Mattel releases Game Developer Barbie [View all]

[Recursion]

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/06/mattel_s_game_developer_barbie_is_fantastic.html

After three false starts Mattel seems to have actually come close to getting this right (spoiler alert: they asked a female tech who works for them).

Game Developer Barbie is wearing jeans, sensible shoes (!), and a T-shirt that is both nerdy and kind of cute. (I think it could be translated as “control-alt-ponytail.”) She has a laptop that is laptop-colored, because women can actually use tech products that aren’t pink. There are no pictures of Ken or fashion magazines around her workspace, just coffee, headphones, flowcharts—not to mention actual programming books (C++ and C#) and action figures (He-Man!). She still likes some pink, of course; this is Barbie, and there’s nothing wrong with pink.

Perhaps most striking, Barbie can actually code. With some help from my colleagues as well as the Twitter hive mind, we were able to just barely make out the code on Barbie’s laptop. The interface appears to be Alice, an educational programming environment, and the code it’s outputting is ActionScript (or maybe Haxe). Basically, she seems to be making a Bejeweled clone in Flash. And whatever you think about that choice, it’s a huge step up from Computer Engineer Barbie’s laptop showing nothing but ones and zeros.

However, even more important than her newfound programming prowess, Game Developer Barbie learned the same lesson that I tried to impart in my remix: that making a game is more than just writing code. The back of her box tells us: “Game development involves storytelling, art & graphic design, audio design, & computer programming. Because there are so many aspects to creating a game, teamwork is important.”


This is particularly important is because as much as we don’t want to suggest that girls can’t code, we also don’t want to suggest that coding is the only path to working with computers or games. Sometimes other parts of computing—like design or human-computer interaction—are delegitimized, considered less rigorous or less important. Or maybe they’re delegitimized in part because they happen to be the parts of computing where there are more women present (in other words, more inclusive), which is even worse.