Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls 9781501319785, 9781501319778, 9781501319815, 9781501319808

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Brenda Laurel

Influential Video Game Designers Series Editors: Carly A. Kocurek Jennifer deWinter

Brenda Laurel Pioneering Games for Girls Carly A. Kocurek

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Carly A. Kocurek, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN:

HB: 978-1-5013-1978-5 PB: 978-1-5013-1977-8 ePub: 978-1-5013-1979-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1980-8

Series: Influential Video Game Designers Cover design: Alice Marwick Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents List of Figuresvi List of Tablesviii Preface from the Series Editorsix Forewordxi Acknowledgmentsxiv 1 Introduction1 2 “Even if It Meant Shipping Products in Pink Boxes”: Research-Driven Design 31 3 Aristotle and HCI: Computers as Theatre in Theory and Practice 51 4 “Friendship Adventures for Girls”: A Pre-History of Emotion Games 71 5 In Her Own Words 99 6 Conclusion: The Dangers of Being a Crash Dummy 131 Gameography141 Works Cited148 Index161

List of Figures 1.1 The cover design of the 2013 edition of Computers as Theatre invokes the dramatic arts. 1.2 The Starfire Soccer Challenge focuses on Ginger’s firstperson experience playing on a team. Here, Ginger (left) celebrates as her friend Sharla is named team captain. 1.3 Brenda Laurel gives a talk on her work at TED in 1998. 1.4 The Purple Moon website featured products in the shop, but also invited girls to participate in a number of other activities and to connect with other girls. 1.5 Purple Moon branded merchandise included character figures like these Adventure Friends. 2.1 Rockett weighs her response to Sharla in Rockett’s First Dance. 2.2 The player’s first choice is whether Ginger will join her teammates’ anger against Dana (left) or work with Jessie to try to break up the argument. 3.1 Strickland and Laurel in Placeholder. Image courtesy Brenda Laurel. 3.2 In playing the in-VR goddess, Laurel guided participants through the world of Placeholder. Image from video documentation of Placeholder. 3.3 Miko (far left) and Rockett (far right) react to the bragging of two popular girls, Nicole (left) and Whitney (right). 3.4 The Friendship Box opens to reveal paper dolls of all of the game’s featured characters. 4.1 The emotional navigation, as in this example from Rockett’s Secret Invitation, shows Rockett’s three possible responses to a given situation. 4.2 Bo threatens to send Rockett to the principal’s office, and the player must choose how to respond.

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24 25 40

43 62

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4.3 Jessie (right) invites Rockett to walk into school with her. 4.4 For this puzzle from Nicole’s path in Secret Paths to the Sea, the player must click and drag a skunk to its destination across the path. 4.5 The tree house in Secret Paths in the Forest serves as the game’s main menu. 4.6 The secret journal gives a brief introduction to gameplay. 4.7 The “I Miss Purple Moon” Facebook group is a meeting place for Purple Moon fans. 4.8 Polyvore user unusualsidekick created real outfits for a number of Purple Moon characters, including Rockett, Jessie, and Nicole, shown here. 4.9 The “Make an Adventure” interface lets players “start from scratch” or “get ideas.” 5.1 Brenda Laurel at her home in California in 2015. 5.2 Laurel (right) is interviewed at the Purple Moon launch at E3. Photo courtesy Brenda Laurel. 5.3 Laurel’s daughter Hilary Hulteen participated in the Purple Moon launch. Photo courtesy Brenda Laurel.

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80 82 82 88

89 91 100 116 116

List of Tables

2.1 Laurel’s approach to human-centered design research.

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Preface from the Series Editors Jennifer deWinter and Carly A. Kocurek

Over recent years, researchers working both in the academy and in the game industry have compiled a great deal of information about particular games, genres, players, and player cultures. Less well developed has been the study of the game industry. This may be because industrial practices are often deliberately shrouded in a number of ways, such as non-disclosure agreements, professional pressures, the closeness of professional networks, and the lack of clear standards for crediting those who have contributed to a game. Additionally, the game industry is young in comparison to both the movie and television industries, both of which have established clear professional standards that recognize and acknowledge labor. For example, viewers know what the end credits of a film look like and, from those, understand a good deal about the relevant roles and responsibilities. This is not the case with games. Instead, computer games are often represented as works without workers and designs without designers. This series is an effort to document and understand the diverse ways in which game designers influence and shape this complex industry. In making such an effort, we seek to make the invisible visible. Influential game designers are not necessarily household names; they are, however, key players in the ongoing development of an important medium. Given that today, industry leaders are looking to topics such as women in games, immersive and emotional games, and rising interest in VR game development, a book on Brenda Laurel seems particularly timely. In this context, Kocurek’s book is both a historical treatise on a highly influential game developer—one who has a hand in shaping the gaming industry as both a practitioner and as a leading professional— and also an analysis of an almost prescient thinker. As becomes evident in reading this book, Laurel’s work in game design is informed by

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her multidisciplinary training, and her games are highly influential in their own right. Yet underappreciated are the ways in which her research-driven design philosophy and her constant curiosity about the technologies of dramatic action and interaction have allowed her to work in diverse fields such as human–computer interaction, virtual reality, education, theater, and so forth. Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls is the second book in The Influential Video Game Designers book series, and after reading these pages, it is easy to see why. Laurel has been visibly working in the US game industry for almost forty years, building games and interactive experiences, giving talks and keynote addresses, and writing and teaching about her approaches to design research and game building. This book joins a growing number of publications that ask readers to consider the role of the game designer as an actor. In Laurel’s case, this goes beyond traditional auteur theory, which interrogates the single vision of the creator of a mediated text, and looks to a person’s influence on future games that get made and on the professionalization of the game industry.

Foreword On Monday, April 11, 1988, twenty-seven people gathered at a home in the hills overlooking San Jose to talk about video games. This event, hosted by Atari game guru Chris Crawford, was the origin of what came to be known as the Game Developers Conference, now attracting more than 25,000 attendees annually. More significantly, it was our first glimpse of a strange new reality: Making video games was a profession, not just a lucky job. That day, we became a community. I was among those crammed into Chris’s upstairs bedroom. Nearly everyone else sharing the giant submarine sandwich was a guy, too. Aside from Chris’s wife (who, quite understandably, made herself scarce), only two women were present. One was Carol Manley, there with her husband and co-worker Ivan. The other was Brenda Laurel. Brenda is a child of the ’60s. This idiom, rarely employed as a compliment nowadays, requires unpacking. 1960s America is typically characterized as a chaotic period of war (hot and cold), assassination, rioting, and other violent expressions of social and political unrest, accompanied by widespread experimentation with sex, drugs, art, and religion, often in combination. But not all of our missiles were aimed at the Soviet Union. A few were aimed at the Moon. Luckily, those are the only ones we found the will to launch. Beneath all that the rage and turmoil was a current of hope. Restless curiosity, a longing for adventure. You could hear it in Rubber Soul and Revolver, immerse yourself in it watching 2001, or follow it weekly in TV series like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, and— particularly, and most durably—Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry’s vision captured the imagination of millions. Teenagers dreamed of following Captain Kirk to the stars at warp

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speed, “seeking out new life and new civilizations.” Free to kiss anyone, regardless of species. Most of us lost sight of that Final Frontier amid the cowardly cynicism of the 1970s. Brenda Laurel did not. Brenda never wanted to follow Kirk. She would not settle for opening subspace frequencies or arming photon torpedoes. She wanted the Captain’s seat—not just for herself, but for all of us. She dreamed harder. This volume traces her pursuit of that harder dream. Trek is not her only 1960s influence. I discovered another at an early 1990s GDC in San Mateo. Brenda was on the Board of Directors, and had personally arranged the keynote speaker. It’s a safe bet that most of those in attendance had never heard of John Perry Barlow. I don’t remember much about his speech. Blame the tequila shots Lord British was buying, repeatedly, for my table. Something about preserving games. But when Brenda introduced us at the hotel bar later that evening, the name clicked. “Estimated Prophet.” “Black-Throated Wind.” “Cassidy.” He wrote those lyrics. Then I understood. The woman beaming at Barlow’s side was a Deadhead. At the time, I had only vague ideas about the Grateful Dead and their fans, most of them unsavory. A few more years would pass before I became curious enough to experience the scene firsthand. Soon after this crisis, I happened to join Brenda for lunch, and sought her advice. “I died,” I murmured, trembling at the still-fresh memory. She responded with perfect calm. “I hate it when that happens.” Flippant? Sure seemed that way at the time. Later, I came to appreciate the compassion behind her remark. She was not dismissing me. She was acknowledging me, letting me know that I would soon get past my quaint LBJ-era shock and awe and be okay. Deadheads are all about community. They are explorers of undiscovered countries, sharing maps and signposts that lead to the next stop in a perpetual celebration. They are also (sadly) outlaws, and watch each other’s backs. Like Trekkies, they draw from a deep

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reservoir of shared lore. They welcome newcomers, and are tolerant of outliers. All they want to know is, “Are you kind?” Such are the voyages of Brenda Laurel’s Enterprise. Her seminal books and pioneering research on interactivity, user experience and virtual reality explore a single, essential question: How might technology be used to shape ourselves into a community of kind, inclusive outlaws? Academic, practitioner, perpetual student. Kisser of aliens. A calliope woman, spinning that curious sense of her own. About time someone wrote a book about her. Brian Moriarty Worcester, July 2016

Acknowledgments The Influential Video Game Designers series was born of conversation, and I hope that it will spark conversation. At the book exhibit at the Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA) meeting some years ago, I was looking at a series on the work of various film directors, and I wondered why there wasn’t a similar series on game designers. In mulling over this question, Jennifer deWinter and I decided there should be, and so we wrote up a proposal and began talking to presses. I am as thrilled now as I was when we signed the initial contract that the series has found such an excellent home at Bloomsbury. Game design is gaining in visibility and influence, and as the field continues to develop, capturing the work and histories of individual designers is critical to understanding  the profession. This series is one approach to doing that. This book marks the second in the series, and we hope to publish many more. With that in mind, thanks first and foremost to Jennifer deWinter; I can’t imagine having undertaken this project—the book or the series— with anyone else. Her tenacity as an editor has improved my writing greatly. Thanks, of course, to the whole team at Bloomsbury, but especially to Katie Gallof who has been both advocate and shepherd. Particular thanks are due to my research assistant Michael Anthony DeAnda, as well as to Megan Boeshart Burrelle, and Angelia Giannone; all three of them contributed pieces to this book, and the project is substantially better for all their work. Thanks to the peers who commented in person on early parts of this project at various conferences with special thanks to Chris Hanson, Matthew Thomas Payne, and Stephanie Vie. Thanks also to everyone else over at the Learning Games Initiative, especially Ken S. McAllister and Judd Ethan Ruggill. This series is very much a product of the lively scholarly community I am part of at LGI and SWPACA. And, thanks, too to the anonymous peer reviewer. I realize peer review often feels thankless, but I appreciate it greatly.

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Institutionally, this project received support from a Dean’s Research Grant from Christine Himes of the Lewis College of Human Sciences at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Those funds made the original interview in this book possible, and I believe the project is much stronger for that. I would also like to offer thanks to my colleagues in the Department of Humanities at Illinois Institute of Technology, in particular department chair Margaret Power. This wouldn’t be a book without the work and help of archivists. In particular, recognition is due to Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. His willingness to track down and share primary sources from the library’s excellent collections is greatly appreciated. Jason Scott at the Internet Archive also located some necessary materials, including a very old version of QuickTime—his help was absolutely essential in making access to the original Purple Moon games possible. Trent Johnson wound up running technical support for this project, whether he liked it or not. Thanks to him for all the work he did rigging up old laptops, old operating systems, and a bunch of other old stuff, both so I could play the games in their original form and so we could extract screen captures. If there were some sort of competitive league for being a supportive partner, he could totally go pro. Special thanks to Brenda Laurel and Rob Tow, who welcomed me into their home and regaled me with amazing stories, only some of which are captured here. Finally, there’s a magnet in my office that says “Behind every woman is a bunch of other successful women who have her back.” Thanks to my whole bunch of successful women, only a few of whom are listed here by name. If it weren’t for all of you, I’d probably give up.

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I think one of the main reasons why the videogame business has been so horribly stunted in its growth is that it has been unwilling to look beyond itself to its audience. Brenda Laurel (2001, 36) While completing graduate degree work in theater in the 1970s, Brenda Laurel did what many students do: She picked up a job. In Laurel’s case, she took a position as a software designer and programmer at CyberVision producing interactive fairytales. The work drew on Laurel’s growing interest in interactive theater and storytelling, but more importantly, it helped launch her on a career trajectory that took her through stints at leading game companies like Atari and Activision to consulting work with major names in games and media more broadly, such as LucasArts, Apyx, Brøderbund, Paramount New Media, Apple, and Sony Pictures, among others. In 1986, she completed her PhD with a dissertation that drew heavily on her immersive storytelling work at Atari Research Labs, and in 1988 she co-founded the Game Developers Conference. By the early 1990s, Laurel entered her second decade in the games industry when she accepted a job at Interval Research Corporation, a lab and tech incubator founded by Paul Allen and David Liddle. There, Laurel oversaw a multi-year study to understand the relationships between gender and technology among children and youth, research that became the spinoff company Purple Moon. As co-founder and VP of Design at Purple Moon, Laurel combined her extensive industry experience both as designer and as manager with her training and expertise in theater. Purple Moon was among the most visible of a

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number of “games for girls”-targeted start-ups in the 1990s. The “games for girls” movement was—and remains—a critical intervention into a games industry that had, by the early 1990s, come to overtly cater to a consumer base made up almost entirely of boys (King and Douai 2014, 4). While Laurel’s published games are also innovative, the very act of taking girls seriously as a potential audience for games was already in and of itself revolutionary. Laurel and her company Purple Moon were at the vanguard of seismic shifts within the game industry. By connecting with and catering to tween girls, Laurel and Purple Moon were at the forefront of exploring what the industry might look like if it looked outside itself to consider the particular needs and desires of the audience. Laurel’s commitment to design research drove innovation at Purple Moon and continues to influence audience-centric approaches to game design. This is particularly true given Laurel’s more recent work creating and leading multiple graduate programs in design. As the games industry is publicly struggling with efforts to diversify ingame representation, audience appeal, and even its workforce, Laurel’s decades of work—as designer, as theorist, as executive, as educator, and as advocate—offer a powerful example of how interdisciplinary thinking, design research, and a willingness to take risks can lead to successful interventions and innovations.

From stage to monitor Laurel’s design work traces a rich, interdisciplinary path that crosses between the academy and industry. When she began working at CyberVision, Inc. in 1977, she was still in the process of completing her graduate studies. After leaving CyberVision, she worked at a number of Silicon Valley companies, including time spent as a Research Staff Member at Atari’s Sunnyvale Research Lab (1982–1984), and as Director of Product Development for Learning and Creativity at Activision (1985– 1987). In 1986, Laurel completed her PhD in Theatre from The Ohio State University. Her dissertation “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based

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Interactive Fantasy System” drew on drama theory as well as her work at Atari Labs; it is a clear example of the degree to which her academic training in theater and research forms a palimpsest with her industry experience. Her work for Interval and later at Purple Moon relies on this particular context of training and experience. Laurel’s theoretical and critical work also draws on a set of insights from both academic and industry perspectives. Her book Computers as Theatre (first released in 1991 and re-issued in 2013; see Figure 1.1) has become a classic in the field of human–computer interaction (HCI). It relies heavily on her dissertation research and is a crash course in drama theory for the uninitiated mixed with practical examples of how theoretical concepts can usefully inform design projects. For her second book, Laurel turned to a reflection on her own industry experience. Both more personal and more reflective, Utopian Entrepreneur details her own entrepreneurial experiences in games, multimedia, virtual reality, and dot-coms and provides a practical guide for others interested in producing positive social change in the context of forprofit business. While providing a guidebook for others who might wish to follow a similar path, Laurel offers significant insights into her own career, which has been driven by a belief that businesses can do good and enact change in meaningful ways. In these books, Laurel demonstrates her willingness to cross-pollinate fields, to mix HCI with Aristotle, or to infuse entrepreneurial pursuits with a commitment to social justice. This interdisciplinarity and hybridization is fundamental to Laurel’s approach and is a key part of what makes her work innovative and important. It is visible in her training, but the culmination and result is not her training, but her finished work, which has proven influential not only to game design, but also to design research, entrepreneurship, and efforts to ensure diversity in technical fields. For Laurel, game design was not an end in and of itself but rather a potential means of addressing a complex social problem through the production of popular culture. In this way Laurel’s game design work is intimately bound with her work as a researcher-practitioner and her desire to further social good. Game

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design, in Laurel’s hands, is not a practice, but a praxis—an opportunity to fully realize the potential of her work as a researcher. Drawing from the notion of game design as a critical research praxis, I consider the extent to which Laurel’s research drives her own design work and subsequently illuminates her ongoing influence as a designer.

Figure 1.1  The cover design of the 2013 edition of Computers as Theatre invokes the dramatic arts.

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In this chapter, I interrogate both Laurel’s research-driven approach to design as realized at Purple Moon and her books Computers as Theatre and the memoir-fueled Utopian Entrepreneur. Throughout, I consider the ethos of Laurel’s work as expressed in the books and as evidenced through her game design work. In unpacking Laurel’s writings on design and entrepreneurship and placing them in a context of her design praxis, I argue that Laurel’s innovations in game design emanate from her diverse professional and intellectual background. These experiences are critical to understanding Laurel’s work and are central to her vision as a designer.

Researching games for girls By the 1980s, video games in the United States were already strongly associated with boys (Kocurek 2015, xiv). And as late as 1998, boys made up 75–85 percent of the industry’s consumers (Cassell and Jenkins 1998, 11). The reasons for this are diverse, including lack of diversity in the industry workforce, gendered notions of childhood, advertising strategies, and numerous other issues (Jenkins 1998; Kocurek 2015; Potanin 2010). In this context, the industry was ripe for intervention. The games for girls movement was an effort by game developers and game companies like Her Interactive, Girl Games, Girltech, and of course Laurel’s own Purple Moon to attract girls and young women as players by producing games. These companies presented a kind of “entrepreneurial feminism” in which women founders sought to intervene in a male-dominated industry that catered to boys and young men (King and Douai 2014, 4). As co-founder and VP of design at Purple Moon, Brenda Laurel was at the forefront of this movement. Purple Moon emerged from a multi-year project at Interval examining girls’ attitudes toward and interest in games and play: “We did hundreds—maybe thousands—of interviews with seven- to twelve-year-olds, the group we wanted to target with our products. We watched play differences between boys and girls. We asked kids how

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they liked to play; we gave them props and mocked-up products to fool around with” (Laurel, quoted in Beato 1997b, n.p.). Beyond this, the team delved into existing research on related topics and also spoke to working experts ranging from toy store owners to scout troop leaders (Beato 1997a). Inspired by the solutions suggested by the years of research, Purple Moon launched in 1996. Startups like Purple Moon, Her Interactive, and Girl Games, Inc. helped pioneer efforts to target girls in the mid-1990s, but major media and toy companies also entered the market. Sparked in part by the runaway success of Mattel’s Barbie Fashion Designer (1996), which sold over 500,000 copies in two months and became a bestselling CD-ROM title, the games for girls movement saw a roughly tenfold increase in the production of game and software titles targeting girls from 1996 to 1997. Well-established toy and media companies like Mattel Media, Hasbro Interactive, Sega, DreamWorks Interactive, and Phillips Media, among others, began producing titles in this area. While in 1996, Barbie Fashion Designer was the standout of less than two dozen games for young girls, in 1997, some 200 games targeting an audience of girls were released by a diverse mix of established and start-up companies (Beato 1997a). Among that flurry of games for girls released in 1997 was Rockett’s New School, the first game from Purple Moon and the first game in the company’s Rockett Movado series. In Rockett’s New School, the titular Rockett starts eighth grade at a new school; the player leads Rockett through various social situations with friendly and hostile peers and teachers and other school staff. Laurel served as designer on Rockett’s New School and the game reflects both the conclusions of Laurel’s research and the general focus of Purple Moon’s games. The company’s titles, including the Rockett Movado series and the Secret Paths series, rely on interactive decision-making as a core mechanic and encourage values like friendship and self-awareness. With these games, the company sought an audience of preteen girls. Under Laurel’s direction, Purple Moon’s design ethos was one highly informed by detailed research into prospective players’ interests, concerns, and habits. In a 1997 interview, Laurel said that her research

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at Interval was contingent on the agreement that she would defer to what the research found: “I agreed that whatever solution the research suggested, I’d go along with. Even if it meant shipping products in pink boxes” (Beato 1997b). But because of this reliance on research, the games ultimately did not ship in pink boxes. Rather, the games formed what journalist Patricia Ramirez has called a “‘purple games’ segment of the [games for girls] movement,” one focused less on pink-washed assumptions about what girls should want and more on detailed research into what girls really did want (Hernandez 2012, n.p.). In a 2014 interview, Rebecca Hains, an expert on girls’ media and author of The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the PrincessObsessed Years, summarizes the issue with pink-washing: By “pink-washing,” I’m specifically referring to the instances where marketers or toy makers create a product that is pink for no reason other than to make it as girly as possible. After all, there’s nothing wrong with pink—it’s a perfectly nice color—but there IS something wrong when it’s a) promoting sex role stereotypes and b) basically the only color found in little girls’ worlds. They deserve a full rainbow of colors. (Siegel 2014, n.p.)

As Hernandez suggests, the games produced under Brenda Laurel at Purple Moon were not pink-washed; they were something else. In this, they contrasted sharply with other games on the market at the time. For example, Barbie Fashion Designer is a clever piece of software that enables players to design, print, and construct clothes for their dolls; however, it and other Barbie games rely on an established and dominant brand with its own fraught gender history (Banks 2003; Rogers 1999), and a huge percent of the paltry number of games intended for young girls were either tied to established girls’ toy brands or were clumsy efforts by adult male developers to make something, anything, for girls. By contrast, Purple Moon’s games did not represent adult imaginings of what girls might want or simply put a game originally meant for boys in pink packaging. The games instead addressed girls’ real needs and desires through a meticulous research and design process.

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Purple Moon’s distinct aesthetic reflects a design process that went beyond pointless feminization, seeking instead to craft games that would resonate with girls. Purple Moon’s games were feminine, but they were carefully, thoughtfully so. The storybook art style of the Secret Paths games, the social maneuverings of Rockett and her friends, and even the online community available on the Purple Moon website can all be seen as feminine, particularly when contrasted to other games produced at the time. But these games are gendered media based not on stereotyped prescription but rather on researched fulfillment. The games presented themes and topics of demonstrable interest to the target demographic; even before launch, the company was referring to the games as part of a new genre: “friendship adventures for girls” (Beato 1997a, n.p.). This same research-driven approach made the company sometimes controversial. Since the research showed that girls were interested in topics like friendship, journaling, and their social lives, Purple Moon focused on those topics; however, since those interests often aligned with gendered stereotypes of girls’ interests, the games were ripe for criticism. At points, Laurel and her company faced pushback on multiple fronts. Game reviewers, for example, often panned the games, and feminist critics attacked the gender essentialism inherent to the idea of games for girls (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015). However, they hit the mark with the intended audience and sold well (exact numbers aren’t available). Girls enjoyed the games even as adults debated their merits. The games’ success with girls demonstrates the merits of research as a basis for reaching new player demographics. Adult misgivings are also instructive as they highlight how difficult producing meaningful media can be within political, economic, and social strictures. The choice to listen to adults over children might have made the games more palatable to critics, but it would have made them less enjoyable and less important for girls. Trusting research to inform design ultimately means trusting the players. While for the game industry at large girls had been at best incidental consumers, for Purple Moon, girls and their needs and desires were the entire point of making games at all.

