Play Like a Girl (or not) with Brenda Laurel

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The Babblery
The Babblery
Play Like a Girl (or not) with Brenda Laurel
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We’re all human (theoretically), but some of us find our way toward being more deeply human. Writer, researcher, designer and entrepreneur Brenda Laurel is known for her work in the world of video games, but starting with that fact doesn’t start you down the path of understanding her. When other people write manuals or textbooks, Laurel writes explorations of ideas. And when other people teach techniques, Laurel teaches her students how to think.

In this conversation, we explore how girls play and what that means for women and game designers. We talk about the relationship between theater and gaming, and how the gaming world grew to change the way children live and develop. We talk about the importance of teaching. But most of all, we talk about what it means to be a creator in this world, someone who asks others to entrust their minds to our work. [Click for transcript]

“It’s up to us as culture workers to create conditions in which we have alternatives that are compelling enough to draw people in. And that’s a tough call. It’s always harder to do the good thing. It’s always harder. And my advice to anybody who complains about it is, suck it up. It’s our job.“

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About Brenda Laurel

Brenda Laurel is an interactive media theorist and designer. Since 1976, she has worked in computer games, UX research and design, and virtual reality. She has also founded and led two graduate programs in media design. Her books include The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre, (1991, Second Edition 2014). Brenda holds a BA in Communication and Theatre from DePauw University and MFA and PhD in Theatre from the Ohio State University. Her current areas of research include climate change and Gaian theory and practice. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.

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Play Like a Girl (or not) with Brenda Laurel

[00:00:00] Brenda Laurel: What I hope we can do, as culture makers, you know, is to shape our culture in such a way that lifts up compassion. And that’s, that’s a tough call. It’s always harder to do the good thing. It’s always harder.

[00:00:39] Voiceover: I’m your host Suki Wessling. Before this interview, my knowledge of interaction designer and theorist Brenda Laurel was confined to the brief, but monumentally important time she spent as co-founder of the game company, Purple Moon.

[00:00:53] At a time when video games were for boys, not just by happenstance, but by design, Laurel asked the simple question, how do girls play?

[00:01:01] What she learned about play informed her later career in academia, but this conversation is about so much more than video games. Laurel’s intellectual curiosity never allows itself to separate from the guiding light of her humanity.

[00:01:15] In the first segment, we’ll discuss her early years in the gaming world. Next we’ll explore the world of games and what girls’ play really is. Finally, we talk about her role as teacher and our roles as people who create in this world.

[00:01:29] I hope you enjoy this thoroughly delightful conversation.

[00:01:33]

Segment 1: From theater to games
—

[00:01:34] Brenda Laurel: Hi there, I’m Brenda Laurel. I am an interaction designer, a writer, a teacher, and a knitter. And I used to be an abalone hunter and hope to be again.

[00:01:49] Suki Wessling: Well, I love that. You’re currently retired, but, and, and I did put air quotes around that. What does retirement mean to you?

[00:01:59] Brenda Laurel: It’s interesting. I thought it meant I could sleep late, but of course, as one ages, one tends to wake up earlier and earlier. So that didn’t turn out. I am still knitting. I think part of that is in honor of my mother, uh, who was a knitter and who succumbed to Alzheimer’s. And couldn’t knit anymore. So this is kind of a self test, but also calisthenics that I’m trying to use to keep my brain going.

[00:02:27] I always choose a more difficult pattern than the last. I’ve done some editing recently. I’ve worked on a book, and a short story with some friends and I’m actually getting paid for it, which blows my mind. I’m still doing public speaking. So, I keep real busy. I’m a reader too. Spend a lot of time out in the natural world as well.

[00:02:49]

The Drama Queen
—

[00:02:49] Suki Wessling: So, you mentioned your mom. What was your childhood like? And what were you interested in before you started down this whole path?

[00:02:58] Brenda Laurel: I was an only child, I was born in 1950. My parents, are very dear to me. They’ve been gone a long time. I spent most of my earliest days in a Veterans Administration housing community, not in like Levittown, where my dad was able to buy a house for 7, 000, I think. My early excursions into drama began in that neighborhood because, um, God, I was such a drama queen even then. We had a little utility room in the back of the carport and I would get the boys to come over and we’d do, whacked out versions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for example. I’d decorate the inside of the utility room with you know, aluminum foil and try to make it look like a mine and then send them all in there and we improvised you know crazy scenarios like I think one time Snow White got spontaneously pregnant for example.

[00:03:59] Suki Wessling: Oh my goodness.

[00:04:00] Brenda Laurel: We we don’t know how this happened because of course I didn’t know what caused it yeah, we had we had a lot of fun when I was about 12, we moved to a neighborhood farther out of town, which was good, but there’s the woods there, and I had trees to climb, which made me extremely happy. I got into theater, I guess, when I was about, well, I was a shepherd in the Christmas play when I was five, um, but I started acting, acting when I was about 12, and then proceeded along with that through junior high.

[00:04:37] Because I’m a sort of a gender non conforming person, you’d say, um, I think I was, you know, not well liked, uh, by a lot of the girls. That and the fact that I was smart. So, I became a debater, and, you know, my, my teammate and I were the first two women to win the nationals. So, debate, academics, some social life, but not a lot. And then, uh, you know, my parents were Republicans. I can remember them having me take my dachshund to the polling place with Goldwater signs draped over him. Uh, and I think that’s illegal, but I didn’t know it. Anyway, when I got to college, I went to DePauw University, my politics completely flipped.

