The American Girls Premiere game retrospective

The basement was where we had our computer lab. I was allergic to some mold growing in Ohio’s humidity. But there were Games — edutainment, I guess I should qualify, given the internet’s stark distinction between games and games — to distract me. The grocery checkout simulator was a great way to get the best of both worlds. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typesetting. Dysentery claimed the lives of many pioneers. Oregon Trail. We would travel together along the Trail, my sister and me, creating stories and naming our adventurers and waxing poetic about their gravestones. If there were a game that let us explore our dramatic side unassisted, it would be this. Premiere by The American Girls. The version we were gifted was the Special Edition Collector’s Set, which cost a whole $10 more and came packaged in a fancy tin destined to become a pencil holder. The raised images of the core American Girls™ on the cover — Felicity, Josefina, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, and Molly — held a 3D promise of stories to be rewritten and written anew, to (seemingly) define for ourselves what it meant to be a girl and to be American. It was not that an Ohio middle school girl recognized this at the time.

When I was in fifth grade, my parents began homeschooling me and my sister. That was in 1996. It was 1996. We were able to live in Appalachia because of the home we had in Ohio in southeastern Ohio. This is also where my mother was born. We weren’t characters from a J.D. Vance book, and we were relatively privileged — white, middle-class. Our father was an engineer for one of those plants, which stunk the air on their way to the shopping center across the river. We lived in the brick split-level house on the hill above.

Appalachia has an unusual relationship to technology as a country. It falls behind in its adoption or access to computers, to the internet (especially broadband), and to smartphones — not only because of the average socioeconomic status, but because of geographic isolation and a prioritization of self-reliance and privacy, both of which computers, and even more so the internet, threaten. When I was in undergrad, the only option for internet access from my home was dial-up. It took an interminable time to reach email. When I visit my home country, my only internet access is via my mobile phone. My current personal tablet isn’t even built to work with dial-up. Many tech conversations assume that broadband and wireless are a given. It isn’t.

We got our first home computer sometime after 2000. This computer would be used to create reports for mom. To play CD-ROM games that didn’t require internet access. My dad would play bloody Westerns, and remakes of classic jungle adventures while we watched (PitfallMy sister and I used to spend endless hours playing educational games together. For me as a wannabe author, Premiere by The American GirlsI loved it, and was given the chance to write and direct plays. The game was first released in 1997 by Pleasant Company, maker of the American Girl dolls and books, and produced by The Learning Company (which essentially reskinned Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium’s Opening Night, This allows you to create mystery plays of your choice).

I was a diehard Felicity fan (though reviewing her character now, I’m… concerned by aspects I overlooked as a kid). The Felicity doll was gorgeous. I loved the accessories. When my parents refused to buy it, I cut out pieces from the catalog and began playing with them as paper dolls. It was too costly for them so they encouraged me to enter the seed catalog sweepstakes and win enough to buy one. It never did happen, though. But, I was gifted by my parents and my sister. American Girls Premiere It was a completely different experience.

Felicity and her companions from the timeline of American History hopped across our computer screens, flailing with prerecorded gestures. They parroted our scripts in glorious ’90s techno-voice, adjustable by pitch and tempo (so you could really capture those NuancesCharacter. They wore the outfits we knew, used the furniture and props we would never buy in their physical forms, and interacted with a familiar cast of side characters (primarily utilized for “lessons” in the books).

It allowed me to create stories. This was something I wanted to do all the time. It was one of those activities, when you look back at your childhood, that you remember as unadulterated joy, the kind that doesn’t seem to exist in the same way when you’re all grown up.

I did not realize, as I do now, that I was late to the “girls’ game movement,” which peaked in the late ’90s and sought to promote girls’ agency. Review of Premiere by The American GirlsContemporary articles about this boom revealed how software companies suddenly realized girls were interested in computer games. “It’s a market that has been all but ignored in favor of the seemingly bottomless appetite of boys and young men for so-called twitch games, like the bloody, light-speed shoot-’em-ups Quake Doom,” Michael Krantz wrote in a June 1997 Time article. These girls’ games satisfied their market’s supposed need for “covert competition, intricate narratives and group efforts based on complex social hierarchies.” They were not filled with the “overt competition, violence and mastery” of boys’ games — the violence of which apparently “appalled” girls.

Brenda Laurel was the founder of Purple Moon developer. She was a key figure in this movement. Her designs were based in research and she wanted to help girls become more comfortable using technology and computers as quickly as possible. “If you’re going to change how girls relate to science and computers, you need to do it by sixth grade,” she argued in Time. That tracks with the intentions of Pleasant Company’s founder, Pleasant Rowland, who was a teacher and viewed her products as educational toys for girls. The game was meant to “engage girls and help them develop the skills they need in a world increasingly dependent on technology,” said Barbara Serwin, director of interactive media for the company, in an article announcing the game.

You could stop here to question these conclusion about girls’ favorite games and the reasons for them. I would also be able to look at how their reasoning is influenced by preexisting female expectations regarding emotional intelligence. I would then become the negative reviewer that Brenda Laurel described in a 1998 TED Talk as “a certain flavor of feminist who thinks they know what little girls ought to be.” And I don’t want to use this article to discredit the aim of these companies and games — not with as much as I loved Premiere by The American Girls. But the headlines of newspaper reviews for the game show us just how much the ’90s reinforced a binary view of gender and how much they still dictated games appropriate for boys and appropriate for girls. Premiere by The American GirlsConsistently, it was described in terms only of girls. And headlines like “All dolled up but nowhere to go” relied on stereotypical jokes. The games were also distinctly separated from video games, raising the question of how we gendered the entire medium: “This Holiday Season, Leave the Video Games in the Store and Give the Gift of Knowledge Younstead.”

For all that it wasn’t part of the girl game movement, I viewed Oregon Trail as a girl game — because I It was fun.

These designers did have a point. Women make up a minority of the employees in STEM fields (which, ouroboros-style, is a career field more respected and more highly paid than traditionally “feminine” fields, in part because of its masculine associations) due to educational and social gatekeeping. Appalachia was the most affected. It was here that I was once told I wouldn’t get a man because I was studying a post-baccalaureate. Gaming may help to level the playing field for women. A study has shown that more women play video games and are better at STEM. Yes Premiere by The American Girls nurtured my writing — which led me down educational paths I would not have imagined as a teenager in my basement.

The computer lab taught us that equity is a matter of play.

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