Dear Three Games Store, Please Rethink Gaming for Girls

Dear Three Games Store, Please Rethink Gaming for Girls

It’s not 2005 so can we please not have a genre in the Three Games Store called Gaming for Girls?

I was waiting for a train and it was a bit sad, actually, because I had literally nothing to read. Well, okay. I lie. There were those tiny words printed on the back of the chocolate wrapper, but I’d consumed them along with the chocolate a whole ten minutes ago.

Ooh! I thought. I’ve just had a very good idea. It’s just fallen into my head like a song from the Mary Poppins musical, like a fluffy baby chick landing in an Easter bonnet.

I’ll buy a game, trilled my lovely idea as it fluttered onto my shoulder. Just a little game for my phone.

Me and my lovely little phone, we’ll play together. We’ll play a game, a good game, an enchanting game, one full of enchantments. Maybe I will get lost or hit something, and maybe I will choose to go down the alleyway or pick up a shiny new axe and name it Smithreen. It will be brilliant, playing this game, and all the commuters will huff at me because I’m so focused on my screen that I don’t hang on properly when the train goes round, you know, those special train-corners, but I won’t care because I’m PLAYING A GAME.

So I went to the Three Game Store and I got this…

I was excited now, I can tell you. As excited as a lovely clean spoon. A new game! Oh mercy me! Would it be as fiendish as the Broken Sword puzzle adventure series? As soothingly modernistic as Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery? Maybe it would be just a really simple yet fantastic dungeon romp like Warhammer Quest, right? Or a bit of past-blasting like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic? Or, er, look, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t picky. How about The Wolf Among Us or The Walking Dead, even though I’d already played them on the PC?

Even… look. I’ll be really honest here. Even Cut the Rope. I had a train to catch and nothing to read and I’m readabetic. I knew I had to move fast. Even plucky little Cut the Rope would have done it.

So I checked out the genres, real excited like, as you can probably tell. And I got…

Um.

I don’t know how to say this nicely. But I think you can see where I’m going with this.

I MEAN YEAH, DAMN YOU, I BOUGHT POCKET HOSPITAL. Is that what you want to hear? Because I did, okay? But I’d have found it just as easily if you’d put it in the sim games genre.

AND IT WASN’T EVEN AS GOOD AS THEME HOSPITAL. BUT THEN NOTHING IS, IT’S ALL LIKE TEARS IN THE RAIN, MY FRIEND, LIKE TEARS IN THE RAIN, BUT THAT’S A SEPARATE MATTER.

Here’s the thing, Three. Please don’t file games, pink or otherwise, into a genre called ‘Gaming for Girls’. We don’t need it. You don’t need it. Us people, us gamers, we’re all okay. We know what we like. We are, all of us, really comfortable nowadays with knowing if we like action or adventure or puzzles or sims or turn-based strategies or things where you help unicorns across rainbow bridges or whatever.

So… drop the ‘Gaming for Girls’ section. Please.

And I promise I’ll name the very next axe I collect after you.


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