She Believes in E-quality

There’s a general belief that women with brains wish they had beauty and that women who are beautiful wish they had smarts. And that it’s a rare woman who has both, especially if “smarts” include technological savvy.

Gillian Bonner is one of those women.

A Playboy Playmate and interactive entertainment entrepreneur whose monthly column about digital culture debuts Tuesday on the Playboy Web site (https://www.playboy.com), Bonner intends to use Virtually Gillian to prove that technology can be fun and sexy, and it can be that way for both men and women.

In her first online article, she profiles three women in high-tech: Barbary Brunner, an executive producer with Sierra On-Line, a game production company; Katherine Moussouris, a systems analyst for Harvard University’s division of engineering and applied science; and Nadja Vol Ochs, a computer programmer and designer with Microsoft.

“They have the whole package--they’re incredibly beautiful and sexy and intelligent,” says Bonner, herself a case in point.

The 33-year-old Atlanta native who now lives in Santa Barbara was Playboy’s Miss April 1996. She had been an Elite model, appearing in ad campaigns for Guess and Cover Girl Cosmetics, and an entrepreneur, establishing three computer-related companies by the time she was 30.

“Technology is not just for geeks anymore,” Bonner says.

Nor is it only for men.

Women are logging on to the Internet in record numbers. In 1997, 16% of Web users in North America were women, according to a recent study by the Strategis Group, a Washington, D.C.-based telecommunications consulting company. In 1998, that number rose to 38%. Today, roughly 46% of Internet users--or 42 million--are women.

Bonner began bridging the gender-technology gap in the ‘80s when, as a New York model, she bought a computer to track her finances. Overloaded by the numbers Bonner was entering, the computer eventually crashed, but, instead of having it repaired by a specialist, Bonner opened it up and fixed it herself.

“That’s when I realized I had an aptitude,” she says, “and that if I quit modeling, I should go into the computer industry.”

A Brief Stop

in Animation

In the early ‘90s, Bonner moved to Sarasota, Fla., where she studied animation at the Ringling School of Art and Design and learned she was less interested in graphic design than in producing interactive, computer-based entertainment. In 1995, she founded Black Dragon (https://www.blackdragon.com) and began work on “Riana Rouge,” a live-action, emotion-based video game for women that has earned a cult-classic reputation as the Barbarella of the gaming industry.

Running an independent company and having an unusual and edgy product, Bonner knew it would be difficult to bring “Riana Rouge” to market without support from major players in the software business, most of whom were (and are still) men.

And what better way to get the attention of men than to pose for Playboy?

“I did it for exposure,” Bonner says, laughing, referring less to her appearance in the magazine and more to her marketing strategy. “I sent them a Polaroid, and when they said, ‘OK. You wanna do it?’ I said I would only if they mentioned my company, my Web address and my product name in the first paragraph. And they did.”

Along with six pages of photos, Bonner’s Playmate data sheet listed her turn-ons as “computers with tons of RAM, garters and push-up bras.” Her mother wouldn’t speak to her after the issue hit the newsstands, but, not surprisingly, a lot of investors were more than happy to introduce themselves.

“Overnight, I knew all the big players in the software industry,” Bonner says. Largely through contacts she had made via Playboy, “Riana Rouge” was released in 1997 by Eidos Interactive, a video-game producer and distributor best known for its hugely successful “Tomb Raider.”

Travel Through

Fantasy Worlds

In the game, Bonner plays the lead character--a secretary with low self-esteem whose boss throws her out a window. Waking up in an altered state, Riana must travel through three fantasy worlds and, through her emotional choices, work toward becoming a more powerful, confident woman. In the prison world, for example, Riana is offered help by a man in a nearby cell, who promises to help her escape if she retrieves the key from his throat.

“Say you chose to trust him, and you get the key and unlock him,” Bonner explains. “He doesn’t save you, so you click around in the environment and figure out how to get yourself out.”

In an industry that sustains itself on violent content and a primarily male audience, “Riana Rouge” was a hard sell for Eidos.

Due to its sexual content (the game contains nudity and two sex scenes, one of them lesbian), the game could not be sold at Wal-Mart or CompUSA, which together account for 50% of all U.S. video game distribution. Still, the game sold 100,000 copies.

At the time “Riana Rouge” was released, the only successful girl-oriented gaming title was “Barbie Fashion Designer,” which has sold 1.75 million copies since it first went on the market in 1996. Despite efforts by Purple Moon, the pioneering girl-oriented gaming company that recently was swallowed by Mattel, and Girl Games Inc., a Texas-based developer of online entertainment for girls, “Barbie Fashion Designer” is still the most successful title for female players. There remains a lot of room for growth in women’s interactive entertainment.

“I’ve always questioned the long-held view that boys like action adventure and girls like relationship-based gaming,” says Katrina Heron, editor in chief of Wired magazine. “I think that those kinds of observations really do not tell the whole story. What I believe is that there should be much more of a range in what’s available for playing.

“What naturally happens is that as the industry grows, women are given more opportunities to succeed and to shine,” she adds.

Even though more and more women are using computers, the development of online entertainment for females has failed to keep pace with their adoption of new technology. And, according to Womengamers.com, women are hungry for Web-based entertainment. Females account for 53% of Internet gamers, although not in the way one might think. Bingo and cards, in addition to already successful game-show formats such as “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!,” are popular with the female online gaming community.

“There’s just not enough out there, and I think that’s because there’s still mainly men controlling the industry,” Bonner says.

Soap Operas Go

Interactive

She is now working on a series of interactive romantic soap operas “for women 18 to 100,” she says, that will combine two of women’s favorite interests: shopping and relationships.

Playing the game as a character named Fanny Adams, women will have the opportunity to choose relationships and how those relationships work out. In addition, they can click on any object in the game’s environment--jewelry, furniture and clothes, for example--and receive more information related to the characters or story line. By clicking again, they can see a real commercial about the real product. And if players also want to buy something in that environment, they would be seamlessly connected to a Web sale site.

“It’s fun because the advertising is not forced on you. It’s only if you’re interested in that stuff, whereas in television today, you have to sit through things you have no interest in buying. Ever.”

As Bonner says, her new series is a “Trojan horse for e-commerce,” but it’s where entertainment is headed once most households have access to high-speed Internet connections, effectively merging the Web with television.

“It’s inevitable that everyone’s going to be online,” says Heron, of Wired. “We’re seeing that happen much more rapidly than with any other technology introduced in this country. So I do see huge opportunities for women.”

But, she cautions, “one thing that concerns me is that, traditionally, women have special programming created for them. I would love to see a world in which we try not to ghettoize women in terms of media consumption.”

Bonner sees that being pretty far down the road.

Eventually women will catch up, she says. “Then they can focus on producing whatever they want, not specifically related to women as a whole. I think that’ll definitely change and catch up, like television.”

Susan Carpenter can be reached by e-mail at susan.carpenter@latimes.com.