Through all the screeching noise of daily life, one 💖thought cuts through with resounding clarity: girl games are totally making a comeback.

I know this truth as well as I breathe air. It's a natural truth. Just as condensation leads to rain, or a seed becomes a sprout, the supposed 20-year trend cycle (which has ) has꧋ brought us b🌺ack to 2000's era, ultra-feminine video games.

You see the evidence in the past year of big releases, in both AAA and indie games. Open-world adventure 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Infinity Nikki recalls browser dress-up games on sites like , 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Princess Peach: Showtime! is the first mainline Peach game since 2005, while Roblox's runway simulator 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dress to Impress has made the same asteroid impact on culture as – another cigarette-chic popularity contest – did in 20ꦐ08.

Looking forward, an independent dev team is trying to , a hot pink virtual world Mattel shut down in 2011. Other indie devs are doing what they can to inject as much bubblegum flavor as possible into new IP like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Don't Stop, Girlypop, an arena shooter with browser dress-up game elements. Plus, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Sims 1 and 2 – two of the earliest mainstream titles to appeal to a – just got re-released, as if you need any more proof of gaming's industrial m🅰a💛keover.

Despite my eagerness for more platform heels and princess gowns in games otherwise dominated by grumpy men with beards, grumpy men in space, and grumpy men on hors🌳es, part of me finds some girl games' narrow purview belittling. Women, who now make up compared to , are as diverse as any demographic and obviously have interests beyond putting on lace and lipstick.

But, because the majority of video games are 🦄made to appeal to male players, , it also feels absolutely necessary that deliriously feminine games return to the industry. It's like ending a juice fast with a dripping cheeseburger – eventually, a girl's gotta eat.

"Piece by piece," writes poꦏet Ann Carson in her 2001 essay "The Beauty of the Husband," "all of it / in the months that followed, sitting / in the living ro꧒om late at night with all the lights on, chewing." Playing games explicitly marketed toward women feels furtive like this, an indulgent shrug to what's expected of us.

For decades, the sentiment among a shrieking subset of players has been that women either don't play games, or they shouldn't play games, so as to not disturb the karmic balance of buns-out fanservice in titles like Stellar Blade or 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Street Fighter 6. In the late 2010s, "fake gamer girl" memes were so pervasive, they warranted . Now, again, some male gamers complain of female protagonists in games like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Witcher 4, or female protagonists who aren't beautiful enough for th🌱em, saying thi꧒ngs in popular Reddit threads like ""

Girl games are the antidote to this aggression. As they rise in popularity – during its Steam release week, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Hello Kitty Island Adventure sold just slightly under 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – I believe that frantically feminine themes will start integrating with more masculine or gender neutral games. So I hope that, one day, I'll be able to play something like Elden Ring without frowning about how nearly every armor set comes with a broad, Superman chest or a codpiece. Maybe, someday, voice chat won't be a . Horror games could start telling affecting stories about complex women again, like Fatal Frame, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:American McGee's Alice, and Rule✤ of Rose were able 🔯to accomplish in the early 2000's.

It's also completely possible that the girly game trend will fade into the roaring sound of men with destinies as it did over a decade ago, when dress-up browser games s♏tarted to disappear🍒 while Call of Duty remained.

But I think things might be different this time. Through social platforms like Twitch, women are now able to loudly assert themselves in gaming. By rallying togeꦕther and gossiping with one another, we've been able to prop up entire genres, . It's obvious to anyone who pays attention that women have their own noble destinies, too – some of them just happen to be bedazzled.

Open-world dress-up game Infinity Nikki is serious business – so serious its devs have already banned over 80 accounts for cheating: "We implore all Stylists to adhere to the game rules."