Packaging girlhood

PACKAGING girlhood: age compression & THE MARKETING OF

ANKE HANS 3

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BARBIE GAMES

Final paper Serious Game Play MA New Media & Digital Culture Faculty of Humanities University of Utrecht

November 2010

Abstract The research in this paper is aimed at investigating how the characteristics of digital Barbie games have developed since their emergence. This was operationalized by analyzing the keywords on the packaging of 38 digital Barbie games. In doing so, special attention was paid to the aspect of age compression: the articifical acceleration of the desire to grow up, a term applicable to tweener girls, who mainly constitute the target group of digital Barbie games. It turned out that the way Barbie games have been marketed towards tweener girls did change. However, over time the keywords did not point towards a greater but rather a smaller influence of the phenomenon of age compression. This might have something to do with the fact that the technology underneath the Barbie games has improved over time, opening up more possibilities contentwise and therefore possibly marketingwise as well.

Contents

1. Introduction

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2. The evolution of girl games

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3. Tweener girls and the phenomenon of age compression

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4. The evolution of the marketing of Barbie games & the phenomenon of age compression

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Hypothesis

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Analysis

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Results

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01 5. Conclusion & Discussion

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Bibliography

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Appendix A

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Appendix B

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Appendix C

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1. Introduction The girl game market is up and running, especially since the release of Barbie Fashion Designer in November 1996. Girl games have been the subject of controversy ever since –especially from the feminist movement– because of the unhealthy ideal of the Barbie body and the values that are being expressed with it towards the target audience (Cassell&Jenkins 1998: 366). Having recently walked into a random toy store in Utrecht to look at Barbie dolls and Barbie games on a quest for inspiration for this research, I could clearly see why.

Packages focus on outer symptoms, on being ‘cool’ and on being ‘trendy’. I found out that this was not only the case for the Barbie department. There appeared to be an entire department dedicated to bags, scarfs, bijoux and cosmetics for young girls called ‘Little diva’. Girls seem to grow up young these days, I thought. This was confirmed while reading Kantrowitz&Wingert (1999) who call the present generation of girls ‘a generation in fast forward’ (according to Rae Gutrhie 2005: 1-2). In this paper the phenomenon of fast forwarding will be covered by the term ‘age compression’. Slightly shocked but, admittedly, also intrigued by this experience I came to formulate the following research question: To what degree has the evolution of the marketing of Barbie games been influenced by age compression?

The research in this paper is aimed at investigating how the characteristics of digital Barbie games as carried out on the packaging of the games have developed since their emergence, whilst elucidating the aspect of age compression. In doing so, I am not paying attention to the content of the games themselves but only focus on the way the games are being sold.

There are four terms in this research that require a definition. The first is ‘marketing’, by which I mean ‘a strategy that seeks to advertise to people with the intention of making people spend money in certain ways.’ (Rae Guthrie 2005: 15). The Barbie games that I am analyzing, then, are defined as ‘all published digital Barbie games between 1984 and 2010’. The target group at whom the marketing of the Barbie games is directed are young girls aged twelve years old and younger. For the majority of the games however, a minimum age

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of five years old applies. This target group then, can mainly be defined as ‘tweener girls’: girls who generally are eight to fourteen year old and more or less spanning two different child demographics: the child and the teenager demographic’ (Rae Gutrhie 2005: 28). At last, the phenomenon of age compression is defined as ‘an artifical acceleration of the desire to grow up’ (GSRI 2000).

The present paper is structured as follows. First I will describe the evolution of digital girl games in general and tweener girls in the context of the age compression phenomenon. Then I will present the actual research I performed on the packaging of Barbie games. This part is followed by the conclusion and a critical reflection on the conclusion and the research in general.

In short, by doing this research I want to find out how the marketing characteristics of digital Barbie games have changed since their emergence, whilst paying attention to possible effects of age compression. Has the way digital Barbie games are being marketed towards young girls changed? And if so, do boxes of modern Barbie games lay a greater emphasis on body, looks and boys than they did 25 years ago? If this turns out to be the case, this could mean that the marketing of digital Barbie games towards tweener girls is subject to –conscious or unconscious– participation in a seductive marketing trick called age compression.

