Girl Games of the 1990s: A Retrospective

[Music] and welcome thank you for coming I'm pleased to see a crowd this big considering that we're opposite the experimental gameplay workshop you're probably all people who couldn't get in right so my name is Ernest Adams I'm going to be the moderator today and I have been instructed to give you the same instructions that you've been hearing all week long namely please turn off cell phones and other noise making devices apparently this has proven to be a problem in the past because game developers don't listen and don't obey instructions and also please be sure to check your email for the feedback form so that you can fill out your feedback about our our panel after the after it's over I think oh yes and there's something about please no unauthorized filming you can

film the slides if you want but there's only one slide and you're looking at it right so before I introduce our panelists I'm gonna start with an anecdote I used to work at Electronic Arts for EA Sports and about 1995 I went to one of the Big Shot executive producers at EA Sports I said I've got a brilliant idea I said let's make a game about horses there are a lot of horse sports there's rodeo and dressage and show jumping and cross-country and flat racing and all kinds of other stuff like that and if we do that we will own every little girl between the age of 9 and 12 in the world and he of course the executive producer was a he said no no no girls don't play video games and I said well they might play video games if there were some games they wanted to play and he said no

no no we don't like girls we don't know about girls we don't care about girls we're not interested in girls go away shut up do your job and so that was the end of that that Christmas what happened outcomes Barbie horse riding adventure it is colossal and one week it was the biggest-selling PC game on the charts you know outstripping all the shoot-'em-ups and everything else and you know we could have had that money now admittedly we didn't have the barbie name which was kind of I think partly key to its success but that you know gives you an idea of the attitude that was floating around at the time among the conventional big publishers it's just you know games are a boy thing you were not interested so but obviously as you know there were a number of girl games that were made in the 90s and many of them were made by these people so let me introduce our panelists you have the privilege of being with some of the heaviest hitters in game design

we will start with the far end Sheree Greiner ray who is currently a senior designer at Electronic Arts formerly director of product development at her interactive next is Jessica darshan snip who is currently director of girls creative content at Mattel and the person who was behind some of the early barbie games and she gave an absolutely fabulous lecture at the Game Developers Conference about 20 years ago the content of which I scribbled down as fast as I could and ripped off for my book on game design [Applause] Brenda Laurel who should need no introduction at all currently owner of neo Gaian design strategy consultancy and a founder of purple moon one of the most highly publicized

of the 90s games for girls publishers [Applause] and finally Laura grumpy former president of girl games incorporated and now president of girls intelligence agency providing marketing and PR information so I'm going to do as little talking as possible so that they can deliver you as much wisdom that's they have but I do want you to expand on your introductions just a little bit by saying briefly what you were actually building the names of the titles and things that the people would remember here from that era so started at that with cherry okay her interactive we did McKinsey & Company was our first title it was we built it as a social adventure which sounded really weird to people

back then but today would be considered a normal title we also did a Vampire Diaries title based on the license and then we moved over into doing Nancy Drew I did want to say we did asked Megan geyser to join us at the spinous panel but she was unable to attend the conference this year so we're going we miss having Megan here that's what I did let's see so I started in 1995 at Mattel and my first project was Barbie fashion designer and then consequently I did almost every Barbie game I'm not horseback riding or magic hair styler there were some other producers I worked with but towards the end in 2000 I left and I had been the executive producer of girl games but I went on to find a co-founder company that was dedicated to social gaming for girls called digital play space and maybe you guys played digital dollhouse at one time or another and that was my game too um so I I got hired by interval research in 1992 and my my job was to do research

on girls and technology we discovered obviously the girls weren't getting their share of Technology education for various reasons and we did a huge research project for four years on girls and play and during the course of that decided that - we can do some computer games that might get girls hands on this tech so we founded purple moon the first products were Rockets new-school and secret paths in the forest we haven't we went on to do ten titles so more titles in the rocket series more titles in the secret pastures and our last title was Starfire soccer challenge so they're also much older I just started I started girl games with a grant from the National Science Foundation in partnership with Rice University to investigate how to pull girls into technology and that founded

girl games and in order to we were very evidence-based and trying to come up with ideas for content and we were based in Austin and it worked for Jessica on many occasions our our methodology was doing slumber parties around the country because that was a way that we felt like girls were already gathering together and that informed a lot of our ideas for content development and then we met we worked with Mattel and Sony and Activision and did original titles as well as licensed titles and so and then that morphed into doing more and more research which is what I have now gie a girl's intelligence agency okay thank you

