Ending the Wild West A future for everyone

When Romero's daughter Maezza was 8, she returned home from school with a story for her mother. Maezza had told her classmates that when she grows up, she wants to be a game designer. She was a level 90 in World of Warcraft. She loved wearing her Blizzard T-shirt to school. She wanted to learn how to code and make games. A kid in her class turned around. "Girls don't play games," he said. "Fortunately, my daughter had a great response," Romero says. "She said to the boy, 'My mommy makes games.' She owned him entirely."

That the concept of "girls don't play games" exists even among children in schoolyards today has less to do with the actual numbers of players as much as it has to do with an idea that was heavily circulated from the '90s through television commercials, magazine ads, video game box art and the media. After all, a person who grew up in the '90s would have little or even no reference for what came before. Their first game marketing experiences would have sold a very black-and-white picture about who video games are for. But this idea is starting to break down.

According to Cotteleer, industries tend to look beyond their existing target demographic only when the market has become totally saturated. It can take a while — sometimes more than a decade. And when that happens, they ask, "Who's next?" She says Nintendo mastered this with the launch of the Wii console, which went on to break records in console sales and introduce video gaming to audiences who had previously never bought a console or played a video game. Its advertising also deliberately targets a different audience, using celebrity spokespeople like BeyoncÃ©, Penelope Cruz and Robin Williams and his daughter Zelda.

But the process of breaking down the widely held stereotype of games being for boys doesn't end with game-makers targeting diverse audiences, Bogost says. In fact, he doesn't believe that is the right approach, in the same way he doesn't believe that the industry going after the male audience was a smart idea. "It seems to me an enormously stupid idea, actually," Bogost says. "All you have to do is look at the most successful games to see that it's only been possible for them to be massively successful if they don't systematically exclude half the population."

In order for video games to overcome their existing stereotype, they have to be sold to us as general purpose products. Bogost uses bookstores as an example. No one is surprised when they go into a bookstore and find that there are books for children, books about gardening or books about cooking. It's accepted that books are a general purpose medium that can address lots of interests. The same applies to television — it doesn't surprise people that there are channels dedicated to cooking, sports, animals or news. Bogost says that games are already there in terms of there being a diverse variety that can do different things — it just hasn't effectively gotten the message out there yet.

When the message gets out there — when video games are seen as a general purpose medium, and a person who plays Angry Birds can associate that with playing games on a PlayStation 4 — then perhaps the stereotype will begin to fade. It would be a big marketing challenge, but it's not impossible.

"Given enough money, I could make guys buy tampons," says Roeser. "I mean, I could figure out something to do with them. It all comes down to how somebody like me, and there's frighteningly thousands of me across the country and the world, creates a campaign that specifically targets an audience." Roeser believes that if the makers of Call of Duty came to him and said they wanted to pursue the female market, it could be done. It would just be a matter of making the message appealing to women and reaching them through the right channels.

Bogost proposes a similar way of selling video game consoles to a wider variety of people — the messaging would have to be different than what it has been over the past two decades. For example, if Sony were to plaster images of its new console on buses and billboards, that's not a different message. It's the same message, just in a different place. Bogost says companies like Sony and Microsoft would have to re-present their high-end game consoles as having something to offer everyone, and he doesn't think it would be that hard. If Sony were to release an Apple-like montage showing people playing games like Journey or any of its narrative-driven or broadly appealing independent games played on Sony devices, that would send a very different message than a montage of virtual bullets being sprayed into a war zone.

"The way we relate to consumer products through marketing is real," Bogost says. "In this industry, we think of marketers as these evil-doers who take the product and ruin it by hawking it in the wrong way to the public. And that might be true. I don't know. But advertising is enormously powerful."

Back in Newburgh, N.Y., wide-eyed and frustrated, Riley Maida paces back and forth in the aisle, occasionally looking into the lens of her father's camera.

"Why do all the girls have to buy princesses?" she asks. "Some girls like superheroes; some girls like princesses. Some boys like superheroes; some boys like princesses. So why do all the girls have to buy princesses and all the boys have to buy different-colored stuff?" She animatedly shrugs her shoulders and huffs as she asks why, and marches off. Her father's shaky camera follows. We hear his voice behind the camera: "That's a good question, Riley."