2. The evolution of girl games Gendered toys go a long way back. Computer-mediated gendered toys and games for girls however, constitute a recent development (De Castell & Bryson 1998: 233). For for a long time the potential of the girl game market as it exists today has been denied. It wasn’t until the 1990s that a handful of companies started challenging the gaming industry’s latent assumption that girls and technology don’t mix. In late 1995, Her Interactive released McKenzie & Co., the first CD-ROM produced especially for girls. The game deals with handling boyfriend or would-be boyfriends problems, how to dress and what make up to wear (Brunner, Bennett and Honey 1997: 81). That young girls have a huge

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business potential became clear in November 1996. This was the date that Mattel Media, Inc. caused a major breakthrough by releasing Barbie Fashion Designer: a CD-ROM game that allowed girls to design clothes for their Barbie dolls and print them out on fabric with a laser printer. With more than 500,000 copies sold in its first two months of sale it became the first piece of entertainment software to garner a mass market with girls (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield 1998, Gorriz&Medina 2000: 3). It became clear that there was a huge untapped consumer electronics market to be exploited. Other game developers tried to fill up the upcoming girl market segment. And they succeeded in doing so: in 1997 approximately $5 billion was generated just in North America. This breakthrough was accomplished however, by affirming received gender stereotypes which goes for the content as well as for the packaging of the girl games: The early attemps to make video games appealing to girls largely consisted of having female protagonists and making the content nonviolent. The gendering of games was furthered by the advertising, promotion, and packaging of the games in the ubiquitous pink and purple boxes. (Cassell&Jenkins 1998)

By the end of 1996 there were 15 girl software titles. As of November 1997, at least 31 girls games had made it to the market (Weatherford 1998: 4).

Companies such as Sega, Hasbro, Simon & Schusters and Mattel started to establish themselves as developing games especially for girls. Mattel continued releasing digital Barbie games that came to form considerable part of the girl game industry. It is said that these games earned and still earn their success because of the representation of their characters. Girls would enjoy identifying with real-life characters and like to act out characters, as if they were in a story (Gorriz&Medina

2000:

47).

The

aforementioned

companies

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themselves as producing girl games were shortly followed by CyberGrrl, Girl Games and Girl Tech (De Castell&Bryson 1998: 233). These days companies are more than willing and even eager to create digital games for girls, because of the profit that can obviously be gained from it (Gorriz&Medina 2000: 43).

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3. Tweener girls and the phenomenon of age compression Traditionally girls aged eight to fourteen years old were looked upon as a group of girls who play with dolls and their friends. Nowadays these girls can be sided with a group of people called tweens. This term has been one of the major inventions by marketeers in the early 1990s to comprise all –mainly female– consumers between eight and fourteen years old. They find themselves located between childhood and teenager-dom and therefore are involved in a period of identity formation and matching insecurities which makes them vulnerable to being influenced (Rae Guthrie 2005: 1-17). Another characteristic of tweens is the economic power that they have through their parents: they “enjoy middle to upperclass comfort and therefore can fully participate in consumer activities that define their generation” (Rae Guthrie 2005: 19). A survey executed by Her Interactive, for example, states that 10 to 15 year old girls contribute some $50 billion per year to the American economy. They spend this on clothes, jewelry and make up but also on software (Gorriz&Medina 2000: 44). The fragile identities and the economic power of tweener girls combined ends in tweener girls easily being pushed into the role of a particular consumer. Klein (2000) describes how corporations in the 1990s started turning towards the youth market, after the baby boomers had stopped consuming as they used to: Their parents might have gone bargain basement, but kids, it turned out, were still willing to pay up to fit in. Through this process, peer pressure emerged as a powerful market force, making the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consumerism of their suburban parents pale by comparison. As clothing retailer Elise Decoteau said of her teen shoppers, "They run in packs. If you sell to one, you sell to everyone in their class and everyone in their school." (p. 34)

Ever since tweens are willing to pay in order to be ‘cool’, companies are willing to chase the cool factor, even to the extent that they hire ‘cool hunters’ or ‘cultural spies’ to infiltrate in the world of tweens in order to keep abreast of what is trendy. This turned out to be tricky since “the minute a cool trend is discovered, repackaged, and sold to kids at the mall—it's no longer cool. So the kids turn to something else, and the whole process starts all over

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again." (Rushkoff 2001) The cool factor for young girls turns out to consist of more and more gendered products which they are encouraged to buy. By means of these products they are being pushed into more defined gender roles.