forgive me for popping up and down like a jack-in-the-box my back is not what it used to be you can ignore me pay attention to them um you mentioned that your work was evidence-based and you know that's a really weird concept of the game industry where most of us think you know we're artistes and you know what we create from our heart and so on but both you and purple moon were very much into you know evidence-based design and I wanted to ask Brenda or start by asking Brenda and move on to to any others who have a have something to say about it what was your goal with the research that led to purple moon and and how did that change over time good question so our goal was to understand what was going on with girls and boys and play there there was this you know at the time six billion dollar business with an empty lot next door where girls might be

playing things so we felt that it was important to meet girls where they were so originally the research was aimed at understanding how girls play because you know if you'd asked the question of why all girls play computer games you would not get a useful answer but if you ask a question how do girls play you might get useful answer so that's what we ended up looking at an original goal was about computer literacy it was about giving girls their fair share of hands-on with technology but as an inveterate feminist as time moved on and I started hearing the stories of these kids it became really important to me I got I got a heart engagement I guess with with what we were learning that it's such a tough time of life for girls being a tween they suffer from a lot of difficulties one of the patterns we saw over and over was kind of a sense of social inevitability about what happened to them that you have to work to get over

as a young girl we learned a lot of things about social status and play patterns and things and and it then became more of my mission to to understand how we might create emotional rehearsal space for a lot of different kinds of girls to get over that hump of between being a kid and being a teenager and we were really interested in recognizing and representing the diversity of the girls that we interviewed sorry so it was funny starting in Barbie because I actually got the job because my resume was stuck to another person's resume and put through the fax fax machine for all of you who don't know if X's are enid it would take you know and I remember Nancy Martin who is the executive producer at the time who also should be up here she

was like she's like I think your name is spelled so weird and her name is na & cie and I am Jes YCA and that was reason enough for me to get the job at Mattel so if you think that it has to be like about to resume things you're like um but we were we were taking that knowledge and saying okay we know that this is happening and I'm an anomaly I had a computer in 1978 whoa and if anybody wants to buy it it's in our garage and it was like it's like this big and then it's got but I was one of the first kids to ever play Zelda cuz it was just a text-based game and so my whole life I was like okay I play with games cuz I played with games and then we got me started talking about this research and I was just happy to be in Mattel because I'm a Barbie freak and so I dressed up all my dolls for each meeting and it was great and they were like no we really think that there is a reason there's a purpose for this and not everybody knows this but fashion designer was not created internally it was actually created by a seven-year-old EJ EJ Rifkin who is

the daughter of my boss who was our kind of our our genius in house and he his whole point which I think goes off of what Brenda Singh was not to create a game for girls have no difference between you're playing with your Barbie on your kitchen floor and a computer that it should be a seamless interaction because girls were sensitive to barriers and you just wanted to be fun and sort of that simple transfer so it's not like oh my god I'm putting in a cd-rom what is this it's just the extension of play so that was really Mattel's philosophy in those first years we heard her active had a head of production was patricia flanagan and she had kind of a combined family with i think it was eight or nine kids and she recognized that her daughters were not playing the games that she american leisure games since the parent company was not playing the games of american laser games were making and she was like this is a huge marketing

opportunities huge market that needs to be is just waiting and so she set out to try to fill that gap and build the building on the empty lot and found me at a GDC where I was working as a CA by the way and interviewed me and and brought me into and head up and helped her get this game out we worked with the Albuquerque Independent School District we had three thousand girls that we worked with and we brought in a we called our design team and we had them pick out my voice we had them pick out their leaders we brought them in and they absolutely directed the design on the McKinsey and company title and we got a lot of kickback from it about this is just stereotypes you're just doing fashion what's wrong with you you people you're doing terrible things and we kept saying that this is what the girls asked for we're doing what they wanted us to do in their game and we got boxes and boxes of letters thanking us for doing a game for them and so that was that was that was

made it all worthwhile yeah I think it's not uncommon for in a more typical general fashion that we find ourselves having to defend our position and needing to go out and collect the data to prove that this is a demographic worth selling to and then ultimately large commercial successes occurred so that that just kind of kept building on itself and and arguably today look at this audience this didn't exist before and so the population we've we've done a tremendous job from what I can tell albeit there is this it leads I what I'm seeing is it's leading this conversation towards this inclusion and diversification of gameplay and I think

that's important for an industry that is this large that has been able to make so much money off of a fairly narrow gameplay design scope and so I feel like way way back in the 90s and probably the gamers before us are saying the same thing like the the iterations that you're seeing and the creative diversity that you're seeing is a part of the evolution of the industry and our voice is a particular voice and we needed to find out you know what does this consumer want so that we could start to feed that consumer to make the money to prove to the publishers that this is worth investing in and so I think that groundwork has definitely been been laid I felt I should say something more in response from my perspective as a second-generation feminist I felt then and I kind of do now apologies that there is something about not just Barbie

