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I'm sitting in a tree house with my friend Whitney. At school, Whitney and I aren't real close. She's been described as "a crabcake and a snob," and I'm not crazy about her. But here in my treehouse I'm seeing a side of her I've never seen before: instead of sticking her nose in the air and walking past me in the hall without waving, her face is crumpling be cause her parents are divorced and her stepmother's trying to throw her a birthday party, and right now she thinks being Whitney is pretty tough.
I know I have a couple of choices: I could laugh at her in order to get her back for all those nonwaves, or I could try to help her out. If I try to help her, she'll tell me even more about what's going on, in such vivid detail that I will be able to see it for myself. If, after hearing all that, I still commit to helping her and being her friend, I can go onto her Secret Path in the forest, where I can look for magical story stones that will help her know what to do about her stepmom's party. Of course, I have to solve some puzzles to find the stones. But if I don't find them all today, I can put the ones I have found in a box and come back for the rest tomorrow. The party's not for a couple of weeks, so I have plenty of time.
Or I could just be nasty to Whitney and diss her.
You've probably guessed by now that I don't really have a tree house or a friend named Whitney. But I do have a computer game that presents a tree house scenario. It's not like most computer games: this one's designed especially for girls.
In high school, a group of my friends voted me "Best Feminist: The Person Who Does the Least to Reinforce Negative Stereotypes About Women," but there are certain ways in which I feel very much like a Helpless Girl. I can't drive a stick shift, and the only thing I know how to do to a computer is turn it on. Neither has proved an insurmountable handicap: I inherited an automatic from my mom, and I have always managed to lure a nearby guy into helping me with my computer.
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, a collection of essays edited by two professors at MIT, has confirmed that I am not the only woman who is computer clueless. While the computer gender gap may seem obvious to anyone who has ever stepped into a software store or ventured into an arcade, academics have happily churned out scads of research to back up that commonsensical observation. Above all, these studies have shown that when it comes to computers, the gender gap starts young. Ac cording to one study, boys between the ages of 11 and 18 are "at least three times more likely to use a computer at home, participate in computer-related clubs or activities at school, or attend a computer camp" than girls.
Studies that Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins cite in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat indicate that even in school classrooms, boys use computers more often than girls, beginning as early as kindergarten, when "children assign a gender to video games, viewing them as more appropriate toys for boys." One preschool teacher reported that in her class, the boys "took over the computer, creating a computer club and refusing to let the girls join the computer club or have access to the computer."
Not surprisingly, adults evidence the same trend: men are more likely to care about computers and to work in computer-related fields than women. According to a 1996 survey, women garnered only 16 percent of bachelor's degrees in computer science, 20 percent of master's degrees, and 12 percent of doctorates. But boys and men don't just dominate C+ and Java. Computer games, too, are the provenance of boys (and sometimes their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers: one software salesman confided to me that on two separate occasions he has sold men in his town computer games for their sons, who, it turned out, were then in utero). At least 75 percent of the $10 billion game-industry revenues are generated by male consumers. The links between boys' dominance in computer games and men's dominance in computer-related jobs are the raison d'etre of this collection of essays about the girls' game movement.
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