rebecca l. eisenberg on Sun, 11 May 1997 23:21:41 +0200 (MET DST)


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<nettime> The Barbie Syndrome


[The following is a copy of an article that originally was published in the
San Francisco Examiner, Sunday May 4, 1997, pages D4, D12, and all initial
commerical rights are theirs, rights to republish non-commercially reserved
for rle.]


The Barbie Syndrome
Rebecca L. Eisenberg
May, 1997

Do girls really need their own private tent in the dark and dangerous
forest of computer games?  They sure do, according to Brenda Laurel, a
human-computer interface designer, virtual reality consultant, and
"recovering self-marginalizer."

Laurel decided to go mainstream and capitalistically exploit a market she
could call her own -- computer games for girls.

As an employee of Interval Research Group, the long-term growth-strategies
thinktank in Silicon Valley founded by Microsoft's zillionaire Paul Allen,
and Xerox Park founder David Liddle, Laurel set out on a project aimed to
bring girls into the overtly male game development world.  Focusing her
market research on girls aged 7 to 12, Laurel spent three years studying
sex-based brain differences and "biologically driven" gender-based
behavioral differences between young males and females -- both human and
chimpanzee.

Thus was born her killer app company of the girlgame world-- Purple Moon,
with its coming-this-fall-we-swear product line tailored to girls'
purported preferences for communication over competition,  context over
chaos, and verbal strikes over violent attacks.

Something sounds real familiar here, as well it should.  By appealing to
these "special qualities" in females, Laurel is doing nothing short of
taking advantage of well-established cultural stereotypes about the
appropriate roles for men and women to create a new market.

Dr. Barrie Thorne, professor at Sociology at UC-Berkeley, agrees.  "This is
just another example of this tawdry history of sex difference research that
is driven by stereotypes and results in reinforcing those stereotypes," she
comments.

"There is simply no basis for their sweeping claims of biological
hardwiring," continued Thorne, who has 20 years' experience studying the
behavior differences between boys and girls. "If anything, most of the
research that is now going on focuses on the diversity of sexual
differentiation within sexes, rather than between them."

Thorne is right.  In looking high and low for biological explanations for
alleged divergent behavior between girls and boys, researchers are avoiding
the more obvious explanation to matters of gender-based behavioral
differences -- such as the plain fact that we live in a society that treats
males and females differently -- usually to the detriment of women by
boxing them into these very non-lucrative, non-powerful "preference"
categories.

It is impossible to exist in our society without being subject to the
ubiquitous social forces that constantly reward girls for acting like
girls; punish girls for acting like boys; reward boys for acting like boys;
and punish boys for acting like girls.  People have trouble talking to a
baby without knowing its gender, for example.   If a girl:  "How pretty she
is!  She'll be a looker!"  If a boy:  "Isn't he a big strong little guy!
He'll be the President!"  All this talk about "celebrating female
qualities" is nothing short of -- like always -- putting women in their
place.

And that place, when it comes to girls' software producers, is in the toy
and software store, pulling pastel boxes from the pink shelves.  For good
reason.  According to the multimedia press materials from Girlgames Inc.
(www.planetgirl.com), there are over 19 million girls between the ages of 8
and 18 in the U.S., and these girls are said to spend over $57 billion of
their own money annually. Furthermore, Girlgames' figures  show that girls
are, in fact, using this money to purchase software regularly. Of 3,000
girls polled in one study, 21 percent had bought software during the course
of the prior month. That is a lot of girls buying a lot of software,
already, without the rise of a gender-segmented market.

Still insisting that girls need a separate line, girlgames producers point
to the market success of Mattel's "Barbie Fashion Designer" as proof.
Some proof.  "Barbie Fashion Designer" exploited an already proven brand,
was accompanied by millions of dollars spent in television commercials and
other advertising, and still sold only about 500,000 units.  This figure
comes nowhere close to gender-neutral titles like Broderbund's
record-setting title "Myst," (3.5 million copies, over one-third of which
were sold to girls and women), and "Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego?"
(over 5 millions copies, split equally between boys and girls). And they
really expect us to believe that "Barbie" sold only to girls?  Whom are
they fooling;  this is theSan Francisco Bay Area.

Laura Groppe, president of Her Interactive, which developed the insipid,
vaguely classist and arguably homophobic point-and-click girl game "Let's
Talk About Me," also insists that she knows what girls really want. "When I
entered this market in 1994, there were 2,500 CD-ROM titles on the shelf,
and not one of them appealed to girls," she pronounced, apparently ignoring
the existence of "Myst'' and "SanDiego," both of which were selling in the
hundred-thousands in 1994. "It is simply a given that girls in 6th grade
through 12th grade have different preferences with regard to technology.
And if we do not engage girls' unique preferences, girls will be completely
left out of the field of technology."

And what, according to Groppe, are "girls' preferences?"   "Let's Talk
About Me" focuses on "my body" (hair, wardrobe by Contempo); "my life"
(cyberpals, diary); my personality (Jungian and Freudian yes-no tests); and
"my future" (crystal ball, astrology, dream interpretation, palm reading,
biorhythms).  "I don't think that my games reinforce conventional sexist
stereotypes," Groppe insists. "What we are doing is supporting girls'
unique cognitive processes."  Basically, to her, cognitive processes of
females seem to mean planning a future through astrology and choosing the
right boyfriend, all point and click able!  "Don't worry," the game
instructs, "dreaming about girls doesn't mean that you are a homosexual!"

Even TV has moved beyond that.  Groppe admits that sexist stereotypes
exist, but explains, "that is not due to Barbie and other games; that is
due to the media."  Not surprisingly, she had no response to my question of
whether or not video games *are* part of the media.

Perhaps Professor Thorne possesses the answer. These games, she explains,
are "a matter of turning the largest possible profit.  This is an example
of the common marketing strategy called market segmentation -- the more
separate markets that you can create, the more money you can make."

In other words, if a company can sell separate games to boys and girls, it
can theoretically bring in up to twice as much revenue, by selling, for
example, two different products to families with both sons and daughters
rather than just one to share between them.

And why not make use of commonly believed (but false) stereotypes of
natural differences between the sexes to create that separate market for
girls?  After all, all girls want to do is point and click their way to
greater popularity, right?

Face it, we not have to create a separate (and insulting) product line to
appeal to girls.  "I'd tell the developers simply to make good games,"
agrees Diane Anderson, managing editor of Next Generation, a popular gaming
magazine, who reports enjoying games as diverse as Myst and blood-and-pulp
ridden Bruschido Blade.

"Stop talking down to us; stop being so condescending. Women are all
different. Sometimes it feels really good to blow an opponent away,
regardless of whether you (or they) are male or female. These are the very
stereotypes we are trying to move away from."

And these are also the very stereotypes that keep women out of the
technology field.  Hey, girlgames developers: we're  not playin'.



© Rebecca L. Eisenberg 1997 All Rights Reserved
 mars@well.com  http://www.bossanova.com/rebeca

rebecca.lynn.eisenberg
mars@bossanova.com, mars@well.com
http://www.bossanova.com/rebeca/


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