games

Queen of the Night

Kyla — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

It didn’t matter that the outcome was predictable, that Beth Hogan would invariably be crowned Miss America. We competed fiercely, as if we expected to win. A year earlier, when we were in fifth grade, we held séances, but now we staged beauty pageants as if our lives depended on it, as many as four or five a night. We’d rearrange the furniture in our hostess’s living room to create a stage, leaving three chairs against the wall so that the judges would have a place to sit, frowning, taking points off if you ended your Talent with a clumsy round-off or had a stuck-up expression on your face during Evening Gown. Contestants skittered around the dining-room holding area, chewing off their Dr. Pepper–flavored Bonne Bell Lip Smackers and confiding, “You guys, I feel like I’m gonna barf.” It was fun in the way that being cranked up a roller coaster’s first hill is fun, especially if you don’t entirely love roller coasters.

I loved judging, loved awarding seven points out of a possible 10. When Darlene Burkee paraded in front of me in a bikini improvised from a dish towel and a couple of chiffon scarves, I gave her a five. It would have been unfair to the others had I scored her higher than she deserved, just because she hadn’t lost her baby fat, wore a patch over her weak left eye, and was ostensibly one of my closest friends. Not that she could be counted on to show me any mercy when the roles were reversed, as they were by necessity every three rounds or so.

Perhaps because of this judicial harshness, the competitors in any given pageant were bonded in the same spirit of camaraderie that allegedly exists in the higher-stakes real thing. Our limited personnel meant we had to make do without commentators and Bert Parks, but we contestants had each other’s backs, as the recently, perennially crowned Beth Hogan provided beauty tips, encouragement, and gentle critiques to the fourth-runner-up-to-be, and vice versa. We swabbed pale-blue shadow, purloined from teenage sisters, up to each other’s eyebrows and rearranged one another’s hair into all manner of glamorous, off-kilter ponytails. Naturally, everyone had brought a dozen or so “costume” pieces from home, but these were treated as a common wardrobe, so that each contestant was given at least one chance to make an impression in Stacy Bernstein’s mother’s four-inch, metallic-gold heels. Casey Coleman swaddled her competitors into the dramatic, bunchy-rumped bathing-suit design she alone knew how to twist from a single twin bedsheet.

My best Talent ever owed much to Susan Teagarten’s marvelous suggestion, in the five-minute interval between rehearsal and performance, that every time Barry Manilow sang the word “daybreak” I should swish my hands up and out in a manner reminiscent of the sunrise. Later, she manned the record player for me and I for her. If the hostess had a piano or if Mandy Grohl had remembered to bring her flute, the record player might be given a brief reprieve, but for the most part Talent was shorthand for a floor routine choreographed to one of Barry’s greatest hits.

And, just like in a real pageant, the contestants squeezed each other’s hands while awaiting the judges’ final tally, even though we all knew that the outcome was as predictable as Casey Coleman eventually storming off in tears and the hostess’s mother shouting down the stairs that she’d call our parents to come get us if we didn’t pipe down and get some sleep.

Ayun Halliday’s most recent book is Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante.

Ode to Joystick

Kyla — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

How can you not love Ms. Pac-Man, a woman for whom power pellets, peaches, and pretzels constitute a steady diet?

This is how I feel about her now, but my love for the little yellow gal with the red bow began when I wore bows myself—when I was around 11. Each summer, my mom would drag me to Atlantic City, New Jersey, under the false pretense of visiting my older brother so she could scratch her casino itch. Since kids weren’t allowed in the casino, I would be relegated to the arcade for hours with a bucket of quarters while Mom gambled, sometimes until the place shut down.

Shooting or driving games made me queasy. I was a loser at Galaga. Donkey Kong drove me bananas. Pinball was a real game, and if I lost that quickly, it was my own fault. As a practicality, I veered away from all of these: They ate up my money, and if the quarters were spent before Mom came back, I had nothing to do but watch other kids play. Ms. Pac-Man, the better half of the Pac-Man couple, hooked me because it not only made a few quarters stretch, but I got to see a girl outrun bad ghosts—great for a budding feminist.

Unfortunately, I was never a champion. The most I remember ever achieving was 30,000 points. When the 5-in-1 TV Game, a joystick that can be plugged into the television for endless Pac-Man pleasure, came out recently, I fell in love all over again. Endless games for the price of a few batteries!

