Gen Katz is editor of Games4Girls.com, an online zine that focuses on games that appeal to girls. For her exclusive Your Studio blogs, she writes about videogames, Princess Bride, and much more.

This little piece of information has been sitting on my desk for awhile now:

33% of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42% of college graduates never read another book after college.
80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

Now, couple this with book industry’s stats that romance fiction comprises over 50% of all popular fiction sold in North America.

So what do we have here? Of the few who read, they read for romance. What about the rest of us? Where do we get our romance?

Yes, there is online, but I don’t want to go there. Movies have always given us a fair amount, with the “date movie” or the “three handkerchief movie.” But I propose the date game — videogames that would somehow include a little romance.

Romance is non-existent in most games. I think it’s because boys/men have been and continue to be a very large proportion of the designers, producers and CEO’s of game companies. In the games that are produced, most of the time is spent in sports, or shooting, or racing, and sometimes solving puzzles so we can get back to fighting. Of course, in our society, the slightest, most obscure hint of sexuality will give the game an “M” rating.

The male/female relationships, if there are any, rarely show any tenderness, care or affection. What the industry gives us is the rescue scenario — girlfriend disappears and boy spends the entire game rescuing her. The implication is that said girl is important enough for the boy to risk life and limb for her. Or, the girl, or wife is brutally killed, and this allows the male character to embark upon a wanton, blood-lust adventure of revenge.

As a start, you have to have characters that you become attached to, and they don’t necessarily have to be human. Kate Walker in Syberia has a surprisingly appealing robotic traveling companion. In Portal, players established a relationship with just the disembodied voice of GLaDOS. Perhaps in epics like Final Fantasy attachments can evolve into love, but that action appears mostly in back story; the player is engaged in mostly fighting and leveling up. Often the reason behind including male and female characters in the story is to give gamers a chance to play as a male or a female.

There has to be a cataclysmic change in the game industry. Females think differently than males. Women controlling games will make different scenarios, and maybe even give us a little romace.

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