Ronnie, Millie, Lila - Women’s History for Games - A Manifesto and a Way Forward

Oct 15, 2026

The article argues that historical writing about games often obscures women’s lives, work, and contributions, and it proposes that games historians should adopt feminist viewpoints. Drawing on history and film studies, it shows how feminist scholarship helped prevent key labor and production practices from becoming invisible. Using three named cases—Ronnie Lamm, Amelia “Millie” McCarthy, and Lila Zinter—the text demonstrates overlooked types of information and calls for broader, archive-based research that avoids reducing game history to a highlights reel.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Overview: Reclaiming Women’s History in Games

Feminist Interventions and Multidisciplinary History

Three Case Studies: Ronnie Lamm, Millie McCarthy, Lila Zinter

What Game Historiography Often Misses

Toward a Fuller Game History

Avoiding a Highlights-Reel Narrative

Women in American and Media History

Ronnie, Millie, Lila—Women’s History for Games A Manifesto and a Way Forward • Carly Kocurek The author discusses how, in practice, historians often obscure the effect of women’s lives, work, and contributions on their topic, and she takes special note of video game history. Using both history and film studies as examples, she argues that games historians can and should adopt feminist viewpoints to help ensure a fuller, more diverse accounting of the past. She examines the stories of three women—video game regulation activist Ronnie Lamm, route operator Amelia “Millie” McCarthy, and Exidy executive Lila Zinter—to demonstrate the types of historical information often overlooked in videogame history. She concludes that video game historians must use archives, documents, and other research to think more broadly about the purpose and impact of their own work and not allow video game history to be reduced toa highlights reel that captures only the works of a few key players. Instead, their history should capture the depth and diversity of video games and game culture, including the impact of women on the field. Keywords: arcade, coin-op games, Exidy, feminist history, Lila Zinter, Millie McCarthy, Ronnie Lamm, women in video games, video game history That video gaming has a gender problem has been so well established as to slide into a truism, something that is common sense, an unanchored, ahistorical fact that we just know. This is not to say that there is a dearth of research on the subject. The gender disparities of the video game industry’s labor force have been extensively documented as have the disparities in on-screen representation and among player populations. Scholars like Kishonna L. Gray, Laine Nooney, and Adrienne Shaw have made important recent contributions to our understanding of the topic. And my own book Coin-Operated Americans emanated from my interest in exploring questions about gender and games.1 However, the degree to which the practices of history can easily obscure women’s lives, work, and contributions has been even better documented than the intersections of gender and video gaming. The feminist turn in film studies during the 1970s was necessary in part 52 American Journal of Play, volume 10, number 1 © The Strong [Contact Carly Kocurek at ckocurek@iit.edu](Contact Carly Kocurek at ckocurek@iit.edu) because of the shortcomings of earlier approaches to the study of film and the documentation of its history. Without the critical interventions of feminist scholars, much of what we know about film’s labor and production practices would remain obscure. Similarly, game studies constitute a multidisciplinary field, one in which we have several working historians, who were not necessarily trained as historians, who understand that the legwork of history requires not only archival research in all its forms, but also careful consideration of how broader cultural, social, and political systems shape the historical trajectory. In researching and writing the history of games, we have an opportunity to produce a comprehensive history—one that looks at all actors as meaningful rather than documenting merely the most obvious key players. If we do so, we can avoid falling into the trap that many fields of historical study have fallen into, initially neglecting the key role of women in shaping history. In this article, I begin by offering a brief overview of efforts to document and reclaim women’s history particularly in the fields of American history and media history. I argue for adopting and integrating these kinds of approaches into games history while the field is young. As I will discuss further, many of these key works in women’s history are responses to the widespread neglect of women’s work and contributions. Because video game studies constitute a relatively new field, we are in a position where it is hopefully possible to avoid some of the mistakes of the past as we complete the initial work o

FAQs

What central problem does the article identify about game history writing?

It argues that historians in practice can obscure women’s lives, work, and contributions, especially within video game history.

How does the article support its argument using other fields?

It points to how feminist scholarship in film studies addressed earlier shortcomings and helped make labor and production practices visible, and it applies similar thinking to game studies.

Which women are used as examples to illustrate overlooked historical information in videogames?

The article discusses Ronnie Lamm, Amelia “Millie” McCarthy, and Lila Zinter as examples of different kinds of women’s work often missing from videogame history.

Oct 15, 2026

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