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Brenda Laurel by design Brenda Laurel becomes the designer she is through a series of choices and opportunities that shaped her approach to and understanding of computers, games, and design. A long-standing interest in theater served as a foundation for much of Laurel’s earlier work, but her entry into the computer games industry—as a means to sustain herself during graduate school—altered her path. From her work developing computer games, Laurel came to think about the computer as a medium for dramatic storytelling and turned her attention to this potential. Her knowledge of and approach to theater shaped her understanding of human–computer interaction, and her unique insights positioned her well for a career in Silicon Valley. There, she worked at companies including Atari, where she was able to join the company’s research lab. At the lab, she began to think of herself as a researcher as she continued her work on interactive storytelling, much of which informed her dissertation and later her book Computers as Theatre. Laurel left Atari and worked as a consultant and at a number of game companies in a variety of production and management roles before landing at Interval Research Corporation. At Interval, Laurel tested her ideas about interface design and storytelling through experiments in virtual reality and also worked on a massive, years-long study of girls and computer games. The threads of these experience—her training in theater, her unique approach to HCI, her experience as a researcher, and her deep interest in the storytelling potential of interactive media—are fundamental to who Laurel is as a designer and go a long way toward explaining her approach to game design.

Theoretically theatrical A reliance on her skills as a researcher and her willingness to trust her research—to follow the direction the research suggests even if it meant “shipping products in pink boxes”—propelled Laurel to

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follow innovative approaches in game design. Laurel helped pioneer the games for girls movement by seeking to diversify the gaming audience, and she also forwarded the notion of using detailed research as a means to inform effective game design. As a public figure, Laurel’s reputation is bound up not only with Purple Moon but also with her published works. Both Computers as Theatre and Utopian Entrepreneur make explicit the theories and approaches that form the foundation of Laurel’s work. They are important to consider for the degree to which they illuminate her various projects and in their own right.

Computers as Theatre: Shaping dramatic wholes Laurel’s Computers as Theatre has become a landmark text in the field of human–computer interaction. In the book, Laurel argues for the utility of applying theories and practices derived from theater to the production of computer software and systems. Throughout, Laurel’s varied professional and intellectual background is at the forefront. The inspiration for the book, for example, derives from her early work at Atari, where she served first in the Home Computer Division and later in the Atari System Research Lab, and it draws too on her early experience developing interactive fairy tales and educational software for CyberVision in the 1970s, and of course on her extensive theater experience both on- and off-stage. In suggesting that human experiences with computer technology might usefully be understood through humanities-derived concepts like acts and narrative structure, Laurel is not alone, but she was at the forefront of suggesting that computer interactions might best be understood as fundamentally human experiences. And indeed, Laurel’s approach to interaction design as expressed in Computers as Theatre is deeply humanistic, a perspective that challenged and enlivened thinking about interface design. The fifth chapter of the book outlines a series of design heuristics, and it is in these that Laurel’s fundamental principles are made clear.

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1. Interaction should be couched in the context of the representation— its objects, environment, potential, and tools. 2. Interface metaphors have limited usefulness. What you gain now you may have to pay for later. 3. Focus on designing the action. The design of objects, environments, and characters must all serve this grand strategic goal. 4. Choices for (and by) interactors can transform possibility into probability for dramatic action later on. 5. Represent sources of agency. 6. Groups of interactors with common goals may function as collective characters where group dynamics serve as traits. 7.  Explore new methods for enabling emotional expression and communication among agents. 8. Examine your assumptions and biases. Everybody has some. 9. Check your preconceptions and values at the door. You will pick them up later, after you have findings and are ready to turn them into design principles. 10. Learn about your audience to gain insights that will help guide you in design. (Laurel 2013, 149–76)

As evidenced by Laurel’s own design work, this approach does not eliminate whimsy or fantasy or humor but does demand that these components serve strategic purposes, helping to construct “whole actions.” For Laurel, the design process is fundamentally about providing satisfying experiences for audience members—even when what those audience members experience is surprising or unexpected—a foundational principle that is deeply indebted to theater. While Laurel initially accepted a position at CyberVision in the late 1970s as a software designer and programmer to sustain herself financially while in graduate school, the resonance between this work and her theatrical work was significant: “I immediately became immersed in mapping my knowledge of drama and theater to the task at hand because the two media were so obviously alike. There were characters, emotions, and actions. I could imagine other worlds through the looking glass, and I could imagine reaching into them”

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(Laurel 2013, 17–18). This early impression of the similarities between the two fields is integral to Laurel’s approach to and understanding of design; it is also, of course, integral to her book and an idea that both made an immediate impact and anticipated a growing zeitgeist. By the late 1990s, a number of narrative and media theorists would make related points regarding the potential of computer-based storytelling and highlighting the parallels between electronic games and older forms including literature and theater (see, for example, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck [1998], Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality [2003], and even Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext [1997]). While Laurel uses examples from software and computer games throughout, she also relies on provocative examples drawn from drama. At one point, she summarizes her experience directing an interactive play she had co-authored with theater colleague Bill Morton; at another, she tells of a time when, in the role of Kanga in Winnie the Pooh, she and the rest of the cast could feel the show falling flat—at intermission, they learned that the audience that day was primarily deaf children and subsequently slowed down the speaking and focused more on gestures and facial expressions (Laurel 2013, 62–63, 67). Through these examples, Laurel demonstrates the role of interaction in theater and provocatively suggests the way that principles gleaned from centuries of theater studies can help illuminate and guide interaction design in emergent media. While Laurel is attentive to the influence and importance of metaphor in driving advancements in interface design, she is also careful to argue that she is not suggesting that theatrical interaction is a metaphor for computer interaction. Rather, she is suggesting that the design of computer interactions can productively utilize principles central to our understanding of theater. In this, Laurel draws on thinkers such as Aristotle and Bertolt Brecht alongside contemporary researchers, popular culture, and her own industry experience as well as a growing body of twentieth-century theatrical works that experimented with and celebrated audience interaction.

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Laurel’s discussions of her own design work are particularly illuminating. For example, her explanation of the importance of “wholeness in dramatic experience,” including computer interactions, centers in part on the satisfaction viewers, users, or players experience when faced with particularly well-structured plots that present a beginning, middle and end (Laurel 2013, 80–82). She demonstrates the application of this principle in the initial development of Purple Moon’s two major series, the Rockett series and the Secret Paths series: At first, we thought simply to build a game—that was the beginning of what became our first title, Rockett’s New School. But as we began conceptualizing the game, we realized that we were actually building a world; material in that particular game arose from constructing out the environment and characters that was larger than the content of the game itself. (Laurel 2013, 83)

As the team developed the Rockett games, they realized the games and the world they had conceived could not attend to girls’ inner lives, but only to their social lives. Laurel’s research had shown that both were important to tween girls’ identity construction, and so the Secret Paths series was developed to provide opportunities for “emotional rehearsal” for girls’ inner lives (Laurel 2013, 159). By walking through potentially fraught social and emotional situations in the games, girls could practice their own social and emotional skills, effectively preparing themselves through play for real situations they might later face. The success of social and emotional learning programs in schools shows the difference this kind of preparation can make in educational and developmental outcomes (Durlak et al. 2011). Further the approaches Purple Moon used echoed those integrated into school curricula, allowing opportunities for reflection and deliberate decision-making (Durlak et al. 2011; Payton et al. 2000). The games in the two series, combined with the opportunities for player interaction and player-generated content provided by the company’s interactive website, constituted a constellation of “whole actions.” Girls could make their own materials, play games, or engage in social activities or other online actions, such as collecting virtual

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Brenda Laurel

items. Whole actions are those that have a beginning, middle, and end that form a dramatic whole. Laurel argues that the coherence of the imaginary world facilitates whole actions when design is properly executed (Laurel 2013, 83). In making this point, Laurel highlights a key principle evident not only in Computers as Theatre but also in the body of work produced by Purple Moon: Game design and storytelling fit together in that good design depends in part on the development of a coherent world in which the called-for actions will make sense, feel whole, and ultimately satisfy the player. This suggests that a dovetailing of ludic and narrative elements is necessary just as a careful consideration of player experience is necessary. From this point of view, narrative and worldbuilding do not necessarily reign supreme over the rules of the system, but the designer has an obligation to create a world or system in which the rules are intelligible. Also evident throughout Computers as Theatre is a point driven home and further explicated in Utopian Entrepreneur. For Laurel, research is not just a means of improving game design, but rather it is essential to an effective design process. In describing the whole actions enabled by the Purple Moon universe, for example, she highlights the research she completed. Her description of adjustments made in theater productions— as in the performance of Winnie the Pooh transformed to connect with a deaf audience or an actor’s quick reaction when, in an interactive play, audience members shouted out warnings of an approaching foe—echo the notion that research is never done. Interactions, once designed, should rarely be left static; rather they should be adjusted and adapted as ongoing research and feedback demand.

Utopian Entrepreneur: Culture work as business endeavor In Utopian Entrepreneur, Laurel offers her own interpretation of her professional trajectory and personal ethics. While Laurel acknowledges that Purple Moon was ultimately a business failure—the company lost its financial backing and was shuttered, the characters

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and intellectual property acquired by Mattel—she argues fiercely for the importance of the principles and practices that guided Purple Moon and continue to inform her own practices. Contextually, Laurel mentions that she found her influence and impact increased when she stopped describing herself as an “artist” and “political activist” (Laurel 2001, 11). Instead, she reframed herself as someone engaged in what she calls “culture work”—the production of culturally significant products, ideas, and experiences through a rigorous, ethical process: “Doing culture work well requires research. Our work relies on our understanding of perception, cognition, and how people construct meaning. Culture work also functions as research. We are continually informed about our time and our nature through the responses of people to the artifacts of popular culture” (Laurel 2001). This notion that culture work both requires research and is research underscores the extent to which design for Laurel is a praxis, a combining of research and its application. Further, Laurel identifies herself as a humanist: as someone who works from “the implicit assumption that we can do good, and therefore that we know what it is good to do” (Laurel 2001, 15). This notion of culture work anticipates the growth of social entrepreneurship with nonprofit and for-profit ventures both attempting to innovate for social good (Mair and Martí 2006; Mair and Noboa 2006). The entrepreneurial feminism of the games for girls movement (King and Douai 2014) and the notion of culture work both reflect the blend of pragmatism and hope that has animated much enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship in recent years (Cho 2006). Moreover, the rapid expansion of the “benefit corporation,” a legally recognized type of for-profit corporate entity with an obligation to produce benefits to the public, in the United States demonstrates the widespread enthusiasm for these types of endeavors in recent years. As of 2016, thirty states recognize benefit corporations, but the first state to recognize benefit corporations only did so in 2010. In many ways, the type of work Laurel undertook at Purple Moon and theorized in Utopian Entrepreneur anticipates what has become a major economic movement.

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Brenda Laurel

Elsewhere in the book, Laurel discusses the importance of storytelling, the cultural and social potential of simulation, and her experience with and hopes for the future of virtual reality and other topics; however, it is in her defense of Purple Moon’s successes, even as she acknowledges the company’s failures, that Laurel most exposes her key principles. In defending the value of the work she did first at Interval Research and later at Purple Moon, Laurel is making a bold argument, not just for the importance of research as a driver of industrial growth and innovation but also for the possibility and potential of ideals, of social good even enacted through commercial entertainments. For Laurel, research and design are both parts of a process of iteration that is, in her own words, never finished. As the design and research processes unfold, ideas are floated then discarded, common sense assumptions are at times effaced and at others formalized. Laurel’s design process is not one that idolizes creative genius or the notion of great ideas; it is marked by a commitment to a rigorous design process in which ideas, no matter how great, are always beholden to the needs of the audience and under revision. However, the purpose of that process is not merely to produce better, more saleable products. Instead the true purpose of this process is to enable closer connections with and better service to audience members. The chief success of Laurel’s work at Purple Moon and what has become its chief legacy is an emphasis on research that drives efforts to look beyond the games industry to connect with players and audiences. In Utopian Entrepreneur, Laurel advocates for research as a design strategy that can lead to innovation and evolution but she is also explicit in noting that the true purpose of any self-proclaimed “utopian entrepreneur” should be to do some kind of good. At Purple Moon, Laurel’s main goal was to do something good for girls who were at the time neglected by a mainstream software and games industry. Post Purple Moon, Laurel has continued to work as an educator and advocate, training designers through her academic work and continuing to advocate for innovation that addresses real social issues.

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Research-driven design Throughout its life, Purple Moon maintained a strong, ongoing commitment to research. (Laurel 2013, 24) In both Computers as Theatre and Utopian Entrepreneur, Laurel emphasizes the importance of research. This emphasis is, in part, detailed in the design heuristics made explicit in Computers as Theatre, but it is demonstrated in both books with anecdotes from her experience developing games for girls at Purple Moon. As mentioned previously, the research Laurel began at Interval and continued through Purple Moon served as a key, ongoing component of the game design process. The team used diverse interview methods: interviewing children and adults; giving girls disposable cameras with which to complete photographic inventories of their interests and concerns; handing girls paper shapes and asking them to develop their own stories. The intensive process involved more than a thousand individuals, and it often turned up surprising information. In the development of the first Secret Paths title, for example, Laurel found herself caught off guard by the girls’ responses. She herself had grown up playing in the forest, and she expected the girls’ stories to conform to her own feelings about that experience. Instead, Laurel was surprised when the girls expressed an intense desire to go into the forest not to share with others, but to find solitude and time for personal reflection, and to be cared for by the forest itself (Laurel 2013, 175). While Laurel uses this anecdote to illustrate the importance of research for interaction design, it also illuminates the extent to which conclusions drawn from research shaped Purple Moon’s games. The Secret Paths series as it was ultimately realized provides a sense of intimacy and focuses overtly on the “inner life” as evidenced through “nurturing, hidden knowledge, self-awareness, and magical tales” (Laurel 2013, 83). Further, since, as Laurel notes in Utopian Entrepreneur, research is never really completed, this was an ongoing process; as she argues, proper research must be continuous and therefore necessarily incomplete.

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Brenda Laurel

This enables iteration and improvement from project to project, but in the case of Purple Moon, it also allowed for the development of new properties. As an example, Laurel mentions The Starfire Soccer Challenge (Purple Moon 1998; see Figure 1.2), which would have been the first in a series of sports games for girls. The initial research findings at Interval had indicated that sports were not a major interest for girls, but within a couple years, women’s soccer became highly visible in the United States, and the US women’s team was gaining international attention. Rather than producing a conventional sports game under the Purple Moon brand, the company again turned to research: We did a boatload of research on how girls engage with sports, and learned, among other things, that boys engaged more from the perspective of watching sports on TV (hence all the TV-like UIs for sports games in those days), whereas girls engaged socially and in the first person. This research had a huge influence on both the plots and the UI for the Starfire series. (Laurel quoted in McManus 2009, n.p.)

Figure 1.2 The Starfire Soccer Challenge focuses on Ginger’s first-person experience playing on a team. Here, Ginger (left) celebrates as her friend Sharla is named team captain.

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While the planned sports series was cut short when Mattel acquired the company and then shelved it, that initial soccer-focused game performed well. It presented an innovative approach to adapting sports themes for video games and designing such games for an audience outside the assumed fanbase of young men. The Starfire series was the first sports-based series intended for girls (Laurel 2001, 24). In its development, The Starfire Soccer Challenge (1998) is emblematic of the Purple Moon design process. Although soccer, particularly women’s soccer, was a visible part of the moment’s cultural zeitgeist, Laurel and her team still relied on the same process of careful research to ensure that the game would resonate with its intended audience. Research not only suggested the types of themes and topics that Purple Moon games would address, it also guided the shape of that address. The anecdote covering Laurel’s surprise at girls’ desire to go into the forest alone, or only with a “really good friend. And only when I say” serves as further illustration of this practice in action (Laurel 2013, 175). Laurel is explicit that when she says “research,” she is not referring to market or sales research. To Laurel, market research is “problematic” at least in part because it conventionally asks consumers to choose favorites from a pool of things that already exist. Such a process fails to support innovation, a point experts have been making since at least the 1970s (Laurel 2001, 36–37; Tauber 1974). Involving users in the design process can drive radical innovation (Lettle 2007), but this is true only when they are included meaningfully—when, like the hundreds of girls Laurel and her team interviewed, they are central to the design process and the creators listen to and incorporate their early feedback. Too often in market research, consumers are brought in only at the point that products have already been developed. Research as conducted by Laurel at Interval and subsequently Purple Moon did not rely on assumptions about what girls would want. Rather, Laurel adhered to her stated design heuristics: to let go of assumptions about the audience, to be willing to follow the research, and to produce the kinds of experiences that would speak to players.

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Brenda Laurel

The result of this approach was a set of games that sharply diverged from earlier endeavors into “games for girls.” Earlier games had relied on the popularity of existing brands like Strawberry Shortcake or Barbie and often presented lazy stereotyping of girls’ gameplay preferences. For example, in one Barbie game produced for the Commodore 64, Barbie is unsurprisingly at a shopping mall, seeking an outfit to wear on a date with Ken. However, rather than developing an original gameplay style specific to the theme, setting, and audience, the developers stuck with a basic shooting mechanic—but the developers assumed that girls aren’t good at shooting games, and so replaced the projectiles with slow-moving marshmallows. Clearly, the disconnect between girls and shooting games was that they were just too fast (Laurel 2001, 22). In the context of earlier, ineffective results at marketing video games to girls, the approach employed by Laurel and Purple Moon was refreshing. Rather than producing slowed down or pink-washed versions of established game styles, the company produced games that resonated with girls’ expressed desires and interests. Demonstrably, this would not have been possible if Interval and Purple Moon both had not heavily invested in Laurel’s innovative vision. For Laurel, and for Purple Moon, research should not just inspire or guide game design; it should fuel the entire process.

The humanism of human–computer interaction As indicated by both Computers as Theatre and Utopian Entrepreneur, Laurel’s approach to game design is part of a broader set of principles she applies to human–computer interaction more generally. Laurel’s impact as a game designer can be traced along several major threads. She has reshaped our understanding of human–computer interaction, particularly as it is applied to games; (1) she has forwarded the importance of research as an ongoing, essential component of the game design process; and (2) she championed the idea that girls, too, should be taken seriously as an audience for games.

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Laurel’s theoretical work has attracted the attention of experts in design, interactive media and games and even of science fiction author William Gibson. Looking backward to the initial impact of the book as it entered the second edition, media scholar Henry Jenkins (2013) summarized the early impact and ongoing importance of Laurel’s theories: Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre was one of the few truly transformative books to emerge in the heady early days of the ‘digital revolution,’ demanding that we think of the computer as posing a series of creative problems that might best be addressed through the lens of the dramatic arts rather than purely technical problems that remain in the domain of the computer scientists. In a new edition released this month, she revisits that classic text in light of her rich and diverse experience as a designer, educator, and entrepreneur. The resulting work looks backwards, at how far we have come towards transforming the computer into a new expressive medium and looks forwards to the technical and cultural problems we still need to resolve if we are going to produce a diverse and sustainable digital culture in the years ahead. (n.p.)

As Jenkins notes, Laurel’s innovation in her consideration of the computer as medium is her conviction that the conventions, traditions, and knowledge of the dramatic arts can and should transform the way we think about interactivity. The pursuit of a design approach that addresses both cultural and technical problems has, for Laurel, been an ongoing project begun with her early work at CyberVisions and continued through her time with Purple Moon and into the present. In advocating that we think of the computer not only as a tool but as a medium, Laurel disrupted a conception of digital culture that, as Jenkins notes, may have become a series of technical problems best left in the hands of computer scientists. Today, not only human–computer interaction, but game design, information architecture, technical communication, and an array of fields demonstrate a growing recognition of the importance

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Brenda Laurel

of addressing design in a way that considers both technical and human factors. Good design can support humans’ sense of autonomy and control (Oulasvirta, 2004), provide true joy of use (Hassenzahl, Beu, and Burmester 2001), and augment human abilities, and empower human users (Mann 1998). However, designers must center not their own fantasies but rather the needs of others (Brown 2009; IDEO.org 2015; Kelley 2001). The games Laurel produced at Purple Moon provide clear examples of her strategies for effective design in action. When Laurel joined Interval Research in 1992, she was at a transitional point in her career “after twenty years or so in the computer game industry having ideas that people didn’t think they could sell” (“Why Not Make Video Games for Girls?” 1998). Her subsequent work was driven first by a desire to understand why computer games weren’t reaching little girls, and later, at the Interval spinoff Purple Moon, to understand how to make computer games that would reach little girls. Today, the online community building, the transmedia property development, and the use of research throughout the development process that Laurel insisted on at Purple Moon are becoming increasingly standard practices. In a 1998 TED talk, Laurel mentioned the success of the company’s online community (see Figure 1.3). Within a few months of launch, the site had 42,000 registered users, and these girls visited the site 1.5 times a day, viewing an average of fifty pages over an average of thirty-five minutes per visit. The user numbers for the Purple Moon website now look small—World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) for example, boasted 10 million registered users in 2014. However, the amount of time girls were spending on the site and their deep engagement as evidenced by both that time and by their investment in trading online “treasures” and writing letters to characters were profound, particularly considering that these same girls had previously been ignored by the industry (Kollar 2014). The development of fan communities now is a vital task for most game companies, regardless of target demographic (Harper 2014). The success of Facebook-based games has highlighted the power of social

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Figure 1.3  Brenda Laurel gives a talk on her work at TED in 1998.

interactions and communities in attracting and retaining players (Hamari and Järvinen 2011; Yee 2006). Along with online community development, Purple Moon also engaged in the development of rich transmedia properties. While girls’ computer use—both for games and web access—was Purple Moon’s raison d’être, Laurel had a canny sense both of HCI and of computer spaces as community spaces. The games may have been the ostensible primary products in the Purple Moon brand, but the Purple Moon website was a major part of the brand’s identity and a key offering for its target audience (see Figure 1.4). Additionally, the company sold other Purple Moon branded merchandise, including Rockett Movado toys (see Figure 1.5), and promotional items like keychains, backpacks, and other items were sometimes packaged with Purple Moon titles. The packaging of “feelies”—physical objects linked to a game’s narrative world—with computer games has a long history, but in many ways, Purple Moon telegraphed the now popular growth of interactive toys

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Brenda Laurel

Figure 1.4  The Purple Moon website featured products in the shop, but also invited girls to participate in a number of other activities and to connect with other girls.

such as the toy-based Skylanders game franchise or the plush Webkinz stuffed toys that enable their owners to interact online through an associated game (Kocurek 2013). Purple Moon also used innovative methods for allowing players to navigate the in-game narratives. In the Rockett Movado series, for example, Laurel developed a navigation system that allowed players to choose paths based on their emotional responses rather than on text-based action cues. The idea of emotionally driven interaction fit with the games’ thematic concern with emotional development, but it also anticipates the more recent emergence of empathy games as an established genre. Both in-game and online, Laurel aimed to provide girls with whole experiences—a guiding principle that derives from her

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Figure 1.5  Purple Moon branded merchandise included character figures like these Adventure Friends.

earlier research on interaction design and which has become a more widely deployed principle. Today, that choices and scenes in games should be meaningful is widely acknowledged (Albor 2015; Heussner et al. 2015; Murphy 2011; Salen and Zimmerman 2005; Worch n.d.). The networking of experiences available online, in-game, and in-person (as  through game merchandise or interactive toys) has become an industry standard (Evans 2007; Jenkins 2006; Ryan 2003; Scolari 2009).