[00:05:24] I mean, we’re talking, this is 1968.

[00:05:27] Suki Wessling: Ah, good year to start college.

[00:05:31] Brenda Laurel: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I can remember when, when the Woodstock movie played at the College Town Theater, the place was lined with policemen. Like we were going to do something. I’m not sure what they thought we were going to do. But yeah, I became pretty quickly, a leftist activist, uh, kept on with theater, uh, worked in the women’s rights movement and the civil rights movement, campaigned for democratic presidential candidates, worked in the student Senate, screwed the student body president in the chapel at midnight.

[00:06:06] You know, as one does.

[00:06:09] Suki Wessling: What were, What were you majoring in?

[00:06:13] Brenda Laurel: Theater.

[00:06:13] Suki Wessling: Theater.

[00:06:13] Brenda Laurel: I actually started my major at DePauw in psychology, and I was used to getting straight A’s. I was at the top of my class. And I hit statistics and I thought, okay, this is just not going to work out. I can learn as much about people by majoring in theater as I can by majoring in psych.

[00:06:34] So that’s how the boar ate the cabbage.

[00:06:39] Suki Wessling: Were your parents scandalized given that, that you went from a career that had at least some sort of income generating career path to one that probably didn’t?

[00:06:51] Brenda Laurel: You know, they were really supportive, uh, of the choices I made. They always supported the art I did. They came to every show, no matter what part of the world I was in. So that didn’t bother them. I think my mother was extremely disturbed by my politics. My father, I think was secretly very proud of me.

[00:07:12] He was an urban planner and pretty much of a social activist himself. Although he would say out loud that he was a Republican, I had my doubts. But my mother was scandalized. I can remember, I gave the commencement address at DePauw. And had some things to say about the war and other stuff. And my mother wept and my father was grinning ear to ear. I can remember that the provost tried not to hand me my diploma, uh, because I had caused something of a little, little riot. The mayor then of Indianapolis, Richard Lugar, got my diploma from the provost and handed it to me. He later became a Senator from Indiana and he was a great guy. Anyway. And then I went to graduate school in theater at Ohio State.

[00:08:02] I got into Yale, but my parents couldn’t afford to send me. And Yale drama wouldn’t give you a scholarship in your first year. So I would have been in class with Meryl Streep,

[00:08:14] Suki Wessling: darn

[00:08:14] Brenda Laurel: I had to go to Ohio State instead. And it was a good education. I got my MFA and my PhD there, so I can’t complain, but, but Yale drama might’ve been

[00:08:23] Suki Wessling: fun.

[00:08:23] Did you ever get to meet Meryl Streep?

[00:08:26] Brenda Laurel: I did not.

[00:08:28] Suki Wessling: Unfair.

[00:08:29] Brenda Laurel: She is so good.

[00:08:31] Suki Wessling: She is so good.

[00:08:32] Brenda Laurel: Being an actor was, just is a fabulous, fabulously pleasurable emotionally and intellectually stimulating thing. I love it. When I was in my MFA program, I also double majored in directing, and turned out to be a pretty good director and really enjoyed that too.

[00:08:52] Suki Wessling: You said something that I think is intriguing and you used a modern phrase, but, um, what was your experience of being a young woman, late sixties, early seventies, and not being gender conforming?

[00:09:06] Brenda Laurel: I think for most of us who are queer or borderline queer, um, we don’t actually know it when we’re kids. At least in those days, it was such a taboo subject that there was nobody to talk to about it. The words weren’t used. I mean, literally were not used. So, I, I, I guess I thought, I, I just, uh, wrote a little piece about Halloween when I was little.

[00:09:33] I went, as Robin Hood for many years. And my mother became concerned about my gender identity. She said, you got to change it up. So I thought about it and I thought, ah, I could be Peter Pan. because Peter Pan is a boy with a girl inside. And my mother was a huge Mary Martin fan. So I could use exactly the same costume, just change the names to protect the innocent, I could be, you know, a boy with a girl inside.

[00:10:02] Later on I figured out I was sort of a girl with a boy inside. It was confusing, but it wasn’t really until I was in college that I was able to understand what was going on with me. And I think typically how I survived was I had a bunch of gay male friends. I now know were gay. I mean, we didn’t talk about it in high school.

[00:10:30] I had a fair number of friends who were intellectual women who always got cast as being sexually wrong because, you know, gender wise you’re not supposed to be a smart woman, at least in 1964 when I was a freshman in high school. I can remember I registered for calculus. I was the only girl in the class.

[00:10:51] And, uh, it became clear to me that I could either take calculus and never have a date, or I could drop the class. So I dropped the class. However, the dates weren’t that satisfying. Anyway, it was a confusing time, but I’ve never, I’ve always had a pretty strong sense of myself and gender has always kind of been secondary to me, like brown eyes, blue eyes, who cares?

[00:11:16] Yeah.

[00:11:17] Suki Wessling: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting how how things change and yet don’t change because what you’re describing was very similar for me and I was born 15 years after you. So, but now things have definitely changed. So, and we could talk about that.

