Great stuff, Marielle. I was especially interested in the comments
about girl gaming.
I saw Brenda Laurel give the closing keynote at CHI-98, where she talked
about her experience doing usability research to found her company
Purple Moon (since killed by the Mattel juggernaut).
Reinforcing the observations you noted, one of the most interesting
things she noted about girl gamers is their attraction to complexity.
According to Laurel's research spanning a 10-year period, the reason
girls don't play a lot of boy-oriented games is not because they're too
difficult, but just the opposite, that the game play is often too
simplistic.
With Purple Moon, Laurel tried to create games that appealed to girls'
appreciation for complex relationships. Much of the game play involved
ethical questions in social simulation scenarios (e.g., do I go to the
birthday party for the unpopular girl or accept the invitation for the
party by the most popular girl for the same day?), and the complexity of
the issues involved certainly carried greater variance in play than
"shoot the zombie".
One of the key aspects Laurel touched on was the self-fulfilling
prophesy of game designers: having delivered games aimed at boys, game
designers look to low sales among girls as a false reinforcement of the
notion that "girls aren't into gaming".
That was one of the things I loved most about Myst when it premiered. I
don't play a lot of games, but Myst appealed to a much broader market
than games had previously addressed. It was in many respects the first
truly literate game, and its focus on environmental immersion and long,
complex puzzles was a radically meditative departure from the
shoot-em-up twitchers that continue to dominate the market.
A thousand Myst-like games have been created since (including the great
Alida <http://www.runrev.com/spotlight_on/alida1.php>), and while
they've been fun I keep wondering if there's an entirely new type of
game waiting to be created, something as different from everything else
we've seen as Myst was for its time.
Somewhere out there is a game waiting to be created, something that will
open up the world of entertainment software to a whole new audience that
isn't currently into games.
Or as I once put it at a game developer meeting: Where is the "Catcher
in the Rye" of games, the thing that will appeal to people who like
rich, provocative entertainment but aren't attracted to current game
play models?
Maybe it'll be made by one of the readers of this list....
--
Richard Gaskin Managing Editor, revJournal
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