Like other media, most games have gender inclination in terms of themes,
stories, representations, mechanisms etc. The game that I want to write about is SIMS, which was my favorite game several years ago. It is the
best-selling game of all time for personal computers. And it is also
seen as a girl-friendly game because the social elements and
constructive play pattern that is introduced in the game. The
inspiration of the game comes from the creator, Will Wright's obsession
with building models to simulate real life. The book of "Designing
Interactions" (Bill Moggridge,
2007) quotes the interview with the designer, in which he contributes
the success to the community design; the game creates a
social space where people connects with each other. When I played the
game, the social interaction was reinforced by the rewarding system.
For example, if the avatar do not get enough social interaction, they are
going to have a bad temper, and the balance of life is messed up. Will Wright
also mentioned that there is more sex in the game then most of the other games, and
the rationality behind this design is all based on the simulation of
real life. This simulation makes the game play to be constructive,
which matches well with the game plan pattern of girls. Although this
game is liked by many female players, the author took a more neutral
method, which is simulating the real life and putting the mechanisms
there so that players can control their avatar's life from the
manipulation level (control mechanism) to the need level (to fulfill
the different requirements for multiple aspects of life), and the community level. This neutral method is actually very
different from the method mentioned in Brenda Laurel's book. She takes
the stance of a social activist, and trying to promote that girls should get enough chance to be involved in the
computer world by computer games. Although the company did not survive due to
business reasons, the games that they created had a strong cultural
influence, especially for girls between 8 to 14 years old. She talked
about the anthropology research method that they took to understand the
girls and how they play, and pointed out that this kind of research is
very different from "market research". The research is not merely based
on statistics, it is more focused on the quantitative findings, and
the purpose is "innovation is for the creative." The difficulties of creating games
for girls within the boy's world is not only hard because of the
demographics of developing and designing team, it is a deeply embedded
in every aspects of life - in play, identity, work, technology and
business (Laurel, 2001).
But comparing the difficult of creating
successful blockbuster games for girls in the digital age, to the
success of the board game among female audiences in pre-computer
age, it seems that technology gets in the way for the games designed for
girls and women. This issue is discussed in the paper of "the hegemony
of play", and there are many things that we can learn from the 19th and early 20th
century board game industry. The role of the power of the player is
more flexible than computer enforcing and dictating all the rules;
producers of the game pieces have more room for their personal
creativity; the game space is more shared than separated; more girls
are involved in the play testing of the game. Many of these are good
lessons to encourage better design for games that's more fun to girls.
Laurel wrote that, "the strategy of culture work is to inject new material into the culture without activating its immune system." It seems that the cultural changes always cause reactions of the "immune system" to feel pain. That's why we need to take multiple methods, including activist methods, anthropology methods, and the improvement of the technology.
Yan Xu
yxu7@gatech.edu
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