And now that I’m older and wiser, I see Ms. Pac-Man’s metaphorical gifts to my life: It’s not all about scoring points, but even if it is, keep going after the fruit along the way—because life should also be sweet. Nothing’s better than killing your ghosts, even when they keep coming back to devour you. Don’t be afraid of the twists and turns in life; they may end up saving your life. And of course, the most important one: Women rule, even in video games.

Joshunda Sanders lives in Austin, Texas. She is a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman and aspires to one day be a librarian.

The Accidental Jock

Kyla — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

I’m not an athlete. I’ve always disliked team sports, with their conformist, vaguely fascist associations. While as a child I longed to be a tree-climbing tomboy, I had to admit a preference for tea parties, dress-up, and long afternoons at the library.

Then one summer night, three years ago, I played my first game of bike polo. It’s an elegant game: With mallets in their right hand, players ride their bikes up and down the field trying to whack a grapefruit-size ball between two orange cones. It was instant love.

Immediately I was declaring things like “This is the game I was born to play” and “If this had been around when I was younger, I’d have done it professionally.” Maybe it’s because I have a talent for it, or because it’s a game on bicycles and I practically live on mine, or maybe it’s just the endorphins kicking in, but polo nights usually end with me biking home exhausted and exhilarated.

During the breaks in the game, however, when the other players and I catch our breath, I’m overcome by a feeling of alienation the likes of which I haven’t felt since high school. There I am, surrounded by a bunch of guys (I never hang around with groups of guys) who are drinking beer (I prefer wine), having just spent 20 minutes shouting things like “I’ve got your back!” (I cringe, mentally). As my heart rate slows and my thoughts veer back into their normal channels, I realize I’m behaving like those sporty people I’ve always, in my heart, despised.

“You’re obviously very athletic,” my doctor said at my last visit. Huh? I thought. But it’s true, and it’s been true all along. In addition to tea parties, my childhood also included casual games of baseball, soccer, and basketball with the neighborhood kids. So have I just been in deep denial all my life, like some sort of closeted jock, hating what I actually am?

What I hate is the culture of sports in this country. It’s no accident that the ruling clique in my seventh-grade class was all the sporty girls; or that when I got to high school the popular boys were all athletes. Who hasn’t lived through the oppressive pep rallies, where “school spirit” is a creepy precursor to “my country, right or wrong” patriotism? For me, sports are inextricably tied to frat boys, drunken brawls, antifeminist machismo, and a creepy rhetorical overlap with the military (sportscasters adore military metaphors as much as the Defense Department likes sports metaphors). With all the bitterness of an antisocial bookworm in a society that prizes team sports, I made up my mind early on: I wanted no part of it.

And yet, the bike polo I play has a purity of purpose, like the games I played as a kid. It doesn’t matter how good you are, or even if you like your fellow players; what matters is getting enough people together to play the game.

But I’m wary during the breaks, noting the cultural warning signs (All that beer drinking! All those men!). Am I making excuses for the oppressor of my youth for my own selfish reasons? At any moment, the game could metamorphose into a “sport” where we organize teams, get sponsors, and start caring about the score. Of course, if we did get more organized, I could play more. And didn’t I just claim I’d do this professionally if I could?

Next I’ll be holding pep rallies.

It’s scary, this realization that I have more in common with those sporty types than I thought. And taking the idea to its logical extreme, some of those wife-beating pro football players may share with me this love of the game, this joy in the pure pleasure of playing. Fortunately, I only think about it during the breaks. When we’re playing, I’m too busy trying to score.

Monica Nolan is a freelance writer/video editor currently seeking sports sponsorship from a small literary press.

Sims Like the Real Thing

Kyla — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

The Sims is a game that consists of little more than creating characters and pushing them through the day, making sure they eat, sleep, stay clean, make friends, advance in a career, and buy stuff. The bodily functions are tedious and the rest is everything I hate about life in a capitalist society. So how to explain why I own all seven expansion packs for the first game, as well as Sims2 and its expansion pack, University?

When I was a kid, I didn’t like baby dolls. Despite their childish faces, my dolls were grown-ups whose daily lives I made up as I went along. I built them furniture and houses out of cardboard and made them clothes. It was social engineering with myself as the almighty deity, a role that apparently still compels me.

