Sometimes, being a woman in the games industry is a bit like my years as a foreigner in China, when every so often characteristics I’m barely even aware of become huge and noteworthy. In Yantai, it was more, That’s a foreigner! Buying apples! Whoa! In games, I’ll be doing something I do all the time, and encounter shock that I am a woman doing that. That’s a girl! Doing game-related math! Whoa!

And, whenever someone visiting our offices mentions the startling fact that we have women working in computer games, I am ready with stats on how 18- to 35-year-old women are the fastest growing market share in games, or how casual games are growing in number and profitability, especially amount women.

This is a difficult codeswitching for me. I want propose game content in terms of how it will be fun for players, but that makes folks in my office laugh at me, and not in the good way. It is a constant effort for me to reframe “my players will love this activity!” as “players engaging this activity will monetize as this rate”.

So, the other day, when I was told again how surprising it is to see women in a game studio, and especially a woman in game design, I was quick to respond with my prepared stats.

“Women from 18 to 35 are a fast-growing market share.” I said “They monetize highly in casual games.”

“They got all that money from the eighteen- to thirty-five-year old men they divorced.” I was told.

I couldn’t force a laugh at this witticism, but that’s okay because it wasn’t intended as a joke. When the speaker registered my reaction to this, he told me it was ok to say because he knows so many wealthy ex-wives.

Of course I’m furious at being confronted with that mentality. I’m annoyed that this person will have a marked effect on the profitability and longevity of my project. I’m also annoyed at how vague I’ve got to be on the identity of the speaker, instead of calling out this person on the extreme level of sexism, because there could be very direct career consequences. (And, in a less direct way, because women who express this sort of indignation are quickly characterized as strident harpies, as tough to work with, and so forth.)

I’d thought I was changing gender expectations by working in games. Turns out, I wasn’t really expected to be working at all.

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18 to 35

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Things I Have Learned About Games

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First and foremost, what would you say if I told you that 60% of women that play games don’t actually consider themselves gamers?

What would I say? Oh, I’d just be preparing myself for another one of these ZOMG! Girls play social games! conclusions. Of course people who play the odd Facebook game (ZOMG! Girls playing games! All game players aren’t antisocial teenage boys!) don’t call themselves gamers, kind of like the way people who enjoy fixing an occasional grilled cheese don’t call themselves gourmet chefs. Especially if “gourmet chef” was usually associated with angry, unshowered teenage boys.

(Yeah. Casual games are grilled cheese. Not my best metaphor ever.)

Via Girls Got Game! A Look at Gender & Gaming | Frisky Mongoose

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New Study: Still Shocked By Girls Playing Games

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But it was awful.

The game opens with you and your best friend arriving at a resort full of  fun activities and hot guys! Unfortunately, the dialogue is stilted, partly because it’s EFL, and partly because I hoped for witty banter. There’s a lot of clicking ok, only “ok” is an awkward agreement. The dialogue was so awkward that I couldn’t always tell who was supposed to be an attractive possible friend and who was a mean girl to be thwarted with my killer wits. I could tell which guys were potential boyfriends, though, because the minor NPCs only had one line to say. Over and over.

As you walk around the resort, white stars appear over activatable items, and you have the option to participate in different resort activities. Whether you choose to relax in the sun, rent waterskiis, or swim in the pool, you don’t play a minigame or even watch a little cutscene animation. You watch a clock tick. I’m not exaggerating. You watch a pink clock tick. Um, when does the fun start?

Other activities do involve minigames. These are activated by talking to an NPC. I’m usually a big fan of minigames (see also: all my recent hidden objects game reviews), but these minigames were awful. AWFUL. We’re talking incomprehensible directions, repetitive gameplay and bizarrely uneven difficultly levels. For Step Aerobics, you need to click the right color in the right order five times to complete level one. For Kareoke, you need to click the right color at the right time FORTY EIGHT times to complete level one. Wait, one is more difficult than the next by a factor of ten?

Your character can also experiment with makeup, but the extremely limited choices forbade either adorable looks or hilarious fashion trainwrecks. (If you think makeup doesn’t lend itself well to a videogame, check out the facial minigame in Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger for a makeup game done right, or Sims 3 for recreational avatar decoration.)

I really wanted to like My Boyfriend, but we have to break up. This just isn’t working out.

Originally posted on ThumbGods, November ’09

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Game Review: My Boyfriend

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Fashion Solitaire On The Shelf

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Lights… has a solid storyline, amusing NPCs, engaging minigames and pretty cutscenes. Nancy’s on the set of Pharoah, a remake of a big-budget Silver Age Egyptian story, where mysterious accidents keep happening, and she has to figure out who’s behind it. Does a crew member have a grudge? Is the production cursed? Does it have anything to do with the tragic death on the set of the original Pharaoh? What’s with that cat?

Playing as Nancy, players have to use items around them to solve puzzles, a lot like an old Sierra game, only without an inventory. Every screen has the items for the puzzle on that screen, which keeps the game very linear, and eliminates wandering from location to location, wondering what you’ve missed. With the solution to each room in that room, it’s impossible to get stuck.

A few days ago, Her Interactive posted a preview screenshot of Lights… and a sharp-eyed forum member noticed a sign for a bar in the background, causing a bit of a ruckus over whether a world in which alcohol exists is an acceptable setting for an E rated game. I’m even more baffled by the worries about a minor alcohol reference because Nancy Drew solves murders, embezzlement, robbery, forgery, etc. Seems like if you’re worried about kids seeing a sign for a bar, they probably shouldn’t see chalk outlines or death threats either. The game maintains the same feel as the novels, there’s suspense and mystery, without gross blood and guts (or any underage drinking). Also no foul language or naked people, which should make parents happy. There was nothing that I found offensive or inappropriate, on the contrary I think a clever, independent crime-solver is exactly what tween girls should be seeing.

