Section IV Changing Girls, Changing Games - MSU
From Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives
on Gender, Games, and Computing
Edited by Yasmin Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner,
Jen Sun
MIT Press, 2007
Section IV
Changing Girls,
Changing Games
Carrie Heeter
The authors of our fourth section, Changing Girls, Changing Games have strong
ideas about how games and girls should be different and are working towards
realizing those visions. We apply a plethora of design research techniques to
understand player motivations and to design games which achieve the designers¡¯
goals. We want to change girls, empowering them to become technological
superheroes. We want to change games, diversifying and enhancing the play
and learning experience. Our motivations vary, from practical perspectives on
how to make games more fun and sell to larger markets, to gender equity
concerns about increasing girls¡¯ and women¡¯s information technology powers, to
designing games for learning which accommodate diverse player types and
learning strategies. We hope that the next generation of game designers will
read our chapters and as a result, will approach their own future game designs
with more gender-conscious perspectives. We hope they will be inspired to focus
on game and player goals throughout the design process, informed by their own
and others¡¯ design research.
Industry consultant Nicole Lazzaro, President of XEODesign, starts this
section with a delightful reframing of the often-asked question: are games
designed just for girls necessary? Necessary for what depends on who is
asking the question. For example, game companies that hope to expand their
market wonder whether girl games are the best way to sell games to female
consumers. And activists that hope games will be a means to technological
empowerment wonder whether girl games are the only way to entice girls to learn
and love technology. On the other hand, in her chapter, Are Boy Games Even
Necessary?, Lazzaro questions whether the game industry should continue
creating games for boys. She argues that the game industry remains stuck
designing for a niche market ¨C: the once adolescent but now aging males who
were the original consumers of console first person shooter, war, and sports
games. Segmenting the game market by sex, and developing for a narrow,
extreme subset of either males or females limits market size. Designing games
160
which are strongly ¡°male¡± typed (or strongly ¡°female¡± typed) limits the appeal of a
game. Extreme male games and extreme female games are probably not
extremely fun games. Lazarro argues and her company¡¯s research shows that
what is fun for both sexes has more in common than different. She points the
way to a game design approach based on what players want rather than what
women or men want. Best selling games accommodate more different forms of
fun and allow for a wider range of playstyles.
Elisabeth Hayes, professor with the University of Wisconsin Games,
Learning, and Society Research Group, wants girls to play the games that boys
play. She doesn¡¯t want them to play just any game, it has to be games which
help girls develop tech-savvy abilities, attitudes, and identities. In her chapter,
Girls, Gaming, and Trajectories of IT Expertise, Hayes acknowledges girls are
not technophobic; they do play games and in fact in surpass boys in some uses
of computer technology such as blogging. But for Hayes, just playing games is
not enough. It matters what games girls choose, and she wants girls to move
beyond being players and engage in game-related practices such as creating ingame and game-related content. These kinds of activities develop domains of IT
expertise and problem solving which translate easily into careers in programming
and computer science and other fields that rely on technologies. Hayes
considers strategies to intentionally foster girls¡¯ deeper participation in
game-related constructive activities, reminding us that ¡°fun¡± is one of the
primary underlying reasons that people want to play games.
Authors of the next three chapters are each leading large scale projects
aimed at getting girls interested in and teaching them about computer
programming or technology. Because women are an underrepresented group in
science, math, engineering, and technology, the National Science Foundation
(NSF) provides funding to find ways to broaden their participation in these fields.
All three projects (Click! Urban Adventure, Storytelling Alice, and RAPUNSEL)
were funded by the NSF and designed for middle school girls. Research has
shown middle school to be a critical period when girls¡¯ educational and career
choices related to computers as well as science are formed.
In Design to Promote Girls¡¯ Agency through Educational Games: The
Click! Urban Adventure, Kristin Hughes outlines the design process of creating
Click! a role-playing science adventure game for middle-school girls. Hughes is
on the faculty at the top-ranked Carnegie Mellon University School of Design
which is well known for innovation and excellence in design research. Her
chapter is a fascinating case study detailing a four-semester exploratory and
discovery phase of researching how to use games to change middle-school girls¡¯
antipathy toward STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers.
The process itself, the insights gained about middle school girls, and the resulting
product will inspire others working in this domain. Early in the design research
process, the designers noticed that boy and girl players took very different
approaches, and furthermore that when girls and boys played together, girls
ended up in support roles. Because the project¡¯s explicit goal was to increase
girls¡¯ agency with science and technology, they decided to create a girls only
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experience. The discovery process applied a sequence of qualitative and
quantitative research activities contributing to the design team¡¯s understanding of
the types of play experience would excite and sustain girls¡¯ interests. Click! Is a
mixed reality story-based multiplayer team mystery game involving five weeks of
training to prepare for game day. The first test of the final game, conducted with
100 girls, succeeded in its goal of promoting girls¡¯ sense of agency in relation to
STEM. Refinements and larger community deployment are underway.
Knowing how to program computers unlocks the power to create
simulations, games, communication systems, and other information and
communication systems. Women are strongly under-represented in computer
science and their absence holds back not only individual careers but also
integration of other-than-male perspectives in the creation of computer-based
experiences. Caitlin Kelleher grew up interested and skilled in computer science.