In the first Sims, there were limits to the storytelling. The lifestyle hardly varied whether a Sim dressed like Cleopatra or Lydia Lunch, and the daily grind went on indefinitely unless some catastrophe took a Sim’s life. Sims2 offers far more potential: Each character has an aspiration track and only seven stages of life in which to complete it. Their mortality adds a level of urgency to the play—your Sims better be happy and accomplished when the grim reaper shows up, or you’ll have an angry ghost on your hands.

I lose sleep thinking about which Sims will pair up. I wake up with a plan to pace the story in one house with the story in another. I need Brandi’s son to propose marriage to Isolde to satisfy her family aspiration. I go back and forth between houses trying to keep everyone happy. Hours go by.

It occurs to me that my preoccupation with the well-being of characters in a game may suggest some displacement in my psychological make-up. This may be due in part to the social appeals of the Sim universe: In the new game, a Sim is pregnant for only three days, and men can become impregnated as a result of alien abduction. Characters of the same sex can be married or “joined” if they are so inclined. Conversely, I always feel disoriented when I’m taking great care to choose the right wallpaper for a house’s bathroom or when I’m pushing a Sim to advance in a military career—especially since wallpaper has never been an issue for me, and career advancement remains elusive.

In my own life, satisfaction is amorphous and aspiration is not sequential. I am most drawn to the game when real problems seem like too much to deal with: A few hours of playing with my onscreen dolls is deeply comforting, just as it was when I was young. While my own dishes sit unwashed in the sink, I make my Sim families clean house and quietly work toward their goals. Brandi’s son does propose, and she gets the energy she needs to get one more skill point and advance in her culinary career. My Sims may have had a kitchen fire, and everyone may have needed to stop what they were doing and take a shower, but in the game it all works out in the end.

Tish Parmeley writes a blog at fatshadow.com. She has written a memoir, Avoirdupois: A Life of Weight.

Board of Education

Kyla — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

Each semester in my American popular culture class, my students and I spend a night playing board games. I start them off with games for small children, like memory cards or Strawberry Shortcake adventure games. They play self-consciously, giggling at the losers who can’t master a game for preschoolers, but loosen up enough to start looking beyond the activity for the deeper meanings.

Then I bring out the big guns—Clue, Life, and Monopoly. The students invariably light up, lose all discomfort, and fight over who gets to play Monopoly, seizing on favorite game pieces like the Scottie dog or the race car. Instead of leaving at 9:30, we all hang around, watching the game with glee, urging the players to buy houses, groaning when someone goes to jail, admiring a particularly crafty strategy.

On the surface, Monopoly is all about buying, acquiring, jumping from purchase to purchase, and hoping to build some solid ground under your feet—which quickly turns to thoughts of expansion, empire building, and total world domination. Sound familiar? But the game’s structure also allows for all kinds of individual modifications. One of my personal favorites is the practice of paying all the fees into the middle of the board and creating a free-parking jackpot, but my students always seem shocked—almost betrayed—that this isn’t sanctioned by the game’s official rules. Economists who have studied the way Monopoly is played have found that with each variation, the strategic elements of the game are weakened, and the possibilities for luck and chance blossom.

Monopoly emerged in the dark days of the mid-1930s, a time when doubts about America’s future ran rampant. I like to read my students a quote from literary magazine the Sun, from an author remembering when Monopoly burst onto the scene and “players became utterly engrossed in the game, handling huge sums of money, buying houses and hotels, wheeling and dealing, shouting and laughing, feeling rich and powerful for one night.” Doesn’t part of the game’s appeal result from watching other people go bankrupt, taking pleasure in the survival of the fittest, in a kind of ethical flexibility that is the United States’ trademark in the world today?

I ask my students: Does a business-style monopoly ever really happen in the game, or are you encouraged to place your wealth in what Americans have always relied on, from Scarlett O’Hara to the Western pioneers—land?

I say all of these things and more, and my students pretend to listen, but I get sucked into the fun of the game every semester, offering to be the banker, laughing and cheering on different students as they go for broke or win the jackpot. We stay late each night, and groan in resignation when we realize that the game has to end.

Jackie Regales writes frequently on motherhood, activism, feminism, and social justice from a cozy row house in Baltimore.

