Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

  After interviewing nearly one thousand children and five hundred adults all over the United States over the course of four years, Brenda came to believe that the problem wasn’t about access, or even, really, the representation of computers in media. It didn’t add up: there were plenty of girls with computers at school or at home who still weren’t using them, and there was no research to substantiate a claim that girls were somehow inherently less skilled or interested in computer play. For Brenda, it came down to a software issue. Little girls didn’t play computer games because the computer games were all for boys.

  The girls Brenda and her team interviewed from 1992 to 1996 didn’t mince their feelings about the games they had played: they hated dying over and over. Violence stressed them out. And they weren’t fans of the way games emphasized mastery, like defeating a difficult final boss or navigating fast-moving terrain without getting killed. “Mastery for its own sake is not very good social currency for a girl,” Brenda explains. “They demand an experiential path.” Instead of trying again and again to beat a level, a baddie, or the clock, the girls Brenda interviewed preferred to wander around, exploring a virtual world and learning the relationships between its characters and places. In Life on the Screen, published only a few years after Brenda began her research, the sociologist Sherry Turkle argued that while men generally see computers as a challenge—something to master and dominate—women see computers as tools, objects to be collaborated with. This “soft mastery,” she explained, requires a closeness, a connection to computers that’s more like the relationship a musician has with her instrument: intimate, dialogue-driven, relational.

  Just as musicians harmonize, Brenda found that her subjects played together regardless of whether the games they played were designed for multiple players. She concluded that girls are naturally collaborative, and that their social experience of play is often as important as the objective of the game itself. Her subjects liked puzzles, discovery, and the immersive conversation with the machine that happened when story lines were strong enough to ensnare them, and they preferred to share their experiences with one another. At that age, I certainly did: after beating the CD-ROM game Myst in 1993, I remember jumping up and down on the rug with my best friends.

  Now this was R that could lead to some D. In 1996, Interval spun Brenda’s research team into its own company, Purple Moon, which would produce games exclusively for young girls. It stood to reason that if boys were hogging the machines at the school computer lab to play games that girls didn’t like, girls would later be disadvantaged in a workplace, and a world, where computer literacy is not only beneficial but necessary. Making games that girls did like seemed like the obvious solution. As one female game designer put it, “We cannot expect women to excel in technology tomorrow if we don’t encourage girls to have fun with technology today.” It was a smart business move, too: girls represented a huge untapped market, and the prevailing wisdom was that anyone who made a computer game that really appealed to them could conceivably double the games industry.

  This thinking was likely influenced by the unexpected success that year of Barbie Fashion Designer, a Mattel CD-ROM game that allowed its players to dress a virtual Barbie. The first best-selling “girl game,” it sold six hundred thousand units in 1996, far outselling first-person shooters like Doom and Quake and surprising just about everyone in the games industry.

  Barbie Fashion Designer illuminated a market for girl games, and it bridged a gap between girls’ real-world and computer play; Barbie’s digital ensembles could be printed, cut, and glued to fit a real Barbie. In terms of game mechanics, however, it hardly pushed the envelope. The idea of dressing a character wasn’t even new: “boy” games offered dress up, too, in the form of customizing an avatar, and that’s usually before the actual adventure begins. This is emblematic of how the industry approached girl games before Purple Moon. Designers would often package re-skinned, easier versions of established game mechanics. Barbie Fashion Designer’s predecessor, a 1991 Barbie game for Super Nintendo, had done much the same thing, replacing coins with perfume bottles and monsters with beach balls. It was a boy game in a dress, what Brenda disdainfully calls “the computer game equivalent of pink Legos.”