Overview of chapters In the subsequent chapters of this book, I draw on the professional and intellectual context developed in this introductory chapter while focusing more specifically on Laurel’s completed game design projects. Considering these games—including the Rockett Movado, Secret Paths, and Starfire Challenge series—alongside her other interactive works, I argue that Laurel’s fundamental innovation in game design,

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Brenda Laurel

her design-driven approach to game development, is the result of Laurel’s particular interdisciplinary background. Moving from this first chapter, this book examines key concepts in Laurel’s approach to games including interactivity, research-driven design, and the genre conventions established and utilized in the Purple Moon games. Trained as a researcher through both academic institutions and a series of technical companies and consulting firms, Laurel’s approach to game design is grounded in exhaustive audience research. In Chapter 2, “‘Even if It Meant Shipping Products in Pink Boxes’: Research-Driven Design,” I examine Laurel’s research in the game design process and argue for the role of research more generally in shaping game design and production. In the years since the release of Laurel’s Purple Moon games, research has grown in visibility and significance within the game industry. The Entertainment Software Association, for example, annually releases oft-cited numbers about the industry’s core audience, identifying trends in demographics, device ownership, and play both for the benefit of industry members and as part of a concerted public relations effort. Here I provide an overview of Laurel’s early research on girls and games and demonstrate the strong influence research played in shaping Purple Moon. In discussing the significance of Laurel’s research as a key part of the design process, I also examine the ways in which efforts to employ a girl-focused design process put the company at odds with games critics and feminists. While critics debated the merits of Purple Moon games and at times went so far as to argue that these were not games, feminists were disappointed to see the games’ frequent focus on “traditional” feminine concerns. However, the topics of the games were generated from an intensive process of studying girls’ play habits and interviewing girls about their interests. Ultimately, the same focus that made the games well liked among the intended audience of young girls made the games unpopular with adults. I consider the potential offered by research-oriented game design processes while also acknowledging the difficulties such a process can present—particularly for designers seeking an overlooked or marginalized audience.

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While the graphics and interfaces of Purple Moon games may look simple in retrospect, they, like other aspects of Laurel’s design work, reflect a rigorous, research-driven effort to produce effective, innovative digital media. In the case of interaction design, Laurel draws heavily on her background in theater, as evidenced in part by her book, Computers as Theatre, which I consider in Chapter 3, “Aristotle and HCI: Computers as Theatre in Theory and Practice.” In the book, Laurel argues that the design of human–computer interactions should be thought of as a type of theater production. To Laurel, interaction design presents not just technical but creative challenges—challenges that can be addressed in part by drawing on the dramatic arts. I reference Laurel’s written work in Computers as Theatre but use it as a lens through which to understand the design principles evident in her game projects. In treating interaction design as a creative, communicative endeavor, Laurel squarely positions game design as a creative field. Further, I argue that games like Rockett’s New School, Secret Paths in the Forest (1997), and Rockett’s Secret Invitation (1998) demonstrate this theater-inspired approach to game design by combining various production components (such as art, sound, voice acting and scripts) to produce a cohesive interactive environment. As game design has grown increasingly professionalized and specialized in recent years and as games draw more deliberately from cinema, this type of design has become normalized—consider, for example, critical darling Gone Home (The Fullbright Company 2013) or the “interactive drama” Beyond: Two Souls (Sony Computer Entertainment 2013), which was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. This normalization of a design style that draws heavily on cinema and theater speaks to the long-standing influence of Laurel’s design principles. In Chapter 4, “‘Friendship Adventures for Girls’: A Pre-History of Emotion Games,” I present a gender-driven analysis of the results of Laurel’s design work as it pertains to Purple Moon and position it in more recent trends in gaming such as the rise of empathy games and highly personalized or autobiographical indie games. Even before the company had released any games, it began referring to them as part of

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a new genre: “friendship adventures for girls.” In producing games in an emergent gender-proscribed genre, Laurel and Purple Moon were responding to the results of Laurel’s research into girls’ practices as they pertain to play and technology and drawing heavily on her research into human–computer interaction. The resultant games present a sometimes-controversial vision of games that would appeal to girls not through pinkwashing, but through a direct appeal to their interests, hobbies, concerns, and habits. I consider the games themselves, focusing on the Rockett Movado series and the Secret Paths series, along with the popular and critical reception of the games, investigating what they reveal about expectations and anxieties of gendered play. In the games, girls are asked to solve problems and practice social skills while engaging in fictionalized, yet realistic scenarios. In Secret Paths in the Forest, for example, players are introduced to characters facing different problems. One of these characters, Miko, is afraid she is disliked because others are jealous. Players learn more about the character’s problem and seek solutions while solving puzzles. In Rockett’s First Dance (1998), Rockett daydreams about being voted “Queen of Hearts” for the Valentine’s Dance then negotiates a day in which she faces her friend’s negative attitude toward the dance, a classmate’s effort to manipulate the vote and other potential conflicts. These games, like other Purple Moon games, focus heavily on social and emotional skills. I argue that these games anticipated growing trends in game development as the industry continues to evolve and diversify. The fifth chapter of this book, “In Her Own Words,” is an original interview with Brenda Laurel, conducted in 2015. In this interview, Laurel details her professional history, her approach to game design, and her hopes for the future of the industry. In the concluding chapter, “The Dangers of Being a Crash Dummy,” I discuss some of the reasons that Purple Moon failed and argue that despite this business failure, the design work Brenda Laurel carried out at Purple Moon should not be considered a failure. Rather, Laurel and the team at Purple Moon produced designs that were forward looking and innovative, ultimately to their own detriment.

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Throughout, I draw on historical and contemporary interviews with Laurel, her public talks and publications, popular media coverage of her games and, of course, the games themselves. The book also includes a gameography and an extensive interview with Laurel, published here for the first time. In considering seriously the impact of Laurel’s game designs, this book also makes an argument for the legacy and importance of the games for girls movement. While many of the games produced during this period have been obscured or treated as cheap punchlines, the movement marks a historically significant moment in the history of the medium. The initial surge of interest in producing games for girls did not succeed in the way that proponents like Laurel might have hoped. Purple Moon in particular confronted criticism from both game and software critics who didn’t like the games based on play style or interface design—never mind that these writers were often adult men, far outside the games’ intended player base—and feminist media activists who argued that the games were reinforcing sexist socialization. As the games for girls movement reached the end of its brief heyday in the late 1990s, many companies like Purple Moon were bought out, shuttered, or both; however, notably Her Interactive has reached longterm success. Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series continues to sell well, now boasting nearly three dozen titles. At least some of the pioneering designers who were at the vanguard of the movement are getting their due. In 2014, the arts nonprofit Rhizome announced plans and began fundraising to publish the games of Theresa Duncan, who is best known for her award-winning games for girls title Chop Suey, through online emulation (Magnet Interactive Studios 2014). And as Entertainment Software Association (ESA) numbers continue to indicate, the push to have more women and girls included among the ranks of gamers has proven successful; at present, 48 percent of gamers are female, and adult women make up the largest single demographic among gamers (Entertainment Software Association 2014). Today, the impact of Laurel’s innovations, including the careful cultivation of an online community of players, the pursuit of satisfying

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Brenda Laurel

whole actions and the consideration and courting of girls as players with unique concerns, interests and skills continue to be felt. As contemporary debate regarding gender diversity both in the game industry workforce and in gaming culture more broadly continues, the legacy of Laurel’s research and her pioneering work with Purple Moon are particularly salient. Further, as empathy games continue to grow as a genre, the importance of games like the Rockett Movado series, which early demonstrated the potential efficacy of games for communicating about complicated emotional and social issues, should not be devalued. I survey not only Laurel’s design and research principles—which are worthy of attention in their own right—but their legacy in the context of contemporary conceptions of interactivity and game design. While Purple Moon was ultimately a short-lived project, the innovative games Laurel produced there and Laurel’s broader body of game design work continue to influence our conceptions of what games can be.

2

“Even if It Meant Shipping Products in Pink Boxes”: Research-Driven Design

The group performed all of these research activities “under the radar” of the organization because the need for them was not acknowledged and utilizing resources on them was seen as wasteful and inappropriate. This, in a nutshell, was the process in every computer game and software company with which I was subsequently involved. (Laurel 2004, 8) In 2004, Brenda Laurel produced an interim report for the Exploratorium and the Macarthur Foundation. The Macarthur Foundation was, at the time, interested in research to improve understanding and use of technology for K-12 learning. Laurel’s report, titled “Design Research, Practice, and Principles for Digital Kids,” focused on Millennials, a generation at the time made up of children up to fifteen years in age. The report details Laurel’s own established research practices and also relays a set of design heuristics for producing learning games for Millennials. These heuristics—provide for collaboration; support multiple communities; facilitate user-created media; avoid outdated stereotypes based on gender, race, or culture; and optimize for positive social interaction—anticipate the present media landscape as well as much of the current discussion of Millennials in the workplace. Journalists and business experts today claim this generation wants “balance and democracy” on the job (Widdicombe 2016), is more likely to call out workplace inequalities, and is made of enthusiastic, techsavvy collaborators, claims that sound strikingly similar to Laurel’s report what the same generation of workers were like as youths (Brack and Kelly 2012; Fromm 2015).

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I begin this chapter by mentioning this report not because it is exceptional, although arguments could be made that it is, but rather because it is representative of Laurel’s work as a researcher and her advocacy for research as a way to produce effective, meaningful game experiences and to deeply understand audience values and desires. Additionally, the report draws heavily on her own experience at multiple game and media companies (as evidenced by the quote with which I open this chapter) and outlines key principles for undertaking design research that is both effective and relatively affordable. By 2004, when Laurel was writing the report, she had worked and interacted with game companies such as Atari, Activision, Epyx, Apple, and Sony and with children’s toy and media companies Hasbro and Mattel over a span of nearly thirty years. While Purple Moon may be the most visible culmination of Laurel’s research-driven approach to design, it is not the only example of this process, and indeed, Laurel remains committed to design research as a key principle for effective game design and continues to advocate for it as a consultant, educator, and speaker. Both prior to founding Purple Moon and in the decades since her work with Purple Moon ended, Laurel has continued to work as a design researcher, and as discussed in the interview in this book, she continues to see design research as a foundational practice for game design not only because it facilitates a design process that meaningfully engages the target audience but also because it increases the efficacy and efficiency of the overall design process. Design research can help head bad ideas off at the pass and help protect designers from making assumptions about the audience— assumptions that, all too often, result in designers producing work for an imagined audience of themselves. In this chapter, I consider Laurel’s research principles and practices, demonstrating the importance of design research at multiple points in her career. At a foundational level, Laurel’s design research is a practice intended to avoid producing projects based on designer’s assumptions rather than meaningful understanding of audience needs. I begin by reviewing Laurel’s research training and work, then proceed to a review

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of her research principles as explicated in the “Digital Kids” report, the most recent edition of Computers as Theatre and in various interviews and other writings. Near the end, I turn to the growing significance of research and analytics as the games industry strives to reach new markets and address long-standing problems. Research is the cornerstone of Laurel’s design practices, and its significance both for her own design work and for her work as a game design consultant and educator cannot be overstated. As a designer, Brenda Laurel demonstrates the degree to which research-driven, audience-focused design can lead to breakthroughs and innovations as it enables designers to correctly identify and usefully address audience desires and needs.

Becoming a design researcher As I have argued throughout this book, Laurel’s design approach is fundamentally informed by her experiences in multiple disciplines and fields. Much of Laurel’s training as a researcher comes from her work in the industry, beginning with the under-the-radar design research she carried out as Manager of Software Marketing for the Home Computer Division, referenced in this chapter’s epigraph. However, Laurel also trained as a researcher through the more formal processes involved in completing a doctoral degree in theater, and her research approaches are shaped by both industrial and scholarly practices. Indeed, in an introduction to a compilation of research memos completed while working at the Atari Sunnyvale Research Laboratory, Laurel notes that the work on “interactive fantasy systems” contained in the memos is “preliminary”: “The bulk of my work in this area was created after the lab’s demise and is published in my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System,’ The Ohio State University, 1986” (Laurel 1983). These kinds of comments make clear the degree to which Laurel’s scholarly and industrial research are impossible to extricate from one another and deeply intermingled. Laurel began working in the game industry

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while still in graduate school, and she finished her dissertation after having spent several years working in the industry. Her work at Atari Labs informed her dissertation, while her dissertation project let her continue the inquiry into interactive media she had begun at Atari Labs and would later continue first at Interval and then at Purple Moon. As a doctoral student, Laurel ostensibly studied theater, the field in which she had completed her PhD. However, the project that Laurel ultimately pursued was fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing from her background in and understanding of theater while also pursuing the possibilities of computer technologies: As an actor I knew a lot about making choices I mean you can play the same scene seventeen different ways and have very different outcomes. So it gave me a clue in to what kind of choices we may be looking at. I also knew from the get-go that is a much more complex situation than branching narratives. So that’s why my PhD thesis was on interactive media with artificial intelligence involved, to basically model, for want of a better guide, Aristotelian poetics. I was a scholar of the poetics in my PhD work and I was also a scholar of Brecht, and I think you could do the same thing with Brecht. (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015)

Brecht and Aristotle offer seemingly different approaches to theater. Brecht’s “epic theatre” works toward rational self-reflection built from a performance of deliberate emotional distance. The end goal of theater for Brecht is to compel audience members to affect social change. Aristotelian poetics presents a system to understand the making of drama focused on imitation and genres to uncover or reveal hidden truths to the audience. Ultimately, both are interested in theater as something that can transform the audience through revelation and reflection. They also both offer clear theoretical frameworks. It is this belief in dramatic potential and this type of theoretical framing that Laurel takes and applies to interaction design. Her interdisciplinary perspective is evident in many of the series of research memos she wrote at Atari in the years preceding the completion of her dissertation in 1986.

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For example, in a memo titled, “First-Person Simulations as Learning Environments,” Laurel draws on psychological research on intrinsic motivation and cognition, references Aristotle, extensively compares theater and simulation and considers the proper integration of ethics into first-person simulations (1983). A research proposal from the same collection is titled, “The Poetics of Interactive Form,” and suggests a rubric to “analyze the powers of certain interactive works as art” and to “identify those powers, and then to discover the formal and structural mechanisms through which they are realized” (Laurel 1983, 1). Given that debate over whether or not computer games are art continues to the present, that much of the work Laurel completed in this early research was both experimental and pushing significant questions about the use and nature of digital media should be obvious (Gee 2006; Parker 2012; Smuts 2005; Tavinor 2009). For Laurel, games and software didn’t just provide tools, they solved problems, fulfilled desires, and allowed for rich and meaningful experiences. Her 1986 dissertation ultimately takes the form of a feasibility study. Grounded in dramatic theory, the work considers the possibility of “an interactive fantasy system that enables a human user to participate as a character in a real-time, interactive drama.” As defined by Laurel, “Such a system must have the ability to understand the words, actions and goals of the user-character and to formulate and enact a dramatically interesting plot.” Laurel’s dissertation, like much of her work at Atari, draws heavily from Aristotle. In the abstract, she claims, “The study applies the principles of Aristotelian dramatic theory to interactive structure. Dramatic theory provides the system’s end cause, the formal and structural qualities of its output, and the organizing principles of its design” (Laurel 1986, abstract). Fundamentally, Laurel maintains that the experience of an interactive fantasy system should be, in the Aristotelian sense, dramatic, maximizing, and optimizing the audience or user’s emotional experience (Laurel 1986, 6). This understanding of interactive media, one based on the engineering of emotional experiences rather than rule sets, puts Laurel’s work at odds with much ludology, but in

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both her games and other media projects, Laurel was interested in providing dramatic experiences that may or may not be ludic. At Atari, the media experiments read like science fiction, but they were also directly inspired by science fiction and in fact even focused on relaying visions from science fiction, hence the involvement of Ray Bradbury. Atari, of course, was not the only company at which Laurel conducted research or consulted on research. By the time she completed her PhD, Laurel had spent stints at CyberVision (1978–1980) as a designer and programmer, at Atari as manager of software marketing (1978– 1982) and as a research scientist in the Atari Labs (1982–1984) and at Activision as director of software development (beginning in 1985 and continuing through completion of the degree) (Laurel 1986, iv). In the years that followed, Laurel would also work for Epyx and Apple and consult with numerous companies before joining Interval Research Corporation, where she worked for seven years (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015). At Interval, Laurel ultimately launched Purple Moon as a spin-off company. However, prior to this, Laurel spent multiple years researching games, gender and technology, a process that, as I discuss, deeply informed both the core principles and design approach at Purple Moon and also shaped her understanding of and commitment to research. In particular, she worked with Cheskin, a commercial research firm, on the groundwork for Purple Moon and adapted and adopted many of the methods used by Cheskin’s researchers including interview and focus group techniques, photo inventories, and observation strategies; Laurel later went on to serve on the company’s Board of Advisors (Laurel 2004, 9). All of these experiences shaped Laurel’s approach to and understanding of research and helped cultivate her commitment to research as a design practice. This commitment is deep enough that at Atari and at multiple other companies, she continued to carry out design research as part of her job even when that research was formally devalued or even frowned upon. Companies often wanted to repeat past

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successes by repeating past designs or minimally iterated on existing properties in part to minimize financial risk: My conclusion is that when a type of product is deemed successful, its form and derivation (in the case of videogames, this was often based on licensing of successful film properties) became the de facto criteria for future product design. Conscientious engineers, designers and marketers conduct stealth research by ad hoc means to do what they know should be done within organizational contexts that do not support their activities or acknowledge the need for research except in relation to marketing and advertising. Play testing and quality assurance are sanctioned ex post facto forms of research that are generally aimed at validation rather than innovation. (Laurel 2004, 6)

This counter-innovative approach is one that Laurel bristled at, but it is also one that fundamentally shaped her commitment to design research. The absence of design research, she came to believe, stifled innovation and creativity and led to the stagnation of ideas. According to Laurel, without research, designers produce work primarily for themselves and companies invest most in established ideas. At Interval and with Purple Moon, Laurel was given an opportunity to develop and test a different approach to game design, one grounded not in established models of what worked in the industry, such as games set in the Wild West or focused on racing cars, but rather in rigorous research.

Design research and Purple Moon Purple Moon can be understood as the culmination of Laurel’s previous research experiences and the clearest expression of her vision of design research. The games Purple Moon produced are both informed by and derived from research; Laurel is disruptive, relying on research as a design technique, an approach that had historically been marginalized or devalued in the games industry. Placing these techniques at the center of the company’s design process remains innovative and unusual.

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However, while this reliance on design research was itself innovative, it also drove innovation. The themes, mechanics, and aesthetic of Purple Moon games resonated deeply with girls and reflected a sharp departure from conventional approaches to game design and from conventional wisdom about what girls wanted. The research that inspired Purple Moon began as an extensive examination of gender and technology carried out at Interval. Laurel worked with an internal team, but also partnered with Cheskin, a market research firm, that introduced the Interval team to methods like photo inventories. In a photo inventory, a research participant was handed a disposable camera and asked to take photographs of her life. Researchers would analyze the resulting images, gaining insights into the participant’s priorities, interests and surroundings. Specific methods like the photo inventory were only part of what Laurel picked up from colleagues at Cheskin, though: I learned from Cheskin’s methodology that it’s not enough to understand people statistically—you need to find out what their lives are really like. Some of that is quantitative information, such as how much TV they watch or how often they play video games. Some of it is qualitative: what makes them insecure or how they represent themselves to other people. Some of what you need to know may be scientific … Some things are better gotten at through personal conversations and stories—what are your favorite things to do? Or, what magical powers might you like to have? These sorts of questions aren’t particularly useful if the answers are multiple choice. (2001, 40)

The optimization of research methods and strategies, and the effort to ensure that the research captured both statistical information and individual voices, became a key part of Laurel’s approach. Through the execution of the research, Laurel and her colleagues began to see commercial possibilities: I took over a group looking at gender and technology and we spent about 4 years doing research on tween-age girls all over the country— human centered … qualitative research. We also did some quant. We talked to experts. It was a very thorough job, and about half way

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through the research project we’re thinking this looks like it wants to be a company. This is that … there’s an opportunity space here. As David [Liddle] put it, there’s a six-billion-dollar business with an empty lot next door. So that was the beginning of Purple Moon. (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015)

As the project shifted toward the founding of a company, Laurel and her research team began identifying patterns in their findings. For example, three major patterns emerged: “narrative construction is a preferred form of play for girls ages 7–12”; “in computer games, girls value character and story while boys tend to value action and competitive measures”; and “an activity is considered ‘play’ when one’s actions do not have significant real-life consequences” (Laurel 2004, 4). From these patterns, Laurel and her team distilled design heuristics: •  avoid gameplay patterns that emphasize speed; •  include gameplay patterns that involve social intelligence; •  provide for open play and exploration; and •  provide early evidence of personal agency within the game context; avoid steep learning curves. (Laurel 2004)

These heuristics are in evidence across the spectrum of Purple Moon games. For example, with regard to the last of these, while puzzles in the Secret Paths series do sometimes challenge player response times and dexterity, they are not reliant on twitch skill, and in the Rockett Movado series, the majority of problem-solving scenarios invite players to apply social intelligence to resolve conflicts or complex situations. For example, in Rockett’s First Dance, Rockett talks to her classmate Sharla about the school dance and confides her own anxiety about whether or not she’ll win queen. Sharla tells Rockett to ignore the popularity contest, and Rockett can choose to agree with Sharla that the king and queen contest is a popularity contest and that it bothers her; to agree with Sharla that it is a popularity contest, but that it doesn’t bother her; or to respond dismissively and tell Sharla she doesn’t care what she thinks (see Figure 2.1). The choices represent different emotional responses to

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Figure 2.1  Rockett weighs her response to Sharla in Rockett’s First Dance.

the conversation with Sharla, and the player’s choice in turn shapes how Sharla reacts, the narrative branching based on Rockett’s emotional and social reactions. The Rockett Movado games’ focus on girls’ social lives is complemented by the Secret Paths series’ focus on girls’ emotional and internal lives. Here, too, research steered design and in fact steered the design away from Laurel’s own assumptions: When we talked to girls and asked them what their garden would look like…. They didn’t want to take care of the animals. They wanted the animals to take care of them. They wanted magical creatures to tell them important stories and give them secrets. They wanted wonder. And they weren’t sure they wanted their friends in there with them. These all went against what I would have done if I had done it just out of my own experience so that’s an example of how research really informed in a deep way what we did with that series. (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015)

