I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

My daughter wrote this http://fingswotidun.com/cruft/MelissaStory.txt While she was on a trip. When she got back she promptly forgot all about it which drives me mad, I really wanted to find out where it was going. She was 10 at the time.

On the other hand I once gave her a mechanical typewriter and later found http://fingswotidun.com/cruft/TypingByMelissa.jpg

YOu are right, though, that the computer games of the nineties offered a lot more hackability than iPhone apps. ZZT was an introduction to OOP for many kids, Red Alert had rules.ini that defined the stats for each unit, and Duke3D had configuration files in C. Mods and "Total Conversions" were a things. That ecosystem isn't just unavailable in mobile games, but would probably be hated by many companies who want full control over their product.

So two things we should do: write more moddable games, include defaults that don't assume we're all male (or white, for that matter.

Or because girls are willing to play as boys, and then pay to play as a girl?

But boys are unwilling to even play as a girl?

I prefer to look for rational (for example economic) reasons for things, and not assume everything is because of bias.

I know first hand this sucks. I have a daughter who just a couple days ago had me to download the Oz Temple Run game. She was very disappointed that the main character was a boy, that only 1 of 4 available characters was a girl, and that the girl was the hardest to unlock. We aren't spending running on virtual currency, so odds she'll never get to play the game as a girl.

It is interesting that often we don't see others' points of view until they're put in front of us. My entire life, I've played games with male defaults and never noticed the lack of females. Only when my 8 year-old girl said, "Why can't I play a girl?" did I realize it was an issue. Yikes!