The American Girls Premiere and computer games ‘for girls’
Our computer lab was in the basement. There was some sort of mold that grew in the Ohio humidity and it made my eyes itch. But there were games — edutainment, I guess I should qualify, given the internet’s stark distinction between games and games — to distract me. It was hard to beat the satisfaction of the grocery check-out simulator in Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. A countless number of pioneers died of dysentery in Oregon Trail. My sister and I would often travel the Trail together, naming and crafting stories around our pixelated adventurers, waxing poetic on their tombstones. And if there was a game that gave us free rein to explore this dramatic side, it was The American Girls Premiere. The version we were gifted was the Special Edition Collector’s Set, which cost a whole $10 more and came packaged in a fancy tin destined to become a pencil holder. The raised images of the core American Girls™ on the cover — Felicity, Josefina, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, and Molly — held a 3D promise of stories to be rewritten and written anew, to (seemingly) define for ourselves what it meant to be a girl and to be American. Not that a middle-school girl from Ohio recognized that at the time.
My parents started homeschooling my sister and me when I went into fifth grade. It was 1996. We lived in Appalachia by virtue of our home in southeastern Ohio, on the border of West Virginia where my mom was born and grew up. We weren’t characters from a J.D. Vance book, and we were relatively privileged — white, middle-class. Our dad was an engineer at one of the plants that stunk up the sky on the way to the mall across the river. You drove through a holler to get to our house, but we lived in a brick split-level on the hill beyond.
Computer
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