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Focusing on narrative, character, and exploration distinguished Purple Moon from many popular games at the time—after all, the 1990s game industry saw the rise and dominance of first-person shooters. It also sometimes put them at the edge of what critics considered a game. This debate is ongoing with the somewhat sneering attack on games like Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013) as “walking simulators,” but these dismissals, often voiced by men, may reflect a broader disdain for women and girls as gamers and for the games readily associated with them. Narrative-driven games, this reasoning goes, are not just feminine, they aren’t even games at all. But these criticisms, like those of adult men who didn’t like Rockett’s New School, are fundamentally irrelevant: Gone Home probably isn’t for players who prefer the Call of Duty series, and Purple Moon’s games were definitively not for middleaged software reviewers. The heuristics that animated Purple Moon’s games were derived from a process focused overtly on a target audience that deliberately excluded the players the games industry was already serving. The heuristics are only some of the insights gleaned from the years of research that precipitated the founding of Purple Moon. For example, the researchers learned that girls would not play with games if their brothers had dismissed the game as bad, so they strove “to create a game that gave boys ‘cooties,’” because they didn’t want boys to touch the Purple Moon games at all (Bryce and Rutter 2003; Cunningham and Carpine n.d.; Laurel 2013, 172). Brenda Laurel and the team at Purple Moon knew exactly who their games were for. What is important to stress is the degree to which Laurel and the others who worked on the research and design of Purple Moon’s games trusted their players. Laurel was committed to providing girls with experiences that were attractive and meaningful not to the researchers, or to the girls’ parents or teachers, or to experts on youth, education, or psychology, but to the girls themselves. This reliance on the girls themselves often put the company between a rock and a hard place in terms of reception. Conventional game critics rarely knew what to make of the games and often discounted the degree to which they were not the

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target audience; at least one reviewer insisted he, an adult man, did not need to take the game to a girl to know that the game was bad (Laurel 2001, 25). Feminist critics sometimes found the games objectionable for the degree to which they focused on seemingly conventional or even stereotypical understandings of girlhood (Laurel 2001, 26–27). However, Laurel and the rest of the designers, writers, artists, and other team members at Purple Moon continued to trust the research. This trust paid off substantially with the audience of girls that the company targeted. The company’s initial sales exceeded preliminary forecasts by nearly tenfold; both Rockett’s New School and Secret Paths in the Forest were listed in PC Data’s top fifty entertainment titles over the 1997 holiday season. Furthermore, the company’s interactive website, by 1999, had served 300 million pages, many of them to 240,000 registered users who visited the site daily and viewed an average of thirty-five pages per visit, and girls visiting the site had collected 5 million virtual treasures and sent over 10 million virtual postcards (Laurel 2001, 24). In short, girls loved the games and the accompanying website and toys. Because as Laurel argues, “good research is never done,” the company continued to iterate and innovate. The Starfire Challenge series saw only one title released, but that series was the first sports game series for girls, and it reflected shifts in girls’ interests. During the company’s earlier research, sports were not of particular interest to the audience members, but the rising prominence of the WNBA and the US capture of the women’s World Cup for soccer sparked an increase in visibility for women athletes and attracted increased interest from girls (Laurel 2001, 41). The Starfire Soccer Challenge featured the same characters from the Purple Moon world. Play focused on the Fireflies, a girls’ soccer team, but followed in-game action primarily by showing the girls’ interactions with one another and their coach. In the game’s opening, the main character Ginger is caught daydreaming while playing goalie. After the opposing team scores, Ginger is upset with herself—and some of the other players are upset with her, too. The game focuses not on the intricacies of soccer strategy, but rather on the complex social interactions that occur on and off field. The game’s art style echoes that of the Rockett games, but uses

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a distinctive audio style more suited to the sports theme. In Starfire, the player is privy to Ginger’s interior life much as the player is privy to Rockett’s thoughts and feelings in the Rockett games. However, the player is asked to make choices about whose side Ginger will take in various social conflicts; this is in contrast to the player’s interactions with Rockett, which are presented largely through the lens of emotion. Choices are, fittingly, represented differently in the Starfire games (see Figure 2.2). While Starfire Soccer Challenge continued to iterate on Purple Moon’s established, working cast of characters and overall aesthetic, it incorporated fresh research findings and took an unusual approach to a sports game: We learned all these things about how boys and girls experience sports differently. Boys will tell you about watching a game more often than not … and girls will tell you about playing soccer, so the television

Figure 2.2  The player’s first choice is whether Ginger will join her teammates’ anger against Dana (left) or work with Jessie to try to break up the argument.

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Brenda Laurel like interface for sports games in those days was entirely appropriate to boys and meaningless to girls. So what we were trying to do with the soccer series was to model a girl’s experience on a team while still having a sports through line, and so we interview a coach. I remember this one guy telling us, “I just wonder why these girls are so slow at passing drills.” … he says “Finally I figured out they’re looking around figuring out the social consequences of who they’re going to pass it to.” … It was a very different take on sports because we learned these differences that were acculturated differences. (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015)

In The Starfire Soccer Challenge as in Purple Moon’s other games, research led design and was often surprising. For this game, the interface focused not on a television-style overview of the game, but rather on experiences of play. Because both coaches and girls mentioned interest in post-game pizza parties, the games included a pizza party scene. The degree to which Purple Moon games focused on design research and integrated heuristics from that research meant the games often did not appeal to those outside of the targeted demographic; but the same things that made games unappealing to critics resonated deeply with players. Ultimately, the case of Purple Moon shows the value of research in reaching new audiences and producing innovative designs; it also shows the extent to which effective design isn’t “for everybody” but is rather for a particular audience with particular needs and desires.

Design principles and practices In the years after Purple Moon was bought out by Mattel in 1999, sharing the fate of a number of other children’s software companies, Laurel continued to work as a consultant on design research projects,  and she also continued to write about human–computer interaction and research practices and to teach. These most recent writings are often deliberately instructive, laying out Laurel’s methods not only so that

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readers may understand what she has done but also so that they can do what she has done as well. Laurel edited Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2003), an anthology that includes chapters from designers from diverse contexts and perspectives, all of them offering insight into the utility and practice of design research. In her introduction to the book titled “Muscular Design,” Laurel elaborates on the definition of human-centered design research that she outlined in Utopian Entrepreneur two years earlier: design research can enable the product to speak for itself, freeing branding and marketing to move toward honest communication and away from persuasion and the creation of desire. Human-centered design research encompasses a set of methods and practices aimed at getting insight into what would serve or delight people. It investigates behind the scenes, looking at individuals, situated contexts, cultures, forms, history, and even business models for clues that can inform design. Furthermore, good human-centered design research amplifies the designer’s ability to shape popular culture and to smoothly transmit values through design. (Laurel 2003, 17)

For Laurel, as stressed both here and in Utopian Entrepreneur, design research is not market research; it does not tell the researcher what can be sold but rather tells her what needs and desires are currently unmet. Design research has become a robust field over the past forty years and attracted particular attention in the most recent decade (Bayazit 2004; Faste and Faste 2012). Design research can help companies and organizations face the future and ensure that design projects are successful in their goals (Höger 2008). This research can employ many methods and take many forms, but fundamentally it is about ensuring that design is both useful and meaningful. Laurel has also written clearly about efficient methods for carrying out design research in the context of game development, as in her “Design Research, Practice, and Principles for Digital Kids” report. In this report, Laurel explicitly lays out a method for human-centered research that she has found “to be efficient and effective and is not

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Table 2.1  Laurel’s approach to human-centered design research. 1. Secondary research

Literature review of existing studies followed by expert interviews.

2. Analysis of secondary research

Analyze findings from secondary research to identify patterns and research opportunities and formulate research questions.

3. Qualitative research

Conduct qualitative research using methods appropriate to the research questions. Possible methods include observational research, photo audits, interviews, ethnography, monitoring, or focus groups.

4. Analysis of qualitative research

Conduct analysis in three stages: First, identify patterns; second, express patterns as findings; and third, convert findings into design principles and heuristics.

5. Validate qualitative findings with quantitative methods

Use quantitative studies to test if findings are accurate for a larger population. Potential methods include presenting a prototype to a larger sample to conduct quantitative evaluation.

Source: Adapted from Brenda Laurel 2004. “Design Research, Practice, and Principles for Digital Kids.” Exploratorium and the Macarthur Foundation, 2–4.

necessarily extremely costly” (Laurel 2004, 2). This process combines qualitative and quantitative methods informed by rigorous secondary research. In Table 2.1, I summarize Laurel’s approach. This process is important to note not only because it informs Laurel’s own design work as with Purple Moon but also because it can readily be adapted to a diversity of design projects, including the development of games. This design process is not necessarily unique to Laurel; however, it is a clear articulation of what is unique about Laurel’s approach to game design, which is always grounded in research.

Conclusion Design research is carried out in diverse settings both corporate and nonprofit, educational and strictly commercial. Design research projects

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can be multi-million dollar endeavors, such as the work that grounded Purple Moon, or it can occur on a much smaller scale. In short, there are many ways to conduct design research, but the purpose of this process remains consistent: Design research is intended to facilitate innovation, to help designers understand audiences and markets so that they can shift meanings and produce technological change (Norman and Verganti 2014). At its core, design research emanates from a commitment to and belief in continuous improvement (Bereiter 2002). This approach may seem like it would have long been at the heart of game design, but this is far from true. As Laurel makes explicit, historically, design research has been little employed in the games industry in part because for many years, those working in the industry could reliably imagine an audience of players just like them: “Beginning with ‘Space War’ in 1967, young male engineers had created games for which they were their own audience. It was fortuitous that the engineers’ demographic was practically identical to the market demographic” (2004, 5). This kind of false-consensus effect is widespread; all of us can easily assume that others are much like us, but in these assumptions, we are frequently wrong; in short, we imagine that we are more average than we are and so imagine that others are more like us than they are (Gilovich 1990, 623). Similarly, those of us who spent time as girls may assume as adults that we know what little girls like or are like, but in this, too, we are often wrong (Laurel 2013, 175). For the reasons Laurel notes, because young, white men were for many years making games for young, white men, design research in the early years of the games industry was often seen as unnecessary or excessive. Designers knew what players liked because for a time, the players really were like them. However, while these assumptions were profitable for years—and at times still are—these ongoing assumptions about what players are like and what they want can prove a hindrance in expanding to new markets, growing business, and producing innovative games. Laurel’s vision of design is one in which it is richly shaped by design research, enabling those making games to create experiences that meet existing audience needs and desires and to produce games that are innovative and unusual.

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In grounding her design practices in research, Laurel has taken an unusual, innovative, and sometimes, as at Atari where research was conducted under the radar of the larger corporation, unauthorized approach to optimizing game design and producing games that push beyond established conventions and forms to reach players. Design research can and should be an open-ended process by which designers come to understand the audience. This process can be surprising or unnerving; it often unsettles expectations, demanding that designers look away from ourselves and our assumptions. It is part of why, decades later, the girls who played Purple Moon’s games in the 1990s still speak of the games’ importance decades later as adults; these games connected with girls at a level that would have been impossible without years of research. While Purple Moon and the games Laurel designed and produced are the clearest example of what this approach can yield, her ongoing work as researcher, consultant, and educator also speaks to the importance design research can have for games. This chapter has explored Laurel’s research training and principles; understanding these is key to understanding Laurel’s design work and legacy. Design research can be carried out in many places, but it must be focused on understanding the audience and ensuring that what is produced reaches them not by manufacturing desires but by fulfilling unmet needs. It is an act of trust in the audience, and can be a leap of faith. In a 1997 interview with Wired magazine, quoted in the title of this chapter, Laurel talked about how the opportunity to head the research team at Interval came with one stipulation. She had to trust the research: She explained,“I agreed that whatever solution the research suggested, I’d go along with, even if it meant shipping products in pink boxes” (Laurel quoted in Beato 1997b, n.p.). Laurel’s training and experience in research and her articulation of the value, purpose and practice of design research can be deeply informative for designers who wish to produce works that resonate with particular audiences. Such an approach is essential in reaching beyond our tendency to design for an imagined audience of people much like ourselves, in reaching

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the audience by trusting the audience members themselves. As Laurel argues, in working to get past our assumptions through research, we can find ways to not only reach players, but to dazzle and delight them, to stretch our own abilities, to produce interactive experiences that offer players opportunities for fulfillment and transformation.

3

Aristotle and HCI: Computers as Theatre in Theory and Practice

Laurel’s interest in and understanding of what is now often called human–computer interaction, or HCI, emerged directly from her experience of researching and producing theater. Her first job as a game programmer and designer for CyberVision seemed, to Laurel, an obvious fit because of the types of theatrical work that she had become most interested in: Some friends of mine were starting a computer game company called CyberVision. They said, “Why don’t you come and write some interactive fairytales for us?” I thought well that’s natural because I was directing interactive plays. Those were the days of interactive drama.… Hair and Dionysus in ’69 and Cafe La MaMa [La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club]. So it made sense. I had just done an interactive outdoor production of Robin Hood, so I thought okay, and I came and did some interactive fairytales. Then I started thinking about it, it’s like, “Wow this business of interaction we don’t know anything about it. It’s like new.” All you could do is change the channel on the TV before you had this stuff show up. (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015)

Laurel began work at CyberVision in 1976, but the company folded a few years later. Like many of her colleagues at CyberVision, Laurel moved to Atari, where she continued to consider the potential of interactive media and to pursue her research on the utility of thinking through HCI from the framework of theater. Laurel began her time at Atari working in software but moved to the company’s research labs, which allowed her to conduct experimental work that relied on the company’s

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resources and location, drawing in artists, experts, and dreamers from across Silicon Valley. Her research culminated in Computers as Theatre, first published in 1991. The project not only reflects Laurel’s own vision but it also reflects the unique educational, professional, geographic, and historic context in which she worked. Laurel’s interactive designs span multiple forms including live site-specific theatrical performances alongside virtual reality projects. I argue all of these shaped Laurel’s work as a game designer and that her legacy as a designer should rightly include her earlier research and production work in HCI. Research may be the most obvious through thread of Laurel’s professional activities, but interaction is an equally important aspect of her interventions and innovations and one of particular interest to game designers as player experience has become a growing area of concern (Isbister and Schaffer 2008; Nacke and Lindley 2008; Nacke et al. 2009; Nacke and Drachen 2011; Sánchez, Zea, and Gutiérrez 2009a, 2009b). Laurel’s work in this area demonstrates her importance and influence in the broader field of design. It anticipates her subsequent position as an academic; she founded and chaired both the media design program at the Art Center College of Design and the graduate design program at California College of the Arts and later taught at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her work on interactivity also shows how her unique understanding has left a legacy in the field of game design (the primary concern of this book) and in HCI more broadly. Through work in areas such as theater, virtual reality, software design, and game development, Laurel has spent decades developing and refining theories of how interactivity can and should work. Computers as Theatre, which is perhaps the clearest expression of those theories, has become a classic text in the field. To understand Laurel’s approach to game design without understanding her approach to and interest in interactivity is at best difficult; principles Laurel adapted from her earliest research and theoretical work directly informed the design ethos of Purple Moon’s games and are an integral part of her professional legacy.

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Brenda Laurel’s work in interactivity is profoundly influential in multiple fields. When The Atlantic reported on multi-user dungeons (MUDs) in 1993, Laurel is quoted as an expert on interactivity; she highlights the opportunities for self-representation and interaction MUDs make possible, allowing users to present themselves as fancifully as they see fit and to carry out entire online social lives (Leslie 1993). In the preface of Women, Art, and Technology, hyperfiction pioneer Judy Malloy invokes Laurel and Rachel Strickland’s Placeholder VR project as exemplary of interactive art (Malloy 2003, xv). Throughout the early 1990s, Laurel published extensively on research into and theories of interface design and virtual reality. These papers, along with Laurel’s other works, most notably Computers as Theatre, form a substantial body of work, a clear demonstration of Laurel’s particular praxis, a blend of scholarly inquiry and both industrial and experimental practice. Central to these is an advocacy for interfaces that feel interfaceless, and for interactions that have their own sense of wholeness by following satisfying narrative arcs.

Storytelling in Silicon Valley In the years preceding Computers as Theatre’s publication in 1991, Laurel did a number of things that contributed to the insights and frameworks that ultimately undergirded the book. First, her work in theater provided a critical context, as evidenced at least in part by her reliance on drama theory. Second, her graduate education in theater helped train her both in theater as an actress, director, and producer, and also as a researcher. From there, Laurel’s early stint as a game designer at CyberVision and her subsequent work at numerous other game companies provided opportunities to explore and test theories of interaction while also allowing her to cut her teeth in an industry that was both booming and volatile—Laurel mentions in the interview later in this book that she may have been the one to turn the lights out as one company closed up shop. At CyberVision, Laurel worked on

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interactive fairy tales. At Atari, she oversaw ports of popular games and worked on a diversity of software and game projects. She also worked in production at Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts) and Activision and consulted on production projects for a number of other game and software companies. However, most importantly during this period, as a researcher at Atari, Laurel was given opportunities to continue theorizing and developing the type of interactive fantasy systems she had begun exploring in her dissertation, which she completed several years later. The dissertation, then, is a type of hybrid document, doubtless indebted to her scholarly training but equally indebted to the time she was able to spend in what was, by all accounts, a relatively experimental corporate research lab with the research lab treated as an area for open exploration rather than direct commercialization: “I ran over to research where Alan Kay had just been hired and begged, and he hired me in research. That really changed my life. It changed the direction of where I was going—so rather than being a producer I started really being a researcher, at least approaching my work as research” (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015). This moment allowed Laurel to shift from thinking about the execution of projects to the theorization of new ideas. Under Alan Kay, Laurel was given leeway to study what interested her, which was primarily interactive systems, specifically “interactive fantasy,” as informed largely by dramatic theory, including notions of narrative structure, audience involvement, and storytelling drawn from Laurel’s theater background. The research itself often also relied directly on a dramatist’s skills and tools. In a draft research proposal for the “Simulation of an Interactive Fantasy System,” Laurel details early-stage design of an immersive media environment intended to produce “a first-person encounter with a fantasy world, in which the user may create and portray a character whose choices and actions may affect the course of events just as they might in real life” (Laurel 1983, 1). This proposal is particularly illuminating and is useful as an early example of the kind of creative framework in which Laurel developed as a researcher. In

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absence of sufficient technical solutions to the challenges presented in producing such an encounter, the researchers proposed relying on theatrical solutions: “The actual event will have the flavor of a planned improvisation, using operational technical elements where they exist and human improvisation for portions of the system that have yet to be fully designed or implemented” (Laurel 1983, 1–2). The purpose of the proposed research simulation/planned improvisation was to further understand what might be necessary to complete such an interactive, computer-based interactive fantasy system. As proposed, the simulation is based on Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. The scenario Laurel developed, derived from the world of Bradbury’s book, was informed in part through conversations with Bradbury about the parameters and realities of the story’s imagined world and through a dress rehearsal involving Bradbury, who was responsible for constructing the story on the fly as the player explored the simulation, taking on a role not unlike that of a gamemaster. The research documented in the proposal is both ambitious and fanciful. Bradbury suggests the environment of the simulation is reminiscent of Larry Niven and Steven Barnes’s 1981 Dream Park, which the Atari interviewer acknowledges as a significant inspiration, as well as Bradbury’s own story “The Veldt.” The proposal for the simulation is highly indebted to both science fiction and theater. The record of early experimentation toward the project is often in a script-like format, the roles in the production team—writers, actors, and so forth—echo roles from theater. In short, the staging of the event demonstrates a fundamentally theatrical perspective and mode of production. The proposal reveals fundamental tenets of Laurel’s overall approach to design and innovation including her anchoring in drama theory and theatrical approaches. The collaboration with Bradbury is significant in part because it reflects a deep-seated belief in working with artists across disciplines, which is made explicit in the report itself. Indeed, working with artists is a key to the research with two of the project’s stated six goals relating directly to their involvement in the project:

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The playwright is the architect of the plot while the poetics are the dramatic rules and heuristics the playwright has in his toolbox. The playwright is key to the system laid out in the report; however, she may not necessarily be the center of the system given the involvement of a diverse team of collaborators and the likelihood that the playwright may not have the most thorough understanding of the technological underpinnings. Regardless, this is importantly a system in which the terms and frameworks throughout are often borrowed from theater. In total, the proposal is both an incredibly ambitious and an incredibly telling document. It points to a design process that is infused with a rich sense of possibility, that is reliant on both technological innovation and human imagination, on engineers and designers working alongside writers, actors and artists. This radical interdisciplinarity is often fundamental to game design; it is why designers build and work in teams, but it is also, according to Laurel, a key practice for innovation.

