Thoughts on Girls' Games (Patreon)

The newest video, on Girls' Games, will be releasing tonight at 7:15 PM EST as a live premier! The video discusses the history of the girls' games movement, the impact it had on the industry, and the reasons why so many girls' games end up as shovel-ware.

As patrons, you will have access to your own ad-free version, right here on Patreon, after the premier!

I wanted to share some interesting material though, for your consideration.

A lot of the research and ideas for the video were inspired by the book From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. 

Henry Jenkins has a bit of post-script written for the book on their website. 

http://www.justinecassell.com/CC_Winter05/pdfs/jenkins_from.html

He goes into something that I wish I could've gotten more into for the video. I'll quote him directly:

"What bothers me even more, however, is the degree to which Purple Moon has been treated not only within the industry but also within academia as a "failed experiment," as if the importance of a political and cultural intervention could be or should be measured only by market standards."

"What killed Purple Moon wasn't the lack of a girl's market for games or the invalidity of her core model about what a girl's game might look like, but rather the impatience of the company's core investors to make the kinds of turnaround that they were seeing elsewhere in the digital economy."

The video alludes to this point, but doesn't go into that much detail. We have a unifying characteristic though here, between the previous two videos and this one:

Investors are what make, or break, companies. And investors are seldom patient or understanding.