Muddy Daughters

Kyla — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

The year my oldest daughter turned 4, her little sister was born, and that spring, in desperation, I let her play more or less unsupervised in the neighbors’ yard. When I came up for air from the endless diaper changes and nursing sessions, I’d catch a glimpse of her through the family-room window. Sweaty, dirty, and wild-eyed, she ran behind the neighbors’ pack of crazy, good-natured, and mostly unsupervised boys. Because my oldest girl is naturally cautious, every time the boys switched from backyard to front, she’d yell to me through the open window, “Can I go in the front yard?” or “Can I go in the back?” I’d holler, “Okay. Just don’t leave the yard,” but that was the extent of my supervision.

Because I’m the type of mother who likes to keep close tabs on the delicate little flowers in her care, this loosening of the apron strings was a bit unnerving, but it was also oddly freeing. At the end of the day, after my husband and I had put the baby down for the night, our big girl would heave her exhausted limbs into the bath and with starry eyes recount her daring adventures. As I scrubbed her dirty feet, I was reminded of my own childhood.

The quintessential “oops” baby, I was born more than a decade after my closest sibling, 21 years after my oldest. At the beginning of my life, I lived in a house full of teenagers. When I was five months old, my 19-year-old brother and his wife had their own “oops” baby, and for what turned out to be some of the best years of my young life, they all moved into our suburban house.

Soon, more nieces and nephews arrived. When all of my older siblings had left home, my parents and I moved to the country. In the freedom of woods, swamps, and ponds, my nieces and nephews and I ran wild, inventing an elaborate set of games, from the romantic (Ice Capades on the frozen pond) to the mysterious (Kids’ Club, with spooky initiation rites and petty thievery).

These games were all completely, deliciously devoid of adult supervision, and what I loved about them was their lawless, Lord of the Flies aura. One of my favorites was a reckless romp we called Natives. It began one summer night when my siblings and their families had made the journey out for dinner. At dusk, the kids gathered in the back garden and split into two groups. The younger kids pretended to be a group of frightened tourists whose plane had just crashed on an isolated island. The older kids were the cannibal “natives.”

We ran around hooting and yelling in the growing darkness, hiding behind trees, climbing onto the garage roof and jumping down, until all of the rattled tourists had been gathered and thrown in a cordoned-off area we called “the pot.” We played this game over and over again until we could barely make out each other’s faces in the darkness and swarms of mosquitoes devoured us.

Maybe it was because she was too busy to pay attention to my comings and goings, but I never had to get my mom’s permission to cross the street, let alone pass from the front yard to the back. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever let my own daughters run wild like my harried mother let me, but I hope that someday I’ll loosen up enough to stand back as they invent their own crazy games, run and yell in the gathering darkness, boost their bravery, and get their feet good and dirty. That, I’ve discovered, is what memories are made of.

Andy Steiner’s two daughters do their best to remind her how much fun it is to play. She is the author of Spilled Milk: Breastfeeding Adventures and Advice from Less-Than-Perfect Moms.

Beyond the Valley of the Geeks

Kyla — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

“When I started out, gaming was a geek thing,” says Sean (not his real name), a 38-year-old senior director of product development for a major electronic game publisher. “Now, it’s totally mainstream. It’s clear there’s money to be made.”

It’s not like there’s any nostalgia in his voice. With a six-figure salary and a generous bonus, Sean is one of those making the money. Electronic games—which encompass both computer games and console-based games—generated nearly $10 billion in revenue last year, thanks in part to top-selling titles like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Madden NFL 2005, ESPN NFL 2K5, and NBA Live 2005.

Given the fact that electronic games have their roots in geekdom, the sheer jock/thug appeal of the above-listed games is striking. You’d think that geek boys, having been a) persecuted by jocks and bullies and b) heavily involved in the production of electronic games, might take advantage of the latter to redress the former. But somewhere between Pong and Madden, those geeks began spending their days and nights creating universes in which testosterone rules, in the process reinforcing the gender roles that made their young lives hell.

What happened?

Gender and Gaming: A Primer

It’s a stereotype, but it’s based in truth: Despite increasing numbers of female players and women working in game development, electronic games are still largely made for guys, by guys. Of the 145 million people in the U.S. who play video games, 43 percent are female. When it comes to console games (think PlayStation and Xbox), which dominate industry sales, only a quarter of the players are women. Women do, however, make up 60 percent of the 6.3 million purchasers of games played on mobile phones.

As for the people who make the games, U.S. gaming companies are reluctant to disclose their percentage of female employees. But we do know that merely 10 to 15 percent of members of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) are women. In the UK, just 17 percent of electronic gaming workers are female, and only 23 percent of those women have jobs that include designing or having creative input.