HCI as theater At its heart, Computers as Theatre is a distillation of what Laurel had learned both during her graduate studies and her years working in and around Silicon Valley. At the time of its publication in 1991, the book was a radical provocation. Laurel’s approach was not just unusual, it was unheard of. The book applied old ideas, many dating to the Classical period, to the computer’s new technology. In suggesting that HCI be

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marked by interactions that each have their own dramatic shape, Laurel makes explicit that she is giving priority to action, but she is also giving priority to narrative and storytelling. The work is deeply indebted to the humanities, to history, to literary and dramatic theory, and to particular understandings of Western culture. HCI had, early in its history, been recognized as an interdisciplinary field, and one that could usefully borrow from other disciplines, including psychology and social science fields (Brave and Nass 2009; Card, Newell, and Moran 1983; Kaptelinin 1995; Kuutti 1995;Newell and Card 1985). But, even interdisciplinary fields have their limits, and Laurel’s use of theater as a means to understand and forward HCI was boundary pushing. For Aristotle, a finished play should form an organic whole; similarly, for Laurel, the actions involved in HCI should similarly be whole (hence “whole actions”). Two chapters of the book are devoted to “dramatic foundations” largely drawn from Aristotle. The first of these covers Aristotle’s four causes and six elements. The four causes are forces that act during the creative process. The formal cause is the form or structure of the thing being created—so something like the building-ness of a building is its formal cause. The material cause is what the thing is made of; for example, a linen dress might be made of linen fabric, wooden buttons, cotton thread, and a metal zipper, with all of the materials influencing the properties of the dress. The efficient cause refers to how the thing is made. Two dresses made of the same materials from the same pattern by two different seamstresses who have different skills and tools will have different efficient causes. The end cause is the purpose of the completed object, what it’s meant to do in the world (Falcon 2015; Hocutt 1974; Laurel 2013, 49–57). Aristotle’s six elements—action (plot), character, thought, language, melody (pattern), and spectacle (enactment)—are the major elements of any theatrical production, which are interconnected. Laurel argues that these elements can be usefully adopted for HCI because of similarities to drama. While in drama the action or plot is the whole action being represented which should be the same in each performance, in HCI the action is the whole action as “collaboratively

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shaped by designer and interactor” and the action may, in fact, vary session to session (Laurel 2013, 58). Character in both drama and HCI includes the predispositions and personality traits that inform patterns of choice and behavior, but HCI includes both human and computer agents. Similarly, thought in both drama and HCI refers to the internal cognitive, emotional, and reasoning processes that precede choice, with HCI including both human and computer processes. In drama, language refers to the use of language; in HCI it includes a broader array of signs that may include “verbal, visual, auditory, and other nonverbal phenomena when used semiotically.” The melody or pattern of drama includes everything heard, particularly speech, and HCI can include this, but goes further, incorporating the broader “pleasurable perception of pattern in sensory phenomena.” Finally, while dramatic spectacle encapsulates everything seen, HCI spectacle includes all sensory aspects of the action represented and so covers what is seen as well as what is heard, felt, touched, and so on (Laurel 2013, 58). This Aristotelian approach to HCI forwards narrative as a fundamental part of interactive patterns and processes. Actions feel whole when they have a pleasing and satisfying dramatic shape, when they are carefully constructed such that the human participants in these systems feel satisfied. Laurel’s vision of HCI places a high premium on that sense of wholeness and satisfaction. It can be hard to make sense of these standards when thinking through the minutiae of daily life as increasingly carried out by keyboard and mouse. Laurel acknowledges that the multitasking user may miss out on this experience of wholeness. But, she argues, so often do players of games with parallel plots that fail to converge meaningfully. Players expect whole actions; they want a certain kind of narrative satisfaction (Laurel 2013, 80). In the early 1990s, Laurel’s framework, drawn not just from drama but from the Classics, was an unusual approach, and one that attracted attention from multiple fields. When Computing Reviews covered the book, the writer lapses into metaphor, noting that “the open mind will find a special meal of intellectual food prepared by a master chef of human-computer cuisine,” a glowing review, even if the idea of

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“human-computer cuisine” is disturbing. The reviewer begins by saying he’d approached the book with trepidation, only to find he couldn’t put it down (Murphy 1991, 624–25). In a series of columns for Communications of the ACM published near the book’s initial publication, designer Marc Rettig makes explicit the radicalism and importance of the book. He calls it “a book that has been shaking my foundations” and writes that “as I read her book I have been inspired to look at our problems in new ways,” concluding “I am grateful to her for the new way of looking at things” (Rettig 1992, 33). In a subsequent column, he highlights readers’ letters that detail the application of dramatic methods to software design. One reader reports on using storyboard techniques “to model the flow of an interface, and [trying] to pace the interaction to make the experience satisfying for the person using the tool”; another details their application of film production practices to producing effective software applications (Rettig 1992, 29). Writing nearly two years later, Rettig asks readers to “recall Brenda Laurel’s suggestion, in Computers as Theatre, that designers think of a system as a collection of agents, some human, others software” (Rettig 1992, 24). During the time between, Laurel’s book had not only shaken foundations, but become enough of a touchstone that it could be invoked with little context or explanation; it was simply something that anyone interested in interface design should know about. Designers like Rettig and his readers were grappling with Laurel’s ideas and responding to them in their work. Meanwhile, the book was reissued in paperback, blurbed by cultural icons including William Gibson, Howard Rheingold, and Timothy Leary (Laurel 1993, back cover). In addition to kindling discussion and experimentation among software, game and application developers, Computers as Theatre also caught the attention of those working in theater, evidence of its cross-disciplinary influence. Interactive performance expert David Z. Saltz noted Laurel as “one of the first to draw attention to the close connection between interactive digital technology and theatre” (2001, 107). A 1993 review in The Drama Review chalks up Laurel’s detailed

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explanation of Aristotelian drama theory to her focus on an audience of programmers, but still finds the potential for radically interactive computer environments enticing: Once Laurel moves beyond her Aristotelian primer into the actual design principles and conceptual creation of her dramatically engaging, action-based model for human computer interaction (in chapters four and five), the material becomes far more interesting, stretching the imaginations of those of us who have often wished that the computer could be less of a hostile or absent nonbeing and more of a creative collaborator. (176)

That wish for the computer as creative collaborator resonates not only with Laurel’s approach in Computers as Theatre but her commitment to working with artists, including actors, designers, improvisers, writers, and other creative thinkers to help envision innovative uses of computer technologies as she had during her experimental work at Atari and as she continued to do through projects at Interval. It seems fitting that while Laurel’s background in theater inspired her understanding of computing, her background in computing would subsequently inspire other dramatists’ approach to computing even as her primary audience remained squarely in the tech industry. Interactive theatrical performances were among Laurel’s earliest inspiration for her approach to games, and various forms of interactive fantasy performances and games have become much more widely practiced in recent years. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and room escapes often rely heavily on the types of dramatic structures that Laurel employs and can, themselves, often be classed as a type of performance, or at least as a form of storytelling (Kim et al. 2009, n.p.). In the more recent edition of Computers as Theatre, many examples throughout the book are drawn from Purple Moon, and these gamebased demonstrations explicitly apply the ideas in the book to the production of innovative games and also speak to how the effort to produce satisfying narratives might not only benefit from but demand transmedia approaches. Purple Moon began development of the Secret

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Paths games in part because addressing girls’ inner lives demanded different environments and materials than those used to address girls’ social lives in the Rockett games. The richness of the Purple Moon world allowed for this expansion as well as for the development of a website that represented the “whole” characters—including their relationships, secrets, and stories. The two game series and the website addressed different aspects of girls’ identities and provided activities with different dramatic purposes (Laurel 2013, 83). Transmedia storytelling, which has become increasingly common, offers numerous opportunities for engaging players through whole actions. In game design, the notion of “whole actions” challenges the designer not to think about brief moments of interaction—the click of a button, the swipe of a screen— but instead a series of events that cohere and form an experience. Whole actions have a “dramatically pleasing shape” as do the larger systems of which they are a part; their wholeness makes them both engaging and satisfying for the audience (Laurel 2013, 81).

Experimenting with virtual reality In 1993, computerized special effects were showing up in Hollywood blockbusters, and the World Wide Web was moving from the realm of fantasy to utility, and technical advancements meant interactive media could increasingly engage in the kind of complicated worldbuilding Laurel championed (Wolf 2011, 3–6). Notably, Myst (Brøderbund 1993) became a best seller, so alluring that it drove the sales of Apple computers and CD-ROM drives and was the best-selling computer game of all time for nearly a decade (Hutchison 2008). Myst provided players with a dreamy, atmospheric experience at odds with the jerky motion, blocky graphics, and electronic noise of most earlier games. It, along with games like The 7th Guest (Virgin Interactive 1993), Doom (id Software 1993), and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (Sierra OnLine 1993), was testing the dramatic and narrative possibilities of the computer game as medium and suggesting new aesthetic possibilities

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and new directions for entertainment and storytelling. This period has been called the “digital nineties,” a period during which computer media became part of daily life (Hutchison 2008, n.p.). Against this landscape of the computerization of mass media, Laurel collaborated with filmmaker and designer Rachel Strickland on a Virtual Reality experiment with Rob Tow (see Figure 3.1). That project, titled Placeholder: Landscape and Narrative in a Virtual Environment, was produced by Interval Research Corporation and the Banff Centre for the Arts. While ultimately presented to audiences in the museum, the work combines elements of site-specific art. For example, actors were brought in for improvisation sessions at particular sites that would be represented in the final narrative, helping to develop particular characters and scenarios (Strickland 1993, n.p.). Real locations were recorded with video for use in the virtual reality environment. Actors, including Laurel (see Figure 3.2), interacted with

Figure 3.1  Strickland and Laurel in Placeholder. Image courtesy Brenda Laurel.

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Figure 3.2  In playing the in-VR goddess, Laurel guided participants through the world of Placeholder. Image from video documentation of Placeholder.

players, and the installation included both directionally specific sound and videographic renderings and animation. The project was resource intensive and high stakes. It ran on eleven computers and involved 25,000 lines of code. At one point in video documentation from the project’s trial runs, Laurel says, “And just to calibrate, if this is where we stopped, I would lose my job” (Laurel quoted in Strickland 1993, n.p.). Placeholder presented opportunities for experimental storytelling and art, but also demanded the team address complex technological challenges: There are some things we did that I think are really important. One is that, in the days of Silicon Graphics training software and NASA’s training software, there were conventional hand gestures that you used to move forward, to stop, to pull down a menu. They were like sign language, and the direction of movement was inferred from a sensor

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Brenda Laurel on the headset. What we did is we gave people two hands, and we took direction of movement from the pelvis and the direction of the gaze from the head. Totally different experience, because now your whole body is engaged. (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015)

At the time, conventions had already sprung up around VR, one of which was to infer direction of both the gaze and the body from a sensor mounted on the head; to separate the gaze and the body as the Interval team did was a significant innovation. The final version of the project, focused heavily on this issue of embodiment, allowed for players to slither like snakes, fly like birds, and take on the bodies of a number of other animals: In order to get people’s attention on this question of body, we had them take on the body of an animal so they started in this cave and all these petroglyphic animals are—“Hey come over here, I’m a crow. I can fly anywhere. I love everything, bright and shiny”—giving ads for themselves. You’re looking at them, and all you’ve got is two little dots showing you where your hands are. You’re invisible. If you put your head in one of those guys, you take on its body. So that means you can fly if you’re a crow, or you can see in the infrared if you’re a snake, etcetera. So it was a way of forcing people to notice they were embodied because we gave them different bodies than the ones they had. Flying was great, it was great …. The first time we ran the software, I was the test agent for the crow. I would flap, and I’d just kill myself, and I’d get like 6 inches off the ground. And they’d go in and tweak it. One flap, I’d be up above the whole world. I’m looking down at it, and it’s like a marble down there. So we had to keep tweaking it until it worked, and I had got these muscles under my arms from flapping. Those are the kinds of things I think presented opportunities and were part of the design statement. (Lawel interviewed by Kocurek 2015)

Placeholder is compelling for its combination of narrative and location in a virtual landscape. Its significance lies also in the innovations made possible by the project’s experimental nature. It heavily focused

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on embodiment and what it meant to experience the world differently. The changes to the VR interface as experienced by users, for example, substantially shifted the sense of embodiment—an impressive feat given how greatly industry continues to struggle with providing VR experiences that don’t make users, especially women, physically ill (Boyd 2014; Lang 2016). Placeholder separated the direction of the head and the body, allowing users to stand facing one direction and then look another, which is similar to how most people move in real life. It also allowed players to interact through their hands, initially represented on-screen by dots; today, gestural controls have become more common (Pavlovic, Sharma, and Huang 1997), notably with Microsoft’s short-lived Kinect (Oikonomidis, Kyriazis, and Argyros. 2011; Zhengyou 2012). In Placeholder, users were even placed on treadmills so that in-game walking reflected real walking. The goal of these interface features was to let users feel present in the imagined world, to not just imagine they were flying, but to feel like they really were flying. The project is also, again, demonstrative of Laurel’s commitment to working with artists. Strickland’s media design and documentary film experience, the work of the actors in improvising characters, and Laurel’s own background in theater all contributed to the project’s overall look and feel and also helped guide its shape, not only in terms of creative direction and narrative but in terms of technological outcome. Placeholder is important in part because it presents a moment of defining and redefining the possibilities of VR as medium. At the time, much of what had been developed focused on training simulations, and the attempts to use VR to playful purposes often adapted conventions developed for computer interfaces and training simulators. Laurel, Strickland, and Tow worked to create a system that had “no interface”— or at least one that felt that way (1994, 121). Placeholder is, doubtless, technologically important—the spatial sound design, the development of specialized tools like the “Grippees” Steve Saunders developed to capture interactors’ hand movements, and of course the computing itself are all interesting in their own right. However, Placeholder is also important as a key conceptualization of what it might mean to be

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immersed in VR as a medium not for training or computing but for exploration, storytelling, and play.

Praxis at Purple Moon The heuristics and principles that structure Laurel’s theories of interactivity and her commitment to narratively satisfying whole actions have a clear expression in the Placeholder project and in the titles Laurel designed and oversaw at Purple Moon. Many of the examples in the 2013 edition of the book are drawn directly from the company’s development processes and practices. Additionally, the heuristics Laurel lays out so clearly can be mapped to the games at Purple Moon. For example, in foregrounding the “primacy of action,” she argues that designers should focus on designing the action that players will engage in rather than designing the objects, environments, and characters that make up the narrative world (Laurel 2013, 160). Action, Laurel argues, should be at the center of the design process and the player experience. For an illustration, consider how the Rockett and Secret Paths games use the same characters but rely on radically different artistic styles. This is because the actions of these games are radically different; Rockett provides emotional rehearsal for social lives and sticky peer interactions while Secret Paths games instead emphasize self-reflection and contemplation. The art differs between the games because the games serve different purposes. The bright, comic or cartoon-style art of the Rockett games supports the action of those games and the gentler, more storybook-inspired art of the Secret Paths games serves as an effective tactic for the strategies of those games. The heuristic that “Choices for (and by) interactors can transform possibility into probability for dramatic action later on” is a useful metric for mapping decision trees (Laurel 2013, 163). If the player of Rockett’s Tricky Decision plays through reacting with anger and insecurity to the in-game situations, Rockett—and by extension the player—has a very different experience than if the player chooses to respond openly and

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kindly to the game’s scenarios. For example, in Rockett’s Tricky Decision, Rockett is invited to a Halloween party at Naikili’s house by her friend Miko just as two popular girls walk by bragging about another party (see Figure 3.3). The player’s initial choice is how to respond—angrily, kindly, or insecurely—to finding out about the other party. Regardless of the player’s choice, Miko will beg Rockett to promise to attend Nakili’s party. This does not mean the initial choice is meaningless, rather, it shapes the possibilities and probabilities of the later game by altering how Rockett (and by extension, the player) feels about the promise. If the other girls’ snobbery angers her, and she responds by saying she wouldn’t want to go in the first place, the invitation to Nakili’s party is likely satisfying, but if she responds insecurely, feeling hurt by her lack of invitation, the promise to attend Nakili’s party probably feels like a less than ideal choice, one made only because Rockett can’t have what she really wants. At the moment the player begins, all of the possibilities of the game are open, but as the player makes choices, certain possibilities

Figure 3.3  Miko (far left) and Rockett (far right) react to the bragging of two popular girls, Nicole (left) and Whitney (right).

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become more and more likely as the action takes shape in response to player input (Laurel 2013, 163). Laurel also stresses that designers should “Represent sources of agency” (Laurel 2013, 165). While the Secret Paths games unfold in a more linear way—the characters’ stories are fixed, and it is the player’s process of revealing them that varies—the games still contain representations of and moments of agency. The player can make choices about how to explore the stories by selecting the character from the paper dolls in the top drawer in the “Friendship Box” (see Figure 3.4) and how to decorate their home base. Further, as the characters’ stories unfold, the characters often are confronted with the reality that while they cannot control others’ actions and responses, they can control their own. For example, in Secret Paths in the Forest, Minh, who is Vietnamese-American, is often embarrassed by her family’s cultural differences, particularly as her grandmother is very proud to share

Figure 3.4  The Friendship Box opens to reveal paper dolls of all of the game’s featured characters.

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Vietnamese traditions and history. Minh’s peers sometimes comment on these differences, which Minh is upset by. However, as the game unfolds, Minh comes to realize the value of being different and feels more pride in her heritage and in her grandmother’s efforts to preserve and share it. Minh’s peers have not changed, but Minh’s response to her peers has, showing a moment of agency and control. In this way, the game conforms to Laurel’s stated heuristic regarding player agency. This game and others also rely on other heuristics Laurel developed. Unsurprisingly, many of Laurel’s design heuristics relate to research. Examining assumptions and biases, avoiding reliance on designers’ preconceptions and biases, and learning about the audience are all related to a research-based design process, one which is absolutely foundational to the work Laurel and her team carried out at Purple Moon. These heuristics are also, however, integral to a design process in which the computer is not a tool, but rather an expressive medium, one that can be effectively used to not only convey information but also provide rich emotional experiences through complex systems of interaction.

Conclusion An abiding interest in interface and interaction design animated Laurel’s career and profoundly informed her approach to game development. Laurel’s approach to interactivity is one influenced by both the principles of theater and the practices and technologies of the computer industry. Computers as Theatre, Laurel’s clearest articulation of her theories and principles of interaction design, was shaped by the diversity of her professional and educational experiences and can also serve as a useful guide to her design approach. The heuristics made explicit in Computers as Theatre are evident across Laurel’s wide-ranging body of work, including both experimental media and VR projects and commercial games. The games Laurel oversaw at Purple Moon are a clear example of what interactions designed around dramatic principles might look like: individual interactions and chains of actions building

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up to a larger, cohesive whole, with each level of the interactive and narrative design working together to form a pleasing dramatic shape. Game design and HCI both are interdisciplinary fields; they are also fields that can usefully inform one another, as is evident in Laurel’s application of HCI principles to effective game design. Additionally, as once again the possibilities and pitfalls of VR are at the forefront of media and technological environment, designers would benefit from Laurel’s understanding of VR and interface design. VR critics often point to the obtrusive, hard to use interfaces as a major hindrance to widespread adoption of these technologies, and so we would do well to revisit projects like Placeholder and to consider what might be possible if we worked toward an experience that felt interfaceless for players.

4

“Friendship Adventures for Girls”: A Pre-History of Emotion Games

The lesson here is that the larger and more coherent the imaginary world, the more opportunities there are for constructing whole actions within it, as long as the design provides the necessary affordances for participation. (Laurel 2013, 83) In the months leading up to the launch of Purple Moon’s first game, Rockett’s New School, the company began referring to the games as part of a new genre: “friendship adventures for girls.” This generic category explicitly referred to the games in the Rockett Movado series, but the phrase captures something that ultimately proved essential to both of the major series for which Laurel oversaw development. While the Rockett Movado series focused on tween girls’ external social lives and the difficulties they faced in navigating complex social situations, the Secret Paths series offered a counterpoint that allowed girls to instead explore their inner lives. Both series relied in part on a type of emotional rehearsal, enabling players to practice emotional and personal difficulties without being exposed to real risk. Representative of Laurel’s research into girls’ identity formation, these games aimed to present girls with opportunities for self-exploration and personal and emotional development. In establishing a new genre intended to appeal to girls, Laurel and the team at Purple Moon plunged into a fraught process. While the games appealed to girls by engaging with their demonstrated interests, hobbies, concerns, and habits, this same focus on girls’ real desires and lives often put the games at odds with feminist efforts to reform culture.

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In this chapter, I consider gender and genre as presented in the Rockett Movado and Secret Paths series. I draw from Laurel’s own statements on the research findings and design principles that informed the development process and interrogate the games, focusing on the two series in question and touching briefly on the single title released in what would have been a series of sports games. Throughout, I argue that in taking girls seriously as a potential audience of gamers, Laurel and the other people who worked on Purple Moon’s games made a significant intervention into the game industry’s standard design practices. I discuss first the Rockett Movado series and then the Secret Paths series, focusing on the characteristics that distinguish the two and demonstrating that each series fulfilled a different perceived audience need or desire. From there, I examine the similarities between these two series and consider them in the broader context of the Purple Moon brand, including the company’s web presence and online community and other physical goods including branded merchandise and Rockett Movado toys. Ultimately, I consider the genre markers of the games and the extent to which these types of design elements have become more common in recent years as demonstrated by the ongoing popularity of branching path interactive fiction and point-and-click adventures, the expanding interest in developing games for diverse audiences, and the increased development of empathy games, which often, like Laurel’s designs, ask players to consider the emotional experiences of themselves and others. Laurel’s game design is influential because of her unique perspective on interactivity and her profound commitment to research, but the games themselves are also worthy of serious consideration for their worldbuilding, their rich emotional content, and their appeal to girls.

The social lives of middle schoolers In the context of the broader Purple Moon universe, the Rockett Movado games are intended to provide opportunities for girls to practice and learn about social skills. In this way, the Rockett Movado

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games are outward looking even as they focus on emotional responses and insights. The games are designed to help girls navigate the kind of daily situations that Laurel found to comprise the major anxieties and interests of girls in the company’s target demographic. While the real girls playing the Rockett games might not ever receive an invitation to a secret club, they would likely be faced with the formation and dissolution of social circles. Similarly, even girls who never change schools must face the challenges of forming and maintaining friendships. The types of situations Rockett faces in each game reflect common situations and concerns revealed through Laurel’s exhaustive research and the welldocumented difficulties and nuances of middle-school girls’ social development (Debold et al. 1999; La Greca and Harrison 2005; Weisfeld and Bloch 1984). They also offer the type of emotional rehearsal Laurel intended to provide; in playing the games, girls could think through how they might feel about or respond to various situations. The first game released by Purple Moon, Rockett’s New School, is also the first game in the Rockett Movado series, which ultimately included six games. Five of the Rockett games are narrative in nature, presenting interactive stories about Rockett Movado as she navigates her life as a middle-school student; the remaining game, Rockett’s Adventure Maker, uses the same style and tone as the other games and in many ways occupies the same universe but offers tools for the creation of characters and stories rather than presenting a single packaged narrative (1998). The narrative games in the Rockett Movado series focus on different periods or events in Rockett’s life. In the first of the games, Rockett’s New School, the character has to navigate Rockett’s first day at Whistling Pines Junior High, where she has just enrolled as an eighth grader. Most of the other games also center on Rockett’s experiences at Whistling Pines. During Rockett’s Tricky Decision, for example, Rockett is put in a difficult situation where she must choose between attending her friend Nakili Abuto’s party or a party where her crush will be playing with his band, all while navigating her school day (1998). Rockett’s Secret Invitation (1998) explores whether or not Rockett should join a particular clique of girls that invites her in, and

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Rockett’s First Dance covers the school day leading up to the Whistling Pines Valentine’s Dance and the attendant drama (1998). The last of the games in the series, Rockett’s Camp Adventures, takes place at Camp Luna, but includes many of the same characters from previous games (1999). All of the games in the series present Laurel’s style of emotional rehearsal, allowing players (presumably girls) to think through and to some extent feel through the kinds of situations they were likely to encounter in their own lives. While this idea of a kind of safe space or protected, artificial environment may seem a nod to Huizinga’s oftcited magic circle, it is also indebted to Laurel’s background in theater and to psychological research which shows that emotional preparation for difficult events, such as death, can help children and adults both negotiate hardships (Reser 2004; Welch 1982). Worth noting is that fan communities, like the one formed around Purple Moon’s titles, may provide particularly rich environments for emotional rehearsal (Codoban 2011, 27). Fan fiction, as Codruta Alina Pohrib discusses, can be written explicitly to ensure the emotional gratification of the reader, a process that is both a narrative exercise and a practice of emotional rehearsal. Additionally, slash fanfic offers perhaps obvious opportunities for exploration and rehearsal of queer identity and emotional attachments (2011, 42). Generally, identification with characters is an enriching experience marked by both affective and cognitive engagement: “We expand our emotional and mental lives beyond the scope of our personal experience and participate in community and cultural life” (Cohen 2011, 183). This is true for audience engagement generally but is likely especially true for audience members who participate in additional acts of identification such as writing about characters’ lives beyond the films, books, and games in which they officially exist. In inviting players to participate in the online world by writing postcards to characters and composing their own stories, the company enabled girls to participate in similar practices, thinking through the characters’ beliefs, needs, and desires and imagining how they’d respond to given situations (Cohen 2011, 185).