[00:11:35] Brenda Laurel: Well, it’s cool. It’s changed so much for the better and um, it took me 60 years to feel comfortable in my skin. And my partner is extremely accepting of my sexuality and gender and very supportive. So, I feel blessed.

[00:11:51] Suki Wessling: That’s great. You graduated with degrees in theater and uh, what, what happened next? You were looking to work in theater.

Enter computer games
—

[00:12:00] Brenda Laurel: Well, I did spend some time in New York coming to the conclusion that success on Broadway or in New York theater was really much more about connections and luck than it was about talent. And I saw some really excellent people sort of get sidelined. And at some point I decided, well, you know, maybe this isn’t for me.

[00:12:23] And that’s when I went back to the, uh, Ph. D. program. While I was studying for my Ph. D. generals in 1975, I met a fella who had been, uh, a friend of my boyfriend in high school, named Joe Miller, he passed away about 10 years ago. He was, you know, he turned out to be just, you know, head of Sega and all kinds of stuff.

[00:12:45] Very important guy in the computer game business. But in 1975, he was working at Battelle Memorial Institute. It was a research lab in Columbus. And he was the computer guy. And I remember he took me to his studio, his, his lab, to show me what he was working on and these images from outer space were painting themselves slowly across the screen.

[00:13:15] And I literally fell to my knees and said, I don’t know what this is, but I want a piece of it. This is amazing. You know, I had this. Oh my god moment. Well a year later he and his colleague John Powers, left Battelle to start a little computer game company in 1976 in Columbus, Ohio, and it was a little box with 2k of RAM.

[00:13:38] 2K of RAM. Um, that connected to your computer with, you could use an alphanumeric keyboard. Um, the cool thing was it was loaded from cassette tape so you could synchronize audio.

[00:13:51] Suki Wessling: Ooh.

[00:13:52]

[00:13:52] Brenda Laurel: Oh, Uh, which was fun, but the unfortunate thing about 2K loaded from cassette tape is that a player couldn’t make a choice that made a difference.

[00:14:05] You had to have converging nodes at the end of a segment of code. Um, so that’s how I got passionate about interaction design. Mainly, how do we design things that allow people to take action in a virtual environment or a computer game that has real consequences, that changes the world, that changes the plot.

[00:14:30] And I came to understand that when somebody plays a computer game, they’re really engaged in time displaced collaboration with the designer, and that’s the designer’s job to design a world in which that person is predisposed to make dramatically interesting choices. So at the end of a, you know, day of play, you can tell a story about what happened that’s a really interesting story.

[00:14:54] That’s so important. It’s so canonical, I think, to making a good computer game, a good VR experience, anything interactive, that if you can construct that dramatically interesting story when you’ve gone through it, It’s a success and ideally you should be able to construct an entirely different story going through that same world multiple times.

[00:15:19] So that became sort of the thing I was about, in the game business and later in the VR business.

[00:15:26]

Interactions
—

[00:15:26] Voiceover: Brenda Laurel found her calling in the nascent game industry where she. applied her theater training to interactive entertainment.

[00:15:36] Brenda Laurel: At the time, we’re talking early to mid 70s, there was a big trend in the theater for audience interaction, Hair, Dionysus in 69, these things were on Broadway, there were people running around doing that kind of work, and I had worked with an actor friend to write a, a kind of a an interactive scenario of a play about Robin Hood.

[00:16:02] I guess I have a thing about Robin Hood. And we staged it around the lake at the center of the campus and the kids would follow the minstrel along to these various places and a scene would unfold. But the rule that we had with the actors and, and the team was, whatever the kid said, you needed to take it in, make it matter in the plot.

[00:16:26] and that was just amazing. So the computer game stuff a year later, I mean, I already had my feet wet in this notion of interactivity in live theater. Uh, and the idea of being able to do it in, in, in a fantasy world was big.

[00:16:41] There’s a book called The Actor’s Freedom, written by Anton Chekhov’s son, that talks about the kind of space for creativity that happens inside of a script, inside of a production. And so, I was already there with that, plus improvisation.

[00:17:02] Suki Wessling: It seems like one of the limitations that you came up against early on was just the technical limitations, just the RAM.

[00:17:11] Brenda Laurel: Yeah,

[00:17:11] Suki Wessling: You couldn’t

[00:17:12] Brenda Laurel: When we got, we got 16k, we thought, uh, we made jokes like, we’re gonna do War and Peace, man, you know. On an 1802 processor.

[00:17:24] Suki Wessling: So after that game, what, what was your path?

[00:17:28] Brenda Laurel: The little company that my friends had started, was superseded by an upstart in California called Atari. And so our company was going bankrupt and the boys were all moving to California. So I’d never been to California.

[00:17:42] I said, okay, I’ll go. There are jobs at Atari. And when I started at Atari, I was, I don’t know, I was manager of educational software or something. Uh, even though it was a game company, I ended up being, um, the director of strategy and production for the Atari 800, 400, 800 computer. And that’s how I started to get into trouble at Atari because, um, the president of, of the corporation wanted me to spend all my budget porting computer games from the game machine to the personal computer. And one day I went into the office of the president of the division, the computer division, and I said, Look, this is stupid. These games don’t run as well, for one thing. For another thing, you have a new product that you’re trying to differentiate from your game machine.