  Purple Moon took a different approach. Rather than softening the edges around “boy” games, Brenda’s company doubled down on complex characters and story building. “I mean, it’s not only that the characters are lame in most boys’ games,” she explained. “It’s that they’re so lame you can’t even make up an interesting story about them.” Purple Moon produced two series of story games about an eighth-grade girl, Rockett Movado, and her circle of friends at Whispering Pines Junior High. The Rockett games have no levels or repetitive trials, no clocks or leaderboards. They can’t even be won. Brenda compares them to an emotional rehearsal space. In Rockett’s New School, Rockett faces situations familiar to any teen or preteen girl: she has to make friends, navigate tricky social situations, and decide what kind of person she is. Will she invite nerdy Mavis to her party? Will she read another girl’s private diary? Will she try to fit in with the popular kids—a clique called “The Ones”—or will she speak her mind when she sees somebody being bullied?

  These questions are answered at branching points. Walking into homeroom on the first day of school, Rockett must decide who she will be; the choice is made inside her head, where three different versions of Rockett share a snippet of their inner dialogue. Each represents a path in the story. The terrified Rockett branches the game into a different story line from the can-do Rockett, who ends up bickering with an alpha girl over a coveted back-row seat. It’s a hypertext choose-your-own-adventure for social development, a first day of school you can do over and over again. One avid Purple Moon gamer, who played Rockett during her formative years, remembers how the games influenced her own development. “I can definitely remember times when, instead of being quick to respond to someone, I thought about my words and what possible repercussions would be for each option I had,” she explains. “They truly helped teach me how to socialize and how to get along with people.”

  These social lessons weren’t only learned in Whispering Pines. Purple Moon’s Web site, an early social network, extended the world of the Rockett games online, allowing girl gamers to learn more about their favorite characters and meet their fellow real-life players. Although Interval’s founder, when first shown a prototype, asked only “Can you do this for boys?,” the Purple Moon Web site became a girl universe, what we’d now call a fandom. Girls submitted articles to the Whispering Pines school newspaper, inventing their own stories surrounding the plotlines they knew well, hung out in the Rockett forums, and exchanged virtual treasures relating to the game world. And unlike the greater Web, the Purple Moon site was safe, because girls registered their accounts through their parents, and the site had a built-in panic button. “Simple,” Brenda explains, with characteristic brio. “Some shit’s going on, you push the panic button, you get a screen capture, everything goes to us, we see who was an asshole, we call their parents, we give them a warning.” The Purple Moon Web site was arguably as influential as its games: in 1997, it was outdoing Disney’s Web site in both hits and dwell time, and it had formed the cornerstone of many young girls’ online world.

  Purple Moon published a companion series to Rockett’s junior high adventures, Secret Paths. Where the Rockett games emphasized social skills, the Secret Paths games were “Friendship Adventures,” and unlike the high-stakes environment of middle school, were soothing and private. Secret Paths in the Woods, for example, begins in a tree house. Depending on user preference, outside the window is an impressionistic mountain, a babbling stream ringed with flowers, or an ocher vista, dotted with wild horses. In the room is a “Friendship Box” full of girls who need help. If you press your heart to one, she will reveal her secrets. Miko fears that other girls won’t like her because she’s too smart; Dana is “really bummed” that her team
lost the state soccer championship; Whitney has problems with her stepmother. The objective of Secret Paths in the Forest is to help each girl by traveling down her “path,” weaving through whispering branches and glowing sunsets. Along the way, puzzles reward players with gemstones representing different strengths the girl might need to overcome her problems. They become a gift—a necklace of amulets, shimmering with the promise of self-reliance.

  Secret Paths in the Forest, and later Secret Paths to the Sea, satisfied different emotional needs than Rockett’s New School. They were quiet, slow, meditative games; they taught girls how to “find emotional resources within themselves and how to observe and respond to others’ unarticulated needs,” in the words of one critic. They were meant to be played alone. And while the Rockett games’ emotional navigation gave girls a chance to try out social behaviors without embarrassing themselves, the accompanying series helped them to understand core values of empathy, kindness, and solidarity among girls to anchor them through the changes ahead. The shy young kids of Secret Paths become the self-assured preteens of Rockett, and there’s no right way for them to do it. There are more generous paths, but Purple Moon’s games reflected real life. Kids could play Rockett as sugar-sweet, but sometimes a bad decision leads Rockett to a good place—like hiding out in the music room, where the cutest boy in school, Ruben, serenades her on the piano. This is what got Brenda in trouble.