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The Rockett Movado games rely on a kind of “emotional navigation” (see Figure 4.1) that Laurel developed in collaboration with Danielle Bunten Berry, who consulted on the development of Purple Moon’s early projects. Throughout the games, the player hears both the conversations Rockett has with other characters and her own internal monologue. While the exterior dialogue and discussion reveals the game’s action to the player, Rockett’s interior thoughts provide insights into her concerns and the perceived stakes of the situation. In the navigation system, the player is presented with three possible responses to a given situation, which are illustrated by Rockett’s face. For each choice, Rockett’s facial expression varies, and as the player mouses over the options, Rockett’s voice, played with a slight reverberation that indicates internal rather than external speaking, summarizes what the character is thinking and feeling. The choices, then, are an extension of

Figure 4.1  The emotional navigation, as in this example from Rockett’s Secret Invitation, shows Rockett’s three possible responses to a given situation.

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the thoughts and feelings Rockett expresses throughout the game and so the character’s pondering as the player considers options fits within the narrative progression. While the three-choice structure may to some degree feel arbitrary to players, the three choices are part of a careful balance. Rockett’s Camp Adventures, the only one of the Rockett titles to be produced under Mattel’s direct supervision, includes only two choices rather than three, perhaps out of a desire to reduce production costs and scale down the scope of the game. It is also the shortest of the Rockett games. The response from players was largely negative; not only did the game take less time to play, it also allowed for fewer options and less exploration. In short, the structure of this last game undid the deliberate narrative structuring and undermined the emotional navigation system that had proven so effective in the other titles in the series. The emotional navigation system provides the core mechanic of the Rockett series. While interactive fiction has a long history in computer gaming as does the type of forked-paths decision tree used in the games, the emphasis on the characters’—and by extension the players’— emotional response to various situations presents an innovative approach to interactive storytelling. Rather than presenting the options through text, the games instead present these options with visual and audio content that expresses the characters’ choices as deeply emotional rather than simply action based. In Rockett’s Secret Invitation, Rockett can choose to express some concerns and misgivings to the members of the Cool Sagittarius Girls, the secretive clique that has invited Rockett to join. The members respond defensively then decide to meet with Rockett later in the day to give her time to think. At the end of the scene, Rockett worries over what to do while imagining a dialogue with her long-distance best friend, only to be interrupted by hall monitor and class bully Bo (see Figure 4.2), who threatens to send her to the principal’s office. Rockett, as usual, has three choices of how to proceed: angrily, seeking to get even with Bo; distractedly, as she worries more over her other problems and doesn’t consider being sent to the office particularly important; or cheerfully, as she attempts to charm her way out of the situation.

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Figure 4.2  Bo threatens to send Rockett to the principal’s office, and the player must choose how to respond.

The three choices not only reflect different courses of action, but they also derive from different emotional responses to the situation and are visually and verbally framed as reflective of these varying emotional states. Considering the aim of the games to provide emotional rehearsal space for real-life situations, the extent to which the games allow the player to consider their choices and emotional responses is worth noting. There is no rush to decide, and in the game, unlike in real social settings, there is ample time to weigh courses of action and work through feelings. Further, as the games allow for the saving of multiple adventures, they invite replay, which means that the player can revisit the narratives, making different choices and deciding what types of strategies and outcomes she finds most desirable. This is not replay for mastery, in which the player seeks to “beat the game” or best opponents to move up the game’s hierarchy (Soukup 2007). The Rockett games have no clear win state or obviously optimum outcome. This is replay as

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exploration and meditation, a way of thinking and rethinking through fraught social interactions for heightened understanding—of the game, of the player’s relationship to it, and ultimately perhaps of herself. In general, the choices the player makes lead down different forks of the game’s decision tree, although some have less obvious narrative impact. In Rockett’s New School, for example, one of the early choices presented to the player is whether or not to enter the school with Jessie Marbella, the first student Rockett meets (see Figure 4.3). Regardless of the decision the player makes, Rockett will end up going to her locker inside the school alone. However, the preceding choice does shape how Rockett feels about her difficulties opening her locker and how she interacts with popular girl Whitney, who has an adjacent locker. In all of the games in the series, the seemingly mundane social interactions Rockett must navigate in order to survive a day at junior high are broken down and laid out carefully. The player witnesses both the unfolding scene and Rockett’s response to that scene through her

Figure 4.3  Jessie (right) invites Rockett to walk into school with her.

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internal monologue; when the player is presented with choices, those choices are framed by the preceding narrative and the visual and verbal representation of the options. The player, then, is invited to engage with the story in part through a process of reflection and reconsideration of her own feelings, desires, and objectives. Further, the same emotional navigation system that makes the gameplay of the Rockett Movado games innovative also makes it possible for a single character—Rockett Movado—to function elastically as players can shape Rockett’s personality and experiences by choosing her emotional responses to situations. Through the games’ design, they invite the audience to play as Rockett and to empathize with her, to feel alongside her as she negotiates the difficulties of junior high. By framing the games as “friendship adventures,” the games also make a subtle argument that the struggles of girls’ day-to-day existence are worth considering alongside the adventures of more epic scope and scale. Given the degree to which relationships with peers, parents, and teachers can affect girls’ motivation and emotional wellbeing, this is not so much an aggrandizement of daily banalities as it is an acknowledgment of the weight seemingly minor interactions can carry (Casey-Cannon, Hayward, and Gowen 2001; Wentzel 1998, 202). In this acknowledgment, Rockett Movado perhaps is not far removed from Clarissa Dalloway, the titular character of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway who is confronted with the profound weight of her own past choices as she prepares for a party (1925).

The secret lives of middle schoolers While the Rockett Movado games attend to girls’ public social lives and the attendant anxieties and concerns, the Secret Paths games focus instead on girls’ internal emotional lives. The two series, along with Purple Moon’s online presence, worked together to present a cohesive narrative world that provided a host of opportunities for interaction, learning, and self-expression. The “emotional rehearsal” facilitated

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throughout the Purple Moon universe is comprised of whole actions as defined by Laurel, actions that present meaningful, satisfying resolutions that address players’ needs and desires. While actions in the Rockett Movado games often relate to the navigation of external social issues, the actions of the Secret Paths games instead focus on the cultivation of self-awareness, personal understanding, and individualized emotional development. In this, the two series together present whole actions par excellence, tending to both the internal and the external social and emotional needs and in doing so working to support girls’ emotional development across a rich spectrum. Mechanically, the Secret Paths games revolve around a series of puzzles (see Figure 4.4). These puzzles, however, serve primarily as a means of accessing the short narrative sequences that make up the heart of the games. While the Rockett Movado series is relatively robust, the Secret Paths series ultimately included only three games: Secret Paths in

Figure 4.4  For this puzzle from Nicole’s path in Secret Paths to the Sea, the player must click and drag a skunk to its destination across the path.

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the Forest, Secret Paths to the Sea (1998), and Secret Paths to Your Dreams (1999). The first two of these are similar in terms of narrative, structure, and play; the third, somewhat like the Rockett’s Adventure Maker, presents a title based on the series that offers something structurally different. Secret Paths to Your Dreams is diary software that utilizes the aesthetic and narrative style of the broader game series, and it, like Rockett’s Camp Adventure, was released under Mattel’s management. Secret Paths in the Forest, the first of the Secret Paths games released, clearly demonstrates the series’ tone and intention. The game opens in a tree house retreat that the player can modify. This invitation to customize the aesthetic experience of the game is one of many design aspects that makes the Secret Paths games distinct from the Rockett Movado games. By clicking on the dreamcatcher in the top left corner of the screen in Secret Paths in the Forest, the player transforms the visible background from a painterly mountain scene to a flower-filled meadow, to a gently rolling plain, complete with horses. Similarly, clicking the “Girls Only” sign displayed in the tree house changes it from a classic, platform-based tree house to one contained in the trunk of a large tree to a kind of gazebo or corral. The sun and moon icon at the top of the dreamcatcher can also change the setting from day to night. The colors of throw pillows can also be changed by clicking. These aesthetic changes in the tree house have no narrative or mechanical impact on the game, which unfolds regardless of the time of day or decor in the tree house. Through this point-and-click exploration, then, the player is able to choose the appearance of her in-game home base by selecting from a limited palette of options. As a player explores the screen and clicks on different objects, however, she is also exposed to the game’s navigation system (see Figure 4.5). While the Rockett Movado games largely relied on a three-option emotional navigation system, the Secret Paths games instead rely on a “secret journal” and “friendship box” that operate as a type of centralized navigation system. When the player first clicks on the secret journal, she is given a text-based introduction to gameplay (see Figure 4.6). The “friendship box” has each of the game’s

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Figure 4.5  The tree house in Secret Paths in the Forest serves as the game’s main menu.

Figure 4.6  The secret journal gives a brief introduction to gameplay.

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seven characters in its top drawer. When the player selects a character, that character appears in the tree house; then, if the player clicks on the character, she is shown an overview of the character’s problem; from there, if she clicks the purple pouch, the game transports the player to that character’s “secret path.” On each path, the player completes puzzles, watches story vignettes related to the character’s problem, and is rewarded with “secret path stones.” When all the stones are collected, they form a “garland necklace” specific to that character; when the character is given her necklace back at the tree house, the game plays a short fable that addresses the character’s problem. Each character in Secret Paths in the Forest and Secret Paths to the Sea faces some kind of difficulty. In exploring a character’s secret path, the player learns more about their problem while also collecting the stones that will ultimately unlock the allegory addressing it. During Secret Paths in the Forest, Miko introduces herself by saying she worries that people don’t like her due to jealousy, Viva expresses anxiety about her appearance as her ballet recital approaches, and Darnetta feels she is unfairly compared to her sister. The characters in Secret Paths to the Sea face similar problems: popular Nicole feels overextended and overwhelmed by her parents’ expectations, Sharla is hurt that her father’s absenteeism means she will be excluded from a father–daughter field trip, and Ginger worries how to handle a new friend’s request that Ginger help her cheat on a test. Each of the two narratively based Secret Paths games includes seven characters. Because most of the characters appear in more than one Purple Moon title, the vignettes presented in the Secret Paths games are just part of what players might know about the characters. Players who see Arrow struggling to tell her parents that she’s chosen to quit orchestra in Secret Paths to the Sea may later find that Arrow does go on to form a rock band with her friends from school, for example, which suggests that her worry about talking to her parents is a hiccup as she continues to pursue music. Similarly, while Nicole can easily be dismissed as a mean girl based on her actions in the Rockett Movado games, her role in Secret Paths in the Forest suggests that she struggles with living up to her parents’ high expectations and standards and is overwhelmed by her demanding schedule.

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All of the Purple Moon games beginning with the Rockett Movado games and including both the Secret Paths series and Starfire Soccer Challenge use a shared set of characters. Because the characters are shown in multiple situations, players are, like viewers of soap operas, able to form complex impressions of the characters’ personalities, motivations, and desires that would shape how they understood and interpreted their actions (Owens, Bower, and Black 1979). Purple Moon’s approach to character development assumes that players want to see established characters in new situations, and reflects a strategy used widely in media. For example, the popularity of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was such that the series resulted in three spinoffs: Rhoda, Phyllis, and Lou Grant, each based on popular characters from the original show (Hoffner and Cantor 2009). Of the fourteen Secret characters, thirteen exist elsewhere in the Purple Moon universe, reflective of the Purple Moon effort at building out a consistent world, although the series also includes one new character, Minh who exists only in Secret Paths in the Forest. The troubles these characters face vary in type and severity. Some characters face issues that speak to issues of culture or class. Minh’s difficulty forging an identity as the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants, for example, is intimately tied to her cultural and ethnic background. The neglect of Sharla’s father may risk her exclusion from a field trip, but there is also a sense that his absence has forced her family into a financially precarious situation. Although the Secret Paths games can be played as standalone games—the vignettes presented for each character are narratively complete and the resolution of their problem forms a satisfying whole action—the player’s understanding of these characters can be furthered by information from other titles in the Purple Moon universe. While Rockett Movado is presented as a kind of elastic character who most players can readily relate to, the characters presented in the Secret Paths games are diverse in terms of interests, worries, cultural and ethnic background, and socioeconomic status. The problems the girls face are likewise varied. This expanding backstory could easily color

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how players experienced the Rockett Movado titles and help cultivate empathy for even the least likable of characters. Ultimately, the games offer a series of lessons for players, some of whom reported replaying the games even years later as a means of making sense of their lives or reassuring themselves about the choices they’d made (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015; McManus 2009). For at least some players, the Secret Paths titles functioned much like a beloved storybook, revisited over and over throughout childhood and adolescence. The narrative function, both of story books and of the Secret Paths games, is important. Girls use narrative to make sense of their lives and to engage in personal growth and development. For example, one study found that girls who read fiction engaged in intellectual, imaginational, and emotional development, often choosing to challenge themselves in these areas through engagement with narrative as a means of pursuing self-actualization (Stutler 2011). Throughout the Secret Paths games, girls are offered similar opportunities through interactive fiction in which fables are presented as a means of thinking through difficulties. The stories, drawn from diverse cultural contexts, function as allegories, allowing the character and by extension the player to draw connections between the actors in the fables and the characters facing daily struggles at school or at home. This design decision is likely reflective of Laurel’s background in theater and humanistic thinking; in Secret Paths, we see storytelling not just as entertainment but as education, healing, and catharsis.

Whole actions for whole lives The Rockett Movado and Secret Paths games along with Purple Moon’s website formed three key components in the brand’s narrative world. Laurel built the Purple Moon universe on the foundation formed by her background in drama and human-computer interaction and the insights gained through her research with Interval. In her game design, Laurel focused on the creation of whole actions: in-game activities

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that had a clear beginning and satisfying resolution rather than just a pileup of tasks. This focus on whole actions is evident throughout the individual games. In the Secret Paths games, for example, the player is introduced to a character and their problem, then spends time exploring that character’s secret path, solving puzzles, collecting stones, and learning more about the character and their difficulties, and finally unlocking the fable that helps the character resolve their issue. This structure means that each character presents a whole action; there is a clear problem, a process for addressing it, and then a resolution that fits within the immediate ludic and dramatic context. These types of whole actions were also presented across Purple Moon media as the concept of whole actions was fundamental not only to the development of the games’ mechanics but to the entire transmedia property. Worth noting is that Ginger, featured in both series, was also the main character of Starfire Soccer Challenge, placing that largely undeveloped series squarely in the broader Purple Moon universe. While the game was intended to become part of a series, these plans were shelved when the company was acquired by Mattel (McManus 2009). Had this series been further developed, it would have been the first sports game series targeting girls. Regardless, Starfire Soccer Challenge is one of the earliest titles to address girls’ interest in sports. The planned series is also reflective of Laurel’s commitment to ongoing research and adjustment. While the initial research had not shown much interest in sports among the games’ target demographic, within a couple years, the increased visibility of women’s athletics was increasingly attracting girls’ attention, and more and more girls were playing sports. As Purple Moon worked to address these new interests, they continued to address them through the existing narrative world of Purple Moon. The transmedia nature of Purple Moon can also be understood through Laurel’s efforts to design stories that would address multiple facets of girls’ lives and development. Ultimately, Purple Moon published games and web content while also producing branded toys; there was also, briefly, the Rockett’s World book series published by

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Scholastic which was largely overseen by Mattel (Tashjian and Naidoo 2007, 181). The collaboration between Purple Moon and Scholastic was the first time that the company had developed books based on a game character. This partnership demonstrates the broad appeal of Rockett as character, but it also demonstrates the extent to which Laurel and the Purple Moon design team effectively created a sprawling narrative world ripe with potential experiences. The game titles may have formed the core of the Rockett Movado and Secret Paths franchises, but the two were inextricably bound not only to each other but to the company’s other productions. Through the development of Purple Moon’s products and web presence, the company presented a complex transmedia property that asked girls to deploy and cultivate new literacies to continue engaging with the growing body of content. While each game could be played as a standalone, a girl playing only one game would have access to only a sliver of the broader story presented. The multimedia nature of the overall story is what Jennifer deWinter has described as a mega-literacy with the story migrating across media and requiring increasingly high levels of literacy as audience members delve deeper into the narrative world (2004). This type of franchise building fits within Laurel’s goal of attracting girls to computer games through play. It also provides an early example of what Henry Jenkins argues in Convergence Culture (2006): new media like websites and computer games do not displace older media like novels and toys but instead these forms interact to produce complex multimedia narratives. This type of franchise development also, as both deWinter and Jenkins imply and I would further argue, presents transmedia as a new generic form. While Rockett Movado, The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski 1999), and Martian Successor Nadesico (Satō 1996–97) may not overlap in terms of thematically defined genre, the storytelling principles and audience experiences available have much in common and present a more formbased genre. The creation of complex narrative worlds and their deployment across media is increasingly common for a variety of historical

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and business reasons, but this type of worldbuilding also presents audiences with distinct experiences that many find richly engaging. In the case of Purple Moon, the “I Miss Purple Moon” (n.d.) community on Facebook, still active in 2016, includes links to Purple Moon-related wiki pages, fan fiction, blog posts, and walk throughs (see Figure 4.7). The group itself demonstrates fan engagement, but the links, including one highlighting user unusualsidekick’s efforts to reproduce the outfits of Rockett Movado characters on Polyvore (see Figure 4.8), provide further evidence of this engagement (2014). That Purple Moon invited this type of participation during the company’s active years is worth noting; likely, many of the now adult fans producing Purple Moonrelated cultural artifacts of their own today were players engaged in designing characters in Rockett’s Adventure Maker, trading online

Figure 4.7  The “I Miss Purple Moon” Facebook group is a meeting place for Purple Moon fans.

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Figure 4.8  Polyvore user unusualsidekick created real outfits for a number of Purple Moon characters, including Rockett, Jessie, and Nicole, shown here.

treasures, and writing notes via the company’s online messaging system. Purple Moon’s initial goal was simply to build games that would appeal to girls in the targeted demographic. However, as Laurel and her team developed the first Rockett Movado title, they realized they were also building a complex narrative world—one which extended beyond the edges of Rockett’s adventures. Laurel designed the Rockett games to address girls’ social lives, and the games therefore discuss relevant themes like affiliation and exclusion, covert power, self-image, and gossip (Clay, Vignoles, and Dittmar 2005; Gazelle and Ladd 2003; Laurel 2013; McDonald et al. 2007; Shroff 2006; Svahn and Evaldsson 2011; Underwood et al. 2004). The games offer emotional rehearsal for common incidents related to these themes, and throughout the Rockett games, decision-making occurs almost entirely in social settings. Rockett must choose how to respond to friends, classmates, and the teacher in potentially stressful situations with relatively little opportunity for delay. In one scene in Rockett’s Tricky Decision, Rockett runs into Viva and Arrow in the school bathroom, where the two girls—who make it obvious they’ve not spoken to Rockett previously— ask for her help making Halloween costumes. Rockett must decide whether to help them, try to get to know them better first, or focus on her own problems. The games allow the player to take her time in

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choosing a course of action, effectively pausing the in-game action while she deliberates, but Rockett rarely has the option to decide later in the game’s narrative timeline. In the case of the encounter with Viva and Arrow, for example, Rockett cannot continue on her day or exit the bathroom without first answering the girls’ request. During the development of the first Rockett Movado titles, Laurel realized that the games did not address girls’ inner lives, in part because doing so would require different settings and narratives (Laurel 2013, 83). It was this realization that sparked the development of the Secret Paths series. While Secret Paths draws on the same characters used elsewhere in the Purple Moon universe, the series invites the player to engage with these characters differently. The Secret Paths games explore themes like nurturing hidden knowledge, self-awareness, and magical tales. The overlap in characters throughout both game series and the Purple Moon website furthers Laurel’s design aims in providing games that address both girls’ inner and outer lives. While we know from the Rockett Movado games that Whitney is popular and can be cruel to her classmates, we learn from the Secret Paths games that she is also the child of divorced parents and deeply anxious about the changes in her family. The insights offered by the Secret Paths games can serve to humanize the characters who present difficulties to Rockett and also allow girls an opportunity for emotional rehearsal as it applies to their inner lives. The characters in the Secret Paths games face difficulties in self-expression and self-awareness; they work to understand their own feelings. In Secret Paths to the Sea, for example, Ginger is unsure whether or not to help her new friend Ingrid cheat on a test. She is both worried that she will get in trouble and that Ingrid will not be her friend—or worse, she might ruin Ginger’s other friendships. As Ginger sorts through her feelings, however, she ultimately realizes that her decision should not be about whether or not she gets caught but about doing what she personally knows to be right regardless of consequences. The process of self-reflection and ultimately self-awareness that Ginger goes through is representative of the stories throughout the series. Resolution of the characters’ problems does not require neat fixes; instead, it requires a

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willingness to stand up for beliefs, ideals, and identities. Interestingly, the player does not ultimately know what becomes of the characters in the Secret Paths games; we can assume, perhaps, that the fallout from Ginger’s refusal to allow her friend to cheat is minimal, but there is also the possibility of harsher repercussions as alluded to in the vignettes. This ambiguity fits with the games’ thematic focus: They are about internal processes rather than social behaviors or consequences. Each series includes a title that is less game and more tool. Rockett’s Adventure Maker invites players to “step inside Rockett’s world and make it your own.” The title includes three modes: Yearbook, Make a Friend, and Make an Adventure (see Figure 4.9). In Make a Friend, players are able to create their own characters by choosing body types, clothing, and other features; in Make an Adventure, players work with a menu of backdrops, props, and characters, including their own original characters, to create stories; and Yearbook offers bios for established Purple Moon characters

Figure 4.9  The “Make an Adventure” interface lets players “start from scratch” or “get ideas.”

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and any completed characters designed by the player. This extends the kind of fan practices encouraged by the game’s websites. Secret Paths to Your Dreams is an interactive dream diary that invites the player to record her dreams using backdrops, stamps, sound effects, and other creative tools while offering a dream dictionary to help the player understand her dreams. Although Secret Paths to Your Dreams is a post-Mattel buyout title, it echoes the type of move represented by Rockett’s Adventure Maker in that it lets players engage in the types of behavior modeled elsewhere in the game series. The title enables the player to import her own images and also includes a mini game in which the player listens to a Purple Moon character’s dream, then illustrates a second dream; these illustrations are rewarded with access to additional content. These two titles can seem like outliers in their respective series, but in fact they serve as further evidence of the series’ aims. By including a dream diary, for example, the Secret Paths series invites players to apply the type of self-reflection and careful consideration that is modeled throughout the Secret Paths games and that has been shown to have psychological and developmental benefits. And the activities included in Rockett’s Adventure Maker extend the overall goal of the Rockett Movado games and the entire Purple Moon endeavor to get girls interested in computer games. While the more conventionally structured games in both series invite girls to play games, these two titles provide lowbarrier-to-entry opportunities for girls to begin using the computer to tell and create stories of their own. Further, these titles demonstrate the extent to which Purple Moon brought to bear diverse technologies, practices, and research on the medium of the video game so that the games become part of a larger cohesive set of practices intended to support emotional growth. Girls playing a Secret Paths game would then be encouraged through the Secret Paths to Your Dreams activities to engage in their own practices of journaling and reflection. The inclusion of a title encouraging player participation in the narrative world of the games through creative activities provides one example of the series’ similar structures. The use of key narrative elements and the reliance on a shared set of characters further make

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visible the degree to which the games occupy a single imagined world. Dramatic and narrative structure—the facilitation of whole actions that satisfy the audience—is central to Laurel’s design approach as is the creation of compelling characters. Here, we see her employing the dramatic principles detailed so clearly in Computers as Theatre. Laurel’s approach is one fundamentally shaped by a commitment to dramatic wholeness and rich, emotionally anchored storytelling. Players don’t just know who characters are, ultimately, they know how they feel and why they act in particular ways. Players are asked, in turn, to sort through their own feelings as they sort through the characters’ emotional and social lives. The character overlap between the Secret Paths and Rockett Movado games is echoed by a thematic harmony. Both series address themes that represent the overlap between girls’ inner and outer emotional lives. All of the games in both series touch on issues of relationships, secrets, self-esteem, and stories. For Laurel, these themes were central in that they were a point of overlap between the series’ differing areas of concern. And, while these areas overlap, the games address them differently. The Rockett games tend to address issues directly, showing the player Rockett’s concerns and her understanding of the stakes and then letting the player decide what she should do. The resolutions offered are often quite practical and immediate even as they derive from Rockett’s emotional responses. By contrast, the approach presented in Secret Paths titles is more mystical and meditative in nature. The characters in Secret Paths solve problems through reflection and deliberation. The issues addressed in Secret Paths are not brief episodes that must be addressed on the way in and out of class, but often reflect longer standing anxieties and fears. The disparate tone, aesthetic, and play style presented by the two series is reflective of their distinct goals.