[00:18:37] Let me use your chalkboard and show you all the things we could be doing. Personal finance, right? Personal wellbeing, in addition to games, word processing a spreadsheet, you know, there’s all these opportunity spaces that we’re not getting into and it’s going to kill this product. And he said to me, your salary’s doubled and you report to me.

[00:19:07] Suki Wessling: I thought you were going to say, you’re fired. No. Quite the

[00:19:11] Brenda Laurel: That happened later. Um,

[00:19:14] Suki Wessling: Well, so, so before, before we get to that, here you are, you come to California and suddenly you’re managing, and I’m guessing, just projecting here that it was mostly men.

[00:19:25] What was that experience like? Mm hmm. Mm

[00:19:29] Brenda Laurel: It was funny. I, I have a story I will tell that has a bleep in it. I was chairing a meeting at one point with heads of engineering and marketing and stuff for, for some of the products we were working on and they were all mad and I’m sitting at a long table and they’re all chatting away and kind of ignoring me.

[00:19:47] Uh, and finally I said, you know, Hey, guys, we got a fucking meeting to run here. And dropping the F bomb got their attention. They never gave me a hard time again. So, there was this sort of rowdy male impersonation period that I went through, you know, with these guys. That didn’t continue to be necessary, but it was an interesting insight for me.

[00:20:12] Suki Wessling: Coming up an industry grows up and Brenda Laurel explores beyond.

[00:20:18] Brenda Laurel: The way you make an industry out of it is you make a culture out of it. And you, you grab on to stuff that already exists in the culture and extend it.

Segment 2: Gender identity, games, and interaction
—

[00:20:29] I’m your host Suki Wessling. As a woman in a man’s industry, Brenda Laurel was acutely aware of her gender, but instead of being held back by that she leaned into her fascination with the difference between the ways women and men play and lead.

[00:20:51] We joined her now as she founds and then moves past the conference that now defines the gaming industry.

[00:20:58] Brenda Laurel: I have a, pretend, uh, brother. His name is Chuck. He has a company called Alter Ego. He’s a stoner. He’s shorter than I am. And when I was, uh, when I was hosting the Computer Game Developers Conference, which I co founded, one time I called and said, You know, I’m sick. My brother’s gonna take my place. So I got up in magnificent drag, including a really finely done beard, army jacket, you know, kind of crass guy. All you have to do to impersonate a male is to look like him. narrow your pitch range. So right now, I could be taken for a male without even lowering the volume because I’m not going like this.

[00:21:43] Uh, right. So anyway, Chuck showed up, uh, and people that I knew well could not see that it was me from a foot away. It was just great. It was really fun. And then I ran into Dan Bunten, who, who did Seven Cities of Gold and Mule, famous computer game designer. And Dan was in drag. And I’m joking. I’m saying, oh, Dan, listen.

[00:22:09] He said, um, my name is Danielle now. I am post op. And I, I freaked out and ran back up to my room, took off all the crepe hair, put on some rhinestone earrings, came back down, you know. I felt awful about it. Danielle, who stayed a great friend of mine until she passed away, and she really inspired a lot of the work that I did with Purple Moon, but that’s another story.

[00:22:33] Suki Wessling: What would you say that emotion was that made you go back and, and dress in a more feminine way?

[00:22:41] Brenda Laurel: Uh, I guess because one could be thought to be making fun of somebody. And here’s this woman who’s gone through major surgery and hormones and really done the job. And here I am screwing around with crepe hair. And I felt cheap and I felt like I could be seen as being, you know, making fun of her, making fun of cross dressing, making fun of queer people, and I sure didn’t want to be that guy.

Building an industry
—

[00:23:08] Suki Wessling: It sounds like, you know, you got really deeply involved, you said you started the conference. Can you talk a little bit about, about the, I mean, when you started in computer games, there was no industry really.

[00:23:22] Brenda Laurel: No.

[00:23:23] Now. No. No.

[00:23:24] Suki Wessling: What does it take to build up an industry like that? A conference is obviously one of them.

[00:23:29] One thing. One part.

[00:23:31] Brenda Laurel: Yeah, I think at the first Computer Game Developers Conference, it was Chris Crawford and me and John Powers and some other folks were at that first one. There were 50 people. And these were guys who were working at Atari. There really weren’t many competitors to Atari until Activision showed up a few years later.

[00:23:51] Um, a lot of us were just nerds. You know, um, but we had the idea that we had information we could exchange. We’d have great conversations. Let’s have a conference. And it started really small. Chris, without our knowledge, sold the conference about four years in to some conglomerate and it got changed to the Game Developers Conference, which now has like, I don’t know, 20, 000 people come?

[00:24:16] Um, last time I went, I just couldn’t handle it. It’s, it’s kind of been taken over by marketing dweebs and finance people. But going back to your question, the way you make an industry out of it is you make a culture out of it. And you, you grab on to stuff that already exists in the culture and extend it.

[00:24:38] So, hence, the somewhat dubious practice of computer game companies licensing, you know, Hollywood movies and making games based on them. Now, like 40 years later, I look back and it’s so ironic that I’m seeing movies based on computer games.

[00:24:56] Suki Wessling: I know.

[00:24:56] Brenda Laurel: It’s just turned itself inside out.

[00:24:58] Suki Wessling: So to, to do that backwards is sort of weird. It’s sort of like when you watch, when you read the novelization of a movie.

