In the gaming world, certain narratives prove popular. Level up, beat the bosses, save the world from an alien invasion. If it’s Call of Duty, help win World War II. If you’re Mario or Link, you save the princess from distress.

If you think that sounds like entertainment heavily marketed to a male audience you’re right.

Few mainstream video games are made — or marketed — with women in mind, even though nearly 40 per cent of video game players in the United States and Canada are female. The likely reason? Few women are actually designing the games.

Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch and Kirsten Forbes hope to ride to the rescue. Last July, the two Vancouverites launched Silicon Sisters, the first game development studio in the country owned and run by women. It is unique in its mission to design games for young girls from a female perspective.

Their first game, School 26, launches in early spring on computer and portable Mac devices. It’s a role-playing game in which players act as a high school student who helps peers with personal and school-related problems.

Gershkovitch and Forbes came together in early 2010 after identifying what they saw as a gap in the market.

“The core game world has not moved aggressively into the female space,” says Gershkovitch of the mainstream world of console games, the kind best sold on Xbox, Play Station and Wii.

“The casual and social gaming world has,” she says, referring to massive success stories such as The Sims, or the more recent and rapidly expanding genre of app games like Angry Birds or Farmville.

According to the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, video game developers and publishers contribute $1.7 billion in revenue annually to the country’s economy. The industry employs more than 14,000 people and supports more than 247 companies.

Canada is widely considered to be the third-most successful video game hub in the world, behind Japan and the United States, so the stakes are high when it comes to figuring out how women fit in both as consumers and part of its work force.

“We’re pretty well represented in the HR and marketing realms, but you don’t see very many women in engineering, and you don’t see very many women in design,” says Gershkovitch.

A 2005 International Game Developers Association study found that women comprised 12, 10 and 5 per cent of jobs in executive, design and programming areas respectively. The fact that little-to-no research on the gap has been done since should be telling, as should the dearth of women enrolling in game design school programs across the country.

“If you look at other cultural industries, they don’t have nearly the growth curve that games have had in the past few years,” says Jennifer Jenson, an associate professor of pedagogy and technology at York University and president of the Canadian Game Studies Association.

“When almost 75 per cent of women work, to not have them somehow represented in this workforce is excluding them from something that has had massive investment from all these different countries.”

When she and Forbes opened up shop, Gershkovitch says resumes from many women told a similar story. Their portfolios would list games they’d developed in school, games the applicants themselves wanted to play and ones not typically seen in the mainstream market.

“This one gal designed a really cool competitive skating game,” she recalls. “And then she got a job. And the rest of her portfolio was guns. She basically designed weapons (for games) for two years.” Which is a great opportunity, says Gershkovitch, but seemingly one of the only options.

While there are scores of women and girls hooked on such console shoot-em-ups as Halo and Call of Duty, “we’re not concentrating on building games for those gals,” says Gershkovitch, “because they’ve figured out what they want.”

“We’re building games for the rest of the girls out there — the girls who haven’t yet broken into traditional gaming.”

Jenson, who spent more than 10 years studying gender and gaming, found one of the reasons a girl might not break into gaming is access. “Girls don’t often have the context for play that necessarily includes other girls. They may play with their brothers, cousins or fathers.”

So how might games look if more women were designing them? Different, but Jenson and Gershkovitch stress it’s not because all women want the same thing. That kind of thinking leads to exactly the sort of pink and glittery stereotypes more likely to induce groans than hours of involved game play.

In testing prototypes for School 26 (originally called Caseworker Kate), Forbes and Gershkovitch found their focus groups of grade school girls and boys knew exactly what they wanted.

“Kate (the game’s protagonist) was going to be this young, funky social worker who cared a lot about teenagers and really wanted to help people. I thought she was a really cool character. But when we tested her with the kids, they weren’t into it. They’d say, ‘Oh, she’s an authority figure. Don’t like her, don’t want her.’” They redrew the character as a classmate.

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A 2005 study conducted at Michigan State University had 524 middle school students preview eight games designed by gender-based teams of the same age. When asked to identify favourites, the girls largely preferred games designed by the four female teams — but not because they were seen as being targeted at girls. In fact, nearly every respondent identified the girl-designed games as both girl and boy appropriate.

In other words, says Forbes, inclusiveness is key. “At the very least, guys, don’t piss them off. Don’t actively exclude them. Don’t give them avatars ... waists are the size of their neck.”

“Women are the most tenacious demographic,” she says. “We’ve played games for years and years, despite the fact that no one was actually making them for us. We stuck with it.”