love of Barbie and not enough taste and experience to distinguish between art and crap.
