< prev | site contents | next >

Critique of Games for Girls

Justine Cassell, one of the authors of the edited collection about gender and computer games titled From Barbie to Mortal Kombat (2000), problematizes the project of designing video games specifically for girls in her follow-up article "Genderizing HCI." Cassell suggests that designing games for girls seeks to solve a problem that it actually ends up reinforcing. She argues that the process of designing especially for females risks ghettoizing girls as a population that needs special help with technology.

According to Cassell, the project of video game design for girls that began in the 1990s is based on a unidimensional and stereotypical understanding of girlhood. In resistance to this essentialization of girls - and boys for that matter - Cassell presents her concept of "underdetermined design for me (whoever I am)." This design understands gender to be dynamic, performative, and context dependent. Games such as Rosebud, which involves storytelling and stuffed animals, are based on underdetermined design and allow children to decide who they are without reinforcing binary gender categories.

Cassell argues that we must move towards a more complex understanding of gender that recognizes diversity. This will make women central to the design interface.