Ok., your name is Rockett. It's your first day at a new junior high school, and you're pretty nervous, but outside the building you meet this girl named Jessie who gives you the lay of the land ("Watch out for Nicole." "Who's Nicole?" "Don't worry, you'll find out sooner than you'd want to"). Now, do you walk into homeroom by Jessie's side or go it alone? She's nice, but is it smart to commit to a best friend already? What do you do?
If this doesn't strike you as hot gaming action, you're probably not a girl between eight and 13--which is to say, a member of Brenda Laurel's favorite demographic group. Laurel, a veteran of computer-game wars going back to Atari, has lately taken on the mystery of why there isn't better software for girls. The result, backed by the deep pockets of Interval Research, the high-tech think tank of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is a start-up called Purple Moon, whose debut CD-ROMs will be unveiled in two weeks at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta.
They won't be alone. Nearly two-dozen CD-ROMs aimed at preteen girls will be released this fall by companies with names like Girl Games and Her Interactive. 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 and Doom. Why the sudden interest in what young women may want? In a word: Barbie. Mattel last fall released a disc called Barbie Fashion Designer that was a runaway best seller, proving once and for all that if the pitch is right, the girls will play. "There's always been an interest in marketing for girls," says Suzanne Groatman, children's software buyer for the retail giant CompUSA. "Barbie just exploded the market. People are looking at this year as the time to launch on the coattails of that traffic."
The iffier question is how much traffic there will be for games that aren't as retrograde as, say, Barbie Magic Hair Styler--this fall's offering from Mattel. Some of the new titles come linked to popular books like the American Girl and Babysitters' Club series or Hollywood franchises such as Clueless and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. But a few hardy souls plan to sail unlicensed into waters that, given the hit-or-miss track record of CD-ROMs, are most kindly described as uncharted.
Count Laurel and her Purple Moon CEO Nancy Deyo among the pioneers. "If you're going to change how girls relate to science and computers, you need to do it by sixth grade," says Laurel, who has spent the past five years studying the play patterns of girls at the critical age she calls "too old for dolls, too young for cosmetics." Her research is based on conversations with more than a thousand girls, who (boys, take note) were interviewed with their best friends in attendance in order to "keep them honest."
The result is a fascinating portrait of gender-based misconceptions. There's a reason, for example, that the company isn't called Pink Moon. "We tested names with boys," says Deyo. "And when we showed them Purple Moon, it was just, like--bam!--'That would be for girls. Because purple [not pink] is girls' favorite color.'"