'Fed up with fantasies for male teenagers': fixing the depiction of women in games

When Nicole Stark set about writing a new video game, she took inspiration from an unusual subject: her autistic teenage daughter who was battling bullies. "I was fed up with power fantasies for male teenagers," says Stark, one half of Noosa-based family studio Disparity Games. Sick of seeing female protagonists who behaved "exactly like the male character but with large boobs", Stark, with help from her daughter, created Gemma, a 16-year-old ninja pizza delivery girl who must navigate a dystopian world of sky-high slums, exploitative mega-corporations and the cruelest of adversaries: her own peers. "It was important to make Gemma look like a 16-year old," says Stark, recalling her career as an artist when she would routinely make the breasts smaller on female characters – only for male colleagues to routinely make them bigger. Launched in 2015, Ninja Pizza Girl received favourable reviews.