[00:25:06] Brenda Laurel: Right, right. Or you see a movie that’s based on a novel that you’ve read, and you see how they, you know, tweaked it and kind of messed it up in some ways, or made it better, who knows. But yeah, so this whole phenomenon got me interested by the time I was done with the computer business, which was about 20 years later, um, not done, but you know, moving, certainly moving out of games into research, into academia, it became clear to me, I was asked to create a graduate design program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and it became clear to me that if you’re going to be a designer in this world, you need to be fluent in interaction, ID and graphic design, at the very least.

[00:25:55] And you need to be able to think in a transmedia way about your work, because that’s what’s going to happen, right? From Barbie, you know, to Barbie, uh, on and on, you know, these things always travel in teams, of disciplines, at least. in today’s world. Now, of course, we’d probably have to teach them AI, but I don’t want to go there.

[00:26:22] I really, I really don’t want to go there. But I, I taught, I founded two graduate programs that were based on this premise that we needed to blend media skills and look at creating projects and design statements that took advantage of all of them. I mean, I had students at Art Center, one in particular, Scott Nazarian, basically invented augmented reality in 2004, um, by using projections on scrim and stuff. These guys were so far ahead of their times. And I like to think that it’s because they were in a transmedia environment and that we were really, really, really focused on research, human centered research and understanding what people like to do, how they like to do it. You know, back in the game world, when I started a company to do games for little girls, we interviewed a thousand little girls all over this country to understand play. Because in those days, that, we started that company in 1997, um, girls weren’t using computers. and one of the reasons for doing the research, with girls was to figure out what it would take to get their hands on a computer and feel secure and safe about it without having this fear that they were going to break it or that they were doing something against gender norms because it was tech.

[00:27:52] Um, because we knew it would make a huge difference in their individual and our collective futures So that’s really what stimulated me to go do that. That plus, you know, after 17 years of working with boy games for boys, those violent games, you know, stupid games, I really wanted to do, I finally got it together to say, okay, I’m in the spot.

[00:28:18] I can ask for the funding. We’re going to make this happen. And we did. So that was nice.

Games for girls
—

[00:28:21] Suki Wessling: Yeah, Brenda Laurel co founded the very first company that produced games for girls, Purple Moon. They soon realized that in order to design for girls, they had to figure out. What girls might actually want.

[00:28:33] Backing up to the situation before you started the company. You’re working in an industry that you know you just described in this way that’s different from the industry now because there are games for boys that are no longer like that. There’s a, perhaps there’s a whole, there’s like a gender neutral section in the middle.

[00:28:55] Brenda Laurel: Yeah,

[00:28:56] Suki Wessling: Um,

[00:28:57] Brenda Laurel: Well, all the, all the, the multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, you know, um, the Rivendell stuff, there’s a bunch of gender inclusive, work being done, especially in the multiplayer space, but also in the independent game design space. In recent years, we’ve seen that I would guess the majority of the most successful games have been authored by gender nonconforming people.

[00:29:23] Suki Wessling: Interesting. So, but, but let’s go back to, to where you were with this hyper masculine environment and, and was it generally accepted that these games were just for boys and that girls were, you know, were a lost cause because they weren’t using computers?

[00:29:39] Brenda Laurel: That’s almost true. I, there were some exceptions. Women really enjoyed, uh, narrative adventure games. So, Roberta Williams work way back in the day. Girls liked Pac Man a lot. I had a male engineer once tell me that that was because it was a game about an eating disorder. And I had to work really hard not to punch this guy.

[00:30:05] Um, yeah. So, but, and, and girls, big insight for me was that girls tended to like, in the arcade days, first person driving games. And what turned out to be important is the first person ness, the first person view, because generally speaking, females do less well than males at mental rotation under time pressure.

[00:30:34] Well, if you remember the old games, they’re, most of them, side scrollers. So, already, a female player has to do a mental rotation to follow the course of the game. Plus, a translation from the keyboard, or the mouse, to the plane of the screen. You’re screwed. You can’t win if you’re, quote, normal in that way.

[00:30:56] And of course, we’re talking about, you know, bell curves. But in a first person game, you’ve got the same edge as anybody else. And by the way, girls can do mental rotation as well as boys when there’s no time pressure.

[00:31:08] Suki Wessling: That’s interesting.

[00:31:10] Brenda Laurel: It is interesting. It’s a brain based difference that isn’t just cultural. There aren’t many of them, but that’s one. Anyway, there were some games that girls played, but mostly this was a culture built by men, by young men, for young men, sold in places where young men shopped. Period. You know?

[00:31:31] Suki Wessling: There’s been a lot of, exploration of the history of RadioShack and its importance in the early computer industry because so many of the kids, almost all of them boys, because it was a very girl unfriendly space, were, were brought into technology through RadioShack.

[00:31:51] Brenda Laurel: I think a big change that happened in the game industry that helped it become more inclusive in a funny way is that the retail spaces changed. So when you started seeing stuff at Target, or Kmart, or, or Fry’s even, you remember

[00:32:10] Suki Wessling: I loved Fry’s.

[00:32:12] Brenda Laurel: I love Fry’s. I miss Fry’s so

[00:32:14] Anyway, yeah, I think the change in retail spaces broadened the audience a little bit. And it certainly made it possible to think about creating and succeeding in selling stuff that wasn’t just for boys.

