The future of girl powered games needs your help

Where do females fit into the world of gaming? Well, it would seem – as evidenced earlier this year by the threats Anita Sarkeesian received from the community, in what we now know as #GamerGate – not very comfortably. But women have been key forces in the industry since the 90s when the late Theresa Duncan and her collaborators flew the female flag in the testosterone-heavy industry.

The fruits of her labour; Chop Suey (co-created with Monica Gesue), Smarty and Zero, Zero went against the girly, frou-frou norms that were expected of female gamers, instead encouraging its players “to be disruptive, adventurous, and whip-smart”, something which inevitably posed a challenge to the industry. “The games were made at a time when many companies were becoming aware that girls could be an interesting target market, but most of the titles produced were based on a very narrow understanding of girls' tastes, i.e. Barbie,” says Michael Connor, Artistic Director at online arts nonprofit organisation Rhizome, a company attempting to immortalise Duncan’s games through a Kickstarter campaign. “These were games for girls in a much more expansive sense, and they are evidence that gaming culture is at its best when it supports a diversity of digital experience. These titles offer a glimpse of a parallel universe where women were allowed to make the video games they wanted to make.”

“These were games for girls in a much more expansive sense, and they are evidence that gaming culture is at its best when it supports a diversity of digital experience” – Michael Connor

Interest in the project was sparked by female gaming figure Jenn Frank (a victim of harassment and a supporter of Duncan’s Chop Suey); “It's upsetting to me that voices like Frank, whose writing was so important to this project, would be silenced by #GamerGate, an organised campaign of online harassment against women in games journalism, and in the games industry as a whole,” he says, adamant that the incidents last August stand apart from gaming in general and shouldn’t be seen as representative of the community as a whole. “Part of my motivation for wanting to celebrate these games was that there has been such a flourishing of interest in women's’ roles in video games. It's important that Duncan and her collaborators are a part of that story.”

If the campaign is successful, the content from the original CD-ROMs will be made available via a web browser courtesy of a cloud-based emulation project with the University of Freiburg and will be kept free for at least a year. “We are all about access with this project. If even one person, who might otherwise have had a profound experience of these works, doesn't get to use them because of the sticker price, then that would be a loss. You never know what impact these games might have. The short-term memory we have for digital works is a real cultural tragedy”.

To find out more about Theresa Duncan CD-ROMs: Visionary Videogames for Girls, visit the Kickstarter page and pledge your contribution before 18 December, 2014