Girls’ Games III – 1984-1994

In 1984 I was eleven and games had become quite male gendered, but I didn’t really notice. At that time all we wanted was to have fun together. We watched videos at home or hung out in the park and made all old school pranks we could come up with. The first ‘date’ was a gang of us going to see Splash and the next we went to the Tivoli, always with our parents in the background. They kind of supported us to do fun stuff together in a demi freedom.



This absence of problems soon turned to something very complex and confusing – the teenage. The old classmates went out of status as we changed school and the run for the top started. The top equaled being popular and seen, preferable by everyone. There was no self analysis or strategy in that plan, only thoughtless action. And the peer pressure was heavy. Everyone did their best to sit on everybody they could sit on to reach higher status. It was all about doing things nobody else dared and about doing things everybody else did - rebelling from parents, school, teachers and old friends – embracing new friends and media. Brands, style and music were some of the very important details to get right.


In the late 80s the supermodels were the most unreachable goal every girl aimed for. Elle McPherson, Paulina Porizkova, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington were later run over by even more unattainable Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campell and Kate Moss. http://forums.thefashionspot.com/f96/supermodels-1980s-35456.html I scanned every magazine, knew every Stockholm based model and even today I know every image from these times by heart. They almost feel like old friends of mine when I see them today. The girls with contracts were admired by everyone. My doubtlessly biggest focus was not to get a boyfriend, it was to lose some weight. I was 100% convinced that that would do my success in all ways.

The goals were clear: to be popular, to be seen

The method was: to lose weight and become a supermodel



During ‘college’ years the girls started to work weekends to earn extra money to save. The boys did not in the same extent for some reason, maybe they trusted everything to solve by itself, maybe they were always saved by parents when needed?
Everyone was going to the gym, solarium and spent a lot of time on their hair. Things were more relaxed and the hunt for popularity in school was not at all as intense. Studies, work and a few selected friends and gossiping occupied all our time. We played board games, went to discos and parties and baked a cake in the afternoons. We never watched TV, at most an hour between school and homework. Games did not exist. To the girls.

But the boys played all along though we didn’t know. Or rather – we did know, but we were that uninterested that we didn’t even hear them talking about it. It was something they did by themselves or boys only and probably didn’t talk about not to be a bore to the girls.

I realized this when I met my first boyfriend (I was very late on this, more interested in myself than in boys as said before) and a console was a natural part of his apartment even though he wasn’t a big gamer. I had no fear though and outplayed him frequently. I didn’t last for very long there. I'd say that both he and his friends had no problem with the girls playing though, rather that they were not going to change their interest for any girl and almost forced us to play if we were going to hang out.

On the arcades I felt a little more mal placé. Those places were dark, uncozy and non social. Not very girly in any way.

Finally, in the university, Internet, e-mail and mobiles appeared!!! The two first were easy to adopt. No more did we have to run around all libraries to find the information we were looking for, and no more did we have to send letters by snail mail to our abroad friends.

The mobile phones took some time though to approach. They were no very user friendly to begin with and many girls hesitated to use them when it went ok as it did, but finally we did and no more we have to get up early in the weekend mornings to not miss everyone before they were out of their homes.

So what’s the same and where are the differences in teens’ habits today? To be continued…

Previous posts on Girls' Games
Girls' Games I - 1980-1984
Girls' Games II - kids 2010

Girls' Games II - 2010

In 2010 7-10 years old boys play football and/or hockey. Girls too, 'it’s so good with team sports'. Then girls also do the gymnastics, ride horses and dance. No boys do that. Obviously it’s not considered important for the future.

Girls’ and boys’ outfits are more clearly separated both in colors and styles than back in the 80s, and the toys provided are still different according to current gender. Girls play with Littlest Pets and boys with Star Wars dolls, sorry figures, and Pokemon collectibles. Barbies are often passé already by 7. The ‘throw ball on the wall’ game has completely vanished. There were of course little commercialism in that, and no status gained.



But even though girls and boys seldom mix, the love games appear in the same age as before, around 7 or 8, and offer opportunities to spend some time together. Otherwise it’s only in computer games that I see girls and boys unite.

Today the computer experience starts a lot earlier though. Seven years ago we played on Disney.com with our one year old daughter. Today our youngest boy’s first words in the morning are ‘I want to play the veggies’ (veggie samurai for iPad).

My girls and their girl friends join at someone’s place playing Indiana Jones or Wii , and iPet. The family favourite is Little Big Planet. The girls spend most of their gaming time customizing their sackboy while dad is running the game forward.


The girls also play online. I’d say none of their male friends would ever join in the favourites girlsgogames or Stardoll, but otherwise it’s both online and by the consoles that they and their class mates find a common interest that today is gender neutral. The girls sit in the phone with Eliot and Linn while playing Panfu. They suddenly spend a couple of hours at the boy next door – playing Star Wars – a game they would not choose themselves, but that is fun enough and the console itself is not a problem.

Somewhat we’re back to the start of the games. I’d say many children don’t see the games, computers and consoles as male gendered. They don’t see them as techniques or machines, but as media for entertainment. They are not afraid to handle a joystick, even though I admit that the girls still want to watch for a while before trying a game, while the boys just jump into the game giving it what it takes.

Why this has changed lately? Both computers and consoles have become a standard in our life style? Lots of dads (and some moms) keep buying new consoles and want their kids to play too? Computers are both tools, entertainment and communication today?