but the pink aisle in general that is a hegemonic representation of what women are supposed to be that it enforces the traditional stereotypes and in a pretty damaging way and so as time went by for me you know I was I was the ugly smart kid with glasses I knew all about this if you played the games I was Mavis there needed to be a way for girls to feel positive about themselves that wasn't part of that hegemonic understanding of what the feminine should be I felt a keenly as a kid growing up and I saw it in the feelings of the girls I interviewed so part of it I think for me was to present at a balance if you will to the pink aisle games so that we had more of a range in

the offering not as it instead of but as it also see also that's the important thing because that was what was so weird is that it's not it's it's we didn't build the pink aisle yes not us that's not us we didn't don't know but but no maybe you built your product line and there wasn't pink but then they build everything else it came from fine the market rather because I mean when fashion design came out we were all excited this broke the door open for us because we've been fighting girls don't play games and all of a sudden the industry went Wow girls do play games and then they said get me some of that and we'd be like okay here's a horse game here's a detective game here's a-- and they wouldn't no no no we want barbie and we'd be going only Barbie can be Barbie anything else we give you is not going to be Barbie and girls should have everything including so one of the

things to break down in just that is the thing that they should have been saying is give us TV support so Barbie fashion designer isn't about it just being groundbreaking game and all kinds of things it was the one of the first CDs to ever CD ROMs to be television advertised and people don't know that boom it first came out the first week of sales I remember being so nervous like how does should we do we sold 11 copies for which my mother bought even though but she couldn't have played it she was like oh I'll just take all of these and she said I felt bad they were all the other games are like emptier than yours purchase better and we went to our CEO and who was Jill Burrard at the time and I said give a speech and said what really needs to happen is we need TV advertising and she said I'll never get it just like you know I believe in this and I have a personal fund that I think we can do some experiments with TV advertising and me being really young and me I thought she was paying it out of her own pocket you were fine okay I was like you didn't know I was like wow

there's so much to unpack you know it's like you can talk about Barbie and we talked about like having balance to me it was also always the balance between games that were all about death and destruction and games are about creativity mm-hmm so for me plus a huge Barbie fan play with Barbie until I was 16 really understood her as a brand and as sort of a dynamic expression as opposed to kind of putting her into a box and say this is her representation for most people I really felt like what we were doing was saying okay there's another option and it was hard and a lot of times that's still to this day you get people who are like oh it's Barbie and so it's these things and it wasn't it was a lot of different people and different an opportunity I mean just had been the one time deal yeah we did

television advertising too and that might have been the most fun part was representing what the games were in in TV ads and I'm still very proud of those ads and boy you could tell the difference we we ended up in the top 100 with both of our launched games because of the television image no one ever talks about that in everyone nobody ever talks about the machine that is Mattel marketing that was Mattel marketing I'm marketing in the telemarketing counterparts sitting out there she's like okay yes um it but it was it was both at the same time and I think that what's true a lot of games now is that you can't get past this all this noise there is no way ever there's a game for every niche group every type of get play pattern but how do you actually get seen and then how does that become of movement it's it's different there's also if it seems to me that there's such a paucity of a diversity in play patterns and shooters and more games and

you know it's like don't don't you guys get bored with that I mean you're doing the same thing over and over so having play patterns that are about creating stuff that a doll can wear or managing your social status in a group of kids I mean these are play patterns that nobody had looked at and I still don't see enough of that kind of experimentation across the hall and by the way we're the experimental game designers we're also some of the first Indies yeah we had to publish ourselves yeah even you were Mattel media because Mattel was so worried about this they were like don't tell me what you're doing they created a small company like a start-up within this big company of Mattel we're in a different building jános we're down the street we're down the street in the warehouse so you're

making TV commercials I know there be making games like board games and any other couldn't explain it to them and then fashion designer came out in the 96th toy fair and they wouldn't have guessed either they wouldn't they had no idea and in and to this day they probably still don't have any idea okay but this was but the weird thing was so it's 95 and 2000 and we were all so deep into it and then I started looking back and like I started doing the Barbie movies I became an independent producer and I was working on the movies and then I went and looked again at the games group and I don't know what happened to all the girls it was like we did this and I said Oh from now on there's gonna be tons of games for girls and everything it was gone by 2006 yep there were no I had went in to THQ and pitched all-star cheer squad so my thing was also about the Wii and how I was seeing girls on and I'm like time to do it again just do it again and then we and then the financial crisis happened and again I was like but that doesn't matter they'll still be girls there's

