Through all the screeching noise of daily life, one thought cuts through with resounding clarity: girl games are totally making a comeback.
I know this truth as well as I breathe air. It's a natural truth. Just as condensation leads to rain, or a seed becomes a sprout, the supposed 20-year trend cycle (which has historically applied to fashion) has brought us back to 2000's era, ultra-feminine video games.
You see the evidence in the past year of big releases, in both AAA and indie games. Open-world adventure Infinity Nikki recalls browser dress-up games on sites like GirlsGoGames, Princess Peach: Showtime! is the first mainline Peach game since 2005, while Roblox's runway simulator Dress to Impress has made the same asteroid impact on culture as Miss Bimbo – another cigarette-chic popularity contest – did in 2008.
Looking forward, an independent dev team is trying to reboot BarbieGirls.com, a hot pink virtual world Mattel shut down in 2011. Other indie devs are doing what they can to inject as much bubblegum flavor as possible into new IP like Don't Stop, Girlypop, an arena shooter with browser dress-up game elements. Plus, The Sims 1 and 2 – two of the earliest mainstream titles to appeal to a mostly female audience – just got re-released, as if you need any more proof of gaming's industrial makeover.
Despite my eagerness for more platform heels and princess gowns in games otherwise dominated by grumpy men with beards, grumpy men in space, and grumpy men on horses, part of me finds some girl games' narrow purview belittling. Women, who now make up 46% of the player population compared to 38% in 2008, are as diverse as any demographic and obviously have interests beyond putting on lace and lipstick.
But, because the majority of video games are made to appeal to male players, with 79% of games featuring male protagonists, it also feels absolutely necessary that deliriously feminine games return to the industry. It's like ending a juice fast with a dripping cheeseburger – eventually, a girl's gotta eat.
"Piece by piece," writes poet Ann Carson in her 2001 essay "The Beauty of the Husband," "all of it / in the months that followed, sitting / in the living room late at night with all the lights on, chewing." Playing games explicitly marketed toward women feels furtive like this, an indulgent shrug to what's expected of us.
For decades, the sentiment among a shrieking subset of players has been that women either don't play games, or they shouldn't play games, so as to not disturb the karmic balance of buns-out fanservice in titles like Stellar Blade or Street Fighter 6. In the late 2010s, "fake gamer girl" memes were so pervasive, they warranted their own research papers. Now, again, some male gamers complain of female protagonists in games like The Witcher 4, or female protagonists who aren't beautiful enough for them, saying things in popular Reddit threads like "AITA for not letting my girlfriend play online games?"
Girl games are the antidote to this aggression. As they rise in popularity – during its Steam release week, Hello Kitty Island Adventure sold just slightly under Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – I believe that frantically feminine themes will start integrating with more masculine or gender neutral games. So I hope that, one day, I'll be able to play something like Elden Ring without frowning about how nearly every armor set comes with a broad, Superman chest or a codpiece. Maybe, someday, voice chat won't be a disproportionately uncomfortable experience for women. Horror games could start telling affecting stories about complex women again, like Fatal Frame, American McGee's Alice, and Rule of Rose were able to accomplish in the early 2000's.
It's also completely possible that the girly game trend will fade into the roaring sound of men with destinies as it did over a decade ago, when dress-up browser games started to disappear while Call of Duty remained.
But I think things might be different this time. Through social platforms like Twitch, women are now able to loudly assert themselves in gaming. By rallying together and gossiping with one another, we've been able to prop up entire genres, like "cozy" games. It's obvious to anyone who pays attention that women have their own noble destinies, too – some of them just happen to be bedazzled.