Is it always a problem when more males than females engage in a particular activity? More men than women participate in both monster-truck rallies and dealing methamphetamines, for instance, and I haven’t seen too many people wringing their hands over that. But one recent argument has succeeded in convincing me that more girls and women should be playing games: Critics such as Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, have cited empirical evidence that playing video games develops our “cognitive muscles.” In other words, gaming makes you smarter, according to standardized measures in the areas of problem solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and spatial logic.

For girls, not having access to a tool for sharpening those aptitudes perpetuates the erosion of their engagement with math and science as academic subjects and career paths; this erosion occurs from childhood through young adulthood, keeping women out of a variety of jobs and public decision-making roles. So unless guys are going to stop playing games—and somehow I just don’t see that happening—we have to make sure girls and women do. (And though my focus is on gender, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the same risk stands for Latinos and African-Americans, who are also underrepresented among game players; and women and girls in these racial/ethnic groups are at especially high risk of being left behind.)

From Dungeon to Stadium

The inception of video games can be traced to William A. Higinbotham, inventor of the precursor to that granddaddy of video games, Pong, in 1958, and quintessential geek. As game development took off in the ’70s and ’80s, geeks, by definition, possessed the specialized knowledge and mathematical/scientific leanings required to make the games. Their creations included electronic versions of the role-playing games they loved, complete with wizards, forests, princesses, and dungeons and dragons. These were games largely made by and for male geeks. (While there have always been female geeks, their ability to influence game content and design was—and is—limited by minority status. We’ll come back to this point later, believe me.)

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, as gaming companies developed friendlier, easier-to-use interfaces, investors smelled profit, and marketing, sales, and executive types began steering game companies toward selling as many games to as many people as possible. “The gaming industry, metaphorically, is a nerd that just wants to be popular,” says Jason Hart, 28, who worked as a game designer and programmer in the early 2000s. Achieving that popularity involved not only hitting the same geek-boy audiences with new games, but reaching out to more mainstream (male) audiences. It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen a proliferation of sports games (including four of 2004’s 10 bestsellers) and games based on movies—like 007 and the soon-to-be-released Godfather—that feature hypermasculine heroes and hyperfeminine accessory characters.

But despite the explosion of games in mainstream culture, games and the makeup of the gaming workforce still point to the industry’s roots in the geek-boy experience. To begin to understand why, let’s go back to the 1970s, in a midsize city in the Midwest…

This Geek’s Life

As early as elementary school, Sean recalls, “I always had bruises on my shoulders and chest, because guys would just come up to me and hit me.” By the time he entered high school, it was clear to him that success and popularity were the purview of athletes, and the feeling of being ostracized had a firm place in his psyche.

You’d think the kind of persecution Sean experienced might have led him—and other male geeks who went into game development—to create games that defy jock values and glorify braininess. But instead, they’re helping to churn out games in which physically aggressive musclemen are still the winners. Why?

The fact is, most people aren’t about changing the system, especially when it comes to our jobs. We tend to look for ways to succeed within the established rules. And for geek boys–turned–game boys, there’s been no need to change the system when they can simply shift their roles in such a way as to profit from it.

Geeks have traded on the skills that made them vulnerable to their erstwhile oppressors. Their progression from making games as a hobby to professionally producing top-selling sports and action titles was inevitable: Game-making skills are transferable across genres. If you can make someone look realistic falling into a mile-deep well teeming with electric eels, you can make someone skid across a muddy football field. So it’s been easy for executives to move flap A—geeky programming staff—into slot B—sports and action games. When Sean was offered a job with a company that makes massively popular sports games, he didn’t think twice before saying yes: “Did I even watch football or know the rules? Absolutely not.”

But from the male geek’s perspective, making popular games has provided some degree of power over his one-time nemesis. Now the jocks are depending on geeks to provide what they want—football, hot cars, gunplay, and babes. And geeks have been able to outearn them in the process: In 2002, video-game programmers made 39 percent more, on average, than wholesale and manufacturing sales reps ($68,344 versus $49,235, accounting for commissions).

Playing with Girls

In her 2004 report “Why Are There So Few Women in Games?,” Lizzie Haines declares that girls of all ages play video games less than boys do, and for the most part they play different games, on different platforms. Women, she says, are more likely to play on the computer, online, on interactive tv, and on their cell phones than on consoles; they also tend to choose games with short play and quick rewards, rather than byzantine universes that require months to learn to navigate. Not surprisingly, many are bored by or uncomfortable with the violent premises of many popular games.