still not well I think those difference the boom occurred to your point where the the existing system in place you required TV advertising the other piece was the boom and the toy industry for the female consumer that in and of itself and the third piece was the platform so that the cd-rom was sort of this window where girls were already using this device and so now there was content for them on that device whereas that platform isn't so much there and arguably I think our research would show that it's all mobile and that this is a new huge opportunity for this consumer that I think we benchmarked and now can that can be built on from the this new generation of gamers is it's all mobile and you know I'm going to be a parent

say that Instagram is the entertainment space for this demographic and it plays out in all the play patterns that we identified very early on and when you watch these girls on these different platforms now that's what's happening for them and the opportunity I think creatively is there to figure out how can we leverage that because I think that's a tremendous opportunity that this era of the 90s of gaming really identified and now mobile is there and the audience penetration is there and so now there is this this new opportunity we discovered in our research historically speaking then the console was a big problem and working with girls as an audience that probably 90% of the girls that we interviewed and surveyed said that game consoles were four boys and personal computers were for anybody so the CD bomb was a way to unlock an

ungenerous was a real opportunity for all of us same thing that's true that was big but then Mattel decided we were gonna be on a game console and it worked it sort of worked it did it just we one of the things that I was asked to do in 97-98 was to actually speak at Sony and to talk about the PlayStation and talk about doing a girl's projects and I gave a speech about hair play and make it play you can imagine how well that went over and I was literally told never come back here again never ever come back here again we don't want to hear about hair playtime like it's gonna look so awesome on this engine they're like we don't need any of that please leave oh my god Jessica look salted for Sony on girls the same year you did and they were just like oh yeah you know around and then we went to England so we went the next so it was like well where we're gonna do I'm like

my chair manager it's like I don't know what do we do now I'm like let's go to Europe let's find somebody within this whole Sony thing that's going to understand it says Sony Europe put out Barbie was a Barbie detective detective the first Oh Barbie writing club on the console thank god you're here and and it was a hit I mean and it was it was right for the time and right for the platform because so many of the consoles were also getting through this going through this change where they were getting better and better upgrades and so those were starting to slide down to the girls in the family we pitched a saudi everybody picked out that's awesome i sat across the table from and he was on the phone closing a multi-million dollar licensing deal with us sitting there in the office and then he put the phone down he looked at me and he said games for girls huh and I said yes sir that's what we're doing with you know started into the piche system what can you give me for $150,000 oh and I was laying my punch in the nose

hey yeah honey $50,000 okay well after funding for years of research at the to the to about eight million dollars Paul Allen of interval research came to see our first web demo and he sat there and he said well that's cool can you do that for boys it was like are you kidding have you paid no all it was very special yeah there were a lot of those meetings yeah and it's interesting he's now you would say so I was at Disney in 2000 when he Disney by Lucas 1314 anyway I was 13 I also work doesn't Imagineer because there was a feeling at Imagineering and Disney was that what girls don't like those type of rides and I'd sit in meetings like how can you say this but the my favorite meeting was Star Wars they just bought Star Wars and

they had all these people in the room and they were talking about interacting and talking about toys and they said well you know there can't be any girls in any of the commercials or any of the planning and I mean my boss had brought me in and he's like I could see him the same way yeah and I'm like I'm getting better it matter it mattered huh and finally I was just like I can tell you have something to say I'm like what do you think I would've had an aneurysm it was like I was if you were sitting in hearing that homie that you couldn't make Star Wars for black people we would have this entire conversation and I'd be like on the phone with my lawyer and and I don't you can say that and look at me in the face and think it's not a big deal I mean in some ways what we're talking about was a specific time but anybody who tells you now that this is only for girls or only for boys it's it just is which is all their curse reasons they can't we can't anywhere yeah well they're not I don't think they're even taping it's a camera back there I don't know that we're still under the radar [Laughter]

[Applause] it's still happening ray was not one of the dolls and the first set of action figures items in him yes and but they weren't going to have and then the other thing was because I'm a mom of a 12 year old boy and they said I'm searching right I want to have any feet I know right we don't have any we don't want to have any moms involved either I was like what is that but that's also part of this so this isn't just about gender business it's about understanding what girls want at different ages this is understanding about how girls create community have created community and are creating every single day so you know now it's just such a different time period but then there were all kinds of other things going on too well I think they're still going on yeah I mean are there any women devs and the audience who haven't experienced a bunch of crap at work oh good