Tweener girls are expected to be busy worrying about make up, their figure and boys. As a consequence, they feel in a rush to grow up (Kantrowitz 1999 according to Rae Gutrhie 2005: 1-2). A first of its kind study performed by The Girl Scout Research Institute called Girls Speak out: Teens before their Time, has recognized the pressure of having to deal with typically teenage issues while not yet having reached the age of a teenager. They call it age compression or developmental compression: an artificial acceleration of the desire to grow up.

The underlying problem consists of an incongruence between different aspects of growing up. The physical and the cognitive development of young girls has accelerated when compared to that of previous generations. For the present generation of girls is getting taller and going through puberty at a younger age than previous generations which goes for the acquisition of critical thinking skills as well. The emotional development such as the processing of puberty however, has remained constant. The incongruence between the level of physical and cognitive development on the one hand and the level of emotional development on the other causes stress and confusion for tweener girls. The parents of the girls cordially trying to help them by encouraging them to take up traditional gender roles, has not proved to be very useful either (Rae Gutrhie 2005: 188).

4. The evolution of the marketing of Barbie games and the phenomenon of age compression Hypothesis Having discussed the two relevant bodies of literature which are used to frame this research we can now formulate the following hypothesis:

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Because of the fact that digital Barbie games are products that have to be sold, the way they are being marketed towards tweener girls has changed since the emergence of the concept of age compression in the 1990s.

The difference consists of a greater emphasis on concepts such as figure, boys, make up and shopping as the years move past.

Analysis To be able to test the hypothesis I first manually collected scans of front and back covers of 38 physically launched digital Barbie games as found on Mobygames.com and Giantbomb.com. The games were all published between 1984 and 2010 by different companies: Mattel Media and Mattel Inc., but also by 1C Company, Vivendi Universal, The Learning Company Inc., Sony Computer, Hi Tech Entertainment and Hi-Tech Expressions Inc. (see Figure 1 and 2).

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Source: Mobygames.com

The next step was to perform a general analysis, which consisted of reading the texts on the front and back covers of the Barbie games and then intuitively noting keywords which state how the game is being marketed to appeal to young girls. For example: adventure, glamour or magic (Appendix A).

Then

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performed a second analysis by specifically looking at keywords which represent terms that are compatible to terms that are being used in literature about age

compression. Of the keywords in Appendix A I found the following to be applicable to this particular analysis: make up, date, shop, cool, trendy, glamour, fashion, hot, gorgeous and success. The table of analysis can be found in Appendix B. To also pay atleast a bit of attention to the aspect of content in the Barbie games, I performed an additional analysis on their genres, such as adventure, action or puzzle-solving (Appendix C). I did this in order to find out whether the phenomenon of age compression can possibly be traced back not only to the keywords as mentioned on the packaging of the games, but also to their contents.

Results Having executed the analyses of which the corresponding tables can be found in Appendices A, B and C, we can now discuss the results of the analyses as described in the preceding section. The goal of this research was to find out how the marketing characteristics of digital Barbie games have changed since their emergence, while looking at this development from the perspective of age compression.

Looking at all the keywords in general we can observe that there are some keywords which constitute a constant factor throughout the history of the marketing of digital Barbie games. These keywords are adventure, solve, fashion, magic, mystery, design, create and explore. Then there are keywords that do not at all appear often on covers such as compete, opponent, skill, dare, and fun. Then there is a development to be noticed as to the levels of personality and sociality of the keywords that were analyzed. When compared to the modern packages, on the early packaging the focus is mainly being put on the glamour, outfits, hairdo and designs. After 1999, there are additional keywords showing up which seem to represent other values than appearance and adventure, expressed by keywords such as friendship/friends/with friends/gain trust and friendship, celebration, persue big dream/let your dreams take flight.

