Why Haven't They Made This?

Pigtails, Pioneers, and Polygons

In the 90s, The Learning Company did release software based on the American Girls franchise: The American Girls Premiere. Players were given the opportunity to create and watch their own theatrical play based on the American Girl stories, selecting a script and casting characters to perform. They could even write their own play, and the level of control was such that players could adjust the lighting and sound. It garnered mostly positive reviews, though not necessarily for its educational value.

The problem is while the software certainly encouraged creativity, users had more fun inputting their own ideas, eschewing the rich historical universe of American Girl. The characters and their stories were just window dressing, not integral to the experience. For any piece of software to really make use of the American Girl license, it needs to play to one of the major strengths of the brand - the detailed historical universe and the engaging adventures that take place in it.

Imagine a fully immersive environment where the player gets to explore the house of one of the girls, like the pioneer girl, Kirsten. Players could walk around inside her humble farmhouse, check out the barn, explore the closets and trunks and all the clothing they may contain, pick up different items, and operate various household devices like looms or water pumps. Each book in the American Girl series has an appendix in the back which describes the historical context, divulging some factual information on what life was like for the people of that time and what their everyday lives might have been like. A video game could integrate this function into the gameplay. A player could highlight an object and get information about it, information that would be vital to using the item in-game.

A large part of what made Myst popular with casual and non-gamers was its pacing. They could explore the environments; walk around without the need to be somewhere right away. It wasn't frantic - it was relaxing, inviting.

Each American Girl game would be similar to that. For each girl, there would be a story to follow, certain objectives to be achieved, but no urgent clock to push the player forward. Gameplay would be similar to an old adventure game like the ones LucasArts and Sierra used to produce, with the environmental detail inherent in Shenmue. The story would be akin to those presented in the books, perhaps even written by the same authors for a sense of consistency. There might even be multiple stories in the same game - but regardless of the number of stories, none of them should ever take longer than a handful of hours to complete. Since it's inside the environment of a 10-year-old girl, none of the games would be too expansive, too intimidating. It would be an intimate experience that even a non-gamer could approach with confidence and become comfortable with.