Video games for girls
Here is a TED talk from 1998 by Brenda Laurel, software designer and researcher who founded Purple Moon, in which she discusses her philosophy about making video games for young female gamers (via Sociological Images).
I actually owned and played one of Purple Moon’s games, Rockett’s New School, on our old Power Mac back in middle school. Honestly, I found it mildly entertaining while it lasted, but ultimately not worth playing again. It has a plot that you could only deviate from slightly (disappointing given the box’s promise that you’ll “make choices that change what happens”). I never really felt like I did anything — mostly just watched things happen. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t seem like much more than a primitively interactive sitcom.
I may not be a typical female computer user, and it’s possible that other girls loved it. It certainly sounds like Laurel and her company did plenty of research to back up their design. But this video got me thinking: what should video games designed for girls look like?
Now hold on for a second before you jump all over that sentence. Yes, we’re dealing with stereotypes here. Obviously not every girl would like a “video game for girls” just like not every boy would like a “video game for boys” — and this is true of all the other gendered toys out there as well. (To say nothing of the glaringly false binaries!) But, but, but. Let’s accept for a moment that in order to develop and market a product and ideally keep one’s business afloat, one has to think of the big picture, find a large enough target group, and so on. Some level of generalization is necessary.
The Rockett model of girl’s games hasn’t exactly made it to the big time over the past decade, yet female gamers are a substantial demographic. In 2005, a Nielsen study counted nearly 40% of gamers were female, and I’d expect the numbers are even closer to even now. Perhaps the barely-interactive, storybook-type game wasn’t really what girls were looking for after all, and perhaps that “certain flavor of feminist” was right to point out that the premise is kind of demeaning. Sure, girls do think a lot about the social choices they make daily, and do enjoy narrative play, but must their games be so tightly restricted to those stipulations that the ideal game for them consists of helping an eighth-grader navigate middle school cliques? I doubt it.
Look at the most popular games of this year — it’s stuff like Call of Duty, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, Left 4 Dead. We’re on the edge of our seats waiting for the next StarCraft game to come out. Arguably these are all male-targeted games, though females play them too. Regardless, I don’t think that this screenshot (from StarCraft 2) is intended to remind guys of their daily lives:
Most people don’t want to play games that closely mirror their everyday thoughts and actions. Most people, I think, wouldn’t even call such a thing a game. Most of the games we play — board games, computer games, pretend games we made up for ourselves as children — are based on the fantastic, the unfamiliar, the surprising and new. They incorporate elements of the familiar but give us a new context in which to experience it. If they didn’t, why would we play the game? We’d just go out and live our lives, and it’d be equally fun.
I think the question that game developers should be asking themselves isn’t so much “What do girls think about?” as “What do girls want to think about?” And perhaps also: “How does that differ from what boys want to think about?” I suspect that these questions will lead girls’-game developers to reduce the number of huge-breasted heroines and probably also the extent to which games are centered around gruesome destruction of one’s opponent. Change the average level of testosterone in your target audience, and you’re pretty likely to change their demand for such things.
So what would developers replace those things with? I haven’t done the market research, so I can only offer my conjecture, based on my own gaming experience and conversations with friends. Although I enjoy real-time strategy games like Warcraft and StarCraft, and remember really liking some first-person shooter games like Heretic, the aspects of those games I most enjoy have always tended to be the “building” rather than the “battle” ones. I like the parts where you set up a base, get upgrades, or train for new skills. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also love games like SimCity and Civilization. (And hey, maybe it’s my girly nature, my interest in social interactions, that makes me appreciate the diplomacy and public relations aspects of games like these.) I’ve also heard of games more in the FPS mold where, instead of walking your character into another battle, you walk them into a puzzle challenge. That’s not typically my cup of tea but I know girls and women who enjoy it.
At the end of the day, I hope people remember that male-targeted games are currently enjoyed by girls and women, and female-targeted games can be enjoyed by boys and men. I doubt that when they began their long line of Sim games the developers at Maxis were even thinking of a female audience in particular, but I’m sure they had a sizable one even before The Sims. “Video games for girls” don’t have to be all about fashion and parties and make-up in order to be appealing; simply by having a premise other than wreaking testosterone-fueled havoc they are making a major step in the direction of inclusivity.
Michael Specter on the Charlie Rose Show
I’m watching Michael Specter, a science writer for the New Yorker, on the Charlie Rose Show right now. I’d never heard of this guy before but I adore him already. (I’m also admittedly not usually a fan of Charlie Rose, I suppose because I’ve fallen victim to the flashiness of modern media — I struggle to stay awake for his one-on-one interviews in front of a black screen for a full hour. The interviews are usually brilliant, though, and this is no exception.) The show’s bio of Specter says he’s just written a book called Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens our Lives. The interview and the book are about some of the same things he covers for the New Yorker: the current anti-vaccination chaos and its effects, misconceptions about organic food and genetically engineered crops, obsession with vitamins and supplements that don’t do any good … among other things. A few highlights that I managed to type before the moment passed by:
- Insightful line from Specter: “Science isn’t a company, it isn’t a country, it’s a method of doing something.” People often oppose scientific consensus and dispute the results of study after study because they claim that political and business interests shaped the results. To be sure, some funding-source bias may slip through occasionally, and a couple so-called “researchers” pop up from time to time who are outright sleazy. But to portray the entire institution of science as something so malleable, so easily lobbied and influenced, is to misunderstand deeply the concepts at the root of science.
