A Lack of Diversity in Girls' Gaming Culture

It seems that too much of girls’ gaming culture reflects the same narrow gender interest that are also found in girls' magazines, webites, and in “Girl Power” advertising culture. Too many assumptions are made about girls’ interests, where girls are presumed to be interested in little else than clothes, popularity, dating, hair, make-up, and themselves. In other words, girls’ interests are assumed to be consumer oriented around obtaining—what might be called—a "girlified" lifestyle.

Image from "Rocket's New School".

Brenda Laurel creator of the girls’ video game Rockett’s New School claims that girls’ interests center around relationships explaining that “girls seek different kinds of complexity than boys, complexity in terms of character relations, not in terms of the action elements” (Cassell and Jenkins 26). But Laurel’s claim grossly oversimplifies the issue at hand, and only provides a new medium in which to display the same old stereotypes surrounding what girls’ are interested in. Thus, her video game Rockett’s New School for girls ages 7-12 simply provides yet another game centered around  “the personal” sphere of girl relationships, portraying narrowly defined girl identities that show girls: chit-chatting, being snarky, striving for popularity, and developing crushes on cute boys.

Justine Cassel and Henry Jenkin’s book From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: gender and Computer Gamers explains McRobbie’s position on what they call “flattening the diversity of girls’ cultural interest”:

British Sociologist Angela McRobbie (1991) notes that from an early an early age, male-centered magazines start to differentiate boys according to hobbies, sports, professional ambitions, and so on, while girl-centered publications have tended to be organized purely around age levels, assuming that all girls are interested in romance, make-up, physical fitness, cooking, and fashion. McRobbie traces women’s magazines across a life cycle that starts with teen romance, acknowledges the budding of late-adolescent sexuality, and then settles into “marriage, childbirth, home-making, child-care, and Woman’s Own.” Girl Games “Lets Talk About Me,” with its sections devoted to “my body,” “my scene,” “my life,” or “my personality,” comes eerrily close to the British teen girls’ magazines (such as Jackie) that McRobbie critiqued almost two decades ago (26).

Image from "Let's Talk About Me" video game with 10
different personality quizzes available for girls to take.

Thus, games like Let’s Talk About Me and Rockett’s New School are just a few among many girl-centered video games that position girls in the same old gender roles with little opportunity for variation inside the world of girl gaming culture. If girls want diversity in their gaming experience they must then enter the world of boys’ games.  A world where characters who embody a female gender are highly sexualized and the male gamer, in essence, runs the show.  There are nevertheless opportunities for girls to use boy-centered games to construct a more "fluid" gendered self—who is more diversified in her interests and gender identification (Royse, Lee, Baasanjav, Hopson and Consalvo 691). However, just because girls may have the option to enter the boy-centered gaming world for greater diversity in their gaming experience does not undo the bigger issue. Using Cassel and Jenkins’s phrasing “girls’ games need to be careful to reflect the diversity of women’s lives and to foster acceptance of a range of different feminine styles and identities” (27).

Supplemental Reference

Cassel, Justine, and Henry Jenkins. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games.

                    Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Print.