The premise of Wired blogger Tracey John's article, Ridiculous Life Lessons From New Girl Games, is intriguing. She introduces a list of upcoming "tween" games as follows:

...you can view these "wholesome" games as being just as bad for girls as Grand Theft Auto's random bloodshed and rampant criminality is for young, impressionable boys. And while GTA's influence on boys has been dissected to death, what about the Nintendo DS' upcoming avalanche of games for tween girls? What kinds of values do preteens learn from these titles? Valuable life lessons, or bad habits?

Great questions! Unfortunately, she then proceeds to suggest possible misconceptions about the games, playing it mainly for laughs rather than information.

Now I'm one of the last guys who should be clucking disapprovingly about someone doing a goofy list on a blog. But Miss John has raised an important question that deserves to be answered when the games she mentions are actually released. And frankly I'd prefer a female gamer answer it.

For instance, is Miss John serious when she offers the following observation about the lesson learned from a THQ game due in September called My Boyfriend?

You are incomplete without a man, or at least a digital replica of one. More specifically, the game instructs that there are only a limited number of potential mates in the world, and the only way to find the right one is to flirt with all of them.

Tween girls are an emerging demographic aggressively targeted by publishers these days. Many of the targeted girls are the daughters of gamers like me who are well informed about what kinds of games may and may not be appropriate for boys. We have a keen eye for violence and profanity. Some of us might even be attuned to persnickety things like bad driving habits and how women are portrayed. We know M-rated alien killing in Halo from M-rated cop killing in GTA4. Many fathers consider it their fatherly duty to play through Call of Duty 4, Far Cry 2, and Red Faction: Guerrilla at least once in order to screen them for their sons.

But how many fathers are going to make it more then fifteen minutes into My Boyfriend? Or whatever candy-colored kill-me-now monstrosity is depicted in that screenshot up there in which Olivia has a 35 frag lead over Emilie and Anna? In the future, I hope we can look to writers like Miss John for their insight into what games are teaching our daughters. Her perspective is a valuable counterpoint to the marketing of videogames to tween girls.