Theoretically, it would be easy to make gaming more attractive to female players by creating different kinds of characters, missions, and settings and testing them with audiences until they hit their mark. But, says Heather Kelley, a 30-year-old game designer for Ubisoft and chair of the IGDA’s Women in Game Development Special Interest Group, “it costs more to make games that are different.” The fact that the industry has been churning out the same kinds of games for young white males over the past two decades suggests that companies haven’t been willing to make that investment.

But they’re going to have to do just that if they want to cash in: The Sims, created by a 60 percent female team at Electronic Arts (EA) and played by an audience that is 50 percent female, is widely acknowledged as the number-one bestselling computer game of all time.

Once we have games whose content appeals to women and girls, players have to be able to get that content in an appealing platform. According to Haines’s research, that could mean making more games available for mobile devices and computers, both online and off. The industry is already bridging the platform gap with consoles like Xbox Live, which hooks up to a broadband connection. But more desirable content would motivate many female users to migrate to consoles, internet-compatible or not.

Having tackled the issues of mission, characters, and platform, there’s one more barrier to increasing the numbers of women and girls who benefit from the cognitive boons of game play: the attraction to games that feature short play and quick rewards. These may not offer the same cognitive workout as those that force the user to invest hours of play just to figure out the rules of the game. I suspect, however, that when girls and women find more games interesting and the characters flattering, they’ll be more than willing to play games that take time to pay off.

But after decades of exclusion, will large numbers of girls and women ever feel comfortable enough to play games seriously? “I played games when I was a kid, but I stopped in middle school and didn’t start again until I was 24, because gaming was just something boys did,” says Kat Hunter. Now, at age 30, she’s working to make sure girls don’t get edged out of gaming. Hunter competes professionally as one of six Frag Dolls, the all-female game team founded by Ubisoft in the late ’90s. She’s part of a movement of women who play in teams or “clans,” making it easier for the ladies to “hop onto a Halo server and play with all these guys,” she says. “It’s a bonding, friendship thing as much as a serious sport. And these girls are good—there’s this one 14-year-old who’s like a robot!”

Avatars and Accessories

The small percentage of women who actually play console games are becoming more vocal about demanding better female characters. The consensus seems to be that while pioneering heroines like Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft have taken female avatars in less purely decorative directions, the gratuitous hypersexualization of female characters is tired. On her blog, Frag Doll team member Jinx writes:

Within certain boundaries of reason, I think no one can argue that attractive game characters are awesome. Outside those bounds, well, I often find myself cocking my head and wondering how physics engines can support the paradoxes of some female models.… Usually there’s an inverse relationship between the size of a character’s breasts and her character development.… Developers, I’m trying to help you. If you’re going to put a female character in the game, put her in for a reason.… Being buxom is not a reason, it is an excuse.

In “Strong = Sexy,” an essay published by WomenGamers.com, game critic Damon Brown muses on what male gamers get out of manipulating virtual vixens. His well-intentioned argument vaguely states that this sexing up of women is about power differentials and has something to do with young men’s “phobias, desires and repression.” He correctly observes that male lead characters—Rambo, Bond, etc.—offer the player the chance to experience power by killing. Then he tries to establish a parallel by attempting to figure out what kind of power female leads proffer to male game players: “[Man] will never be able to stop his fascination of [sic] the womb, the place from where he came.... Women have this power. He does not.”

By “this power,” Brown means the ability to give birth. He reasons that male characters allow players to have power over others by killing them, and female characters allow players to have power over others by…having babies? I must have passed right by Grand Theft Auto: Maternity Ward the last time I perused the game store.

Brown does start down the right path, though: There’s a difference between what male and female characters, as currently constructed, offer players, and it does have to do with power. What these female characters offer to the largest market share of game players—heterosexual men—is the chance to be aroused while going about the business of destroying bad guys or stealing cars. Just by pressing a button, the player can have game babes put on a sexual performance for him. That’s an appealing power trip—one that most players take for granted, thanks to the ubiquity of hot babes in popular visual culture.

