How pink games came into existence

In the early game development days, the industry skewed male. Most things did. But games weren't explicitly gendered in the manner of pink games.

So what went wrong? Why couldn't games stay like this forever? How did we end up with pink games? In short, the story of pink games is all about money, as these things often are.

Here's what happened - the industry experienced what was called the video games' crash of 1983. The biggest casualty was Atari, whose revenues fell by 97% between 1983 and 1985. So the games industry couldn't go on as it always had. And the solution, according to the game designer Ian Bogost, was to start marketing games as a subcategory of toys instead of just, well, games. And toys have traditionally been gendered. It's often been claimed that boys and girls play differently, so they get different toys - guns versus dollhouses. The toy transformation brought this binary to games. But why did the industry target boys instead of girls? Researchers found that marginally more kids were playing games. The key word there is marginal. And those notions of gamers as young boys became a self-fulfilling prophecy that we’re still very much feeling today. Selling and marketing games to boys resulted in more male players. It could be used to justify more pandering to male audiences. And when you renew this process you have our current that’s a player debate. But dynamic market segmentation doesn't just push girls out of gaming. It also panders to them.

The idea behind gendered toys was also used to create games that were explicitly for girls, hence pink-games. So we got games like "Beauty and the Beast,"Nintendogs," as well as the Rockett and Secret Paths series. Most of these games were outgrowths of toys already targeting girls that focused on fashion and shopping. And like the games marketed at boys, pink games were similarly self-reinforcing. They defined female gamers in a specific way and then used that definition to justify more pink-games.

The original wave of pink games was followed by even more gendered tie-ins. PlayStation released a purple PSP. Nintendo created a pink Game Boy. More recently, we've seen the Kinect wardrobe reproduce "Clueless" and the Nintendo's Girls Club channel repeat many of the same tropes about female gamers. There is huge range of items to choose from to decorate the house. So it sounds like pink games are a big part of history, but that's not really how things have worked out. I'm not going to claim that some of these games aren't self-parody. But it's more dangerous to write them off entirely. To do so affirm the exclusionary premise pink games grew out. These were games that mattered and still matter, both regarding their mechanics and cultural significance.

In many ways, there were stereotypical pink-games, all about clothes, shopping, and fashion. But another term for these stereo-typically girlie mechanics is just new character customization. Avatar customization in non-pink games is Barbie fashion designer by another name. But pink games rarely get this kind of credit from the world of games. A website like Virteract gives equal importance to games when it comes to girls.

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