  Purple Moon released six Rockett games. The first two broke the top 100 best-selling games the year they were released, beating industry titans like John Madden Football. Like the women’s Web, they represented a sea change in the gender dynamics of computer use: by the time Purple Moon established itself, so-called “girl games” were everywhere. Mattel, riding the success of Barbie Fashion Designer, released several more Barbie Interactive titles—an ocean adventure, a game for designing and printing party invitations, and Barbie Magic Hair Styler, which requires little explanation—while Sega competed with Cosmo Virtual Makeover and The Learning Company produced an American Girl series. The game designer Theresa Duncan found success with the dreamy, alt-rock story games Chop Suey, Zero Zero, and Smarty. Her Interactive, an offshoot of American Laser Games, produced another high school adventure, McKenzie & Co., which was like a Rockett game with live-action cut scenes, and a popular series of Nancy Drew games. This critical mass had an amplifying effect. The more studios jumped into girl games, the larger the shelf grew in the store. To kids, that real estate is a whole world; the Purple Moon gamer I spoke with, who was in elementary school during the upwelling, told me she just assumed, as a child, that the computer aisles had always been full of games for girls.

  The girl games movement coincided with an uptick in female-fronted businesses throughout the 1990s. Like Purple Moon, several of the major girl games studios were woman owned and largely woman staffed, paralleling a larger national trend for entrepreneurial feminism. This made it a hot topic in its day. Popular media found it fascinating: Nightline ran a special on girl gaming, and Time magazine, in a profile of Purple Moon, joked about girls needing a “rom of their own.” It provoked even more chatter in game industry and academic circles, and several scholarly anthologies have been published on the subject. The excitement was largely based on the assumption that girl games would create a “‘virtuous cycle’ where girls playing computer games would lead to women writing game software, and hence more girl-friendly game experiences, and even more girl gamers.” But by 2000, the girl game movement was effectively over, with its most recognizable studios—Purple Moon among them—dead and buried.

  After Barbie Fashion Designer, no girl game studio managed to produce a blockbuster title. Industry observers eventually wrote the game off as a fluke, crediting its sales to Mattel’s brand recognition: the typical American girl at the time owned, on average, nine Barbies. But many critics argued that the fundamental thinking behind girl games was flawed, and that designing games explicitly for girls actually undermined them by forcing them into pink-and-purple fishbowls. Instead of separating kids by gender, critics argued, why not make games that all kids could enjoy? The first really successful computer games, like Pong and Tetris, had no explicit gender, and it wasn’t until Atari put a pink bow on Pac-Man to create Ms. Pac-Man in 1980 that the issue was even raised.

  Brenda’s research led her to believe that only boys enjoyed shooters and adventure games, but many girls, then and now, love blasting aliens and annihilating bosses with sprays of machine-gun fire. As one self-professed “Game Grrl” wrote in the late 1990s, “What Purple Moon and other ‘girlie games’ companies have to understand is that although there is a market for games like Barbie Fashion Designer, there is just as big a market for girls who like to do the same things boys do.”

  Purple Moon found itself embroiled in a much larger cultural conversation about the influence of games on kids’ lives, and its girl-forward approach was read as essentialism. In an influential editorial, the feminist critic Rebecca Eisenberg questioned the research that spawned Purple Moon, arguing that the Rockett games, with their focus on “popularity and fashion,” only “reinforce the very same stereotypes they purport to combat.” While Brenda Laurel designed Whispering Pines Junior High to mirror the social realities of the girls she’d interviewed, Purple Moon’s critics lambasted the company for presenting too narrow a view of girlhood and for emphasizing the same patterns of exclusion and affiliation feminists work so hard to deconstruct. Didn’t girls deserve better than a cartoon version of a world they already knew? When I ask Brenda about this, she’s more pragmatic. She was making an intervention at the level of popular culture, and that required a certain broad appeal. “You can’t get buy-in from somebody when they don’t recognize the character they’re playing,” she says.

