| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
 |
|
| Girls, Schools and Computergames |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Brenda Laurel |
What a pleasure to be here finally. I started in the business when many of you were unborn. That gives me a special credit of some sort. I'm not sure what it is. I do know that I was one of the few girls in the business for a long time. And when I first decided to get into the business, I went to an arcade to fool around with the Asteroids game. I waited until everyone else had gone home so that I wouldn't embarrass myself in front of the boys. I think that has a lot to do with the difficulties that girls have in computer labs and in schools today. I was asked to answer some questions in this talk, so I'm going to try to give you some specific information. The first question I was asked is: what games do girls play? Girls have been playing games since computer games were invented, just not very many of us. Throughout the years until about 1995 the statistics were about ten to fifteen percent female players. Most of those players were sisters of boys who owned computer game machines, or children of parents who owned personal computers. I worked at Atari from 1979 to 1982 and Pacman was certainly one of the most popular games with girls even in those days. And it took something to play Pacman as a female to enter a very gendered male arcade-space. To play the game was a non trivial challenge, especially to younger girls. One of the things that we see changing today is that the gendering of public arcade spaces is becoming more evenly distributed. Tetris, later on was a very popular game with girls as well and still is. Girls have always been disproportionately fond of driving games. So for example, at Atari, girls made up about 20 percent of the audience for Pole Position. And they continued to enjoy driving games in the arcades in increasing numbers. The King's Quest and other adventure games have been strong with girls throughout the years. As many of you know, Roberta Williams designed the King's Quest series at Sierra and eventually placed a female character in the lead of those games. But the adventure genre has been popular with girls and women from the beginning. And I believe that's because these games have a lot to do with character-narrative action. We'll come to that in a minute when we talk about some of the research I've done. In terms of Nintendo and Sega games, Echo the Dolphin has been a very popular one. This game is actually written by a friend of mine, a storyteller, Lucinda Delourmea. It's popular because it's about saving. At least that's how the traditional lore goes, that the dolphin has been helped, saved, helped to find home and the dolphin is a very popular animal with girls. The Mario Brothers games are perpetual girls' favourites. Sonic the Hedgehog was especially popular with girls. And I would submit that a lot of that has to do with the first person point of few in some of the sequences. The left-to-right scrolling that's typical of early computer and video games actually presents a little bit of a gender bias. Females in general tend to prefer more body-centric styles of navigation. They also tend to perform a little less well at tasks involving mental rotation. So when you have a left-to-right scrolling game, and you navigate in a body-centric way, you have to perform a continuous mental rotation to follow the action. That's in addition to the translation from the form of the keyboard to the plane of the screen. So for people who are a little less adept at mental rotation, this presents a little bit of an impediment. Myst is a breakthrough game with adult females, as well as it's sequel. Girls have typically been much better represented in the entertainment category. And as well as hard-core educational software, they've been the biggest fans of Carmen Diego, Oregon Trail, Read the Rabbit, Master, many of the other educational games. And finally in the traditional category at least, creativity and productivity tools have always been strong with girls, where again 'strong' means 20-25 percent. Today, we see a lot of teen girls, from 14 up really, playing Quake, Tombraider and a lot of the classic action games that are being revived through Hasbro and other companies. Something interesting happened recently in1995, recently as my world goes. And that's the invention as you will of the girl game genre in computer games. The retail movement was kicked of by Barbie Fashion Designer which was introduced for the Christmas season in 1996. They sold half a million copies right out the gate - into a market that has always been described by the industry as one that girls would not be involved with. For 20 years of my career I've listened to people in the industry say 'girls will not play computer games, they will not enjoy them, they don't like computers, there's no reason to make games for girls.' In fact the reason why girls haven't played computer games are much more idiotic and straight forward than that. First of all, the spaces where they might first encounter games - arcades - are male spaces. Second, of all the spaces where they could buy games: traditional were male spaces. And finally: the play patterns that are represented in most computer games are not the most popular play patterns with girls. In the contemporary girl games category, the Barbie games are by far the dominant genre. They have about 16 titles now for girls. The Barbie Fashion Designer, the Cool Looks Fashion Designer, Nail Designer and the Writing Club are very successful games and are helping to define the category. Purple