I loved all the puzzles in Lights…. One of my greatest gaming memories is playing 221B Baker St. with my dad when I was a kid, and using the clues to break codes. The Nancy Drew Dossier puzzles were just challenging enough to make you think, without crossing the line and becoming work.

The challenges in the story were a collection of minigames. They were so varied that they became a bit hit-or-miss. Lights… will be the first in the Dossier series, so Her can improve any snags for the next one in the series. One annoying minigame had users light candles by clicking the matchbook and then finding the candlestubs in a dark room. Only then the candles blow out, and it’s dark again. You have to keep trying until you’ve managed to find and light all the candles in the allotted time. Games that are essentially “hit buttons really fast” always take me out of the story and ruin my suspension of disbelief.  Other minigames, like having Nancy make smoothies or play the piano, kept me entertained by introducing new rules and objectives for quick challenges.

The range of graphics styles for the minigames, like tropical cartoon fruit, a Matrixy green screen or pen-and-ink sketches, also kept things fun and light. Throughout the game, I was annoyed by the text choices. In my mind, PC adventure games are a safe place for zany behavior, and picking the “wrong” text choice in games like Monkey Island and more recently A Case Of The Crabs, is rewarding. Ask an NPC a zany question, get a zany answer. In Lights, Camera, Curses, I felt teased by seeing the goofy possible responses and being punished scorewise for choosing one. Even if I’m willing to take the points hit, the NPC doesn’t react to wrong responses. Why give me silly options if Nancy won’t say take them?

Overall, a solid game, finding a good balance between a fluffy game to play while you’re on the phone, and an all-encompassing game. The dossier series promises an entertaining casual game with a good mystery storyline, and they deliver.

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Nancy Drew: Lights, Camera, Curses

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Fashion Solitaire is a casual game along the lines of Spider Solitaire or Freecell, but cuter. The cartoony models and paper-doll clothes rock! I spend a long time dressing my Sims, and I spent more time styling my superheroes than fighting crime in City Of Heroes. The models appear in undies and a towel-turban until you assign them hair.

Each model needs to be decent (a top, a bottom, shoes and hair), and then you can add optional accessories like jackets and jewelry. But models want to wear certain things. One might want to wear a skirt, or something red, or something plaid, and you get bonus points for dressing them in what makes them happy. Your bonus points become money, and you can spend your money making new clothes. This is the part where Stick came over to kibbutz.

The game rewards you for dressing your girls like freaks. You receive bonus points for dressing your models in their chosen color or pattern, so it’s better to put as many colors as possible on one item when you make your clothes. You also receive bonus points for grabbing as many clothes cards at once as possible, so you should throw the first thing you see on your models, resulting in “got dressed in the dark” chic. Sometimes disaster play is more fun than trying for success.

If you like it so far, you’ll continue to like it. Each level is exactly the same, only the clothes cards are different. I got the miniskirts and capris but I lost interest before I unlocked the ball gowns.

Overall, Fashion Solitaire is a cute break from Minesweeper, which means if we’re on the phone, there’s a good chance that I’m dressing cartoony models.

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Fashion Solitaire

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And how did Princess Maker fail to make the list of simple games targeted to girls? This game comes from Japan, where preteen girls are a bigger segment of the gaming market. This might be because the American games for this demographic are along the lines of Super Model Barbie.

The story is set in a pseudo-medieval fantasy kingdom. You play as the victor in a epic battle against the dark lord, now retired from combat and the adoptive father of a baby girl. The goddess Venus appears in a cloud of light, ok, in a King’s Quest-era speech box, and gives you the baby and tells you to raise the girl to be healthy, attractive, good-natured and smart. You send her to school, art and dance lessons, etiquette class, assign her chores, take her on vacations, etc. Although you are trying to increase her stats, the random events in the game like competitions or potential suitors, keep Princess Maker from being a repetitive leveling game.

With proper training, your little princess can become quite an accomplished mage or swordswoman, and venture outside the city looking for monsters and dragons to fight.(See above regarding “pseudo-medieval fantasy kingdom”) The combats are bloodless, although I can’t tell whether that’s intentionally keeping the game girl-friendly or a function of the ancient graphics.

There’s a not-so-subtle message not-so-cleverly embedded in Princess Maker about the fine balance between attractive and slutty. It’s not a good theme for preteen girls, but it’s a message they’ll get from hundreds of sources more important that a videogame. And your princess can also be happy and successful by excelling at academics or fencing or dancing or another skill.

At the end of the game, when your princess turns eighteen, you receive a letter from her, telling you about her life. Some of my princesses ended up happily single, some married nice boys from good families (yes, that’s the description, and no, that doesn’t bother me. I’m half-Jewish), one ran off with my butler (apparently I had a butler) and I finally got one to marry the prince. Oh yeah, that’s the goal of the game. One princess was unhappy since she had no children (I’m not entirely sure where I failed as a father).

I’m not sure if I enjoyed Princess Maker so much because it was like playing dolls or because it reminded me of the Laura Bow mysteries and the King’s Quest games. And for the record, I got my copy of Princess Maker 2 from a male friend, after hearing two other college guys talking about how awesome it is.

Coming up next: I once cross-gamed and played Mr. Pac-Man.

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Princess Maker

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