Sega Girls Task Force

Outline

"Operation"? Production? The middle section

• Research possible Sega Club connections.
• At some point, the ideology behind the project shifted from "games specifically for girls" to "girl-friendly".

Analysis and legacy

The Sega Girls Task Force was created foremost from a need to work uphill against something which seemed insurmountable, and often mirroring Sega of America's own uphill battle with Nintendo. As the then-modern Sega of America was formed largely to take on Nintendo, its way of thinking and corporate personality took on a more bold, maverick form, instilling the company with the courage to take chances that its competitor wouldn't. This scrappy, get-it-done spirit allowed for a wide range of creative ideas to spring forth, and from this environment, a project like the Sega Girls Task Force could finally see enough corporate support to be actually implemented.

While the project's acknowledgement of girls as a legitimate audience was a relative first for such a large game company, the Sega Girls Task Force received very little in the way of publicity or promotion, and with the group's legacy more apparently in the later work of team members (specifically in the realms of production practices and game design considerations).

• All analysis aside, the article needs to be framed to, somewhere near the end, take a step back and say something to the effect of: hey, this is still a corporation trying to tackle gender considerations, don't read too much into it outside of being A) a time capsule of interesting SoA history, and B) a very small stepping stone in the history of gender studies. Good minds can only push limited money so far, and that extends to a company's gender understanding as well. Everyone involved did everything right and worked with passion and class, but this is a case of- something between society having progressed in our understanding of gender, and just not having enough resources allocated to get the marketing ideology to a certain point.