By: Kristin Fitzsimmons, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow at The Strong National Museum of Play
In her 2011 book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle wrote that “in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.” Turkle’s concern 14 years ago that anthropomorphized machines and digital networks might counterintuitively alienate us from each other now seems almost quaint post-Covid 19 as many of us grapple with the impact of generative AI. I came to The Strong’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play to better understand the role of women as creators and as a market for games. By the end of the week, I realized that the most powerful part of this experience with the archives was uncovering the individual voices of creators and players page-by-page in their mimeographed, dot-matrixed, and handwritten notes. While I looked at later documents nicely printed from Microsoft Word, it was the faded, messy documents where I felt a deeper connection to their creators. In my research, I am most interested in women’s labor and leisure time when it comes to gaming. This led me to look at materials from The Strong by women in the game industry, market research, and periodicals. In this blog post, I highlight three of the collections I examined.
Computers, the internet, and all manner of tech have been blamed for isolating people from each other in exchange for an ersatz relationship with games or online life. Yet, there was evidence in The Strong’s collection that many game designers were interested in bringing people together through play. In a paper called “Multi-Player Games,” Danielle Bunten Berry, best known for 1983’s M.U.L.E., wrote, “From my point of view there is nothing a computer can do in a solo game that compares with the feeling you get from interacting with real people.” Bunten Berry was an early proponent of multiplayer games when the computer industry seemed to be moving in the other direction. Instead of envisioning a digital game as a relationship between user and computer or console, Bunten Berry saw the potential in a game to be a conduit for connection through multiplayer games.
Another collection that I felt drawn to was from HeR Interactive (1995–present), whose early motto was “For Girls Who Aren’t Afraid of a Mouse.” Unlike many other gaming companies at the time whose approach was to take an existing game but make it pink, companies like HeR Interactive and its contemporary Purple Moon (1996–1999) asked girls what they wanted in a game through interviews, focus groups and, in HeR Interactive’s case, by creating a teen advisory board. And girls weren’t afraid to share their feelings about the games. One girl wrote on her 1999 application to the teen advisory board that she wanted to be a member in order to “keep games for girls non-sexist and fun. Would like to see a game riding horses NOT with Barbie. Tired of boy games where the girl is rescued and almost always has big boobs. Would like brave and smart girls and athletic girls. Would like to see a girl save a boy.” One of my other favorites was a letter written to HeR Interactive’s president Megan Gaiser in 2011 from 15-year-old Katherine critiquing some elements in one of their Nancy Drew games, including the fact that Nancy “shrieks at the sight of a mouse despite the fact that your old slogan was ‘For girls not afraid of a mouse.’” In contrast to the assumption that girls were looking for something easy, much of their feedback was that they liked games that “made them think.” The Nancy Drew games also have intergenerational appeal. In printouts of reviews from Amazon and other game review websites, grandmothers lauded a game that they could play alone or with their grandkids.
Drawing back even further in time, I had the pleasure of looking at some early issues of the tabletop roleplaying game fanzine Alarums & Excursions (A&E), which was continuously edited and published by Lee Gold from 1975 until April 2025. Game historians Jon Peterson, Aaron Trammell, and Nikki Crenshaw have published works on A&E, but it was something else to see it myself and it took me a while to understand how to read it. Alarums & Excursions was an Amateur Press Association (APA), where contributors sent in their contributions (their own zines) to a central editor who would collate and distribute them. In Alarums & Excursions #60 from August 1980, Lee Gold estimated that she spent about 80 hours a month working on A&E, not including the time her husband Barry took to mimeograph and staple the pages. Each issue of A&E was about 60-80 pages (the maximum length accepted by Gold was 160 pages, according to A&E 68 from April 1981). Each zine was assembled from letter-sized, double-sided, single-spaced pages typed and mimeographed and stapled by the Golds. Not having seen A&E before, and having come of age in the 1990s, I had something much smaller in mind for the concept of “zine.” Before the advent of internet forums, APA publications like A&E directed comments to contributors of previous issues. Just like internet forums, there were ongoing disagreements—like whether female dwarves had beards and whether the increase in young players was a sign of success for gaming or a mere nuisance to the established gaming cohort. In almost every issue I looked at from 1978–1981, there were also discussions about women roleplayers. Contributors pontificated on why there weren’t larger numbers of women in roleplaying. More interesting to me was how deeply they discussed issues that could potentially face female characters such as pregnancy and the use of birth control. Because tabletop RPGs have their origins in wargaming, there was always a tension between the fantasy and “realism,” that is, what would be realistic given the fantastical, pseudo-medieval settings.
Unsurprisingly, the privileging of what Aaron Trammell calls the “accuracy of simulation over the ethics of simulation” did not sit well with everyone. In issue #63, electrical engineering graduate student Nancy Jane Bailey goes on a “tirade” (her word), letting readers know exactly why there weren’t more women in tabletop roleplaying. Among her reasons, she directly addresses the ongoing discourse about female characters, sex, and pregnancy, which was a commonly discussed topic in these early issues. Bailey argued that without access to reliable birth control, sexually active female characters would be at a strong disadvantage. She added, “In a world where magic is common, there must be some safe, reliable form of magical birth control… There is no purpose to female characters being penalized for having the same sort of active sex-life that most players seem to feel is necessary for the male characters.”
In the issues that I observed at The Strong, Lee Gold often retyped her contributors’ submissions to format them correctly. In some cases, that meant retyping commentary that she disagreed with. In issue #53 from January 1980, she wrote, “From time to time I contemplate charging an additional fee to insult others in A&E. (Say one dollar per paragraph). You have nudged me slightly closer to instituting this surcharge.” From a contemporary perspective, that A&E was an open forum despite having a single editor is striking because Gold could have easily rejected such pieces.
This was my first time working in a physical archive and it was a unique experience. For five to six hours a day, I would sit in a very cold, quiet room, my cell phone tucked away in a locker, flipping through gaming history alongside one or two fellow researchers. On paper, it sounds a little isolating, but on the contrary, observing documents, especially those that are not publicly available, was incredibly intimate. I had expected a wow factor to seeing some of the documents, but there was also a mix of other emotions—sadness, loss, anxiety, and hope— bound up in the personal and business papers of early gaming contributors. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to access these collections which helped me with my research but, more importantly, allowed me to connect across time and space with women who were pioneers in gaming.