Affiliation and exclusion
—

[00:32:31] Suki Wessling: You said you started with research. What are some of the big takeaways that you had about the research on what girls might enjoy in games that was different?

[00:32:41] Brenda Laurel: Well, you know, at first we thought we’re just gonna ask girls, you know, what kind of games would you like to play until we realized they didn’t have any experience with computer games. Most of them hadn’t played at all. They watched their brothers play. So the real question was how do girls and boys maybe play differently, period, you know, in terms of play.

[00:33:02] So the mental rotation finding was a big one. Probably the most Illuminating thing that we discovered is it was well known, probably to sociologists, is the differences in how girls and boys in U. S. culture tended to, um, manage their social networks. So boys, and again, making generalizations here that aren’t universally true, boys tended to do direct competition.

[00:33:36] I can kick your ass, I can throw this ball farther, and then it’s over. It may change who’s popular, you know, if I’m the star quarterback and my best friend is gonna get elevated socially along with me. So there’s a kind of a an org chart like network for boys. For girls, it is really different. The tools that tend to be used are affiliation and exclusion, so that it’s not what level of a, of a hierarchy you’re in, it’s how many friends you have and which friends you have.

[00:34:19] And to increase your social status, you can either affiliate with a new friend, or you can cause an exclusion to happen among friends that are currently- this probably sounds familiar to any woman listening to this program. We do this. You know, I mean, when we’re little, we play in groups of three girls, and we take turns excluding one.

[00:34:45] That’s how we roll.

[00:34:46] Suki Wessling: I feel like you just sort of described why I was a child without that many friends.

[00:34:54] Brenda Laurel: Well, me

[00:34:56] Suki Wessling: too.

[00:34:56] I still not I’m still not good at this stuff. You know, it’s

[00:34:59] Brenda Laurel: I’m not either.

[00:35:00] Suki Wessling: I

[00:35:00] Brenda Laurel: can remember it so well. And you know, I see it. I, when I taught, when I give talks about this, women light up and they’ll say I’m 60 and this is still going on, you know, in my life. Um, so there is something about that. And it, If you look at pygmy chimps, they do the same thing.

[00:35:22] Uh, when they’re, when they’re hanging out in same sex groups, they use affiliation and exclusion and they do it by grooming or holding your baby or, you know, whatever it is. It’s, it’s the same behavior.

Purple Moon
—

[00:35:35] Suki Wessling: Sum up your feeling of, of what happened when you created your company and, and, and brought girls into it.

[00:35:45] Did you feel at the end like you had done something, moved something in a any direction?

[00:35:50] Brenda Laurel: Abso fucking lutely. Let me say that again. Absolutely. Um, I felt, and I still feel it. I still get email from these women who are now 35 or 30 who played my games and say you changed my life because the games were called friendship adventures and they had to do with issues like the one we just discussed, uh, and in terms of both social status and self esteem.

[00:36:19] So I felt very proud of the games, and so did all the people, mostly women, who worked for me in that situation. And with me, my collaborator, Christy Rosenthal was the co founder of that company.

[00:36:33] I was very proud of it. At the same time, Paul Allen who had funded the company through Interval Research was on the board. Paul was not a very bright man. You may know he, he got his Microsoft billions by kind of inventing BASIC. That’s about it. But he decided that the grass was greener on the internet side of the fence. So they pulled their investment, from the company.

[00:37:04] Just, like I had 80 people to give a paycheck to the next day.

[00:37:09] Suki Wessling: Wow.

[00:37:10] Brenda Laurel: And, um, they just threw the big red switch and then, and we had been negotiating with Mattel to invest, even though Barbie is something I hate more than I can say, um, because of her, you know, instantiation of hegemonic values. but when they pulled the rug out from under us, we were in the process of shipping our eighth game.

[00:37:35] Our website, you know, in the first year was beating Disney uh, in terms of hits and dwell time, but this fickle behavior on the part of a millionaire, I just was devastated. I was blown away.

[00:37:48] I got a half a year’s pay. And I spent that year writing a very angry book, and then I burned it, and then I wrote a very good book called Utopian Entrepreneur, which I think of as my best book. Even though people talk about Computers as Theater as an important book, uh, Utopia and Entrepreneur was really the lessons I took away about business, about how you can have goals to do social good and still manage to make a success of it.

[00:38:24] Voiceover: That was a very thoughtful year, and at the end of that year was when I was asked by Andy Davidson to come revamp the Graduate Media Program at Artcenter. And that changed my trajectory. For the next 15 years I was an academic, until I retired. When we return, Brenda Laurel moves from industry to academia, where she discovers the importance of interaction with young people.

[00:38:48] Brenda Laurel: Our children need to get back in touch with flesh and blood, with clouds and stars, with trees to climb. Because, you know, in the, in the absence of those kinds of pleasures and spiritual values, we can kiss this planet goodbye.

Segment 3: Academic life and beyond
—

[00:39:06] Voiceover: I’m your host Suki Wessling. After a career on the leading edge of the computer game industry, Brenda Laurel moved to academia. In this last segment, we explore the role of creators in society, starting with her students. My first question was what she felt her work as an academic actually was.

