TRANSCRIPT:
Kelly Roark
Hello and welcome to our podcast series from the Center for Learning Innovation. I'm Kelly Roark, a staff member in the CLI and your host for this episode. Today, we're talking to an associate professor from the Department of Humanities, discussing Games for Girls, and the roles that women play in the gaming industry.
Carly Kocurek
My name is Carly Kocurek. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Humanities. My official appointment is in digital humanities and media studies, and I also direct our graduate program right now. I teach interactive storytelling and history of video games. I also teach our graduate professionalization course, which helps particularly PhD students, but also masters students think about career goals and how to get there while they're in school.
Roark
Wow, awesome. Can you please tell me about Games for Girls?
Kocurek
Games for Girls is really a push in the mid 1990s that comes up through the game industry from mostly women working in the industry who are very aware that the industry is like really making kind of games for a very niche audience, which is mostly young men and boys, and it's actually even narrower than that. So it's just kind of a moment where there are new companies started to make games for girls like Purple Moon, which Brenda Laurel founds, Her Interactive which starts off as a division of another company and then spins off. And they still make the Nancy Drew games, which are very popular. Mattel, of course, is in the game and starts making a bunch of Barbie games. It's an interesting moment. It's not a failed effort, but it's also not a successful effort. And so I'm really interested in looking at the successes and failures there. And so it's also a nice opportunity to kind of document that at a moment when those stories are still available.
Roark
What are some of those successes that you're talking about?
Kocurek
If you look at Her Interactive launches the Nancy Drew series and that series is still running. It's one of the longest running series in the history of games, and they also do some other interesting things. Then Brenda Laurel, who founded Purple Moon and their games, sold quite well, and then they lost their investors, which is very sad. But for example, I really love that Her Interactive made a game out of The Vampire Diaries. And I was talking to one of the women that worked on that, and I was like, I love that you all made a game out of The Vampire Diaries. That's been such a huge hit recently, and it really indicates to me that you had a clear understanding of what teen girls were interested in and what that market could look like. Well, that game is very obscure. People don't really know about it, and didn't sell widely.
Roark
What are some ways that women and girls have been traditionally cut out of the gaming industry?
Kocurek
Even now, the industry's only about 25 percent women workers, and that actually represents more than doubling over the past 15 years. So it was like 11 percent or nine percent even just a decade ago. And the games industry really starts in the early 1970s, just as we're starting to have a bunch of lawsuits about whether or not you have to hire women. Another factor that's really interesting, and Caroline Cunningham, who's a researcher, she did a book looking at why girls now do or do not have access to games. And one of the things she found echoed a finding that Brenda Laurel had, which is that a major factor was actually hardware access that the console would be absolutely dominated. If there were any boys in the household, the consoles would be dominated by the boys. And so in fact, like a lot of the move towards making games on CD-ROM was super smart because it moves them on to a different device. So I think it goes throughout. There's not as many women working. They don't make games for girls because they're not seen as part of the audience. We're starting to see some change in that. But then we still have an infrastructure where, like most of the critics are older and are men and have expectations about what games look like. And so even as things are changing, you still have to be kind of alert to some of these inequities and some of these existing problems because they're still there.
Roark
How do you define girl? Is it at a certain age range?
Kocurek
I think this is actually a really interesting problem, and I always did my research. I realized our understanding of gender has absolutely gotten much more complex in the past few decades, and I think that's awesome, and I love that we're finding more ways for people to be and to exist and to feel comfortable in the world. So girls from like eight to 11 or eight to 12, there are some companies like Her Interactive that look at slightly older demographics. And so we're looking more at kind of like into early teen or all the way through the teen market. So that's kind of how I define girl is they're probably tween or teenage and using kind of the gender binary that was how we were talking about gender at the time.
Roark
In your time at Illinois Tech, have you seen a change in the number of women that are interested in gaming?
Kocurek
You know, it's interesting. It varies a lot semester to semester. Certainly, there's more infrastructure for gaming on campus than there was when I started. the E-Sports program I've been really impressed with. They have a real emphasis on bringing in new players and including casual players and helping people engage with that as something that's like recreational and life enriching instead of only competition. Even that, of course, we also have some of the best rank players in the US. So we have this really great range of people participating there, which I think it's fantastic. My fundamentals of game design class would be mostly men like often overwhelmingly, which is unsurprising. The campus is only a third women, so this is no shocker. But then when we teach interactive storytelling, it would be like more than half women. It's hard to know because the places where we can see that people are gaming aren't always the places that people are gaming. So if we have like lots of students that hang out playing on their Nintendo Switch to relax, I don't know. Like I wouldn't see that necessarily. But definitely, I think I've seen kind of an increased engagement with pop culture in general from our students in the time I've been here, which I find really fun. And definitely, the students have been working to start a chapter of the International Game Developers Association. There is Warhammer Club and I like that. I like seeing where students are finding ways to exercise their creativity and to build community and play together, because I think that's just such an important part of like being a whole person is finding things that bring you joy and enrich your life.
Roark
How can we better support women studying computing and video games at Illinois Tech?
Kocurek
We actually do minor in game studies and design that is available to all undergraduates. Definitely core sequencing is something always to think about. There have been universities that change sequencing of courses and saw a major jump in retention. So that's one thing. Games programs actually tend to be more gender diverse than computer science programs and also the constituent engineering programs. So games is a very interdisciplinary field. I'm hoping we can continue to grow classes in that area. It's actually really an opportunity to reach some students who may not think to apply to an engineering program or a computer science program, but who have skills in those areas and interests in those areas and who might get through a gaming program and be more at home there.
Roark
Carly tells me about a cross-departmental gaming project that Illinois Tech students created together.
Kocurek
Over the summer, I worked with a group of students to build an escape room on campus, and when I tell people about this, over a class! And I'm like, no, I just asked if any students wanted to build an escape room. And they showed up and spent hours and hours on this thing, and it's really cool. Students from all over the university we had like an MBA student, a law student, civil and architectural engineering student, computer science like all over the campus, a really diverse skillset, doing really fun, interesting stuff together!
Roark
Many thanks to Carly for teaching us more about how women and girls have been included in the gaming industry. Thanks for listening!