Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Games for Girls

The game industry has always been overwhelmingly male, and male developers have tended to design games that they themselves would like (or would have liked when they were boys). For most of the industry's history, no one made an effort to design games specifically for girls, or to 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 they 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 ...