[00:39:43] Suki Wessling:

The academic’s work
—

[00:39:43] Suki Wessling: What a good question. My work was to see my students, to help them identify and manifest their passions, their dreams, to make sure they had the skills to manifest what floated their boats and to make sure that they were conscious of the ethical dimensions of what they were doing. Those were the guiding lights for me and I felt that I took really good care of each and every one of them.

[00:40:16] I love that because part of what the history of the digital revolution has been is this lack of understanding the ethical consequences of what we

[00:40:29] Brenda Laurel: do.

[00:40:29] Absolutely. Well, and, and lack of interjection of history or humanities into curricula. The last four years, three years I was in academia, I was at UC Santa Cruz in their game group inside of the computer science program, which was still pretty much of an all boys show. And these kids were utterly ahistorical, not only about the industry, but about the world. Uh, and they were encouraged to emphasize engineering over everything. I taught a design research course with some undergraduate game design students, boys. Uh, there were a couple girls in that class. And, you know, I would always, when I taught all those years, I would always give a challenge.

[00:41:19] It usually had a couple of terms in it that didn’t quite go together. And then ask the student to find where they intersected and figure out what that means. So, like, energy, entitlement, etc. Put these mashed up things together. Well, this class of undergrads, I asked them to look at math anxiety, play, and pleasure.

[00:41:46] The class interviewed a bunch of six, seven, eight year old kids. and they came back with these heartwarming ideas about, you know, about games that could really stimulate kids not to be afraid of math. I got so much shit from the people who ran that program for teaching that class.

[00:42:08] It’s like, what are you doing having these game design kids go off and worry about children and math anxiety? Are you crazy? It’s like, this is our job. This is what we’re supposed to

[00:42:18] Suki Wessling: do!

[00:42:19] Okay, what did they think their job was? Because what you were just saying sounded to me like the most cool college class that I want to take, and I’m wondering what they thought that their job was, if not to open young people’s minds to what the real questions of their future career really are.

[00:42:41] Brenda Laurel: Well, I don’t think the people that I’m talking about who shall remain nameless knew about the, knew the real questions. Uh, they thought they were preparing young people for lucrative careers in a booming industry that had always relied on popular culture tropes to make the next thing. So it was all about engineering.

[00:43:03] It was all about money. It was all about career path. It wasn’t about changing the fucking world for the better. You know, it wasn’t about social responsibility. It wasn’t about curiosity. I think, you know, people like Tracy Fullerton, who, who runs a magnificent program at UCLA, and has done this great game called Walden, for example.

[00:43:26] She’s a hero, because she did the same thing. She corralled, and probably with a lot more engineering skill than I had, corralled a bunch of graduate students to do beautiful, humanistic, soul feeding work. And, and that’s what I think we do. I mean, I, I have my background’s in the arts and so that’s ingrained in me and I’m a big fan of the enlightenment.

[00:43:51] So, you know, so it, it, it was just, it was just so depressing to be around this. These guys are teaching, you know, level design. Well, yeah. If your game has levels, if it has to have, if you’re doing the Mario brothers again, let’s do talk about that. You know, it’s, I’m being sarcastic, but the game annex were the main event and it was all about getting a

[00:44:16] Suki Wessling: career.

[00:44:16] Mm hmm. You’re, you’re being sarcastic, but I will tell you as a teacher of teenagers, I teach fiction writing in one of my classes, and you can learn a whole lot about teenagers through the, uh, the not real things that they write about because really they’re, they’re revealing themselves.

[00:44:35] Often they’re not revealing themselves, they’re revealing that they’ve been programmed to expect things through their gameplay and they just expect that there will be levels and that there will be, you know, the, the ones that I notice are the, um, especially the health thing. I don’t remember which game invented that, but it seems like so many of them have it now, that if your character in the game gets into some trouble, they lose health, and then you have to gain it back.

[00:45:08] And all of a sudden this is showing up in kids’ fiction,

[00:45:13] Brenda Laurel: How weird, how sad, that’s disturbing.

[00:45:16] Suki Wessling: is, it is. And it, what I try to do is, maybe sounds similar to what you you tried to do on your end, is to get them to step outside of what they know about what fiction is, and try to just plumb their own self. And I think that the, the students you are getting very likely had an innovative game, an innovative world, something that nobody ever thought of inside of themselves.

[00:45:49] Brenda Laurel: Yeah, and I think some of them have succeeded. I hope so. Just about every student I had at Artcenter, and then later when I recreated that program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, those, those students are still my, they’re my friends now, because we’re colleagues, you know, we’re, we’re equals.

[00:46:12] They’re a really important part of my community. And I’m so grateful for that.

[00:46:17] Suki Wessling: Yeah,

The future of society
—

[00:46:19]

[00:46:22] Voiceover: Brenda, Laurel is now retired, which for her means continuing her writing and focusing on nature and family. As someone who started an industry, which now dominates children’s lives, she has strong ideas of how we can save young people from what the industry has done to them.

[00:46:38] Brenda Laurel: I feel pretty strongly that, I mean, I can speak personally about my grandson who’s 12, for example. He fell into a screen when he was nine and he never climbed back out. Um, luckily he, he does some outdoor activities. In fact, he’s doing the salmon run and indigenous people’s day tomorrow. And, but I watched this kid get smaller and smaller and smaller in terms of his range of interest and his attention span.