do you work in all women companies but I mean I would go into our developers and say how many women do you working here and they would inevitably they would say a receptionist yeah there's two over at marker baby our security guard and I would say and I would say your marketing person I'm like it's your marketing CML like the top yeah well I'll tell you our company was 80% female and if I could have bottled and sold all the drama that went on in that company between women I'd be rich now that's actually a show I could yeah Silicon Valley X yeah well oh my god you know well first I did want to I did want to mention because Jessica's

told me about it that after she gave her talk here at GDC those years ago she got a great deal of hate from in fact the vigorously feminist community she got a great deal of hate from all the men who said you be making video games at all I'm like then you knew you were on the right track yeah it was really never happened to me but I wanted to to look a little bit to the future because you know as we say things have changed that kind of 90s you know boom was temporary at Moomin is shall we say industry interest was temporary but now 48% of all gamers are female and in fact in the United Kingdom it's over 50% no which is pretty astonishing to those of us who grew up in an era when the stereotype was they were all thirteen-year-old boys so and

and of course much of this as Laura has pointed out is driven by mobile the question is now is there still room for creating content just for girls I mean art is there still a demand for girl games even if it's necessarily on mobile or something like that or do we think we think that's kind of done and it's all just going to be sort of gender neutral you feeling neutral baby I also wanted to ask everybody I hear how many people how many of you are in a company that 48% of the people you work with are women that means we keep doing our job doing I do what you make what Oh covet fashion oh yeah that game right that's cool so I think that it what we should be doing is making games that women enjoy and that everyone can enjoy like sets and finding those type of play patterns are there things specifically for girls I think there are play patterns that are

definitely more for girls but you find him on your mobile games you find uh dress up games calm do you guys know that site so when we did when I did digital dollhouse it was an online game and you could decorate a dollhouse in 3d sort of two and a half D online and we could not get traction and every VC person we went to they were like crickets so what they want to do what and then we hooked up with dress up with dress up games and we broke they broke our server and like within ten hours like it was just girls from all over the globe pouring in and wanting to do more of what they were getting little bites from in a dress of Gamescom environment I think that we have a lot of that opportunity today where you say okay this is a hit it's also figuring out what makes a hit anymore because you used to have to sell a certain amount to make you know to say okay this is worth it and now you have a lot more smaller audiences who would pay so there's it's a bad economy as opposed to about gender I would I guess I would disagree in that

I think there is space for games that are aimed at a female or female identified audience if if you look at you know overlapping Gaussian distributions right we're talking curves here we're not talking stereotypes but there are differences in cognitive and social abilities that events either because of genetics or culture or both that predispose certain individuals to like certain kinds of lay patterns better than others and we ought to be looking at to me that the open opportunity space people who are interested in serving girls is to look at that that sector that those questions about social intelligence about spatial navigation about the things that might interest us in science or help us express ourselves in art that that there are different ways of understanding and being that are

incredibly loaded with cultural stuff and that may also be a to a large extent pre determined genetically if you look at what goes on with our friends the pygmy chimps I advise you to review your primatology and you will see some differences so it's not just us humans who have them that's not to say that all females do this and all males do that but there are opportunities spaces and developing abilities and confidence in females and female identified people that are distinctive and deserve to be served and not watered down into some kind of neutral kumbaya crap thank you yeah I mean it's I appreciate the challenge of that question because I think what I do see is otherwise porn and sports hijacked

the whole market that's true because that drives the technology and that's fine I'll give them that and then what so I think the creative challenge comes you know roblox they just announced their numbers this past week I mean that is tremendously successful huge female population and I think what's compelling about that is the within that environment the user-generated entertainment and so will we see girls developing within roblox and some environments that are that are you know navigating in a different way there's like with Minecraft huge female consumer space they play it way differently so when you're in a girl's environment in Minecraft it's just a different experience and so I don't know maybe we'll see more of that kind of a thing and again Instagram primarily female users and what can we do with that and I do think

that that is I never thought about it that way but I do think it's going to end up being where there is a lot of places where a boys not going to feel comfortable and a lot of those spaces and that's cool too I mean I think there's space for that we weren't really hard to give purple moon cooties and now what they are you can do that yeah the idea was to make this obvious that boys this is not for you because we knew that if a boy played a game and pronounced it lame his little sister would never touch it right so we didn't want his hands on it to start with and I think it was a pretty good strategy but I'm hearing what you're saying I think it's a wonderful opportunity to study to these yells that that differently generally people make and to learn from that yeah where will that gameplay goes I really like the concept that you're saying you're talking about it is a it I this