I know I generalize a lot. Also there are more local preferences today as the supply is much wider than 30 years ago (at least in Sweden who has shifted from a social state to a capitalistic model), but I have also run communication with millions of girls word wide for the last 5 years, why I believe there is some truth in these generalizations.

There are some stronger separations in real life toys and spare time occupations than 30 years ago though and there are yet not many games that are built for girls by girls, or even for boys and girls, by girls. And why don’t women play as much in the middle of their lives and returning stronger than men later on. And what do the girls find so great about the sackboy? To be continued…

Previous post
Girls' Games I - 1980-1984

Girls' Games I - 1980-1984

I'm thinking about girls' games, why and what they are, and I begin here today with my own experiences of games, friends and what we played back then around 1980-1984.

Me and a friend went to see a movie on our own for the first time when we were about seven. We choose Star Wars. Soon after dad returned from the States with a Star Wars printed long sleeved t-shirt for me. I wore it every day. It made me kind of interesting and in and Princess Leia in the front of the image was radiant.

Star Wars was a big thing by then. The boys in class did nothing but played with Star Wars dolls (for boys called figures, for girls dolls), while the girls had absolutely no interest in spacecrafts’ heavy artillery down the sandbox, resulting in explosions throwing the dolls, sorry figures, in all directions. We were lining up for ‘throwing ball at the wall’, where the rules were clear and everybody waited for their turn. Conflicts were by that easy to solve through discussions, and no pell-mell necessary. A few of the guys were sometimes jumping in.


About the same time most of us got a Game & Watch. I got some strange copy from dad when he came home from Asia. There was also a digital watch including a plane bombing game that gained me some status amongst my classmates.

Neither Star Wars or these first games had any gender tags by then. They were marketed as family entertainment.


A couple of years later the talented boys (these later on, not very cool guys) in class started to focus on Dungeons and Dragons, as well as designing road and water maps on checked paper. The girls at that time were lining up for jumping twist with rubber strings, waiting for our turn, following the rules. Sometimes we tried to adopt the guys’ interests as football and marbles just to get some time spent together, but most of all we enjoyed the mixed teams hunting each other down on the meandering backyards. Actually when thinking about it, the same guys sometimes jumped in on the rubber strings and also preferred the mixed team hunts.

A guy in our class got an Atari console. We used to gather at his place to race with cars. The girls tried it. The guys had absolutely no problem with that, and they did not in any way try to exclude us, and yet we weren’t that interested, only for shorter pauses in more interesting real life interactions. Soon all boys had a console at home. None of the girls did. I guess also the parents found car racings and war games more proper for young boys than for the girls.

As I remember it the girls and the boys had different interests of their own as well as mixing up and trying out each others' games. The theme of the console games did by time not match the girls' interests at all why the games became a boys' thing.

To be continued...

You are never alone

I got a little perplex yesterday, reading a striking post on our role model Lady Lovelace. Although it is my mantra and foundation in all I do, it’s still the strangest feeling everytime you realize how true it is that you are never alone. I’m stuffed with studies on why girls often/normally don’t take interest in techniques, and yet this post again put the finger on my own personal history up til today.

The author Audrey Watters describes how she in the late seventies got her first inspiration from Princess Leia, was more into geek things but yet ended up as the girl ‘who minored in Women’s Studies but took the “easy” science and math classes for graduation because somewhere along the way I’d got the message that science and technology weren’t really my thing.’

I did all that. My second daughter is not named Leia for no reason. The impression of the original has never vanished. I’ve always been all brains in school although my friends never expected it and got just as surprised by the exams every year. I hid it well, and did my best not to stand out as a swot. I wanted to be the cool, soft type hanging outside the school gates (even though I didn’t smoke, smoking was too stupid for me) and did well on that role. Also I wanted to become a photo model, it was the times of Paulina Poriskova, Claudia Schiffer and Emma Wiklund – or winning the Nobel Prize – kind of split idea of who I was, typical to most young girls today I guess…

Of course I followed friends and other normal people for the standard studies of economy. Tech school never even came close to my mind. The image of me amongst hundreds of geek guys was just not realistic (today geek has quite a better status even amongst girls then it had before the Internet era). Yet the interest for computers and programming was persistent and after years of studies in the more female populated classes of communication, media, pedagogy and hr, I ended up in the right spot of the by the time so called ‘Multimedia’. Creative presentations on CD-ROM lead me further to social medias as MUD’s and MOO’s, lead me further to programming chat bots.

Probably due to my split goals and feeling of not going in the fully right direction being steered by powers above my own head, I early developed the deepest interest for genus studies and realized how much work there is still to do on the boys vs girls thing in all fields. The origin for me working with MOO’s was a friend and partner who considered himself not to be neither a girl or a boy, but a sex not defined, but in the virtual existence he could be what is felt he was. When programming chat bots the genus aspect arised again in the dialogue between a real life person and a fictive man or woman.

When I finally got the offer to inherit 200 dress up dolls (a genius idea by the founder Liisa) and expand them to a complete ‘game’ for young girls, there was no risk. There were no such great places for girls at the Internet 5 years ago. There was an empty hole to just fill. When offering young girls what they are interested in within the computer we are one step closer to allowing them to further develop the possibilities. Today girls know that they are on the right spot, doing the right thing when they sit by the computer. It’s a small but good start.