Moon is my company; we have some products that are ahead of 15 of the Barbie-products. So this makes me happy, because I think of them as being culturally alternative to the Barbie paradigm. We have seven CD-ROMs on the market right now. I'll show you a couple of them in a minute. One of our series is about a character named Rocket and it has to do with the friendship adventures of a young girl, starting at a new school in 8th grade and the kinds of emotional and social decisions she needs to make to get along with her new friends and her new school. This is quite different from Quake, Tombraider, Doom, Pacman, etcetera. Because it's a game about narrative, a series about narrative play, and it's very interesting in that the characters that are like its players. Our secret is that it's more romantic, I guess, than a series that deals with the natural world and puzzle solving in natural environments. Adventure Maker, which I'll demonstrate for you in a little while, is a creativity product that builds on the Rocket games. And we've just introduced what we think is the first ever sport game for girls called The Starflyer Soccer Challenge, based on extensive research on differences between how boys and girls experience and appreciate sports. Other games that you'll find in the category right now include the American girls primary which is a Learning Company product that came on very strong last year. Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Cosmopolitan Makeover, The baby-sitters club, most of the games in the category are based on television properties or film properties like for example Disney's Mulan property. Girls are increasingly active on the Internet, recently America Online said that the share of women and girls on their service has increased from under 20 percent to 60 percent in a little over 18 months. So that gives you an idea of how rapidly the female audience for Internet activities is growing. The PurpleMoon.com website is the leader in the category, we have 200.000 registered users and we serve about 12 million pages a month. I want to talk a little bit about the research that we did before we started Purple Moon I was a researcher at an institution called Interval Research, I started there in 1992, and I was hired on the basis of the idea: We 're doing a research program about what it would take to design computer games, activities on the computer that would attract girls, that would make girls willing to reach through the problem of putting their hands on the technology and become comfortable with it. In 1992 there were no computer games for girls. And as you may know, the whole topic of gender difference has been a taboo one, especially during the 1980's. Even in academic circles it was very difficult to research this topic or to publish about it. And even today I take a fairly large amount of hate from both the extreme feminist community and the traditional community about even using the word 'different'. At Interval we decided to take a scientific approach and try to discover as much as we could about differences, both cultural and biological that might help us create products that would attract girls. We collaborated with a company called Cheskin Research, and we did three kinds of research at Interval. We began with an extensive literature survey. There was a team of about ten people working on this. We looked at all of the domains in science where there might be data that would be applicable to this question of difference. Cognitive psychology, sociology, play theory, gender studies etcetera. In the second phase of our research we took those findings and pursued the most interesting ones by interviewing the experts that produce them, people like Barry Thorn, Makuchecs Mahaj, and also people in the industry, for example the head of the Barbie line at Mattel, who earn a living knowing things about difference. We also did focus groups in that stage with adults who spend their time with children at play. So that we could learn some more from that perspective about differences between boys and girls play patterns. The third phase of our research, which was by far the most extensive, was actually talking to children. We interviewed over a thousand children in eight US cities, primarily girls, about play preferences, about gender signaling, and play activities. And we tried to create a chart of how play preferences are affected by both age and gender in American culture. At the end of that process of excessive interviewing, we began to talk to girls specifically about some concepts for computer games and get their evaluation of them. At the end of the interview period we also gathered survey data from another 10,000 children. Then we got together and spent several months consolidating our key findings. And then we spent some time turning these findings into design principles. And at that point of time we decided to form a company to take advantage of those design principles and actually produce some products for girls. Again, this was before Barbie software was announced by Mattel. So when Barbie happened we realised we had less time than we thought to become a player in this segment. Some of the important things that we learned first is that there's no intrinsic reason why girls can't or won't play with computers. Brain-based differences between boys and girls are very slight. And where they exist at all, as in the case of mental rotation I described, even though they are small they get mythologised into large differences by our culture. So for example, differences in navigational strategy I explained before that girls, females in general, tend