is gonna sound weird but I almost want to remove the gender label from it completely and just talk about play patterns you know we would never say should we make a game for people who like golf or not that's a silly thing we would we would talk about the play pattern should we make games for people who like this particular type of play pattern and and the fact that we have for ages we've kind of demonized and trivialized particular play patterns is silly to me I mean and that's part of why I started doing this all that time ago is now we work in an incredibly smart industry and I thought this was a really stupid mistake they were making there's a lot of money out there and so I like the idea of backing us up in thinking about play patterns and what play patterns are out there that we can use and explore and provide entertainment to and find markets that like them and just just move the gender label from it completely and whoever likes that type of play pattern there's something

it also requires us though to be open to finding out new things so it's it's a it's a dual kind of idea that you can learn about you can come into it and say this is what we know girls like and then be completely closed off to new ideas when we were doing all-star cheer squad I originally had pitched it and said it's cheerleading there's social components there's gonna be drama there's gonna be clothes changes cheerleader and then I discovered I know and then I discovered that cheerleading is a sport I didn't realize like what a hardcore sport until I met because it was all motion capture and so I met real cheerleaders and then they explained to me what these championships look like and I start bringing it on and we had the same choreographer and these people get hurt like they were like we do this and we I said we're animating it you do not need to throw that person up in the air we'll pull it apart it'll look fine they're like no no that's not truly cheerleading you do those things so I think it's yes we can make stuff that a girl will appeal to girls but everybody

on both sides girls and the audience have to be willing to find something new and people who are creating the games need to be open to those ideas too yeah that's right and and you know San Francisco great example that it is of everything the whole notion of binary gender is kind of put out warned idea I mean if you were gonna try to express the 37 genders you see in this city you'd have a lot of tiny little games with tiny little audiences so there's a way in which it's kind of an out worn notion some of you will probably remember that at the time I wrote a harshly critical article in kamasutra because in the 90s I felt like a number of the games for girls were being made as jump on the bandwagon quick cheap you know not knockoffs exactly but but quick cheap titles that were you know offered like

four or five hours of gameplay but they still cost 40 or 50 bucks and you know and I felt like an awful lot of this was simply a quick marketing phenomenon rather than than something real I'm not accusing anyone here yeah well I know but I knew about your eight million dollars worth of research so yes yes but you know I went when Sheree asked me to moderate this panel I wasn't entirely sure the Welcome I was going to get but you know that that does sort of lead to an interesting question you know a certain amount of it you must admit was just marketing fluff and people grabbing for some pink dollars so what do you think was actually kind of accomplished at the time in in real terms I mean what what did you do that really who says to

me changed my life I can't thank you enough I'm studying design there or whatever I just had a wonderful meeting with a young woman who's gonna become a terrific game dev as a result of I think of having had that space in that example so for me that's that's what happened that's what happened and when I get those letters from girls now in their 20s or whatever I send them a copy of utopian entrepreneur which really explains how the sausage was made so that they can understand you know what it actually meant to be doing what we all did that's what happened I think there was a lot of empowerment that persists to this day there's a Facebook group called I miss purple moon you know I we mattered to people and and you matter

to people and we all did and and we changed some lives and some of those lives that got changed are moving forward in culture making today and I think that's really important that's the thing I'm proudest of to the pink game idea I remember being really excited when they were either knocked off some things I didn't it didn't bother me cuz yet Barbie right but so there wasn't there wasn't could be a concert in that way but I remember a dad sent me a picture when I was at Mattel in media of his daughter and it's both of his daughters so one was like maybe four and the other one was seven and he had carved them a chair to sit in front of the computer because he said that they kept bringing their chairs closer together to play at the same time and at the time I was having this whole conversation about social connection and how multiplayer how that was making sense and I was pushing to get more and more budget so we could at least experiment and never say I don't know our girls gonna play with other girls like that I was like really really how people play with the

dolls like this again no different seamless so I was excited that these girls are playing together and that they had other things to choose from like it felt like they can't play Barbie Fashion Designer all the time well and people there was telling you guys this earlier the reporters when when the four of us were kind of all there up at the forefront and I mean reporters were they were just all over this they would come to me and they would ask me questions and what they really wanted me to do was dig dirt on the other developers and I was like are you crazy we have to succeed all of us we must all succeed because we owe it to our girls we owe it to our audiences we must be there we must have and if any of us fail my heart will be broken because we must all succeed and that they'd always not print that [Applause] Ernest you naughty man yeah I've been

nervous about meeting you again because we haven't spoken for like the last 18 years well since it was a big topic last year and it was a it is still somewhat of a big topic there's still a aspect of it here this year the RNA are this is not particularly gendered but it's potentially interesting you know I did our our girls going to accept it is you know is this a guy thing how does it make people feel does anybody want to comment on VR and AR in the in the that collection of play patterns which has been traditionally associated with X chromosomes well I do see a whole lot of