Conclusion The two game series and the Purple Moon website present a broader picture of Laurel’s design ethos. In the narrative world of Purple

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Moon, Laurel presented girls with opportunities for growth marked by emotional rehearsals; those rehearsals were intended to prepare them for the ups and downs of coming of age while also engaging them in a medium, the computer game, which had too often neglected girls as a potential and important audience at least in part because of a lack of diversity in the broader industry (Bratteteig 2002). The design of Purple Moon’s games, however, was only one factor in a much more involved and long-running design project. Begun with Laurel’s research at Interval and culminating in the launch of the Purple Moon games, website, and merchandise, this process served to create a complex narrative world that engaged girls through a diverse mix of whole actions. Those actions included playing the company’s games, which were in many ways the central texts of the Purple Moon narrative world, but they also included tasks like creating content and interacting with other players on the website, collecting virtual treasures online, playing with Purple Moon toys, and imagining new Purple Moon stories. The Rockett Movado, Secret Paths, and to a lesser extent The Starfire Soccer Challenge game series demonstrate a number of game design principles that have become increasingly important in recent years. Laurel’s groundbreaking work in making “games for girls” is an important milestone as contemporary discussion continues to circle around effective means of engaging diverse audiences through the production of diverse content. They were an early effort to disrupt the “hegemony of play,” under which a dominant, normative vision of gaming has been naturalized and hindered the growth of computer gaming (Fron et al. 2008). Further, the interactive novel or point-andclick adventure style of play used throughout the Purple Moon games has seen a resurgence alongside the rise of tablets as gaming devices in part because the play style is well suited to the interface. The emotional navigation system that Laurel developed with Danielle Bunten Berry may have, to Laurel’s own thinking, been a little backward looking in that it presented a forking-path narrative, but it was also forward looking in centering characters’ and players’ emotional experience.

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The concept of whole actions and the notion of emotional rehearsal are integral to Laurel’s game design ethos as evidenced by the Purple Moon games. The importance of emotional content and empathetic experiences in games has continued to grow over the past twenty years. In anticipating this growing trend, Laurel’s work was forward looking and remains influential. Serious games like Depression Quest (Quinn 2013), Spent (McKinney Ventures 2011), and dys4ia (Newgrounds 2012) are overt in their deployment of empathetic experiences to educate players or share experiences. Depression Quest, for example, inserts the player in the life of a clinically depressed young adult, asking players who have not experienced depression to understand what it might feel like and perhaps helping players who have experienced depression to recognize its symptoms and impact. In this effort to educate players about complex emotional issues, Depression Quest is very much the progeny of the Secret Paths series. An interest in empathy and emotional experiences has not, however, been limited to the realm of serious games. Major game companies have begun experimenting with emotions as narrative and ludic elements, as in L.A. Noire (Rockstar Games 2011). In this game, the player takes the role of a detective who interrogates suspects and witnesses, and as the detective, the player must read the characters’ emotional state, deciding how to respond and whether or not to trust them. This facsimile of police work presents an echo of the emotional navigation series that structures the Rockett Movado Games. In Telltale Games’ Walking Dead horror game series, player choice is often met with a reminder that the affected character “will remember that.” The ambiguous phrasing invites the player to reflect on the impact of her actions and their effect on other characters. While these newer games turn Laurel’s innovative attention to the emotional content and power of games to new purposes, they underscore the extent to which her focus on emotions anticipated important developments in game design. Further, in cultivating a rich transmedia narrative world, Laurel emphasized the importance of narrative. While the games allowed players to reveal and create narrative through their own actions and

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participations, they also demonstrate effective narrativization of actions. The world in which a group of diverse middle-school students show up to school at Whistling Pines each day is a coherent, fixed one that can be revealed in parts across diverse titles and platforms. This use of narrative as anchor is backward looking in that it ties to the early rise of interactive fiction and point-and-click adventure games, but it is also forward looking, anticipating the increased importance of complex multi-media franchises. Successful game series like Tomb Raider also point to this, but Tomb Raider, unlike Rockett Movado or Secret Paths, is a meandering and at times inconsistent narrative world. Even before the recent reboot, the games present a seemingly mercurial portrait of heroine Lara Croft, whose age and background seem to shift game-to-game (Eidos Interactive 1996). This does not necessarily detract from the Tomb Raider games, but it does mean that the narrative is subservient to game action and is consequently inconsistent. This is a fundamentally different approach to game design, one focused less on story and more on the game’s rules. However, fan practices enabled by widespread internet use have made these types of inconsistencies more problematic, and in at least one case, BioWare responded to fan outrage by patching an error-ridden novel (Hamilton 2012, n.p.). In deliberately developing and supporting a multimedia narrative environment, Laurel not only presented a cohesive backdrop for Purple Moon’s multiple game series and web presence, but she also provided a world that invited exploration and engagement beyond the time that might be allocated to playing a single title. Finally, outside the scope of the specific design choices evidenced throughout Purple Moon’s efforts is Laurel’s key design innovation: her willingness to take girls seriously. While I have discussed elsewhere the ways in which the research process demonstrates a willingness to listen to girls’ desires and concerns, the games themselves also demonstrate the extent to which Laurel understood the weight of girls’ daily concerns. While critics sometimes dismissed Purple Moon’s games for focusing on allegedly stereotypically feminine concerns, the games do something

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subtly subversive: in creating “friendship adventures for girls,” Laurel framed girls’ daily lives as epics in and of themselves. The narrative threads that run through Laurel’s games are easily summarized: A group of popular girls ask a new girl to join their clique; a girl agonizes over her appearance as she compares herself to the other girls in her ballet class; two conflicting social events force a girl to navigate between conflicting social pressures and different groups of friends. However, the seeming simplicity of these games is their underlying genius. Purple Moon’s games conveyed to girls that their worries and dreams were worth taking seriously, and in this, Laurel’s games, which predate by years the current generation of games that tackle topics like depression, awkward phone calls, and dead-end jobs, are truly revolutionary.

5

In Her Own Words In 2015, I interviewed Brenda Laurel at her home in California (see Figure 5.1). In the interview, we discussed her early work in the games industry, her training as a researcher, her work with Interval and Purple Moon, and her subsequent work as an educator and mentor. Ultimately, this interview speaks to many of the themes and topics explored throughout this book. In recounting her past and current projects, Laurel argues for the utility of research as a core design practice, distills her commitment to effective storytelling, and suggests the possibilities of VR as experimental medium. This interview summarizes much of Laurel’s approach to game design, including in particular her adamant belief that research is essential for good design. In this conversation, Laurel touches on the major threads of her career and approach as a game designer. She stresses the importance of research, the essentials of good interface design, and the potential and power of storytelling when games are approached as a narrative medium. The tangling of these threads, of design research, HCI, storytelling, and careful attention to audience is at the heart of Laurel’s work. CK. Can you just talk a little bit broadly about your own professional history? BL. I started out in theater. I had an MFA in acting and a PhD in drama theory and crit. Just at that time—this is ’76—some friends of mine were starting a computer game company called CyberVision. They said, “Why don’t you come and write some interactive fairytales for us?” I thought well that’s natural because I was directing interactive plays. Those were the days of interactive drama … the days of Hair and Dionysus in ’69 and Cafe La MaMa [La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club]. I had just done an interactive outdoor production of Robin Hood, so I thought, okay,

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Figure 5.1  Brenda Laurel at her home in California in 2015.

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and I came and did some interactive fairy tales. Then I started thinking about it, it’s like: wow, this business of interaction, we don’t know anything about it. It’s totally new. All you could do is change the channel on the TV before this stuff showed up. Eventually, that company folded, and we all drifted out to Atari. So by ’79, I was working at Atari. I was the director of software marketing, which meant software strategy and production in those days. Many of the programmers were these old guys from aerospace. You know, it’s a very strange, different cultural mix. When Warner acquired the company, I was running software for the home computer, which was a new product. The president called me and said, “I want you to spend seventy-five percent of your budget porting Ms. Pac-Man.” I said, “No, I’m trying to do product differentiation here,” and I went, and I drew him a map and showed him all the things we could do and the opportunity spaces. He said, “Your salary’s doubled, you’re working for me,” and it was great. So that was a big deal. But eventually, the Warner guys let go of quality as we all know from the E.T. scandal, and the grim reaper was coming through, so I ran over to research, where Alan Kay had just been hired, and begged, and he hired me in research. That really changed my life. It changed the direction of where I was going—so rather than being a producer, I started really being a researcher, at least approaching my work as research. I worked for a lot of game companies, LucasArts, Activision, Epyx, which is now folded. I did some work at Apple in their research group. Alan was there too, so I worked with the Vivarium project researching how kids tell and understand stories. I also worked on an interactive encyclopedia project where we were using storytelling as the interface to an encyclopedia and trying to figure out if agents could tell stories that would influence through their point of view how you traverse the material. So for example, in Westward Movement, we had a Native American, a trapper, and a pioneer wife. I played the pioneer wife, which was pretty funny. The outtakes are stunning. From Apple I just went into consulting because Apple Human Interface was folding, and I was really disillusioned with the work

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Brenda Laurel that was going on in the game industry after seventeen years and all boy stuff. I did some random consulting and then I got introduced to David Liddle by John Perry Barlow, who is a songwriter for the Grateful Dead. Liddle was starting Interval Research Corporation, and I had the great pleasure and honor of working there. I worked at Interval for seven years. I started with the virtual reality project Rachel Strickland and I had gotten approved at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Interval decided to help fund it. Rachel and I designed and Rob [Tow], my husband, and Michael Naimark a bunch of other folks helped build. Then I took over a group looking at gender and technology, and we spent about four years doing research on tween-age girls all over the country. About halfway through the research project, we’re thinking this looks like it wants to be a company. There’s an opportunity space here. As David put it, there’s a six billion dollar business with an empty lot next door. So that was the beginning of Purple Moon. At the end of the day, we launched our first product in ’97. And the company was abandoned by its shareholders when the web got big in ’99, and it was sold to Mattel. So nobody made any money, and Mattel of course bought and killed just about every girl game company at that time except American Girl and Her Interactive, but American Girl became a brand that they supported with their distribution. I felt that we’d made a pretty good, an important cultural intervention. We put out eight products; I still get letters, probably one or two a week, from girls who are in their twenties now saying, “I’m a designer because of you.” When Purple Moon crashed and burned, which was really nasty, I took a year, and I started writing a book about it. The first book was really bitter, so I threw it away. Then I got a hold of this great editor Doug Sery at MIT Press and was able to write the book that became Utopian Entrepreneur, which was part of the Mediaworks series that Peter Lunenfeld edited. It was a way for me to pass along both what I’d learned about girls and what I’d learned about being a change agent and doing things through games that were intended to change society and intended to change how people thought and behaved to one another. So that became I guess the theme. Looking back, my life has been about being a

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change agent. Injecting new genetic material into the culture without activating its immune system is kind of the strategic way I’ve always thought about this. CK. Since you had such a long history in the industry, can we talk about the kinds of changes in the industry you saw during that time? BL. At my first job there were six of us. A couple of guys from Battelle had figured out how to make a television display big pixels and built a system that used an alphanumeric keypad as its interface. We were trying to do educational stuff, good games, and other kinds of things like programming and languages that kids could learn and stuff like that. It was a very small team, seat of the pants operation without a lot of funding. After that company folded, we all came out to Atari and at first, it was just a blast. Anything was possible; the sky was the limit. When Warner acquired it, the Warner guys had this attitude that if you had a good license, you had a good game. They didn’t understand game mechanics, game play, art quality. They would throw you a title and give you three months. I watched young programmers burn out. It was not a pretty time, but then when Alan Kay came along, everything changed. The other game companies I worked for … I was a producer at Activision back when they were doing a learning series. So I had all kinds of stuff in production, like the Space Shuttle Operator’s Manual. Ian Ballantine had come to me with that, so I got to meet him, which was a highlight of my life. I was producing Tim Leary, who became a very good friend. Activision made the decision that they were just going to cut off educational and personal development stuff altogether, and coincidentally, two weeks after I told them I was pregnant, I was laid off. My friend Joe Miller, who had been at CyberVision, hired me at Epyx to fool around with them, so I produced a couple of games there. I produced the Lucasfilm products for Activision back in the day. Lucasfilm published through Activision. I was there for Monkey Island and Weird Ed and Labyrinth and some of the really great canonical Lucasfilm products were coming out. At that time, LucasArts had a rule that they wouldn’t

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make games out of their own properties, so imagination was running rampant over there. Anyway I did some producing; I attempted to deliver some research. I was invited by Paramount and Sony Pictures and various other people to come in and talk about gender because I had done all this research. You know, people would be sitting there looking at their screen, really not paying attention. It wasn’t working, and I got pretty depressed with that. VR was unreachable at that time because it was just too expensive unless you were working in a university that could afford the equipment. There was no playing around with it as a medium. Silicon Graphics was primarily doing training stuff. But when I finally broke through that little glacier, we made a lot of inventions in VR that people need to give us credit for. We built a lot of interface affordances, both hardware and software, that hadn’t existed before. I think Placeholder was a proof of concept project in that we wanted to demonstrate that this medium was capable of doing other things besides training, like fantasy, you know like blow-your-mind trippy stuff. And the culture around VR in San Francisco is all intermingled with the Grateful Dead, and the acid culture, and all that stuff, so we had a great time. I always wanted to get back into VR, but it hadn’t become possible until a couple years ago. And now I’m really concerned I guess with the quick move to implement the same old fighting crap in a VR environment. I’m really glad Google is doing some experimental work, but the stuff I’m seeing that’s really interesting is coming from the indie community. So I’d like to get my hands back into that. CK. Can we talk about Placeholder a bit? BL. There are some things we did that I think are really important. One is that, in the days of Silicon Graphics training software and NASA’s training software, there were conventional hand gestures that you used to move forward, to stop, to pull down a menu; they were like sign language. And the direction of movement was inferred from a sensor on the headset. What we did is we gave people two hands and we took direction of movement from the pelvis and the direction of the gaze from the head. Totally different experience because now your whole body is engaged.

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There was this issue at the time of embodiment. We didn’t do enough interviews for me to be real confident about the findings, but it seemed that men were describing their experiences in the VR as an out-of-body experience, and women were telling us, “I’m taking my sensorium into a new place.” That’s a really different orientation, and I think when you provide these interface affordances that facilitate embodiment that you improve the experience for people who feel disembodied. In order to get people’s attention on this question of body, we had them take on the body of an animal so they started in this cave and all these petroglyphic animals are—“Hey come over here, I’m a crow. I can fly anywhere. I love everything, bright and shiny”—giving ads for themselves. You’re looking at them, and all you’ve got is two little dots showing you where your hands are. You’re invisible. If you put your head in one of those guys, you take on its body. So that means you can fly if you’re a crow, or you can see in the infrared if you’re a snake, etcetera. It was a way of forcing people to notice they were embodied because we gave them different bodies than the ones they had. Flying was great. I can remember trying to figure out as a UI problem how people fly for this crow thing. I was interviewing random people in Banff, Alberta, about how they fly in their dreams. I thought that would be a good thing. Man it was all over the map, some of them were doing fist up Super Man things, and some were doing the hydrofoil thing, and some of them were kind of swimming. I was just sitting, and a crow came and sat down on a fence, and I said, “Flapping man!” Everybody knows birds have wings that flap, so then we realized that our software wasn’t logging the users’ motions, so we had to log the position of the hand and the motion of the hand in order to recognize a flap when someone was embodied as a crow. The first time we ran the software, I was the test agent for the crow. I would flap, and I’d just kill myself, and I’d get like six inches off the ground. And they’d go in and tweak it. One flap, I’d be up above the whole world. I’m looking down at it, and it’s like a marble down there. So we had to keep tweaking it until it worked, and I got these muscles under my arms from flapping. Those are the kinds of things I think presented opportunities and were part of the design statement.

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We accommodated two users at a time. We created portals that would transport you to different places. We learned that people don’t like jump cuts in VR, so if you’re going from here to there, there needs to be a travel time. There needs to be like a five-second time; so what we did was when people went into the portal, as you moved through it, you’re starting to hear the sounds from the other world you’re going to, and you can see your hands. People always looked at their hands to make sure they were okay because it was kind of dark in the portal. But it eased that jump cut problem. It was really interesting. CK. That hand thing is really interesting because that’s what they tell you to learn how to do for lucid dreaming. BL. Yeah, well it’s kind of like it isn’t it? If you have the kind of resolution and stuff that we have today at the price that we have, we can do things that feel like lucid dreaming if somebody would just support it. I made a rant at SIGGRAPH this year, and I know Google is trying to do this. But anybody who’s working in VR ought to collaborate and put like a hundred million dollars aside and invite artists to come in because that’s where you get innovation. The people who did great stuff in VR in the beginning were artists, all of them, you know? That’s where the innovation came from, and that’s where it should be coming from today. At least that’s one source of innovation. I don’t want to see VR turn into a bunch of embodied Halo, you know? World of Warcraft might be fun just for the costumes. We also had specialized audio so when you turned your head towards an audio source it worked properly; it was coming from the proper direction. If you don’t have that, it’s really disorienting. A friend of mine recorded a Grateful Dead concert with microphones on his glasses, and when he went down to get his beer if you’re listening to the tape, the band goes up here over your head. So specializing audio is really important to create a sense of presence. We also managed to figure out how to make a voice come from inside your skull, and that character was called the goddess. So when somebody—and of course I played it most of the time—when somebody got stuck, the goddess could give suggestions. I remember one time, these two guys came in and got into their bodies, and they

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are standing there looking at each other, what do I do now? Do I kill you? Can I shoot you? So I had to say, “Why you don’t think about exploring the portals or pick up a Voiceholder and tell it a story?” Of course, it hadn’t occurred to them. So that was fun. I didn’t say, “You stupid jerks! You have bad habits, so get out of my game.” CK. You talked about how you first got interested in design because at CyberVision you were thinking about how this was really interactive storytelling, and there’s a lot of resonance with theater. Can you talk a little bit about that storytelling kind of aspect and how you worked with that? BL. Well first of all, we had a constraint. We had 2k of RAM, so there wasn’t a lot, and we were loading programs from cassette tapes, so we had to have branching nodes that converged at the end of every data load. You could only make one or two little choices. So people couldn’t really move the action around very much. They could decide if the woman in Snow White is wearing red or blue, you know, little inconsequential choices, and that’s what got me thinking about the seeds of what became Computers as Theatre was this business of no range of choice. Obviously, that was a hardware problem but also a conceptual one. It’s like everybody was doing branching and storytelling and Choose Your Own Adventure kind of stuff with converging nodes, or else they’d try to take you out into three different endings. But it wasn’t interactive in a robust way, so I came to formulate “What is interactivity then?” It’s something that has personal agency for the player or the user. It has scope: There are a lot of ways you can go and your choices have consequences in the story. So I’ve come to think of it as mediated collaboration with a player or participant and constructing a narrative that is the story of the journey of that person through the game. So the question then becomes, how do you author for that odd desaturation? And that’s what I’ve been working on mostly in my research time. CK. Can you talk a bit about your work in theater before you started working in games? You talk a lot about being a researcher, and obviously some of your earlier research training comes from there, but also a lot of the writing and performance does too, correct?

