June 15

Girls as game designers: what choices do they make?

From the mandate of Michigan State University’s Girls as Game Designers project:

“Computer games, designed by young men for boys and young men, epitomize technology's exclusion of girls, their interests, and values. Less obvious but more devastating, this technological estrangement exacerbates girls' lack of interest and self confidence not just in computers but in science.”

The goals of this project are to observe:
-whether existing “edutainment” is effective in teaching science and technology subjects to girls
-what would happen when an all-girl group designed its own science learning game, and what
the characteristics of this all-girl design team would be
-whether girls would approach the design process differently from boys
-whether gender differences are strongly polarized at the end of middle school (grade 8) or are evident by grade 5 as well.

To that end, forty children were invited to attend a “space camp” where they played existing edutainment software and worked in small design teams to create the concept for an outer space edutainment game intended to appeal to their peers. The kids were separated into groups of five with others of the same gender and age. In all there were two groups each of grade 5 boys, grade 5 girls, grade 8 boys, and grade 8 girls.

MSU’s Carrie Heeter, a Professor of Digital Media Arts and Technology, recently presented the project at the Computer Game Technology Conference in Toronto. Several of the groups’ videogame concepts had been made into short trailers with visuals, voice-overs and music.

The first trailer shown was for a game designed by one of the grade 5 girl teams, entitled Dr. Evil Stinky and the Poison Cake. It was a light-hearted game that involved communicating with aliens through barter and compromise to achieve the desired result. There was a cute robot sidekick and an atmosphere of silly-fun humour. Eventually world peace was achieved.

When Heeter asked the audience to comment on what was weird about the game, one of the budding young game designers responded, with great disappointment, “no one dies!”

The second game was called Virus Fighters: The Defeat of Juppa, and was designed by grade 5 boys. Unlike the first trailer, there was a high sense of urgency here. Juppa was a direct threat to the player, a villain who went around defeating people with viruses. There were a few different main characters to choose from, including two females who were both described as “bad-tempered.” Everyone had a sword. There was a mini-game that involved shooting comet pieces before they collided with Earth.

As part of the edutainment requirement, Dr. Stinky had required players to answer questions such as naming the correct gravity of planets. Virus Fighters asked the correct number of warheads to destroy ships with. (Too high a number and the ship explodes.)

After the trailers had been presented (and had all progressed more or less along the same lines,) Heeter offered some observations. Interestingly, all of the boys groups had ripped off other videogames. Apparently one of the trailers not shown was a direct clone of Halo. The girl games were focused on playing, not winning, whereas boys’ games all involved fighting opponents. Boys favoured frequent death, what Heeter referred to as “dangerous fun,” while the girls had less of a sense of urgency and were centered around problem-solving.

The unfortunate part of the study as I see it is that there were no groups of girl gamers. The groups contained boys who were already familiar with videogames, and girls who had little or no experience with them. I wonder what kind of games girl gamers would have designed? What kinds of games would they have mimicked? For that matter, what kinds of games would male non-gamers have designed? What would the trailers have looked like had they been designed by mixed gender groups?

According to Heeter, the results of the study shows that boys are both more experienced with today’s games, and more satisfied with them. Unfortunately Heeter declined to address the issue of why past attempts to create games specifically targeted to young girls have failed – Brenda Laurel’s Purple Moon, for example. (Laurel, incidentally, is a consultant on this project.)

The recurring complaint directed at the girl-designed games that came from the audience, mostly student game designers and programmers and their professors, and mostly male, was the lack of urgency in the girls’ games – the fact that there was nothing to do and the player was expected to just go around experiencing things.

I found it mildly alarming that none of the attendees – budding game designers and programmers, mind you - could seem to recall playing any games where exploration of this kind played a prominent role. The closest anyone came was when one person ventured, “I think I remember playing a game like that when I was little…was it called…King’s Quest…?”

Posted by Erin at 01:59 PM

----------------------------------

Comments

Grouping girls and women into a hivemind, does not make sense at all Ms. Lou. But howcome us male gamers are often put into a neat little "all-you-want-is-cleaveage" bow. See Robin Hunicke's E3 photo coverage.

I think her photos amongst many more aspects of the marketing mechanisms surrounding games these days call for a more critical look from the designers' chairs around the globe.

The way I see it more and more games are embracing the 'mature audience' target group - yet the graphic designs used by these games have an inherently heterosexual white male bias in them.

User-centered design has it's limits, but when the industry itself is going down the stereotypical tubes, perhaps it's time to
1. Observe the gamers
2. Listen to the non-gamers
3. Mix up the design teams behind the games

----------------------------------

Additionally, the fact that none of the budding game-designers present at the Toronto Conference thought of Morrowind as an example of an exploration game really makes me worried. Sure the game has conflict, but the exploration factor of the world is immensely engaging. The experience of a virtual world unfolding before your eyes and ears is astounding.
Posted by: Tore Vesterby at June 16, 2004 03:49 PM

I've done the opposite of pay attention to this sort of thing (maybe it's time to start), so I'm probably 200% wrong, but it seems that a huge problem with "games for girls," is that, even when the games are designed by girls/women/the ladies/whatever, the games are come at with the initial angle of "what would a girl want in a game?" Asking yourself "what would [x-variable-that-is-someone-other-than-myself] want in a good game?" is basically begging you to fail. "Girls like this thing, maybe we should put this thing in the game." To a larger extent, that attitude is probably responsible for a lot of retarded decisions in games on the whole, but it's an observation I sort of picked up on when reading the above article.

Posted by: Jake at June 15, 2004 02:23 PM

Aggreed, making statements like "Girls like this" is not much help - I always find it rather exasperating when researchers lump together all members of the same gender as a homogenous hive-mind who must all think the same. I've been a game designer for 6 years now, and I doubt very much that if you looked anonomously at my work and the work of some of my male colleagues, you would be able to tell which was mine.

Although I realise that the focus of this research wasn't strictly games, it was certainly a wierd decision to take a group of non-gamers pit them against a group of gamers in a study where gender was supposed to be the key issue - without a control group of male non-gamers/female gamers it makes the results pretty suspect.

Posted by: Mrs. Lou at June 16, 2004 10:10 AM

I couldn't agree more. Not even all white hetrosexual males think the same and like the same things :)

One of the big problems here is that what game developers get to work on and release is largely controlled by marketing/sales/brand people, who mainly only see a game's potential if they can see another very similar game has done well previously - hence gluts of stereotypical, identikit games. I'm sure most designers would love to mix it up, look at gamers and non-gamers and work on something fresh. Ho hum, that's buisness I guess. Still, all is not totally bad when a corporate monster like Sony turns around and releases something totally new like EyeToy.

Incidentally, I too was surprised that the attendees couldn't think of games with exploration in them. I don't reckon much to their chances of passing as game students if they couldn't even think of a Zelda title...
Posted by: Mrs. Lou at June 17, 2004 01:17 AM