female VR XR devs out there and I think that's terrific many more X are games them gained dams as far as I can tell they're women I don't know if that's true that's a cursory look I'm on the board of the virtual world Society and both the gender balance on the board and the gender balance among the dances is pretty even Steven there's tremendous opportunity but it's not you know if we're really doing VR if you're really doing that you are you're not looking at filet pattern so much as you are looking at environments that are productive of play which is different in a subtle way so I think we're all trying to find our way around that and I think female does maybe have an advantage because our play has always you know traditionally overlapping gaussians narrative play is the constructive play of females

so creating narrative out of environments and situations is something we do well and creating the environments and situations out of which play can be made is something that we do well so I feel there's great potential both from the development side and and the customer side for these two technologies yeah 100% agree I think it's a great opportunity I don't think there's gonna be money in video I don't care that's fine I know but just say that and I say that both to be provocative but also PR is a very old technology and we've been doing it for a long time and I think that there are new markets and new ways to be paying for I tend to be cap grande I'm very money oriented it's terrible but it's something that when people are thinking about starting their own companies and what kinds of things they want to be doing I think it's really important to understand how are you gonna monetize and so I think VR has opportunities I personally am much more excited about augmented reality me too

because I think I think contextually the idea of making productive environments and finding play but I always kind of break down is it how curious is the child how curious is a person doing working on the experience before gender before anything what are they going to try to do and I do think that there are different steps that men and women take but that's it I don't have to give any other part of it that's being gender-based I think one of the reasons why we've been starting to refer to this whole field as XR is because we see oh yeah a are in VR or not that's are different all you do is like opaque the screen for VR in that's nice not a huge deal and and there are a bunch of things in between like modeling and simulation that can be blended together into augmented experiences of the natural world of the social world of the microscopic world you know that opportunities abound but putting ourselves in any of these little boxes

it's going to be premature because I think the medium will turn into something that we used to mean when we said mixed reality and XR as a way to say it's not mixed it's a different fabric and it has all these capacities you know like electronics and textiles right well but bluntly it's going to be a moot point completely if we don't get the publishing the developers to fund the women to bed that's true because we're still something like one woman for every seven men that are funded and so the women that are out there there are a lot of women out there doing the x/r work and they're not getting funding Denis Reichle sure especially if they're over 26 i'm 2772 is that hexer no I thought I mean I just

refer to it as an umbrella look how many technologies have we all lived through where I mean they're in the garage so this is all just I agree at some point money can't matter and it's so devalued now because what does Blackrock house I don't know how many trillion under management so I mean it's there it but you gotta try and go get it but there's a lot of money out there and it needs to be dedicated to figuring this out I mean you're gonna keep going to these events where it doesn't work when it's supposed to and you're standing and the Third's that on and you're like what the hell am I doing with this there's no interactive play but you got to get you know these are baby steps until you can get to where where you're gonna hit the motherlode and there do have to be women in that environment and in that creative brainstorming session to see where that unfolds and there's such terrific research opportunities I mean there's a vector for research funding and the X are world just so you know how do you make a smooth transition from AR to VR you should be able to do that and you know

what does that look like that's a really damn good research question I bet DARPA would pay for it you know so there are other avenues for funding work if there's honest-to-god research in it that we might all be doing a better job of grabbing well having done I don't know seventeen different varieties of fashion closets with various technologies I guarantee the fashion closet will be one of the home runs in some form of reality beyond what we are living in right now whatever that technology driven by fashion we're getting a vibe we just got my son got it for his birthday and putting it up the room and the only I went plays tilt brush because I would stand in the middle and dress I create the princess dress that my son's looking like what do I do honey this is your mom's thing oh you're playing with it like yeah what do you think but it's it is it's gonna be great it already is in a lot of ways I'm very

excited I am consulted briefly for an AR company in based in Australia and they they had a they had a device with goggles and everything and they put the computer in the in the backpack and you were supposed to run around in a park playing this game and aliens would attack you and so forth but but you were you know it was a R so you were and of course part of the screen was obscured by my things that were going on and I said have you considered the liability issues are you aware that you know if you're hiding that then what happens if a person steps into a manhole or stomps a little kid that they can't see because it's covered by an alien you know and oh no they'd never considered that because they're Australians and they will attend just society so I never heard from them again yes yes yeah I think it's it's time yes so thank you all very much for those insights

