Yesterday I had the most incredible day.
Yesterday I visited the studio of Good Game: Spawn Point, at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Good Game: Spawn Point is a TV show about video games, and its target audience are young gamers â under 10s â kids who spend their days playing Minecraft, Smash Bros., and Mario Kart.
The showâs creator is a woman, her name is Janet Carr. She is a real hero of mine, and Iâll never forget what she said.
âThe kids are so innocent in the way they love games,â she explained, as she showed me around the set, âbut the thing that really amazes me is just how many girls there are gaming.
âWhen I speak to developers I always say, âyou better start thinking about the games you want to make in a couple of years for teenage girls â because soon thereâs going to be a whole army of them, and theyâre going to be angry when they see whatâs out there.'â
And then I went home and I watched the new trailer for Hitman Absolution
This, I think to myself, is what those girls, who love video games in the purest way possible, have to look forward to.
They get to watch the âsexyâ unboxing of video games. They get to wear underwear armour that isnât armour at all! They get to lick lollipops suggestively. They get to play beach volleyball; they get to choose which bikini to wear while doing so.
I canât abide it. If this is what works, if this is what genuinely sells video games I just donât want any part of it. Is this what we want as a culture? Is this what really works. I genuinely hope not.
Yesterday I had the most incredible day, and I left with a real hope for video games as a medium âbecause it has this beautiful, pure, diverse audience to look forward to, to cater to â an audience that doesnât engage with video games in the same dull, gendered way.
Theyâre going to be so angry.
And I hope they get angry. All of them. Thereâs already an army of girls playing, engaging, writing and talking about video games â and theyâre about to get some new recruits.
Janet told me that in a single week, Good Game: Spawn Point receives over 17,000 letters and emails from its viewers. At least 50% of them are from girls. I sincerely hope that, by the time theyâve grown up, weâll have something significantly more substantial for them than Nuns in stilettos and beach volleyball in bikinis.
Because if we donât, thereâll be hell to pay. And you best believe they wonât be donning leather and bikini armour when they burn this silly little boys club to the ground.
Mark Serrels is the EIC for Kotaku Australia. You can follow him on Twitter!
Republished from Kotaku Australia