But is there something about video games in particular, and the male geeks who create them, that makes the medium more prone to characterizing women as sexual accessories? “Many of the heterosexual geek boys in this industry have a deep resentment of women because they haven’t had as much access to women as they’d like,” says Jerry Darcy, a 32-year-old senior game designer for a major gaming company. As a game designer, “you don’t have to ask a supermodel to do something, you can create a character and do whatever you want.”

For the all-too-rare female player of role-playing and action games, hypersexualized female lead characters can provide the opportunity to sport mainstream symbols of desirability and also have the agency of the killer hero. But it’s the “all-too-rare” part that’s telling; most women stay away from these games, and their implication that a woman’s power always has to have something to do with giving a guy a hard-on.

The gaming industry as a whole is light-years away from admitting there’s a problem, and that denial is even evident among female executives: The main complaint of Brenda Brathwaite, senior designer of Cyberlore’s Playboy: The Mansion, regarding female characters is: “If you’re going to animate breasts, animate them properly. The breasts in the original Dark Alliance drove me nuts. If my breasts moved like that, I’d go to the doctor…or call an exorcist,” she told PlayStation magazine.

Where the Girls Aren’t

Brathwaite is living proof that the mere presence of women in the gaming industry by no means eliminates sexist content. But bringing a realistic gender balance to design teams does affect content and characters: The aforementioned Sims franchise is the product of a gender-balanced design team, whereas EA’s other games—007, Battlefield 2, the Need for Speed series—are the product of a seriously male-dominated creative staff.

In the past five years, the mainstream press has begun to make an issue of how few women work in the gaming industry. The proverbial first step to solving a problem is admitting it exists, and while the media does pay attention to the issue—in large part due to the existence of charismatic female teams like the Frag Dolls—American gaming companies have been conspicuously unwilling to acknowledge it. (One manager at EA told me he couldn’t be quoted in a story about gender and gaming because he’d be fired.) The closest we come to data on women in the U.S. industry are the minimal statistics available through the IGDA and the Gamasutra annual salary survey.

The UK, on the other hand, has published studies documenting the scarcity of female gaming professionals, and the British government devotes public resources to solving the problem: Recently, the equivalent of $15 million was earmarked to establish computer clubs for 10-to-14-year-old girls. These clubs are meant to catch girls at a time during which they often fall behind boys in computer knowledge and math and science; the goal is to obliterate that pattern before it starts, using games and other computerized activities to build abilities in problem solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and spatial logic—so that these can in turn help sustain girls’ interest in math and science in school and into the career world.

For women who do have an active interest in making a career out of games, there are more barriers. A significant one, according to Haines’s report, is a “stubborn adherence to a garage-hacker work culture” that, among other things, “elevates the nerdy but successful male founder of the company to heroic status.”

Change on all levels—from improving career-path education to making a more appealing workplace for women—is being pushed by a number of women-in-gaming organizations, conferences, and websites. A group of female members of the IGDA started a Women in Game Development Special Interest Group that promotes gender balance and equity in the field.

But it’s not just a matter of profit-motivated executives hiring special female staff to make female-oriented games. Pressure from geeks in the lower echelons of corporate gaming can help bring women onto all design teams. But that pressure is far less effective coming from individual staff than from organized groups of workers.

Let’s say Joe Designer gets it in his head that a game could be just as good without scantily clad prostitutes. He mentions this to his boss, who opines that, to the contrary, the well-being of millions of gaming Americans depends on the placement of three virtual hookers on three virtual Los Angeles street corners. What can Joe do but refuse, at which point he is sure to get canned? But if, alternatively, Joe got involved in one of the women-in-gaming organizations or conferences, listened to women talk about the changes they’d like to see, and organized a group of employees to push for those changes, he’d be less likely to be quashed or ignored by management.

A Personal Appeal

I care about all this because, well, I love geeks. As a punk-rock girl in a small, rural high school, I counted them among my allies.

As electronic games, and computers in general, have become more widely used, the qualities that once made geeks uncool—a combination of intellectual curiosity and the ability to solve problems using technology—have acquired tangible value. Many geek boys of my generation who went into gaming have risen to management positions in which they have more creative control than rank-and-file programmers and designers. It’s not too late for these guys to use their influence to redress the gaming industry’s gender bias. So, you old-school geeks, don’t forget about us, the girls who truly loved to be around you—and make some games you think we’d like.

Jacqueline Lalley is a writer and poet whose essay “Evidence” appears in Secrets and Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women’s Friendships.