and by all means let's take questions we'll start over here thank you all for being here so much it's incredible to hear you talk about your experiences um so I I and maybe a couple that people here grew up in the 90s inspired by the stuff that y'all made and I was just wondering when you were growing up what inspired you I people don't understand necessarily that Barbie especially when I was growing up the sort of a both like you could put the aspirations that I had this dream I lived I grew up in a small town in Oregon and going to New York get into fashion and all these different things and she was my avatar she got dressed up and she went and every couple of seconds she was doing something else and I was like that's what I thought so she was that part was very inspiring for me I was inspired by Girl Scouts I really was yeah and I still have trouble resisting

a woman in a uniform so to why I was inspired by my dad I was told that we were the first generation that could grow up and be our dads and so I just you know that was what building a business and defining and sort of obliterating the boundary so Dungeons and Dragons [Laughter] Dungeons and Dragons and I could not understand why more girls weren't doing this because it was the most wonderful escape storytelling I never been involved in 9 okay let's go over the other side I think everyone's gonna thank you for the panel this was awesome I just want to go back and I guess piggybacking off of all of your answers there about the kind of mechanics you know this the act of play that went into

these games how much of that would you say was borrowed from things you've seen before how much were you inventing outright and just that sort of sense of of building these worlds of games at that time like that just historical questions really fascinating to me and thank you so much I have a quick answer wait the secret past games were about in the inner lives of girls and if I had built if I had designed those games on the basis of what I thought I knew about the inner secret lives of girls I would have done you know Secret Garden but when we went out and interviewed girls they didn't want to take care of no stinking animals they wanted the animals to take care of them and they wanted magic stories and it was you know I would have been so wrong if I hadn't you listened you know if I had based everything on my own childhood so just a tidbit I had to play out everything with the doll I would actually take all the Barbie dolls and I'd sit under my desk I would do inky don't play it out and

think okay again playing Barbies I was six until I was 16 and I was thinking now what would I do next oh this and then that would be the next level of the game and this is what we would do and you know Barbie fashion designer we had fabric that printed through the printer and you cut it out we actually went through and made sure the designs were right for girls and that it really was about the play pattern and not just what I wanted yeah yeah I say we we worked like said we worked with 3,000 high school junior high school and high school aged girls to develop it and we just kind of followed what they asked for and what they wanted to do was there anything out there I would say maybe kind of like choose-your-own-adventure text adventure story building stuff would kind of be where we were thinking but we just did what the girls asked us for it's also really important Mattel is a huge research facility I mean they do tons and tons of testing so a lot of that also came from an enormous amount of information that's coming really fast but I think that's actually an incredibly insightful question because

we didn't grow up knowing certain engines and informing oh well if we you know if I'm a doomed player and then I can that'll inform how I'm going to develop a game and so I found it to be very difficult in all I'd chose Austin because I'm from Texas and that's where all the gamers were but I had no idea how to explain to my programmers what I wanted them to do because they were coming from a lot of gameplay and I was coming from like can you make it do this and I needed to and they you know so that took a lot in that development process to get them to understand and for me to understand what the capacity was over here okay thank you for the panel I'm not an expert in this so you can correct me if I get something wrong but lately I've seen this kind of slightly new market for games they said

that seem to be directed at moms rather than girls I've seen games that are solitaire games set around a romance story in Regency England which is an excellent game by the way and other stories which are about sexy vampire solving jigsaw puzzles I'm curious how much do you think these games came out of the work you and others did in the 90s and what do you think of them as kind of representing a earliest part of the future from what you've worked on prior thank you I'm amazed it took so long for the romance genre to be realized and interactive because it is such a huge category books yep so and I I don't think they took much from us I think maybe just the idea that there's a vacant lot why don't we go see if this works because there are obviously customers for this type of narrative I'm pleased to see we're

seeing them and we're seen to be there seems to be this increase in them and I'm pleased to see it again you know new play pattern different play pattern um yeah I like seeing it I think it's also about how much time you have so a mom wants to get in we have a game and her game will be at 5 minutes 10 minutes snackable small well the daughter might be on a mobile for hours in kind of dirt kind of getting all of her world into one place so I think that that's about appealing to just different age groups and boomer women are really into puzzle games yes as you know yeah so Hyneman family is number one in women over was a lot of groups it's it's incredibly puffed and then the older you get with women the more they like the ones that are based on board games that they knew when they were kids oh I would hope that the people making them played our games and started there with the idea that now we can do games that are games we like um I would like

to know if you can all be available for the wrap-up room sure I don't know where it is from here they're usually down the end here or I think they're around the hallway Oh follow the Hat and but I mean we'll ask us not this yeah I'm very sorry for those of you who've been waiting to ask a question but we have in fact run out of time so I want to thank you all very much for coming and I want to give [Applause]