[00:47:14] Because he’s looking at TikTok. And in a way, you know, when you’ve got a crappy life going on or your parents fighting or whatever, that’s a place where you can go. It feeds ADHD. And we know that ADHD is a bigger problem than we thought. And so the media types that we have around are, are not helping with that.

[00:47:34] I feel that the connection with the natural world is probably the most important one that we will ever form in our lives. And the thing that concerns me most about our culture today, right now, in the United States, not Lebanon or Gaza, but here in the U. S., is that we have created a context with our media and our technology that has bled over into the values of our culture that is keeping kids from even thinking about climbing a tree, or the culture of fear that makes their parents say they can’t go out on their bike. And you know, so much of that fear is fed by misinformation and lies. I fear for the soul of our young people when they can’t look at the sky, when they can’t climb a tree because it doesn’t occur to them or because their parents won’t let them or because their little young minds have been so acclimated to, games and social media that there’s no room for it.

[00:48:44] And unless you’re a wonderful parent who’s taking your kid outside and supporting them and understanding, you know, getting curious about the stars or whatever, you know building something with wood, cooking food something real, you know, it’s our job. And, and I encourage anybody listening to this to really think hard:

[00:49:09] How can I help with this situation where our children need to get back in touch with flesh and blood, with clouds and stars, with trees to climb? Because, you know, in the, in the absence of those kinds of pleasures and spiritual values, we can kiss this planet goodbye. We’re done. So it’s really important.

[00:49:38] Suki Wessling: Yeah.

[00:49:39] Brenda Laurel: I do tend to preach. I’m sorry.

Our job as creators
—

[00:49:41] Suki Wessling: No, that was, that was beautifully stated. I definitely don’t want to end there though,

[00:49:46] Brenda Laurel: Okay.

[00:49:46] Suki Wessling: Because one of the things that I have noticed, and this ties back into games, it ties into a lot of our media, is that when people realize, no matter what media you’re talking about, anywhere from the very old form of the song or the novel to the modern form of a TikTok video, people discovered that conflict and negative emotions are what got people’s, you know, our lizard brains activated. And so we’re focusing on activating that lizard brain through all of these, all of our media, all of our entertainment, all of our, even the way our politics works now is different because of that understanding of how to activate the brain.

[00:50:43] We’ve done so many beautiful, beautiful things with the understanding that we’ve developed of the brain, from being able to measure that meditation works to being able to measure that children who have severe ADHD, if you just bring them out in the woods, you can see their symptoms going away.

[00:51:04] Yet we are really focusing on this one very negative thing we learned about activating that lizard brain through conflict and negativity. So if you looked forward and thought, how do we get out of this? Where do we go from here? What do you want to see us do as a culture?

[00:51:27] Brenda Laurel: Well, first of all, we have to turn away from, uh, autocratic notions of how government ought to work. We need to turn away from capitalism. At least the kind of capitalism that we see right now. It’s not working. It’s hurting everybody except the very wealthy. Those two things plus probably fundamentalist religion stand in the way of our exercise of compassion and spiritual quest.

[00:52:04] At least gaining greater literacy about those forces, which feed, obviously, the lizard brain that you’re talking about, right? They’re, they’re utterly about that. At least becoming literate that that’s going on. And looking for ways to present alternatives to it is a good way to proceed. I go back and I, you know, I think about the Stoics, and I think about Confucianism, and I think about how, in both of those cases, and many other religions and practices, the way one becomes, you know, a good person, or the way one enacts being a good person, is to set a good example for others, and to lift up one’s community.

[00:52:53] is still possible. We’re seeing it in the recovery from the recent hurricanes, the way people are helping one another. Compassion is alive in those situations. Now you ask somebody to extend that to the conflict in the Middle East, it gets dicier because it’s a made up idea to think that there’s a world community right now.

[00:53:17] Everything is way too fragmented. I will say in recent, probably in this last year, I’ve really had to struggle to stay hopeful. You know, the concatenation of climate change with politics. the concatenation of religion with politics. Um, these are incredibly disturbing, dangerous things that are going on.

[00:53:39] And so what we can do, what I hope we can do, is begin as, and continue, as culture makers, you know, as culture workers, to shape our culture in such a way, through our efforts, that lifts up compassion. You know, there’s more than just fight or flight that gets us excited. Helping gets us excited. Loving gets us excited.

[00:54:06] Watching somebody’s fortune turn from awful to good gets us excited. Read Shakespeare, you know. It’s not the only way to get somebody’s attention. And it’s up to us as culture workers, you, me, to create conditions in which we have alternatives to that kind of thinking that are compelling enough to draw people in.

[00:54:30] And that’s, that’s a tough call. It’s always harder to do the good thing. It’s always harder. And my advice to anybody who complains about it is, suck it up. It’s our job.

[00:54:44] Voiceover: Thanks to Brenda Laurel for. For the fun and inspiring conversation.

[00:55:07] You can find links to her work at. At BA B B L E R y.com.

[00:55:12] The song "Where the Magic Happens" is by Steviasphere on Bandcamp.

[00:55:31] " Play Like a Girl" is by June and Jean Millington, courtesy of the free music archive dot org.

[00:55:39] Thanks for listening.

END
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[00:55:42]

 

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