What Lor wanted most for Christmas last year was Style Savvy, which was surprising since it was, well, not a Pokemon title. It looked like a kindred spirit to Roiworld‘s Fashion Fix on the iPhone/iPod Touch, which Lor adored despite being fairly terrible at it. I knew I was going to like it, but I held off until I could see how accessible it was, and after watching her play through the tutorial on Christmas night, I was hooked. Against our better judgement, we ventured out into the post-holiday chaos in search of a second copy.

As we were in the car, Nick marveled at how utterly obsessed with the game I was, but wasn’t really surprised. “I’ve read some of the reviews,” he said, “and they’ve all said that even though they expected it to be terrible, they’re surprised that it’s a great game.” At first, I just went on gushing about how well the game is structured and the micromanaging of your store and everything, but after a moment, I began to wonder — why would one assume it’d be terrible?

I thought about it for a moment, and you know, it really did make perfect sense, considering the shift in marketplace perceptions. Nowadays, games created and/or marketed toward a female audience are the new licensed games, as far as their perception as shovelware is concerned.

It’s not hard to see why: when you look at the shelves of your local game store you’ve got cases with smiling girls and animals owning a sizable chunk of the DS wall, not to mention all of the boxes with the word “Princess” on them. However, let’s face the truth here: the problem that surrounds “girl games” isn’t due to the quality or the quantity. When it comes down to it, it’s all about the audience and the culture that surrounds it.

Licensed games have had decades to build their bad reputation and cement their place as the kings of shovelware. There are a lot of factors that play into it: rushing a game to tie into the movie’s release date, the quality of the source material, the age range that they’re targeting. Generally, those games that suffer the most are the ones based on childrens’ franchises, because children are assumed to have less skill and expectations from a game than their adult counterparts. I mean, think about it — although one doesn’t expect much from the port of James Cameron’s Avatar, it’s still expected to be better than Planet 51 or, God forbid, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

The idea that licensed = bad is not foolproof, though. How often does someone dismiss licensed games as trash before slipping Batman: Arkham Asylum in the disc tray? Granted, many times, it’s the diamond in the rough amongst its terrible brethren, but it still throws a wrench into things.

At least when you’re denouncing a licensed game, you’re usually doing so on the merits of its parent media. When you’re dismissive of a female-oriented game, you’re doing so partially due to the merits of its target gender. It doesn’t make you sexist — taking those negative thoughts and applying them to everyday life would. The thing is that gaming culture is just a microcosm of popular culture, and while we’ve made huge strides over the past fifty decades, there’s still a long way to go.

In the last five years, there has been an overwhelming surge of games developed with a female audience in mind, and with the Imagine, Petz, and the newer Style Lab series, Ubisoft has the market cornered on that front. In the Imagine series alone, there are thirty-three titles either announced or already released on the DS, ranging from Imagine: Fashion Designer to Imagine Teacher: Class Trip. When it comes to sheer numbers, even the Army Men have nothing on them.

Late last year, Tony Key (Ubisoft’s VP of Sales and Marketing), along with Susie Folgeson (Food Network’s VP of Marketing and Brand Strategy), went on CNBC’s Power Lunch to discuss the sudden push to cater to this “new” market. [Sorry, folks, but the video refused to embed properly!] In the interview, Key discusses what kick-started Ubisoft’s push into girl-centric games (both the sales of the Petz franchise and the popularity of the pink DSLites).

However, one of the more interesting tidbits of the interview/commercial came from Fogelson. On being asked whether or not game companies were trying to separate boys from girls too much, and if girls wouldn’t want to shoot aliens as well, she responded: “Yeah, maybe, and they probably also want to race cars. But I think they want to cook and I think they want to work out, so there’s enough for everybody.”

The question that needed to be asked here was why? Why is it that girls want to cook and work out, and boys want to be run around and roughhouse? It’s because they’re spoon-fed those ideas from everything around them. This is not an issue that’s specific to video games — far from it. I can’t count how many times I’ve read articles lauding young women for breaking the ranks: Girls excel at math and science! Girls like extreme sports! Girls shoot guns! In drawing undue attention to these “achievements”, the idea that it’s something unusual and strange is reinforced, that they’re things that boys are supposed to do. As a mother, I can tell you that the fear of fitting in comes at a very young age for a child, and the pressure to conform to those ideals comes early.

The gender roles that are being reflected in these games are clear as day: if you look at the Imagine titles, for example, there isn’t one occupation there that isn’t soft and nurturing. You won’t find Imagine: Police Officer, Hockey Goalie, or Defense Attorney on the shelves — the closest thing to confrontational these girls will get is in Imagine: Detective, but even there you just end up using your “sixth sense” and your puzzling skills to solve any crimes. They even dumbed down the role of veterinarian to “animal doctor”, as if a ten-year-old couldn’t figure out what a vet was even with the huge dog on the cover.

These girl games sell their audience short. There’s no reason why young ladies should be looked at or treated differently because they play “male” games such as Modern Warfare 2 or Halo 3 ODST, and continuing to segregate the two genders will only exacerbate the issue. Even with this new glut of female-oriented games, nothing has really changed in the four-and-a-half years since I last wrote about gender issues in gaming. In fact, it may have become worse. Is it better to create myopic, throwaway games for girls, catering to what society feels they should want? Or should we just return to the status quo, making games for “everyone” while being fully aware of their intended audience, making young girls and women who play them a strange, almost-fetishized anomaly?

I realize that this piece posed more questions than answers. I honestly don’t think there are any easy solutions to the issue, but it’s important to think about how these unspoken expectations influence our lives. If we as gamers, readers, humans want to precipitate a change in our culture, we need to start asking ourselves these questions.

I think that Dennis Kneale said it best when he opened the above interview: “Tony, I’m looking at what you guys are doing here, and you’ve got Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed 2, but for girls like my nine-year-old daughter, you’ve got Your Style with Jenny McCarthy. Why don’t you let girls come out and kill some stuff?”

Good question, Dennis. Good question.