- Explaining that eating locally grown, organic food is a nice goal but not a workable solution to the problems of starvation in the developing world, Specter emphasizes, “We’re not going to be serving everyone Swiss chard from the backyard. We’re just not.” The normally somber Charlie Rose starts giggling and says, “That’s true.”
You can watch the interview here once it goes online, probably later on Wednesday.
Don’t talk about politics or religion
It’s a rule of thumb for polite conversation that most of us had drilled into us as children, here in the US. Don’t talk about politics, and don’t talk about religion. You’ll only start an argument.
Maybe that’s true. After all, merely by saying “I am a member of such-and-such political party,” you are implying that you think its platform and philosophy are superior to the platforms and philosophies of all other political parties. If you didn’t think that was the case, you’d be a member of a different party. And by saying, “I am such-and-such religion,” you are saying that there is a certain set of statements about reality that you believe to be true. That means that other people, who don’t think that set of statements is true, are wrong in their beliefs. You don’t even have to say it outright. You just have to let it be known. Maybe someone spotted a bumper sticker on your car, a pendant on your necklace, a logo on your t-shirt. You can say that you think we should “coexist,” that we should be tolerant and all get along. Those are worthy ideals. But you have to face the fact that if you every commit to any opinion, you’re effectively telling everyone who doesn’t share it that they’re wrong, which doesn’t come across as very “tolerant.”
But that’s okay! I actually think we should be talking about politics and religion more freely. The discord is still happening, when the very existence of Democrats is an implicit affront to Republicans and vice versa, and when religious (or irreligious) groups rally support from within by directing anger at the mere presence of other groups. I think that by stifling conversation, we’re only silencing the argument, not really stopping it. No one gains anything from that.
I really wish I could remember the details of this story, because it made a real impression on me, but sadly I can only offer vagueness. At any rate: I read a news story once about an election happening in another country, quite possibly a country relatively new to the whole “election” thing. The focus of the story was on how the citizens were all eagerly arguing with each other about which candidates to support, all over the place. It was not a taboo topic in the least. And that’s an exciting thing to see, because it means that people are engaged in their democracy, they care about the outcome of the election. Most importantly (to me), they don’t see the election as rooting for their own team, but as a search for the best possible candidates. They’d prefer to get the right people into office, even if it means changing their minds.
Well, I’m sorry that anecdote came across as completely made up; I promise you it’s not. (If anyone remembers reading something like that – or experienced something like that! – and could help me figure out details, leave a comment. I’d bet there are plenty of countries this could apply to, but I only read a news story about one of them.) My point is that when we disagree and argue about it, it may feel a little uncomfortable and unpleasant at the time, but there are major benefits in the long run. After all, what’s more important: that your political party control a majority of seats in the legislature, or that the legislature is as full as possible of thoughtful people who have the best interests of the country in mind? Sure, you’d hope those things are the same, but you have to recognize the possibility that they’re not always. And what if there is one particular deity (or set of deities) who really wants you to live your life in a very specific way or else. Wouldn’t it be good to figure out which deity/deities it was, as soon as possible? (Alternatively, what if there are no deities like that? Wouldn’t you want to figure that out before spending your entire life obsessed with made-up rules and nonexistent judgment?)
“Sure, Z,” I can hear you saying. “I guess it would be great if we could all have these calm, reasoned debates. But how? I’m sure of my beliefs, and you’re sure of yours – we’ll never work it out!” It does seem daunting. What I do is, I try to keep a bit of agnosticism in my attitude. Perhaps it doesn’t come across that way… maybe it’d be better to call it best guess-ism. I feel strongly about my beliefs, having reflected on them and examined them before actively calling them my own, but I try to remember that they only reflect my current best guess. At any time, I could come into new information that might lead me to change my mind – to make a new, better guess. I welcome arguments because they’re the primary way I might get that new information.
I’d like to live in a society where more people had an attitude like that. But I’m open to debate about even that belief!
Astronomy at home
If you’re looking for a constructive way to use your critical thinking skills in your spare time, then I have some good news for you: Galaxy Zoo wants your help!
In partnership with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Galaxy Zoo is looking for volunteers to help with image processing: identifying what types of galaxies SDSS has seen, and trying to understand how observed galaxy collisions may have happened. It might seem like these jobs would be a perfect application for computers. Actually, image identification is harder than you’d think – if it wasn’t, Captcha would be useless – and collision simulations are very cumbersome programs to run. The human eye (with brain attached) is a better tool for these sorts of problems, if you can get enough eyes (and brains) working together on all the data. And that’s exactly what Galaxy Zoo was set up for.
No scientific background is necessary. There are very helpful and easy-to-understand tutorials on how to answer the questions they’ll ask about each image. All you really need is your eyes, and you’ll be contributing to astrophysics research in no time. So go help out!
(Thanks to Elles for posting about this over at Teen Skepchick.)
Is this just fantasy?
I think it’s about time for some lighter fare around here.