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

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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

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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

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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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