Girls as game designers: what choices do they make?

[Akasha]

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…?�

Information Source : Ludonauts