She earned a doctorate in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
without the benefit of the software that she has since designed to help interest
girls in computer programming. Her chapter, Using Storytellling to Introduce
Girls to Computer Programming, describes a multiyear iterative process of
design, user testing, and refinement. Kelleher had worked with ¡°Alice,¡± a
programming environment designed by Randy Pausch and colleagues at
Carnegie Mellon University which enables novice programmers to create high
quality animations. Because she believed that storytelling and sharing stories
would provide stronger inherent motivation than animation alone for girls to want
to learn programming, she adapted Alice to create Storytelling Alice. Kelleher
began with the hunch that programming as a means to tell stories would attract
girls. Over a three year period she prototyped, tested, and revised her design.
She then conducted a trial of Stortyelling Alice involving 43 girls. The trial
showed that Storytelling Alice was more successful than Alice at engaging
middle school girls. The success of her program will grow larger with the
announced donation by Electronic Arts of The Sims 2 character library to be
integrated into Alice and Storytelling Alice.
In Design Heuristics for Activist Games, academic, activist, and former
commercial game designer Mary Flanagan and philosopher colleague Helen
Nissenbaum propose a design heuristic for embedding activist values in a game.
They draw examples from RAPUNSEL, a game designed to engage inner city
girls and teach them programming. Their Values in Play method (V.A.P.)
involves three often-overlapping phases: Discovery, Translation, and Verification.
The goal of discovery is to identify relevant values. Translation operationalizes
the values, transforming them into game features. Verification checks to see that
the intended value goals are actually achieved. This process is applied each time
the game design iterates. They advocate conscious consideration of values
throughout the design process, from the definition of a project, to specification of
game mechanics, to safeguarding critical values-rich design features during
implementation and revision. V.A.P. provides an added layer of design
methodology, to be applied in conjunction with whatever process game designers
currently use. Flanagan and Nissenbaum describe the overriding social value of
162
RAPUNSEL, a game design to teach girls to program, as ¡°gender equity.¡± The
game itself is based on girls¡¯ preferences and interests. RAPUNSEL addresses
the goal of gender equity not within the confines of the game (which intentionally
privileges girls¡¯ preferences) but within the larger societal perspective because of
the extreme under representation of women in game design and computer
science. RAPUNSEL also embodied values such as cooperation, sharing, and
fair representation. Whether makers of media experiences intend to do so or not,
they transmit values through their designs. Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide
game designers with tools to appreciate and consciously apply the subtle power
of this medium to embody and reinforce activist (or socially responsible) values.
Despite being games for learning, the exclusive focus of
RAPUNSEL, Storytelling Alice, and Click! on girls¡¯ interests and
preferences positions them as poor choices for classroom learning.
Strategic adaptations could be made to incorporate play styles appealing
to boys. Carrie Heeter and Brian Winn teach serious game design at the
Michigan State University Games for Entertainment and Learn (GEL) Lab. In
their chapter, Implications of Gender, Player Type and Learning Strategies for
the Design of Games for Learning, they warn that educational game designs
which blindly borrow from commercial game motifs and genres risk privileging
male learners by replicating commercial games¡¯ historical exclusive emphasis on
masculine interests and play styles. The authors propose four characteristics that
should be incorporated into games intended for classroom learning: 1) classroom
games strongly engage both girls and boys; 2) they accommodate diverse play
style preferences, 3) they provide support where needed for learners with limited
gaming experience; and 4) they result in deep learning through play. Heeter and
Winn designed and studied a classroom learning game intended to
accommodate both masculine and feminine play styles. Heeter and Winn
propose and validate a taxonomy of player types for learning games, classifying
players as Competitive (speedy, few errors), Engaged (slow exploration, few
errors), Careless (speedy, many errors) and Lost (slow play, many errors).
Competitive and Engaged play are successful learning strategies. Careless and
Lost play are unsuccessful learning strategies. They tested three variations of ingame reward structures. Rewarding speedy play harmed girls and had no impact
on boys¡¯ play. Rewarding exploration helped boys and had no impact on girls¡¯
play. The authors conclude with advice to designers about accommodating
diverse play styles and using reward structures to attract learners to more
successful play and learning strategies.
This section begins with persuasive arguments for why to design for
players rather than for extreme male or female play preferences. Doing so will
result in more satisfying, more fun, more widely appealing games. Games are
assumed to be powerful, designed experiences able to engage and change
players, experiences can be improved upon, made more powerful or more fun,
through a combination of carefully held design objectives and design research
163
techniques. The authors¡¯ belief in the potential power of games underlies their
own attempts to use games to engage and empower girls to themselves
someday wield this power. Three chapters describe the design of games
specifically for girl audience. This approach is less contradictory of Lazarro¡¯s
chapter than it may seem because the authors¡¯ works are based on design
research. Although they only consider girls¡¯ interests and preferences, the
question they ask is not ¡°what do girls want?¡± but ¡°how do we understand and
engage our (girl) audience?¡± Their goal is not to create games which are extreme
girl games. They are trying to create games which are extremely appealing to girl
players. We would expect that their games already accommodate a diversity of
play styles, though slanted towards more feminine play styles. Should Hughes,
Kelleher, Flanagan and Nissenbaum move to target a mix of female and male
players, they will again use design research to find ways to incorporate more
masculine play styles, expanding the appeal of their games. Games for
classroom learning carry a mandate to be good for learning for both sexes.
Great commercial games allow for many different play styles; great classroom
learning games allow for many different learning styles. Gender differences can
help inform that diversity, but in fun and learning players of both sexes have
more in common than different.
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