Singing the pink blues

Theresa Duncan is one of the few designers with a flagrant disregard for focus groups or educational content. Her titles, which neither force-feed users high fiber content nor pander to the lowest common denominator, are some of the smartest out there.

Duncan released her first CD-ROM, Chop Suey, in 1995 to critical acclaim. In it, sisters Lily and June Bugg bop around their small town after eating Chinese food, stumbling on tea parties and visiting with their eccentric aunt Rose. Next came Smarty (in which a 7-year-old tools around Detroit, finding genie lamps and playing pinball with a witch), followed by Zero Zero, a picaresque Parisian tale set in 1899.

Duncan alone appears to have harnessed the unique properties of CD-ROM technology: Instead of trying to map books and games onto it or transposing doll-play into it, she enriches her quirky, highly literary story lines by expanding them through a garden of digital forking paths.

Unfortunately, art doesn't sell. Although her titles are well-reviewed, Duncan has had trouble distributing them, and recently quit making children's software because, she says, she wasn't interested in the TV and product tie-ins that distributors demand.

The appeal of computer games like Duncan's Zero Zero or Broderbund's Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, which draw girls in without targeting them specifically, raises the question: Is a CD-ROM of one's own necessary for smoothing a girl's way into electronic play?

Some girls find "pink" software patronizing, and enjoy video game shoot'em-ups even though there's not a girl title in the genre; indeed, fierce coalitions of such gamers have emerged on the Internet.

As one player posted in a discussion group, "Maybe it's a problem that girls don't like to play games that slaughter entire planets. Maybe it's why we are still underpaid, still struggling, still fighting for our rights. Maybe if we had the mettle to take on an entire planet, we could fight some of the smaller battles we face every day."

But a look at the numbers confirms that pink software satisfies an enormous need; according to PC Data, girl games' sales increased by 250 percent from 1996 to1997, while overall software game sales went up only 22 percent. With that many girls getting wired that quickly, girl games clearly have their commercial benefits, even if they reinforce the same tired gender divisions found in the toy world.

For the most part, girl games are toys in drag: The technology is "male," but the pastel content has been dragged wholesale out of Toys 'R' Us. Still, the difference between pink software designers and toy manufacturers is that some of the former, successfully or not, indulge a social vision of what girls can be -- not what they've always been.

"With time," write the editors of "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat," "we expect that, by pushing at both ends of the spectrum of what girl games look like, a gender-neutral space may open up in the middle, a space that allows multiple definitions of girlhood and boyhood, and multiple types of interaction with computer games of all sorts."

What if the same philosophy informed the slow-to-evolve toy industry? I can see it now: a world of Tickle-Me-Zoes, gadget patch dolls and Wee Waffle sets where mothers not only drive the tractors, but also program the software.

• View blog reactions