Hi Richard,
Thanks for your comments and the tip on Brenda Laurel, didn't know
that one. Funny, I found mention of her on a website "game girl
advance" <http://www.gamegirladvance.com/>. I like the pun!
Other games that are said to be highly successful with girls are:
Alexandra Ledermann 6 : L'école des Champions <http://
www.gamekult.com/tout/jeux/fiches/J000073976.html> (French only) and
Kitchen Conundrum by Open University <http://www.greencathedral.com/
ougame/>
Note that in the UK, there is now a new initiative, computer club for
girls <http://www.cc4g.net/>. Girls and computing/gaming is an
interesting emerging market ;-).
Marielle
On 2 Feb 2007, at 18:32, Richard Gaskin wrote:
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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Marielle Lange (PhD), http://widged.com
Bite-size Applications for Education
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