Oh good, a “girls can” book that actually says girls can’t. Helpful.
The latest affront to basic decency in gendered toy marketing comes from a Barbie book that tells girls they can’t be game developers or programmers.
The book is bafflingly called Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer. It was written by Susan Marenco and published by Random House. Despite its encouraging title, Marenco’s book actually tells pre-teen girls that Barbie can only contribute to the design of the game she’s building.
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As [blogger Pamela] Ribon describes in an increasingly cringe-inducing writeup about the book, Barbie is introduced as the designer of stereotypically “girly” games featuring cute little animals. Barbie’s work resembles Pet Rescue or similar mobile games—you know, not the ones “real gamers” make.
That’s okay, though, because Barbie is apparently perfectly happy with her second-class status. “I’m only creating the design ideas,” Barbie tells Skipper. “I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!”
Subtle!
Holy fuck. My head hurts.
@2…Beat me to it…my exact reaction was:
Holy fuck. My head hurts.
Here’s a better title for a book: “Roberta Williams: I founded Sierra, invented the entire genre of adventure games, and wrote, like, a thousand games myself. “
The Simpsons mocked the heck out of Barbie’s sexism in Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy way back in 1994 – and they still don’t get it.
Yesterday, there were some righteous tweets riffing on this by Brianna Wu — aka @spacekatgal. Happily, someone kindly storified all the tweets in one place. Good news, because @spacekatgal tweets prolifically.
Facepalm, after the fact. The “Someone” I just referred to who storified @spacekatgal IS @spacekatgal.
Katie Mack refactored some of the problematic issues with the book, in true engineering (and Barbie-loving!) style.
“Roberta Williams: I founded Sierra, invented the entire genre of adventure games, and wrote, like, a thousand games myself. “
Invented the graphic adventure genre. Which brought us masterpieces like Jane Jensen‘s game “Gabriel Knight, Sins Of The Fathers” … which was actually creepy enough in spots that I got a bit nervous.
Jane Jensen did work on a ton of games. It’s like they’re ‘hard core gamers‘ or somethin’
The Barbie in the picture above must have had some major breast reduction surgery since I last saw her.
Barbie apparently also thinks computers work via lining up different colored blocks to make a puppy do cute tricks. This series of non sequiturs clearly indicates that Barbie should probably not be writing games. In fact, she may want to pack that computer in a box and ship it off to a deserving 12 year old girl who probably could write (or learn to write) games or other applications or roll her own OS…
More improvements: feminist hacker Barbie.
Whoinhell is Steven and Brian?
Where’s Ken?
And *that* is why I tried very hard to make sure my daughter never got any of that barbie crap.
Gee, I wonder who’s help Susan Marenco needed to turn it into a ‘real book?’
Gaaah
Guess what’s not going to be in ANYONE’s gift this Yule??