Illustration by Mandy Catalano and Oates

Five years ago, I co-founded Purple Moon, a company devoted to making interactive media for little girls. It was a dream come true. Throughout my then-twenty years in the computer game business, I had ached for a chance to create alternatives to the chasing, shooting, fighting, exploding, hyper-male world of games. Why weren’t there any computer games for girls? And why did I end up losing my job every time I suggested it? It couldn’t be just a sexist conspiracy. The boys’ game business was worth $6 or $7 billion; surely even the most virulent sexist in Silicon Valley would be perfectly happy to reap the corresponding billions from girls if he could figure out how to do it. Nor was the male culture of computer games simply an artifact of the history of the industry. Something more complex and subtle was going on, and I knew it had to do with the construction of gender embedded in every aspect of our lives – in play, identity, work, technology, and business.

I worked for some of the most powerful companies in the business – Atari, Activision, Epyx. Until 1992, a girls’ games business wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Traditional marketing wisdom in the game industry held that girls weren’t a "viable segment." In fact, they wouldn’t even constitute a "niche market." Everyone knew that girls simply didn’t like computer games and wouldn’t play them. Examples would be trotted out as proof. My favorite was Barbie, published in 1985 by Epyx for the Commodore-64. Barbie was at the mall, shopping for the right outfit to wear on her date with Ken. Now, "everyone knows" that girls aren’t good at shooting games, so the designers reasoned that the game should make it easier for them. The brilliant solution: make projectiles that move slowly. And so it was decided that the action component of the game would consist of throwing marshmallows. "You see," the game execs would say, "they did everything right, but sales were dismal." Therefore you can’t sell computer games to girls. Ergo hoc, propter hoc.

The truth was that from its inception, everything about the computer game industry actively excluded girls. The games were filled with violent action and grisly imagery. They were available only in quintessentially "male" spaces like dark, noisy, smelly arcades or the aisles of computer and electronics stores. Advertisements, commercials, and packaging featured only male players. And that’s just the obvious stuff. Given all these barriers, who knew if girls and women would play computer games or not? Were there intrinsic gender differences that caused females to be repelled by computer games? How should we understand the exceptions — games that attracted a higher than usual percentage of female players, like Pac Man, Mario Brothers, and Tetris? What would it take to design a computer game that a large number of girls really liked?

I finally got a chance to ask the right questions in 1992, when I persuaded Interval Research to hire me to direct a research project about girls, play, and technology. I wanted to figure out why girls weren’t gamers, and I wanted research results that were actionable. I didn’t just want to study the problem, I wanted to do something about it. Everyone had theories, but no one seemed to be able to back them up with good data or scientific evidence. Interval's CEO and I disagreed loudly and often about what had led to the male domination of the world of computers and computer games, but we agreed to let research settle the argument. The underlying conviction was that it would benefit girls enormously to achieve familiarity and ease with technology, and I suspected that the most effective way to bring make girls comfortable with computers was through play.