Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch Makes Games of Social Mastery

We know women play games.  So why can’t women design games for other women—and then tally up their itunes revenue??
 
Silicon sisters is one of the few companies selling games for women owned and created by women. However, co-founder Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch wants to make it perfectly clear they are not pinkifying games. Gershkovitch isn’t a pink kind of girl:  she is a pilot in training and took her honeymoon in Canadian arctic.

Baily Gershkovitch and partner Kirsten Forbes introduced their first game, School 26 last year.  Intended for girls 12-16, School 26 presents a daunting challenge:  to enter a new school, make friends and relationships—basically navigate the perilous and unmarked terrain on teenaged social life. A new version about the power of secrets was released in July of this year.
 
Veterans of the gaming industry with 25 years of experience between them Gershkovitch and Forbes started Silicon Sisters in 2010.

How did you come up with the idea for your first game?  

We started by researching games women want to play—so we read about games and gender studies.   What teen girls are really into is figuring out things socially.  In high school we’re developing those skills, my partner Kirsten likes to call it social mastery--understanding who’s doing what with whom.  It’s really all-consuming at that age.  So in School 26, you progress by using the tool of empathy.  It’s an experimental game that doesn’t fit in nicely to any genre.
 
We included a bit of dating in the “Summer of Secrets” version as a way to explore body image. We introduced a guy named Manny who has a crush on a hot girl named Emma. She enjoys his company, they play in band together.  But she gets pushback from her friend --- about how it’s disgusting to date a heavy guy.  We know the girls enjoyed their characters already, providing a chance for a girl to explore this issue.

How have users responded to School 26?

Girls have told us that it’s very authentic and feels so real. It’s a huge balancing act to be accurate to the high school experience yet not be really out there and risky and provocative. We tackle some tough issues, we don’t stay away from the real stuff teens are facing in their lives. For example, one character is pressured into going into an area of study that he is not interested in, but is being pushed hard by his parents. He rebels and pushes back by partying a lot and ends up in hospital with alcohol poisoning.  We don’t want to glorify it, he ends up regretting that choice, we also didn’t want to preach. There are other big issues in the game, Lucas is bullying a boy named Thomas, it comes out that lucas is gay and having a hard time sharing that, but it was a non-issue for his friends, who accept him for who he is. The lead character helps in all of these situations by being empathetic and a shoulder to lean on. Empathy is a powerful tool in the teenage girls toolkit.

They also say they’d like us to look at dating in the game. That is a big part of social mastery, but we didn’t want it to be about that one thing. Still, girls themselves find that’s missing, so we are looking at that for the third game in the series.

What do you think of current girl games?

My opinion is that the majority of the people in games industry are male and when they try to deliver content for girls, they often rely on gendered stereotypes, and that’s a really shallow offering.
 
For example, Sorority life. It is a Mafia game with a pink re-wrap—they just got a bunch of guys to redo it and ship it.  It wasn’t even designed from the bottom up for a female audience, but a retrofit. It’s smart to resell their product, but not a very deep offering to the female market.

What did you find out about girls and games?

For one thing, girls will always take a buddy in their quests.  Of course, we also know that guys have a larger interest to explore violence in games and many women are not into that as much—and besides that part of the gaming sector has been well represented..  
That hidden object games are especially accessible for women.  There is research that shows that there is a gender difference in the ability to find items in cluttered space.  When my sons and husband are standing in front of the fridge yelling “where’s the mustard”, and I can see it from 20 feet away, there is a biological component to that. They’re not lazy, their brain just can’t plow through clutter quite as well.

Not surprisingly, men don’t tend to enjoy hidden object games as much as women do. So, in the business context, look at Big Fish Games. They sell 1.5 million games a day to women, mostly over 30. The largest genre of games on their site are hidden object games.

Do women or men design your games?

In the design team for our first product – half of team was male. But
if you’re trying to address one side of the market, you’re going to be well served by hiring that side of the market.   We are particularly interested in ensuring a female perspective leads in all design decisions. I think guys can design from a female perspective if that is something they have truly tasked themselves with – but most guys in the industry aren’t as interested in the female games market. They want to build the games they want to play, not games for their sisters. Generally speaking, women designers are lit up by the chance to build games for girls, and I think truly excited about building high quality content for that market.

What are you developing now?

We have quite a few games on the drawing board—with big partners

We’re designing a Facebook game for moms; a hilarious romp of how crazy it can be to be a working mom.  That game is all out fun, and some pretty hilarious stuff happens. Facebook  is a very good platform to reach that audience of 35 plus females so it’s a really good spot for who we’re targeting.  

Are there types of games that women are more likely to play?

The casual space and social space is very important for women who have very small snippets of time available for games.  For the most part, they’re not sitting down to play halo for two hours.  Millions of millions of people play on smart phones or via Facebook.  Zynga is now as big a producer as Electronic Arts, and that growth has mostly been driven by female consumers.

The casual space is really tough to do, because women who play casual games don’t identify as gamers—they will just say, “I take a little break from work”.
 
Farmville has been hugely successful for women, there is something I personally think there is inherent to act of growing and producing.   It tickles that part of us.

What changes do you see—or want to see in the gaming space?

I hope that games can continue to broaden. Games are a an important part of our media mix and are a very powerful form of entertainment. They are also excellent as educational tools. And they are an amazing way to connect with people.  
 
We’re seeing the tip of the iceberg. I hope that over time we’ll have games that more appropriately reflect our world, where the types of games are much broader, and the representation of people in the games look more like what people in the world look like. I’d like to see more people of color, more women with breast that are not massively distorted, and a wider variety of body types for both genders.

There’s a ton of growth in the games industry; a lot of companies are hiring women developers. As we see more diversity in our workforce, I bet we’ll see more diversity on screen.  Then we’ll see more realistic games.

The big question is, why does this matter? Well, it matters enormously. We know from recent research that game playing is a gateway to further connection to technology. A study from the University of Alberta recently showed that kids who played games are more likely to choose tech careers. This is very concerning given the current gender gaps. I don’t believe that women have less of an aptitude for technology, I believe this is a social construct, and it should, and will, change.