What are girls made of?
By Margie Wylie
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM

SAN JOSE, California--Brenda Laurel wants girls to have fun. And if they pick up a few computer skills along the way, that's OK too.

The cofounder of software start-up Purple Moon, Laurel is making software that she hopes can tempt girls to use computers, have fun, and learn something, without being preachy or patronizing.

It's no mean ambition. Of the combined $5 billion market for games and software, analysts estimate that girls still account for only 20 percent, at best. If you consider that girls spend upward of $50 billion on "stuff" each year, that figure seems woefully low. The siren song of that vast untapped girl's software market, has lured other companies, including Sega and Sanctuary Woods, onto the rocks.

A woman who defiantly pointed out the sexism and shortsighted management that are often at play in the video gaming world, Laurel's just the Silicon Valley anachronism to take on the challenge. She has not only managed to survive, but she is counted among the techno-illuminati of her generation.

Don't mistake Laurel for too much of an insider though. After 20 years in the business, she is still wickedly disdainful of self-important industry-types, and still the wrong sex to be a top-dog in Silicon Valley. She smiles slyly when she recounts being fired four times, once getting sacked and rehired by the same company on the same day.

Unlike earlier flops, Laurel isn't making wild guesses or simply shoehorning female characters into twitchy blood-and-guts action games. She's done her homework. Before Purple Moon spun off from Paul Allen's industry think tank Interval Research Corporation, Laurel spent 2-1/2 years researching girls aged 7 to 12: how they think, what they want, how they play, who they are.

Purple Moon won't release its first line until the Christmas season this year, so Laurel is a little coy about how exactly she'll put all that research to work. What she will say is that much of what she found didn't suprise her. After all, she lived through those silent ages between little girlhood and womanhood herself. "It was nightmarish, it was hellish, I hated it," she says.

Laurel is first to admit that Purple Moon doesn't possess the magic key to unlock the riches of the girl's software market. But, if the research doesn't do it, then the sheer force of her personality combined with Paul Allen's notoriously deep pockets--he's also a major CNET backer--just might do the trick. "Anybody who knows me will see me in the products, at least in a couple of them," she said.

With Barbie, the first successful girls title, selling a half-million copies during the last Christmas season, Laurel finally has a target to gun for. Not that she dislikes the Barbie CD-ROM; she doesn't. But she admits the competition has forced Purple Moon to move a little faster.

NEWS.COM interviewed Laurel in March during this year's 50th Anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, where we discussed how others have missed the mark, her research, and making good girlware.

NEWS.COM: The Barbie CD-ROM that came out last Christmas sold 500,000 copies in two months, yet girls have been virtually ignored when it comes to software and games. Why have you invested three years of your life researching and creating software for girls?
Laurel: First off, I should say we're not in the exclusive possession of the Holy Grail here. The more women there are building Web sites for instance, the better the stuff is out there for girls. I've just been amazed over the last year to see amazingly cool stuff showing up. A lot of it is being done by women in college, women in graduate school, young professionals in Media Gulch.

I think it's taken us so long to do this because nobody saw a good business reason to pay attention and on the few occasions when people did try to pay attention, they paid attention in the wrong way. They basically extrapolated. So if a girl doesn't like an action game, it obviously must be because it's too hard or it's too technical. So let's make it stupid and have characters throwing marshmallows instead of shooting guns. And then if that doesn't work, then you get to say, "Well see, girls don't like computer games" and you get to walk away from it, you're off the hook.

The radical idea that girls are intelligent and inquisitive and get off on complexity hasn't occurred to people in the video game industry very often.

NEXT: Sugar? spice?