Girls, games, grenades

Naturally, just minutes after I bare my geeky girl-gamer^* soul to the resonant echo chamber of the Internet, I read this. Synopsis for the tl;dr crowd: old TED talk video from the ringleader of the Purple Moon game series, marketer of "horizontal" rather than "hierarchical" games for girls, inspires Jezebel contributor and avid girl-gamer to rehash all the problematic talking points of the Purple Moon "games for girls" project.

Now, there are a lot of obvious things that irk me about this video -- most glaringly, the idea of "giving girls what they want!" that totally ignores the by-now practically sacrosanct Judith Butler et al. literature on gender as a social construct. Or, in layman's terms: exactly what is it about pink, unicorns, and tiaras -- or, for that matter, "horizontal social bonds" -- that's "naturally" feminine, and how do we know it's not just the "natural" product of a century of Disneyian social conditioning, from cradle to grave? O hai, obvious feminist social theory is obvious!

No, but what really gets to me about "games for girls" is something else. It's an argument that's seeped into the well of our collective conscious even more insidiously, so much so that nobody seems to notice when they're drinking the Kool-aid. It's the idea that girls need didactic games, because girls are special, delicate creatures that need to be nurtured and protected. They need to be taught how to navigate those tricky social bonds (despite the fact that they're naturally good at it...?), to be guided to make the right choices and be happy, friendly, and popular. I can see how this is a more delicate matter to discuss; in spite of the many leaps and bounds our civilization has taken in the past century-long race to gender equality, girls are still limping behind boys, getting tangled up and drowning in the swamps of body dismorphia, beauty magazines, and the Industrial Wedding Complex. Nobody wants another generation of starvers, purgers, cutters, hysterics, and bridezillas. But to suggest that video games are the proper media for conveying a healthy social message is to overlook the decades of actual reality: most people play video games to transgress boundaries (to kill, steal, speed, fly), not to reinforce them. And to suggest that girls need this kind of nurturing more than boys, who obviously seem to do alright in our society despite hours of mind-numbing, gore-splattering shooting and fighting games -- well, ma'am, tha's just plain sexist!

It is my humble and, I think, empirically-justified opinion as a girl gamer that this is all the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about what video games actually are. To me, video games are the epitome of a medium that actively challenges any kind of essentialist assumptions about reality, showing that our morality is (ba-ba-BAH!) a construct that we're happy to set aside in order to frag the hell of our best friend and get that sweet 10-person kill streak. They're an escape, a fantasy, a gleeful descent into the depths of the Jungian abyss. Everything else is just well-marketed educational software. And as great as Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego were, I certainly hope no child of mine, girl or boy, will ever be satisfied with that kind of light didactic fare.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be off "horizontally" bonding with some zombies. Via chainsaw.

^*With all the propers going to this lady and her aggressive deconstruction of the term... but I'll still use it, because goddamn do I love me some alliteration.