Minibabble: Brenda Laurel on Girls and Games

Posted on by suki
The Babblery
The Babblery
Minibabble: Brenda Laurel on Girls and Games
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Writer, researcher, designer and entrepreneur Brenda Laurel started in theater, moved to videogames and then virtual reality, and ended up as an academic. This mini-episode, based on the full-length interview “Play Like a Girl (or not),” covers the years that Laurel spent in the videogame industry. Her first contribution to the world of games was developing the idea of game interactivity. But during the 80s, she noticed that despite the industry’s advances, she was still often the only woman in the room.

And girls weren’t playing games at all. As she says in this episode, girls’ only experience with videogames was often watching their brothers play. So Laurel set out to co-found a company, Purple Moon, that would design games for girls. But first, she’d have to find out how girls play.

Please access the full episode for links and information.

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On Girls and Games 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]

[00:00:40] Suki Wessling: This is your host, Suki Wessling, and this is a Minibabble.

[00:00:43] 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.

[00:00:55]

[00:00:55] Voiceover: Brenda Laurel

[00:00:56] Suki Wessling: is an unlikely tech entrepreneur. She has a Ph. D. in theater. But that unlikely pairing led to a perspective that changed the early video game industry for the better, especially for girls.

[00:01:10] Brenda Laurel: 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.

[00:01:28] 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.

[00:01:58] 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.

[00:02:21] 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.

[00:02:34] Suki Wessling: Ooh.

[00:02:35]

[00:02:35] 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.

[00:02:47] 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.

[00:03:12] 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.

[00:03:37] 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.

[00:04:02] So that became sort of the thing I was about, in the game business and later in the VR business.

[00:04:09]

Interactions
—

[00:04:09] Voiceover: Brenda Laurel found her calling in the nascent game industry where she. applied her theater training to interactive entertainment.

[00:04:18] Brenda Laurel: I had worked with an actor friend to write a, a kind of a an interactive scenario of a play about Robin Hood.

[00:04:27] 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.

[00:04:49] Suki Wessling: 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. So after that game, what was your path?

[00:05:07] 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.

[00:05:21] 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.

[00:05:41] Suki Wessling: Here you are, you come to California and suddenly you’re managing, and I’m guessing, just projecting here that it was mostly men.

[00:05:50] What was that experience like? Mm hmm. Mm

[00:05:54] 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 men and I’m sitting at a long table and they’re all chatting away and kind of ignoring me.

[00:06:13] Uh, and finally I said, you know, Hey, guys, we got a 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.

[00:06:37] 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.

[00:06:53] Brenda Laurel: 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.

[00:07:31] 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.

[00:07:57] I can ask for the funding. We’re going to make this happen. And we did. So that was nice.

Games for girls
—

[00:08:01] 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.

[00:08:12] Brenda Laurel: 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.

[00:08:34] Um, yeah. 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.

[00:09:01] 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.

[00:09:22] 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.

[00:09:35] Suki Wessling: That’s interesting.

[00:09:36] 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?

[00:09:58] 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.

[00:10:18] 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, 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
—

[00:10:52] 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?

[00:11:02] 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.

[00:11:23] 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.

[00:11:57] 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.

[00:12:40] 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.

[00:13:06] That’s how we roll.

[00:13:07] Suki Wessling: I feel like you just sort of described why I was a child without that many friends.

[00:13:15] Brenda Laurel: Well, me

[00:13:17] Suki Wessling: too.

[00:13:17] Brenda Laurel: 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. so there is something about that. And it, If you look at pygmy chimps, they do the same thing.

[00:13:34] 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.

[00:13:48] Suki Wessling: Sum up your feeling of, of what happened when you created your company and, and brought girls into it.

[00:13:56] Did you feel at the end like you had done something, moved something in a any direction?

[00:14:01] Brenda Laurel: Absolutely. 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.

[00:14:25] So I felt very proud of the games.

[00:14:28] You know, there’s more than just fight or flight that gets us excited. Helping gets us excited. Loving gets us excited.

[00:14:45] Watching somebody’s fortune turn from awful to good gets us excited. Read Shakespeare, you know. 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.

[00:15:04] 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.

[00:15:19]

[00:15:37] Voiceover:

[00:15:37] Suki Wessling: Catch the full episode of my interview with groundbreaking game interaction designer Brenda Laurel on the Babblery. That’s at B A B B L E R Y dot com.

[00:15:47] Voiceover: The song "Where the Magic Happens" is by Steviasphere on Bandcamp.

[00:16:05] " Play Like a Girl" is by June and Jean Millington, courtesy of the free music archive dot org.

[00:16:12] Thanks for listening.

 

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