FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Games for Girls
The game industry has always been overwhelmingly dominated by men, and male developers have tended to design games that they themselves would like (or would have liked when they were boys). Whether for societal or genetic reasons, boys' and girls' interests diverge more widely from one another than men's and women's do; on their respective bell-shaped curves, the means are farther apart. At certain ages,
boys and girls may flatly reject things (clothing, toys, or other symbols) associated with the opposite sex.
For most of the game industry's history, no one made an effort to design games specifically for girls or even to think much about what kinds of games girls would like. It was a catch-22 situation: If you proposed a game for girls to a publisher, you would be met with the reply, "Girls don't play video games." But, of course, the reason girls didn't play video games was that there weren't many games they liked to play—or at least that was the general perception. (Further research showed that this was an unfounded stereotype; far more girls played games than people realized, even though no one was considering their interests.)
In the mid-1990s, a number of people realized that girls represented an untapped market, and several companies grew up to exploit it. Unfortunately, many of these early efforts were graphically poor and offered less value for the money than most other games. Girls want, and deserve, games just as good as those made for boys. More recently, several companies have started making games for girls again with more success. Most notable is Ubisoft's Imagine series of games, which covers a huge range of subjects. The Barbie, Bratz, and Nancy Drew licenses have all been steady earners.
If you're interested in making games for this market, remember that the audience is girls, not women. Adult women are naturally more diverse than children and have a wider variety of interests. Don't assume that what applies to women also applies to girls generally.