to prefer a body-centric approach to navigation. This includes moving around space by landmarks and orienting your body physically in the direction that you are going. Which explains for instance why girls tend to turn maps upside down, if they want the map to face the direction that they're going. The mythology that the culture puts out is that girls and women can't read maps. But in fact what's going on is that girls read maps differently and prioritise the information on them differently. That was a finding that ended up having some relevance to us. I want to talk a little bit about what girls told us what they like and didn't like about computer games. I expected to hear from girls in my research that they didn't like games because they are violent. While it is true, that girls are not particularly fond of violence, that is not their primary objection to computer games, at least in American culture. Their primary objection is that the games are boring. That makes me so happy! That makes me so proud! And when asked why they'd think games are boring, they tell us the characters are really boring. In fact the characters are so boring you can't even make up stories about them. Who have you heard make up a story about an X-Man, you know? It's just not something you're motivated to do. So characters where the number one thing that they found boring about boys' games. They disliked the fact that there are weak story lines in most computer games, if there are any story lines at all. They hate the idea of dying and starting over; this seems really stupid. A more interesting finding is that mastery for its own sake isn't highly motivational in American culture. Let me say that another way. It's not worth their time to climb a steep learning curve master a bunch of arcane information, and play a difficult game only in order to say they've achieved a high score. That has no social currency for them. It's not particularly valuable to be able to do that. Their criteria are much more experiential. They will solve very difficult problems and learn very difficult skills if the pay-off is an experience that they're interested in. Again, direct competition based on scoring is not a high motivator for girls in American culture because the social organisation of the way girls as peer groups work renders direct competition moderately taboo. To be seen in too direct competition with another girl or with a boy is moderately taboo. So this is not a socially interesting thing to be able to do. Now that has nothing to do with sports. Girls are very competitive in many ways. They express their competitiveness in different ways than boys do in our culture. In individual sports. They're looking for personal best. They're also competitive with other athletes. In team sports, an interesting finding that we had is that in a boys' team a good strategy is to get the players to be in competition with each other. This will increase the performance of each player and improve the performance of the entire team. In girls' teams in American culture, conflict or competition between individual team members makes a poorer performance for the entire team. And instead, a good coach will focus the energy on the opposing team, which is across an important social boundary. So that's an example of how competition gets worked out differently. Girls are not particularly interested in speed and action, with the exception of driving games. And we believe that it's because of the first person characteristic of driving games. So they are looking for well-developed characters, and complex storylines. They are looking for relationships and social complexity. They are looking for rich story materials. I should stop and say that when we talked to boys and girls about characters they're interested in, boys in the age group of 8-to-12 would tell us that their number one choice is a superhero. Characters with extraordinary powers that they can look up to. Girls will tell us their favourite kind of character is characters they can imagine being in a relationship with. The reason why a superhero like Sailor Moon works is because she's a child, and a girl can imagine being in a relationship with her. She's relatively more successful, in our culture at least, than Wonder Woman or Xena or any of the other superhero-type female characters. Girls demand personal relevance even in entertainment products. This is a really important finding for us. They want to be doing something that they can map to their own lives either through fantasy or through actual likeness to their own situations. Across the board, all classes, every age between seven and twelve, we heard this was a strong finding. Finally, they disliked being trapped behind an obstacle that must be overcome in order to move forward, and vastly prefer the ability to play in a lot of different ways and to move freely around the environment of a game. Now you'll notice that these descriptions are really pointing towards a kind of play that has to do with story making. It has to do with narrative as a constructed activity. I will show you a couple of our products so that you'll get an idea of what we've done with narrative. And I want to say that it's really clear to us that this is just one approach that you can take. It is based on research but I don't intend in any way to negate work that other people have done with other genres for this audience. This is the third in the Rocket series, it is called Rocket's Secret Invitation. I'll show you how you make choices and then show you a little bit of the backstory area. Choices are made through a process that we call 'emotional navigation'. The