The second analysis focused on the keywords that specifically have to do with age compression. We can observe that the majority of the keywords (in

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games from 17 out of 24 years of publication) is stated on the packaging of games published in 1999 and before. The keywords that appear most frequently in these early digital Barbie games are cool and trendy, followed by make up, date and shop. On the boxes of the games released after 1999, glamour and fashion are mentioned most frequently in the context of age compression.

Looking at the additional analysis of genre of the games that have been analyzed we can state that the adventure, the action and the puzzle-solving genre are most dominant. The racing/driving, role play and simulation genre are least present. Inbetween there is the sports genre. There is no tendency to discover in genres of the games over time.

5. Conclusion & Discussion On the basis of the results as discussed in the previous section we can now formulate an answer to the research question of to what degree the way digital Barbie games are being marketed towards tweener girls has changed.

The first result appears to be an appearing dichotomy between digital Barbie games before and after 1999. For the convenience in describing the outcomes of this research I will call the games published before 1999 ‘first generation Barbie games’ and the games published after 1999 ‘second generation Barbie games’. In both groups of games keywords representing materialistic values are predominant, as the constant factor fashion and recurring keywords such as make up and glamour point out. What makes these two groups of games different however, is the partition of gender stereotypical keywords inclining towards teenage issues. The first generation of Barbie games seems to confirm gender stereotypical aspects more than the second generation of Barbie games does. So we can conclude that the keywords on the boxes of second generation Barbie games do not lay a greater emphasis on body, looks and boys than is the case for the first generation of games. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. The additional analysis of the genre of the Barbie games from the first and second generation, does not add any interesting results.

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The hypothesis as formulated in section 4 can therefore be partially accepted and partially rejected: Because of the fact that digital Barbie games are products that have to be sold, the way they are being marketed towards tweener girls has changed since the emergence of the concept of age compression in the 1990s. The difference consists of a smaller emphasis on concepts such as figure, boys, make up and shopping as the years move past.

Discussion There are a few critical notes to this research and the results that it has brought forth, which I would like to pay attention to. First of all it has to be stated that the material that has been analyzed in order to come to the findings as described above, concerns the marketing of physically published Barbie games only. If one would like to have a complete overview of Barbie games, one also should take into account the Barbie games that can be played online, for example. For future research, it may also be interesting to analyze packaging of other girl games with other female protagonists, in order to grasp a more representative picture of the marketing of girl games.

Secondly, it has to be noted that the identifiable decrease of stereotypicality in the marketing of digital Barbie games could be the consequence of a more sophistated product as a result of improving technology.

In 1997 Nancie S. Martin from Mattel recognized the relationship between the quality of games and the status quo of technology: It [the product] has to foster some sense of relationship –and the difficulty of doing this is one of the limitations of technology– but the more emotional content a product can have, the more successful I believe it’s going to be with anybody, but particularly with girls, because they have a stake in it. They feel that something will happen that they took part in and that there’s a back-andforth between them and the product, that there was a dialogue between them and the product in some way, and that part of that is about the choices that they’re making and part of that is that those choices lead to an accomplishment.

(Martin 1997 according to Cassel & Jenkins 1998: 148)

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Now if the quality of the games are dependent on technology, then the vocabulary on the packaging of the games might have been subject to some limitation as well. This might have been an interfering factor to this research.

Finally I would like to state my opinion with respect to the gender aspect which clearly comes forward in this research. Even though according to the results of this research the gendered stereotypicality has decreased, during the analysis it became obvious that materiality and outer appearance continue to play an explicit role in the marketing of Barbie games. This is worrying, since the girls who are labelled ‘target group’ of those games find themselves in a process of identity development in which they are vulnerable to basically any marketing trick. To turn insecurities into profit is not very tasteful. Another turn can be given to the processes these girls go through. Brunner, Bennett and Honey (1997) for example, propose to use the quest for identity as a basis for the design of game environments. They suggest to offer players options, ... where you can pick and choose from a range of personas, decide on varying strategies, and discover that different actions result in variable outcomes. We need a more complex relationship between actions taken and results obtained, and we need contexts that offer rich and varied opportunities for exploration. (p. 82)

This broader perspective pleading for variety and diversity in game design should also be applied to the packaging of digital Barbie games: more variety and hereby matching a range of interests and personalisaties so that the boxes challenge received gender stereotypes, and not simply affirm them.

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