Brenda Laurel on Designing Video Games For Young Girls

Brenda LaurelThe Sociological Images blog today led me to this TED talk by games designer Brenda Laurel.  Several years ago, Laurel decided to tackle the issue of "why girls don't play video games" head on.  Unlike everyone else ever, Laurel decided to amass a great sparkling whack of empirical data.  

In other words, to answer the question "what kind of video games do young girls want to play," Brenda Laurel took the unprecedented step of asking them.  The only surprising thing about this is that it is so surprising.  Laurel and her team of researchers asked and observed, and interviewed accessory adults as well (like playground supervisors).  Instead of deciding what young girls ought to play, they gradually built up a picture of the kind of game young girls DID want to play.

The issue of the gender divide in video games is more than just a constant personal annoyance.  It is also, as Laurel points out, a key factor in the development of tech savviness.  Many computer savvy people originally derived their comfort level with computers by playing video games.  And quite a lot of those people go on to enter Computer Science degree programs.  And the more women who develop that comfort level early and go on to personally address the gender balance in the Computer Science department, the better.

My one note of sorrow in this TED talk is that, because Laurel's research took place under the guise of marketing research for a privately held company, her research will presumably not be released to the public.  I understand this - her company Purple Moon paid for the research, and they didn't perform it (just) out of the goodness of their hearts.  They amassed that research so that they could use it to crush the competition.  Nevertheless, it seems to me that the world would be a better place if Laurel released her ground-breaking research to the public.  (I'm just too Unix hippie for words, I know.)

The resulting game stars Rockett, a young girl who is starting her first day of school.  She has to navigate the churning waters of eighth grade, with the help of the player.  Rockett's adventure allows the  player to try on new identities, and experiment with branching interactions.  

In the clip Laurel shows in her TED talk, the player's decision matrix is based on choosing how Rockett will FEEL about the most recent incident, which was mind-blowing.  To quote Laurel, the Rockett game lets girls "exercise the love of social complexity and the narrative intelligence that drives most of their play behavior."
Laurel says that 96% of the reaction Purple Moon has received has been positive.  Of the remaining 4%, there are two types of negative reviews: one is from the male gamer, who thinks he knows what video games ought to be.  And the other is from a "certain flavor of feminist," who thinks she knows what young girls ought to be.  

Both of these complaints are, as Laurel points out, prescriptivist rather than descriptivist.  They are telling girls what to do, rather than asking girls what they want to do.  And isn't that just the problem with the world in a nutshell right there?