Our computer lab was in the basement. There was some kind of mold growing in the Ohio humidity and it made my eyes itch. But there were games – edutainment, I think I should qualify, given the sharp distinction on the internet between games and spell – to distract me. It was hard to beat satisfaction of grocery cash register simulator in Mavis Beacon learns to type. Countless pioneers died of dysentery in Oregon Trail. My sister and I often traveled the Trail together, names and stories surrounding our pixelated adventurers, poetically forming on their tombstones. And if there was one game that gave us a free hand to explore this dramatic side, it was it The American Girls Premiere. The version we got was the Special Edition Collector’s Set, which cost a whole $10 more and came packaged in a pretty tin destined to become a pencil holder. The elevated cover images of key American Girls™ — Felicity, Josefina, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, and Molly — held a 3D promise of stories being rewritten and rewritten, to (seemingly) define for ourselves what it meant to be a girl and be American. Not that any Ohio high school girl recognized it at the time.

My parents started homeschooling my sister and me when I entered fifth grade. It was 1996. We lived in Appalachia because of our home in southeastern Ohio, on the border with West Virginia, where my mother was born and grew up. We weren’t characters from a JD Vance book, and we were relatively privileged – white, middle class. Our father was an engineer at one of the factories that reeked of air on the way to the mall across the river. You drove through a burrow to get to our house, but we lived in a stone split level on the hill behind.

Appalachia as a region has a unique relationship with technology. It is lagging behind in adopting or accessing computers, the Internet (particularly broadband), and smartphones — not just because of average socioeconomic status, but also because of geographic isolation and a prioritization of self-reliance and privacy, which both computers, and more importantly, the Internet, threaten. During my undergraduate studies, when I was traveling from home, we only had a dial-up connection that took screeching time to connect to email. Even now, when I plan to go home, I prepare for slow data service on my phone as my only access to the Internet. My current personal tablet isn’t even built to work with dial-up. In many technical discussions we assume that broadband and wireless are a given. It’s not.

We got our first home computer sometime after 2000. I would continue to use this computer to write reports for my mother. And to play games on CD-ROM that didn’t require internet. While we’d see my dad play fucking westerns and reboots of classic jungle adventures (Pitfall), my sister and I spent hours playing educational games. And for me, as a wannabe writer, The American Girls Premiere was a favorite, which gave me the opportunity to become a playwright and director. The game was first released in 1997 by Pleasant Company, maker of the American Girl dolls and books, and produced by The Learning Company (which is essentially the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium’s reskin). opening night, that lets you stage your own mystery dramas).

I was a diehard Felicity fan (although looking at her character now, I worry about aspects I overlooked as a kid). I salivated over the Felicity doll and accessories in the catalog, and even cut out items from the catalog to play with as paper dolls when it became clear that my parents would never buy the doll themselves. They thought it was too expensive, so I made plans to win enough money through seed catalog lotteries to buy one myself. (This never happened, by the way.) My parents did give my sister and me as a present The American Girls Premiere, which made for a different kind of immersive experience.

Felicity and her friends meandered the timeline of American history across our computer screens, waving in pre-recorded gestures. They echoed our scripts in a glorious ’90s techno voice, adjustable in pitch and tempo (so you could really capture it) nuances of character). They wore the outfits we knew, used the furniture and props we would never buy in their physical form, and interacted with a familiar cast of side characters (used mainly for “lessons” in the books).

And the game allowed me to write stories, something I was constantly looking for. It was one of those activities, when you look back on your childhood, that you remember as unadulterated joy, the kind that doesn’t seem to exist in the same way when you grow up.

I didn’t realize, as I do now, that I was late with the “girls’ game movement,” which peaked in the late ’90s and wanted to promote that girl agency. Reviews from The American Girls Premiere and contemporary articles on this sudden boom highlighted how the software industry had suddenly realized that girls were playing computer games. “It’s a market that’s been almost ignored in favor of boys’ and young men’s seemingly bottomless hunger for so-called twitch games, like the bloody, light-speed shoot-’em-ups. earthquake and demise”, wrote Michael Krantz in June 1997 Time article. These girls’ games satisfied their market’s supposed need for “secret competition, intricate storytelling, and group effort based on complex social hierarchies.” They were not filled with the “open competition, violence and mastery” of boys’ games – the violence of which apparently “abhorred” girls.

Brenda Laurel, the co-founder of developer Purple Moon, was a key figure in this movement, she based her designs on research and she wanted girls to get familiar with computers and technology as soon as possible. “If you want to change the way girls interact with science and computers, you have to do it before the sixth grade,” she argued in Time. That ties in with the intentions of Pleasant Company founder Pleasant Rowland, who was a teacher and saw her products as educational toys for girls. The game was designed to “engage girls and help them develop the skills they need in a world increasingly dependent on technology,” said Barbara Serwin, director of interactive media for the company, in an article highlighting the game. is announced.

I could, of course, pause here and question some of these conclusions about what girls like to play and why, to explore how this reasoning relies on pre-existing expectations of emotional intelligence in women. I would then become the negative reviewer who described Brenda Laurel in a 1998 TED Talk as “a certain kind of feminist who thinks they know what little girls should be.” And I don’t want to use this article to discredit the purpose of these companies and games – not with as much as I loved The American Girls Premiere. But the headlines of newspaper reviews for the game show us just how much the ’90s reinforced a binary view of gender and how much they still dictated games that were appropriate for boys and appropriate for girls. The American Girls Premiere was consistently described in terms of an all-girl audience. And headlines like “Everything Dressed Up But Going Nowhere” were based on stereotypical jokes. The games were also clearly separated from video games, raising the question of how we gendered the entire medium: “This holiday season, leave the video games in store and give the gift of knowledge instead.”

Despite not being part of the girls gaming movement, I watched Oregon Trail like a girl game — because l played it.

That said, these designers had a point. Women make up a minority of workers in STEM areas (which, in ouroboros style, is a career area that is more respected and better paid than traditionally “female” areas, in part because of the male associations) as a result of educational and social gatekeepers. This is especially true in Appalachia (where I was once teased that I would never get a man since I took a post-baccalaureate degree). And gaming can be a way to hit even that playing field for girls. Play more video games, get more girls in STEM, a study shows. Secure The American Girls Premiere fueled my writing — leading me on educational paths I couldn’t have imagined in my basement as a teenager.

In the computer lab we learned that play itself was important for equality.

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