kinds of choices girls make in the product, have to do with how they're going to enter the next moment and the consequences of that. In this situation here, our character Rocket, has been invited to join a secret society. She's going to decide to say yes but in the meantime, the people who invited her discovered that she told a lie. Okay I just interrupted the game to select something called the Truth Glasses. In order to find them, I have to move into a timeless place behind the scenes called the Hidden Hallway and look in characters' lockers. All the objects in here are interactive and each character has a journal in his or her locker. What's written in the journal changes depending on the choices that you make in the game. So what you have in this part of the product is backstory materials that children use to create further stories than the surface narrative that we saw at the beginning. So if I find the Truth Glasses, and take them back into the scene with me, and hear the thoughts of the characters. If I don't like the way that was going I can go back and make a different emotional choice. You can get an idea of how we tried to put new dimensions into the narrative by having a place where backstory is stored. I quickly show you a product called Rocket's Adventure Maker that uses the same characters but let's you create your own stories and add characters to the world. Okay, I can find characters that I might have already met in other products in this yearbook. I just made this character, this is my daughter Hillary. But if I go forward I will also see characters from Rocket's world. Here's Jessy. The objective here is to be able to make characters that are equal to the characters that we've already built. Let's start from scratch and make a new friend. I'll show you how fast this is, and make an adventure with this character. Okay I've selected a format. I can select scenes. I can grab characters, so I grab Brooke, I just made Brooke. I put Brooke up here in this scene. She's a little bit small so I'll make her a little larger. I want to make her say something. That needs to go the other way so I move this up here. You get the sense that I can also bring other characters from the world in here. And I can also mix up characters and make them look new and different. So this is the way to take the characters in storylines that we started and bring yourself into the story or make up a bunch of new people. I want to make a few concluding remarks. I have three daughters. I am a gamer myself. I did this because I love girls. About 90 percent of the press that I get is positive. That other six percent is both from traditional game people who say, 'but this isn't a game', and a lot of it is from Women's Studies-types, feminists who don't think this is a feminist's enterprise. A friend of mine said that you're most likely to be criticised by the person nearest to you on the path. For some reason these people don't go after games based on dolls with impossible bodies. They go after games based on the lives of little girls that I've talked to. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I believe, and my conversations with girls have shown me, that at every age in our lives we work out the important issues about our values and our character in the context in which we find ourselves. For girls between the ages of eight and twelve, there is a horrible crucible of peer relationships that's going on. And the most important things in the world have to do with, who is my friend, who is not my friend, am I well liked, what have I done wrong, is my body okay, am I popular. We can tell our children not to have these things going on in their lives but they do. The important thing to remember is that what a girl worries about - whether or not her best friend is going to like her tomorrow - she is forming the parts of her character that we'll come to know as loyalty, honesty, integrity, passion, commitment and she's forming them in the context of the life that she lives. There are three kinds of values that I had to exercise in this process. The first was the open-minded, mind set of a scientist, who listens without judging to what children tell me about what's going on with them. And we still do that at Purple Moon; research is a big part of our work. The second set of values is to decide ethically, as a human being in a society, how am I going to use what I find out. The way I've tried to use it is at constructive, narrative play with personal relevance, that has the kinds of problems in it that allows girls to work on these big issues of character and ethics. That they need to at this age of their lives. The third hat that we have to wear is the business hat. If you're going to try to make an intervention in people's lives at the level of popular culture, you can't do that by making a toy that only 200 people will play with. You have to roll up your sleeves and attempt to make something that a lot of people will see. And if you do that, that means you're spending someone else's money and you have to make a good business out of it. Now the happy fact is that it's possible to do good things and make money doing them. It's also possible to make good things and lose money doing them. But it's not a done deal that doing the right thing means you have to be marginalised. And the way that we fail as humanists, and designers, is to decide ahead of time that business success is something we can't or shouldn't have. It's about engaging successfully with popular culture, and if we believe in change, that's what we have to do. |
|
|
url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
|