A ROM OF THEIR OWN

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

Ok., your name is Rockett. It's your first day at a new junior high school, and you're pretty nervous, but outside the building you meet this girl named Jessie who gives you the lay of the land ("Watch out for Nicole." "Who's Nicole?" "Don't worry, you'll find out sooner than you'd want to"). Now, do you walk into homeroom by Jessie's side or go it alone? She's nice, but is it smart to commit to a best friend already? What do you do?

If this doesn't strike you as hot gaming action, you're probably not a girl between eight and 13--which is to say, a member of Brenda Laurel's favorite demographic group. Laurel, a veteran of computer-game wars going back to Atari, has lately taken on the mystery of why there isn't better software for girls. The result, backed by the deep pockets of Interval Research, the high-tech think tank of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is a start-up called Purple Moon, whose debut CD-ROMs will be unveiled in two weeks at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta.

They won't be alone. Nearly two-dozen CD-ROMs aimed at preteen girls will be released this fall by companies with names like Girl Games and Her Interactive. It's a market that has been all but ignored in favor of the seemingly bottomless appetite of boys and young men for so-called twitch games, like the bloody, light-speed shoot-'em-ups Quake and Doom. Why the sudden interest in what young women may want? In a word: Barbie. Mattel last fall released a disc called Barbie Fashion Designer that was a runaway best seller, proving once and for all that if the pitch is right, the girls will play. "There's always been an interest in marketing for girls," says Suzanne Groatman, children's software buyer for the retail giant CompUSA. "Barbie just exploded the market. People are looking at this year as the time to launch on the coattails of that traffic."

The iffier question is how much traffic there will be for games that aren't as retrograde as, say, Barbie Magic Hair Styler--this fall's offering from Mattel. Some of the new titles come linked to popular books like the American Girl and Babysitters' Club series or Hollywood franchises such as Clueless and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. But a few hardy souls plan to sail unlicensed into waters that, given the hit-or-miss track record of CD-ROMs, are most kindly described as uncharted.

Count Laurel and her Purple Moon CEO Nancy Deyo among the pioneers. "If you're going to change how girls relate to science and computers, you need to do it by sixth grade," says Laurel, who has spent the past five years studying the play patterns of girls at the critical age she calls "too old for dolls, too young for cosmetics." Her research is based on conversations with more than a thousand girls, who (boys, take note) were interviewed with their best friends in attendance in order to "keep them honest."

The result is a fascinating portrait of gender-based misconceptions. There's a reason, for example, that the company isn't called Pink Moon. "We tested names with boys," says Deyo. "And when we showed them Purple Moon, it was just, like--bam!--'That would be for girls. Because purple [not pink] is girls' favorite color.'"

The biggest mistake game developers make, Laurel believes, is misunderstanding why girls don't like Doom and Quake and other so-called boys' games. It's not just that most girls are appalled by the brutal violence--they certainly are--but also that they resent the programmers' assumption that these games are too difficult for girls to play. "The industry said, 'Make it easier,'" says Laurel. "'Throw marshmallows at Barbie, make the projectiles move more slowly.'" But dumbing down, she insists, is precisely the wrong way to go. Girls don't think boys' games are too hard; they think they're too stupid. "They lack complexity in dimensions that girls care about," Laurel says. Boys like overt competition, violence and mastery for their own sake; girls, by contrast, prefer covert competition, intricate narratives and group efforts based on complex social hierarchies.

Translation: boys like Die Hard, girls like Guiding Light. Not exactly rocket science, eh? In fact, as the only modestly successful software house Rocket Science Games has learned, creating a hit CD-ROM can be just as hard as rocket science. Purple Moon's strategy is to give girls what they need and don't get nearly enough of: a chance to use play to deal with the issues they face in their increasingly complex emotional lives. "We call the age between childhood and adolescence the Two-Headed Girl," says Laurel. "On the one hand you're constructing your social persona, and on the other hand you're constructing your inner self, finding out what you value and how your emotions work. Those two sides don't talk to each other very well."

So Purple Moon built two games that do. In Rockett's First Day (the first of a series), carrot-topped Rockett steers through the treacherous shoals of junior high using a storytelling strategy Laurel calls "emotional navigation." Players decide how to interact with other characters, guiding and shaping the story based on how they think Rockett is feeling about a given situation. As a bonus, Rockett can even sneak peeks into her classmates' lockers.

Beneath the Two-Headed Girl's intricate social sphere lies her even murkier "inner life." This is the purview of Purple Moon's second line of games, Secret Paths. The debut title, Secret Paths in the Forest, is a gorgeously illustrated adventure game whose players take soul-baring journeys that are essentially preteen female versions of Robert Bly. The game begins with girls gathering in a tree house to talk Issues: one girl doesn't think she's pretty enough, another isn't getting along with her siblings, and so on. Purple Moon misses no chance to add layers of complexity or to cross-merchandise; most of the characters in Secret Paths are kids from the Rockett series revealing themselves more intimately. They'll also turn up this fall on the Purple Moon Website. "Every character," Deyo promises, "will write and publish her own Web page." One girl named Whitney, for instance, comes across in the Rockett games as kind of a...well, let's just say it rhymes with witch. "But we learn in the tree house," Laurel adds reassuringly, "that her parents are divorced and she misses her mom, and there are some issues there that she really needs help with."

Will such diversions capture the hearts, minds and leisure time of nine-year-old girls? Something's bound to. "Half the people who shop in our children's area have girls at home," notes CompUSA's Groatman. That kind of market power surely abhors a product vacuum.

And corporate culture abhors an undereducated employee. Three-quarters of today's working women regard computer proficiency as essential to women's professional advancement, a survey released last week by Avon Products reports. For years, boys have been using video games as entry points into the world of serious computing. Purple Moon and its competitors think it's high time America's girls got their share of the action.