  In 1999, Interval pulled the plug on Purple Moon. The company did not have a graceful end. “Paul Allen took us into Chapter 7,” Brenda says, “and we had to talk him out of that and get back into Chapter 11 so we could sell the damn thing to Mattel at a bargain-basement price and make everybody’s paycheck. It was just hideous, how it came out.” Brenda was forced to shut down the Purple Moon Web site, where girls from all over the world had formed intense friendships, and to fire most of her staff—80 percent of whom were women, the inverse of most Silicon Valley workplaces—in a day. At a game developer’s conference in San Jose that year, she blamed Purple Moon’s failure on a tech marketplace that valued short-term gains over long-term progress and which fetishized incorporeal Web businesses over those actually selling physical, warehoused goods. “I promised to talk to you about some approaches to research and design that will help us grow both our audiences and our ideas,” she told the crowd, according to the New York Times. “But since Purple Moon did not make it to the big I.P.O. or a lavish acquisition that made everybody rich, it would be understandable for you to conclude the methods I’m advocating for don’t necessarily work.” She later published a book titled Utopian Entrepreneur.

  Barbie bought Rockett on a shopping spree: in 1999, when Mattel acquired Purple Moon, it also picked up The Learning Company, which produced the Carmen San Diego games, and Pleasant Company, known for its American Girl dolls and games, before shutting down their games group entirely, effectively kneecapping the girl games movement. “Mattel was trying to protect their Barbie franchise,” Brenda says. “They bought everybody and drove a stake through their hearts.” But by the late 1990s, the most recognizable female figure in video games wasn’t Rockett or even Barbie: it was the buxom Tomb Raider, Lara Croft, with a hypersexualized body and skin-tight ensemble that earned her legions of male fans.

  After Purple Moon folded, Brenda held a wake at her house. Former employees and friends of the company gathered around a toy Rockett figurine, laid to rest in a miniature plastic locker on Brenda’s antique dining room table, flanked by “black candles, bouquets of purple irises, and a seriously depleted bottle of Irish whiskey.” Brenda poured herself a shot and gave a
eulogy to the little red-haired girl on which she’d staked the future of games. “We’re always trying to heal something,” she said. “Lousy childhoods, raw deals, crappy self-esteem. We were trying to heal something when we made her.” Brenda has three daughters, and it’s clear her mission was personal. They were preteens when Purple Moon shipped its first game, and barely a few years older when the company was shut down. Like any passage through the final stage of childhood, it wasn’t long enough. To console their mother, the girls strung the Rockett figurine on a length of pink yarn and dangled her from the second-floor landing like an angel.

  Before I leave her house, Brenda runs into her office and plucks something from an altar in the corner: a milky blue bead, shaped like a moon. It’s one of the original Secret Paths gems, sold by Purple Moon in packs of six, in little purple velvet baggies, for girls to collect and trade. She hands it to me triumphantly. On the back is inscribed a single word: maturity. It’s presumably the trait I need to complete the necklace of strength that will help me through the next phase of my life. It seems incongruous for a plastic toy to tell anyone to grow up. But I look at Brenda, at the altar of sacred objects at her side, and I realize: it’s not telling me to grow up. It’s trying to teach me how.

  The gem comes home with me, down the long path through the forest.

  Epilogue

  THE CYBERFEMINISTS

  In the summer of 1992, a billboard popped up overnight on the side of an art gallery in Sydney, Australia. Eighteen feet long, it featured a strange assortment of images: spherical fragments of DNA, vaginal wedges of color, and a pair of mirrored women with unicorn horns, flexing their muscles and emerging from seashells. In the middle was a blob of text, rendered convex as a bead of water. WE ARE THE VIRUS OF A NEW WORLD DISORDER, it read, DISRUPTING THE SYMBOLIC FROM WITHIN. SABOTEURS OF BIG DADDY MAINFRAME. THE CLITORIS IS A DIRECT LINE TO THE MATRIX.