Thank you to the girls who participated in this study. It is their voices and perspectives that I hope shine through in the book. I also appreciate the time that Jane Friedhoff gave to me to share her work on video game design. I am grateful to the informal education programs that participated in the interviews. They are truly doing amazing work to teach girls video game design.

In 2014, high school students Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser created a video game called “Tampon Run.” The basic premise of the game is to collect tampons, shoot them at your enemies, and be sure not to run out of them before you have your next period. The girls developed the idea for the game at a Girls Who...

In the popular Nintendo game Super Mario Brothers, the quote “Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle” appears at the end of each of the game levels (Nintendo R&D4, 1985). In the game, Mario navigates through the Mushroom Kingdom and his main goal is to save Princess Peach. Princess Peach’s only role in the game is to be a damsel in distress. As Anita...

Aybie, age 16, tells me about how she is an avid gamer, playing online every day after school. She plays adventure and fantasy games like Skyrim and Paragon. She is different from most of the girls in my study, who primarily play casual games in small doses of time. As she tells me about the different games she plays and the accessories she buys with her own money, I ask her if she...

This chapter explores how the domestic context influences girls’ video game playing, specifically how girls’ interactions with their parents and siblings impact how, why, and if girls play video games. In chapter 3, girls spoke about how they played casual games in snippets of time in between other activities both in and out of the home. In this chapter, I look more closely at gender...

In 2013, Mike Mika, a video game designer who likes to play video games with his three-year-old daughter, did something that went viral. His daughter was upset when she couldn’t play a female character to rescue Mario in Donkey Kong. So he modified, or “modded,” the game so that Pauline could save Mario, rather than the other way around. He posted his mod on...

Women make up 41 percent of video game players (Entertainment Software Association, 2016), yet they account for only 23 percent of video game developers (Weststar & Legault, 2016). These numbers mirror the broader statistics of women in STEM fields, with the number of women accounting for only 26 percent of computing professionals and only 12 percent of engineers in 2013 (Corbett & Hill...

I was first interested in the role that video games play in girls’ lives when I was completing my dissertation. For my dissertation research, I examined informal education programs designed to bridge the digital divide for girls and minority youth. Informal education programs play an important role in developing technological literacy, since much of the learning that is important to...

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AAUWsee American Association of University Women ,

Carolyn M. Cunningham is associate professor in the Communication and Leadership Studies program at Gonzaga University, where she teaches classes in communication theory, women and leadership, digital storytelling, and communication pedagogy. Her research examines the intersections of gender, technology, and youth. She is the editor of Social...