To be a video game critic is both a dream come true and a daily embarrassment.

Video games are the frontier of fiction, a cultural outpost that is intoxicating if not always refined. Games are not ossified or hidebound. Their creators can still delight and surprise with the thrill of the new.

But as the father of two daughters, I worry that games, for all their promise, are not always welcoming to young women. During a trip this month to a retro arcade in New Hampshire, my older child, who just turned 4, told me she wanted to be the kidnapped damsel in one of the games we played together. If she were 10 or 12 years older, I might strain to explain why she cannot play a female killer in the next Assassin’s Creed game, due out this fall. Or maybe I wouldn’t, because she would be smart enough to figure out that the creators of these games are signaling that girls don’t belong in their treehouse.

Except, of course, that they do. Women have created, or contributed to, scores of video games. Putting together a museum exhibition to highlight their work would be a way to reclaim some of this overlooked history.