Girl Gamers and the Bigger Picture

Within the field of game and digital studies, there has been much written about the marginalized role of girls (and women) in terms of both in the industry as well as players. Much of the current research if you were to google "girls + games" and "girl + gamers" in google scholar, you would see that much of the 'literature' surrounds the notion of exposing girls to video games, the complaint that there aren't (m)any games our there for girls and that girls are a minute part of the recognized demographic in terms of industry and marketing and looking at ways to changing that fact.

Many research projects who study "girl gamers" tend to gather a group of girls in a school or after-school center environment and offer them a wide selection of games and the technology to play them and then analyse their play choices, styles and social interactions during this time. Whether the girls had previous game experience or not is rarely an issue. Besides this being what I feel is an 'artificial' environment, I wonder what it REALLY tells us about girls and video games.

This past week, at the CGSA, there was a presentation (quite a good one for the most part) that ended with the casual statement "the research shows that if we want girls to play games we have to make them playable under 5 minutes". Personally, I found this a tad insulting and muttered that I will tell that to my sometimes hours-on-end-game-playing daughters. Which, of course earned the reply that there are always exceptions.

But what bothers me, is that although my girls are priveleged in the way of games and technology by having a games researching mom and a hardcore game playing dad - is that I know many many girls whose parents have no background or current interest in games who actually play games. And i dont mean five minute flash games. Most of the young girls I know have a DS and play more than Nintendogs. They like rpg and adventure games, Ratchet and Clank to Rose Online. They are not interested in Barbie's dress up adventures and Mary Kate and Ashley's 'girl games'. They want action, humor and all in all, general fun.

So I asked the question - when talking about needing to make more 'girl-ccentric, sims like games playable under 5 minutes' is that really to appease the 'girl gamers' - who, in my opinion would be girls who already play video games on their own, or is it to broaden the market share ini the video game industry to create games that appeal to a larger, non-video game playing female population? (Personally, by selecting girls who have never played much in the way of video games, I would suggest the latter). But I was told that that is not the case. So I continue to ask myself, how can you study girl gamers as the unique population that they are, by studying a random, volunteer based sample of girls in a school or community (who dont play games?!).

Maybe it is time to start talking to the girls who love video games, and have been playing them for as long as they can remember and see what makes them tick.