Josephine Anstey Three Seminar AH 563
Frustration was pretty much all I experienced when I spent a very brief time playing a Monty Python version of the "twisty passage type" game on my commodore 64 in 1986. I got nowhere. I understood nothing. The computer repeatedly told me it didn't understand what I was typing. Playing Zork (actually I played Zork 2) wasn't completely a reply of that feeling because time has spread information on what to expect in these games and a friend of mine had clued me to some of the short cuts.

Type S for go South, I for the Inventory of what your carrying, L to get the description of where you are printed out in full.

However, frustration still just about summed it up - except that, prompted by my friend, I managed to lure the dragon out of his lair and into the ice room, where his was drowned when his flame throwing melted the ice. And, all on my own, I managed to pick up a newspaper and matches, put the newspaper into the burner of a hot air ballon and make the ballon fly.

Eureka! Well hardly. I stayed frustrated because the pay off for each achievement was so small in terms of the amount of extra story it gave you. At some level I could see getting into the mind-set and letting my animo out to play (my animo with his ammunition, his need for achievement!) Part of me enjoys puzzle solving, which is why I quite enjoyed the intelligence tests they gave us at school, but the other part of me is always thinking why am I jumping through these more than ridiculous hoops?

I'm a girl - my game playing proves it. In the first place I haven't spent much time playing computer games. I remember hating Ms PacMan's bow - but I was a pretty radical feminist at the time! I did get into Tetris, I did like Minesweeper, I have enjoyed playing with the little jumping Mario on a game-boy - but the new 3D Mario is just too much work in the puzzle solving department. I am looking forward to the Barbie game, and the virtual reality I am working on is all about relationships.

It's much easier to create a spatial dimension than a social dimension. Computers were designed with spatial logic in mind. They were not designed to deal with interpersonal interaction and storytelling. Making a game based on social logic presents some incredibly thorny code problems and may not be possible with today's technology, which is mostly good at making pretty pictures spin around in complicated ways. For boys this is wonderfully satisfying. Girls are quickly bored by it and demand breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Herz, Joystick Nation, 175)

Market forces are the great new leveler - the only hope for equality - they created a softer, more romatic kind of porn for women, and presumably they will create girls' games.

Meanwhile I'm still made uncomfortable every time something throws the differences between the sexes into relief. I still find it chilling that boys will not play girls' games, wear girls' clothes, but that at some level many of us think that it's probably a good thing when the reverse happens. Talking about the plethora of female action heroes in games, Herz writes:

But alas these games aren't designed for girls. These are the same brilliant boy games in drag and 95 percent of the people playing them are guys. ... It's painful to say this, but boys' games have the only female characters worth playing. (Joystick Nation, 182 )

Undervaluing Barbie games seems inevitable and feminist in a social context where women can be stereotyped as shopper-bimbos. But I am not convinced that creating strong women who kill like men, emote like men, lust like men, but curve slightly differently (something happening in movies as well as in games), is a great leap forward.

That the games industry is currently driven by the desires of boys seems to be a truism. But girls remain a tantalizing market - sometime, somehow, an AI, relationship, story-telling game will find its way out there and someone will make money and we will have a new paradigm.

And that's the game I want to see, that's the game that could represent a great leap forward for us all. Of course since girl things are taboo, boys will find that access to these games is not quite straight forward. But although young girls and boys want to be very careful that they are adhering to the gender rules of their society, both internally and externally, the human mind seems to be flexible enough so that things we are interested in bleed across sexual boundaries - and the curious and the brave always find ways to play the games they want to play.