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BL. I often regret that I got out of theater actually because I was good at acting, and it was like falling off a log; it was delight. So to have a job where you feel that way is pretty neat, but I’d probably be starving, and I wouldn’t have met any of the cool people I’ve met and all that jazz. I acted at Ohio State consistently, had leads during my MFA and also in my undergrad, and then I did summer stock in several different companies. I was in a Gilbert and Sullivan Company and a couple of repertory sort of situations. I did a dinner theater job that proved to me that nobody is paying attention in a dinner theater, and you just have to stomp. You have to make a lot of noise if you want attention there. Learned a lot of little rules of thumb working as an actor, like when people are restless and moving around in the audience, the actor’s tendency is to speed up. You have to slow down because they’re not following, so you have to exaggerate and slow down and be very mindful of what’s going on on the stage—really strange because it is counterintuitive to most actors. And the interactive work, I did a production of Robin Hood that I co-wrote with a friend at Ohio State where we took the eleventhcentury tales—Maid Marion was only a marginal character, but I think we amped her a little—and then what we did was mansion staging, because I’d been studying medieval, around a lake at Ohio State. All we had identified was places and scenarios, and the kids really made suggestions, and the actors followed them. So one time we had a group of blind children coming through, and in the ambush scene, a couple of them were saying, “Robin there are people behind you to the left,” and he had to completely change the choreography of a broad sword battle because they were supposed to be sneaking up on him now he’s got a clue, so there was all this improvisation going on. It was really terrific. Really wonderful fun. I can remember, I’ll just give you an anecdote also about change— about being a change agent—because this has to do with my work now. A kid’s coming into that play, it started at the faculty club, and it was this huge old castle-like structure, and I was all dressed up in costume and greeting like everyone else. One of the kids said, “What kind of tree is that?” And I pulled down the leaves, and I said, “This is an oak tree in Sherwood Forest.” And he goes, “An oak tree in

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Sherwood Forest.” That kid will always be able to identify an oak leaf you know? It was magical for him that it had that fantasy context that made him pay attention to it. This has led to a lot of work on my part just thinking about how can I enliven a space with fantasy and sensors and stuff like that to, say, have characters from Alice in Wonderland pop out from behind trees in augmented reality and still deliver some information about the environment. I think the key is having kids have a reason to pay attention and then they sort of do the rest on their own. I’ve watched them enough to know that. CK. So you kind of go from writing theater to writing these interactive computer games. Can you talk about the learning process, like how you learned to do design and production? BL. Well at first the fellows at CyberVision had developed a custom programming language that was pretty easy to use. The cool thing about CyberVision was that you could sync the animation with the audio on the tape so your characters could actually talk. I don’t think anybody did that until a long time later. Moving out of Robin Hood, it just seemed totally natural to me to look at, okay, how can a person move this action around inside the constraints of the machine and make the story of it their own. Henry Jenkins has this wonderful observation on fan culture. He says that true fans appropriate characters and actions from whatever medium to have personal meaning. That means there have got to be some choices in there where you can make personal meaning right? So as an actor, I knew a lot about making choices. I mean you can play the same scene seventeen different ways and have very different outcomes. So it gave me a clue in to what kind of choices we may be looking at. I also knew from the get-go that we needed much more complex situations than branching narratives. So that’s why my PhD thesis was on interactive media with artificial intelligence involved, to basically model for want of a better guide, Aristotelian poetics. I was a scholar of the poetics in my PhD work, and I was also a scholar of Brecht, and I think you could do the same thing with Brecht. When I taught game designers one of the things, I always talked to them about was making sure they understood that the plot of a

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Brenda Laurel game is your journey through it. The only way a game designer can influence that is to build in affordances that make it likely for you to make dramatically interesting choices. And then we’d talk about the Renaissance Faire and how the layout of it and the characters in it predispose people who attend to make interesting dramatic choices, so when they look back at their whole day, has an arc. You know, your good ol’ Freytag Triangle.1 I taught computer game designers about Freytag, it’s true. Some of them hated it, but some of them were really turned on by it. At every place I’ve worked in academia, I have taught courses in design research and make sure that students get in front of people who are not them and understand those people really well and design for them. The last time I taught the class was at U. C. Santa Cruz. The second time I taught it, our theme was math anxiety and the students did a lot of background research on math anxiety and read articles and examined their own childhood experiences, and then they interview kids we very carefully recruited and boy did they go to town. I was so surprised. I expected resistance, but no, they were all totally down with it. And we got four or five ideas out of that class that could have legs. It’s that encounter with a real person that I think a lot of game designers are missing because their culture doesn’t support it, so I try to make it part of the equipment that students I teach take into a design situation. It’s up to them to persuade the guys at the top that this is really important, and we need to do this, and we really kind of can’t move forward until we understand what six-yearold boys are like or whoever our audience is. This is just the end of a long rant about needing to see people in their situated context as part of your research process before you even articulate a game concept. That’s really the difference between design research and market research. It’s not how to sell it, it’s what to make. So that’s a point that you have to hammer on a lot because you use

1

Freytag’s Triangle refers to a theory of dramatic structure developed by Gustav Freytag from his analysis of ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama. The structure is pyramid shaped. Stories begin with Exposition, then move onto Rising Action, with the drama coming to a point at the Climax before sloping through Falling Action and ending in the Denouement.

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a lot of the same methods as market research, but you’re using them at a really different stage in the process, and you’re using them for a different reason. Then when you get data back from the people you’ve interviewed, then the trick is to represent it to yourself over and over and over again until you start to see patterns. When you see those patterns, you pull them out, and you’ve got findings. Then you need to translate those findings into heuristics that then will guide you in what it is that you’re developing. So if you’ve got twelve heuristics, maybe you can blow off two of them but the majority of this, what you found out, needs to be respected. That’s a real key to success. Historically, from the get go—even in pinball—it was a pretty vertically integrated scene, designed by young men, for young men, no question: Young men wrote it; young men played it. That was the source of a whole lot of denial about, well girls don’t play games. Well dude, you know, you’re doing the whole thing and then you’re putting it in a male-orientated electronics store. How do you expect a girl to even find it or want to do it? I think it’s still the case because these guys think they know their play mechanics, and they have a great idea, and it floats their boat, and their colleagues say it’s good; that’s all they need. Well it is if you’re designing games for yourself and people just like you, which is the traditional audience. But if you’re not, and even when you are, if you want to make any kind of innovation, you need to go and explore who those people are, what are their lives like? What bugs them? What kind of impasses do they come to in their personal lives that you might turn into a narrative thread you know? So I think it’s really important, and I think most of the time, it’s not done not because the designer doesn’t want to do it but because they are told they can’t have funding or time to do it. So I’ve tried to train designers to just stand up to that and give a good explanation and give some examples of where it’s worked and how it’s worked. Sometimes you can’t win. I know a lot of the indie game designers are working with pretty narrow communities like the trans community. And that’s a case where people do know each other and they do share things in common; they’re a small audience of developers working for that audience. EA [Electronic Arts] will never publish that stuff unless they see money behind it, you know? I’m not suggesting we do those particular games at EA,

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CK. BL.

Brenda Laurel but we could certainly do games for gender inclusive audiences, and that means really understanding what they have in common. Just to kind of give a big picture, when you think about doing design research, how does that change the outcomes from design? If you do design research and you integrate that into your process, like how does that affect the kind of designs you produce? I can give you an example from Purple Moon. We had two series we launched. One was, Rockett’s New School and the other one was called Secret Paths. The reason we did that was because our research showed us that when a girl is being reflective about her inner self, she’s thinking about different rewards and values than when a girl is reflective about a social situation. So I wanted to tease those apart, the inner self the social self. We used the same characters in both series. Secret Paths in the Forest was the first Secret Paths title. If I had designed that straight out of what I knew, we’d have something like The Secret Garden. But when we talked to girls and asked them what their garden would look like. We gave them paper dolls and had them act out stuff and prepare shows for us and things. They didn’t want to take care of the animals. They wanted the animals to take care of them. They wanted magical creatures to tell them important stories and give them secrets. They wanted wonder. And they weren’t sure they wanted their friends in there with them. These all went against what I would have done if I had done it just out of my own experience so that’s an example of how research really informed in a deep way what we did with that series. Can you talk about the scope of the research that went into Purple Moon? It went on for three years, there was a progression. We did our secondary research—we looked at all kinds of fields, like play theory, developmental psychology and sociology, and adolescent behavior and all that stuff. Then we called experts out of that secondary research and interviewed them personally to get more information, and we also pulled in some people like playground managers and teachers and stuff to fill in with their experience. That helped us put together our interview guides then for the large-scale human-centered research that we did.

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We interviewed over a thousand kids in eight US cities, every region in the country. What we didn’t do is interview rural kids, which I’m sorry about because I think it would have enriched our research. But we did interview all over the country. We didn’t try to internationalize it; it was too rough. The difference between Japanese high schools and American high schools is really big. We interviewed over a thousand kids. We interviewed probably fifty experts, and about 100 parents in focus groups. We interviewed the kids in dyads so we would recruit for one kid that met our profile and then ask them to bring a friend, so the friend would keep them honest. They would talk to each other, which is always great, so you don’t have to get them to do the talk out loud stuff. We weren’t usually having them play with the game; we had them do other projects for us. That was just incredibly productive. That is the way I would interview children from now on. I have in fact interviewed six-year-old boys. I’ve interviewed teenagers. It’s always the case that dyads are really good. Focus groups are a really bad idea for kids because they’re so responsive to social status that the moment someone voices an opinion, there’s agreement among people. You don’t learn anything really. It’s like a snapshot of a social status ladder. With adults, it’s a little better because they speak up, so we interviewed parents at home parties and in focus groups. We didn’t do any dyads with parents. Overall, I would say we interviewed about 1,500 people using a lot of different methods. In one round, we looked at gender signaling in toys. We presented things like a pink fuzzy truck and that, the pink fuzzy overcame truckness, so the gender signal is female. Then we introduced a diary. Boys don’t usually like them, so we called it war journal and blew a shot through it, and the boy said, “No, that’s a diary. That’s for girls.” Then we did a bunch of those, but the best one was we dressed up Barbie in G.I. Joe’s uniform, and that was the toy that nobody wanted. The girls hated the gun, the boys hated the hair, and everybody thought those vacant blue eyes staring out from under her helmet were really creepy. So that was fun. We had Ecco the Dolphin. We took the cover and put fangs on the dolphin with blood dripping. It became a boy’s game, and as you know, that had a pretty strong female following. So that was fun. And in one case we

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sent out paper dolls of school, and we asked the kids to create a little show with their paper dolls. What we learned is all the teachers died; they had lung cancer or got murdered. Teachers had a terrible time, and they weren’t well liked. Generally speaking the scenarios got rid of the teachers in pretty short order, but we learned so much about the social dynamics, like this girl won’t take math class because she’s afraid she’ll be labeled as strange, that kind of stuff. We did paper dolls with the Secret Paths series as well. We asked kids to draw maps of their playgrounds for us while they were there. Some kids drew a geographical map as best as they could, but most kids said it was a map of groups of people. So this is where the smokers are, this is where the jocks are; they were mapping it by the people occupying it, which is a really big finding. That’s going to be the way kids will tend to look at that kind of space. We didn’t always do the same thing, but we got huge amounts of data, huge. It took us a year to get through the data, and at the same time we were starting to do a little art style prototyping. We found stuff like girls hated a purple cabin, but a blue one was fine. We don’t know why. It was a huge effort there in research. Then we went through the data, came up with some findings; we translated them to these design heuristics, and we were off to the races. It was a three-and-half-a-year process. It cost 4 million dollars. CK. Can you talk a little bit about the development process at Purple Moon and how it went from research ideas to something really applied and produced? BL. When we got our findings together, and we did our design heuristics, we were pretty sure we were right about them, and it was novel stuff. It was stuff other people hadn’t touched. I mean, we were looking at tween girls. One of their greatest fears is that they won’t be accepted socially, and they have this sort of dreadful sense of inevitability about their social lives. I’m not in the in crowd, I’ll never had a date with someone, so and so doesn’t like me, the girls who like me aren’t as cool as I am. On and on and it repeats, and every group of girls that we talked to, there were these sort of archetypal characters and groups hanging around in their social lives that they had to navigate. We didn’t know of anything

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that helped with that. There were really two grand strategic goals of that company. One was to develop something relevant enough to get girls to put their hands on the machine because we knew once they did it would spread like an oil slick. They’d play a variety of different things once they got over that initial hump. But the real sort of change agent goal for me, I guess, was to help young adolescents get over that horrible bump of becoming a young teenager, and that means addressing the sense of social inevitability for example. In the Rockett games, there was no winning or losing, but you could try whining, you could try yelling, you could get mad at somebody, you could steal a notebook. You could behave very badly, and sometimes it worked; sometimes whining worked, and sometimes it didn’t. If you did a certain kind of path, you would get to some Easter eggs that would be fun. But you could always go back and play it again and make different choices and find new parts of the world that you hadn’t seen before because you were moving through it in a different way. This was meant to be parallel to the sense of personal agency that you have to develop as a young woman to survive being as teenager. For me, that was the goal in my heart, and remember I had three kids in this age group, and they were all girls, and they were my booth babes when we launched at E3 (see Figures 5.2 and 5.3). They played parts in the games and stuff so yeah that was—it was the emotional rehearsal space that we were really trying to provide with the series. With the Secret Paths series we were really looking hard at selfesteem and the value of story. I mean, basically, the scenario was all the characters are sitting around in a lighthouse or wherever. We did three or four of those, and they would each tell you something that was going on with them. There were things going on with some of these girls that had our marketing people tearing their hair out, stuff that we heard in interviews: I’m afraid someone will make me smoke; my parents are divorced, and my dad won’t come to the father–daughter dance. You know, these are hardcore things. They’re not just, “What should I wear tomorrow?” And so the girls would tell you their issues. You would decide which one you wanted to

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Figure 5.2  Laurel (right) is interviewed at the Purple Moon launch at E3. Photo courtesy Brenda Laurel.

Figure 5.3  Laurel’s daughter Hilary Hulteen participated in the Purple Moon launch. Photo courtesy Brenda Laurel.

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work on, and then you would go on a quest, which was basically a set of puzzle games where you were looking for secret stones that had qualities that that girl would need in her situation. The girl with the dad who wouldn’t come to the dance, unconditional love right? Pride. Courage. Forgiveness. These things were there to be found in the environment, and if you found all of them, you could come back and give them in their little purple pouch to that girl. It would turn into this beautiful necklace, and then we would go to a non-interactive old folk tale or fairy tale that was just about that issue in some metaphorical way. What we learned was the girls would go on the same quest over and over and over because they needed to hear the story. I’ve heard that so much; it’s really interesting. They’d go back and make sure they made the same choices so they would get that same tale because they loved the story that was at the end of it, that was about what qualities do I need here to deal with my life? What do I need to bring forward? It’s a developmental choice, not necessarily that you’re forced into it or that nature made you this way or society made you this way; you had some choices. So that was kind of the social goal behind those games. Then we did some make your own adventure stuff with cartoon characters that were really quite clever. And we were about to launch our first Starfire Soccer title because the World Cup had just happened when our funders pulled the plug on us. That was in the pipeline. We learned all these things about how boys and girls experience sports differently. Boys will tell you about watching a game more often than not. And girls will tell you about playing soccer, so the television like interfaces for sports games in those days was entirely appropriate to boys and meaningless to girls. So what we were trying to do with the soccer series was to model a girl’s experience on a team while still having a sports through line, and so we interview a coach. I remember this one guy telling us, “I just wonder why these girls are so slow at passing drills. I’m yelling at them.” He says, “Finally I figured out they’re looking around figuring out the social consequences of who they’re going to pass it to.” So that was good information to have, and there was always this hope for the pizza

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Brenda Laurel party no matter how the game turned out, so we had a pizza scene in there. It was a very different take on sports because we learned these differences that were acculturated differences, you know? That’s not to say all boys see sports on TV. Boys play sports, they can tell you stories about sports, but their first thought typically in the majority of cases was, “Yeah I watched the Steelers,” or “I hate the Raiders,” or whatever. I was just going to ask in the Secret Paths games—those fables and stories, where did they come from? We did a lot of research. One was a story from Italy about a boat maker and his son. Another was, I think we used the Baba Yaga story as I recall about standing up for yourself because that’s a dark tale but it’s a really good one. My best friend [Lucinda De Lorimier] is a storyteller by profession, so she did a huge amount of research for us. She’s also a librarian, so we would say, “Okay here’s the quandary that this girl has,” and she would come in with Native American stories and African stories. She was a great resource; she was great at matching the issue to the tale. After you started development on Secret Paths and the Rockett titles, what kind of research did you do after that point that production started? The basic concepts came out of the research. The game play and some of the mechanics came out of the research, but then we needed to have like Lucinda running around and curating stories. The artists were working with different art styles that we were testing. So you’ll notice the art styles are really different, but you can recognize that they’re the same characters; nobody hiccupped over that. The reason for that is that we learned girls this age typically like to think of themselves as older than they are when they are thinking socially. They have fantasies about being in sororities and stuff and long role playing things they do with their friends that puts them older. When they’re thinking about the inner self and the forest and sea and nature, they’re their same age; they’re ten instead of fifteen. So the art styles reflected those differences in self-perception so it would reinforce the message and get the kid into the right headspace to experience what was going on.

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CK. Can you talk about some of the key characteristics of the Purple Moon games? What made those games feel different from other games that were on the market? BL. Well, the big competitor in 1997 in our launch was Barbie Fashion Designer. Barbie is intended to be an aspirational character. The theory behind the Barbie doll was to give girls an aspirational role model so that they could visualize their future, but in fact, it was in my opinion a training tool for conventional femininity that included some disempowerment, included excessive attention to one’s appearance, had no depth. You know, by the time kids got through playing with their Barbies at twelve, they were consumer-spectacle-ready. So one way we were different was that our cast was wildly diverse—race, personality, hair color, personal attributes. There were a lot of different kinds of people, and you were playing one of them. What’s fascinating to me about Barbie Fashion Designer is that, if my research is right, up to 30 percent of their users were boys because they liked construction and they liked making stuff. I can see that. Girls like that too, and it wasn’t an all bad game. We were just looking a whole different aspect of what it means to be a tween girl. We weren’t trying to sell anything or trying to train people up to be standard females. We were a bunch of feminists, what can I say? But you know, David Liddle was a feminist, and the games had wild success, at least the first season they were out. They were both in the top 100. I feel like it was a cultural intervention to just create a situated context in which you treat girls the way they are. You meet them where they are with their divorced parents or their leather jacket working at Orange Crush to make money. These are real people. So I think that’s the defining characteristic. After the catastrophe with the Mattel acquisitions, we did start seeing some more gender-inclusive games in the fantasy genre. I don’t know how much we had to do with that, but it’s like the interest in serving girls and women grew back despite Mattel’s efforts. I don’t think people have grokked the understanding that we had of at least in this age group the inner and the outer, and I think it’s probably true for boys too. There’s probably a lot of room for development that looks at that reality of that age group.

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CK. Can you talk more about the reception of the games, like what people liked or didn’t like about them at that time? BL. In a way, we got exactly what we wanted. The reviewer in the New York Times said, “This is horrible, who’d want to do this? This is like social stuff.” And radical feminists were saying, “This is horrible, I don’t see any queer kids.” We didn’t get into that. Today we would get into it, but then we didn’t. So we were getting bashed by radical feminists and bashed by men, exactly where we wanted to be. The people who loved it were parents. I got lots of mail from parents, and the response of the girls was—when we launched our website we were beating Disney.com for both hits and dwell time for three months in a row. Kids would spend half an hour on there or an hour. After we got closed down, we just changed the front screen of the website, but there was a way to bring a friend into the website wherever you had bookmarked yourself, so like, 280 girls registered for the website after it was officially dead and were in there running around having a good time with their friends because it still worked, and we got all these sympathy cards. I feel that I know why the investors shifted their money, and I wrote about this a little bit in Utopian Entrepreneur. The economics of the situation are simple when you have a material product like a CDROM that has to be packaged, warehoused, shipped, and placed at retail. If you’ve got something that’s just running on the web, all those expenses go away. If we had had some confidence and some recourse and some tools—there were no web tools out there—if there had been support for this to move forward on the web, I’m sure we’d still have a brand. It would be going different places because, although the needs of girls and boys have changed culturally speaking, they still have needs and desires that aren’t really being met by the games they play. CK. Can you talk about the website and its function but also how it fit with the games? BL. There was a lot going on in the website. First of all, the Secret Stones were in the website, so you could trade them, you could gift them. We figured out a way to make some of them scarce, and after we shut the company down, I think we found like eight

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websites that were pirate websites that girls or their parents had built to do stuff with Secret Stones because of the scarcity problem. The little treasures on Facebook now, I mean there’s definitely a similarity to what we were doing with our treasures. On our website, the characters were there, and there were little vignettes. We let users submit stories for the Whistling Pines newspaper so that they could imagine what happened to Nicole last week. If they were good, we’d publish them, and sometimes they would make their way into the next iteration of the game. So there was a real sort of genuine co-authorship going on. The other thing I must say, we had a panic button. It was always on the screen, so if anyone was hassling you, push the panic button: We’ve got a screen shot; we’ve got the other guy’s ISP. We kicked a lot of people out—not a lot, maybe twenty people out—for harassing. But most of the time when boys came in there and tried to mess things up, the girls drove them out. The panic button was such a good idea. Now we get into the question of true names, which for me is a huge question, and I haven’t answered it for myself yet. But the way it worked at Purple Moon, and the way I think it ought to work, is that we know you are. We know, the producers, the people who are running the site. We know who you are, we have reliable telephone number, etcetera, and we know who your parents are maybe if you’re a kid. Then if you want to call yourself Spoonman, you know, to name a friend of mine, you can. If you screw up and someone panic buttons you, I can find out who you are, not so sure that that’s not a good idea for grownup sites too. I know people get kicked off of Twitter and stuff, but this notion of having that kind of intervention available to people who get harassed online might be a good step. It could be complicated; I’d love to work on it. CK. What would you say your key contributions at Purple Moon were? BL. I certainly found the right research partners, and we did a really thorough job together. I hired terrific artists. One guy was featured in a Sunday San Francisco newspaper because he was a graffiti artist, and I called him and grabbed him, and he was fabulous. So with the arts people I had, I had a success. I think as a recruiter and a manager, I think I contributed a great deal to making the social mission clear, to get everybody on the same page, and this

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really comes from directing plays. When you’re directing a play, everybody from the lighting designer to the lead actor needs to see somewhat of the same picture out there at the end of the process so we’re all converging on this thing and we’re shaping it as we go. I learned that technique from Alan Kay, who said, “When you’re trying to do innovation, place a goal far enough out there that it’s a little bit foggy but magnetic so that it draws people toward the idea.” When the marketing team rebelled and put a banner ad on the site, I just left the building and went to the movies. I was so sad. Looking back, I know they had to do things like that, but I’d rather do product placement. It’s more natural. Anyway, that was a bummer. I think I held a high standard, and I kind of kept people to that standard. I had a great CEO. I was smart enough to know I was not the CEO. I think that’s a big mistake that designers of anything often make. There’s this notion, and I think it comes from the way people advance in technology. If you’re working in a tech company and you’re working in the department where you’re just writing code, then you want to get into middle management. Some people will want to go higher, and if it’s a small company, and it’s your idea, of course you want to be the CEO, except you’re not the CEO. You’re the lead designer. Be different. You can be the chairman of the board, but you’re not the CEO. So learning that and being able to pass that along I think was a contribution, among other things. CK. Thinking about Purple Moon and what worked and didn’t work what do you think are some of the lessons from Purple Moon that other designers or other people launching small games companies could take from that? BL. Do your design research; don’t assume you know what the game ought to be. If you know the audience you want to reach or the genre you want to work in, and you’re going to make a guess about who the audience is, you still need to get to know them because it will change your design, one. Two, spend your time designing. Do not be your own CEO, right? The rest of it is this medium, not unlike film, has the opportunity to change people and broaden their worldview to change their lives in positive ways. I don’t see enough of us paying attention to that. It doesn’t have to be painful

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like eat your oatmeal. There are some games out there that create transcendent experiences. I don’t see enough concern. I don’t see enough acting out of more than a kind of one-dimensional notion of masculinity in a lot of games. And there’s so much territory being missed that would both be good for the player and be fun for the player. So I think the lesson I learned was, don’t take it for granted that you understand what the game ought to be but look for broadening the space of action and the space of outcomes because we are part of media culture, and we do matter. If I were doing Purple Moon again today, I would be modeling it in a majorly different culture because there’s been so many changes in what girls do and think. Some of the things we learned are always going to be true, and some of the things we learned are not true anymore. I would want to re-interview everybody, start over, think about who people are today and what they need. I’m hung up on games as a healing agent. That doesn’t mean the whole world has to be, but more of us would be good—the stuff that Tracy Fullerton has done with Walden. Let’s look at that; let’s see how to do that more often. It’s a wonderful thing, and I’m really blissed out that she did it. CK. Thinking about games for girls, so not just Purple Moon but also like the context of that and also thinking about what’s come out of that long run. What were some of the challenges for really making something for a new audience and do you see some of those barriers still in place? BL. I think a lot of the triple A companies are aware that they’re missing a boat with romance and mystery, for example, which are the two most popular reading genres for women. I see people putting their toe in the water there, and my advice is step forward. Either you have to self-publish or you have to have a publisher who really believes in that audience. And another barrier is that since most designers and developers in the triple A side are men, they are not as familiar with the genres of play and story that women like. So that’s why there’s an empty lot in the romance category. There’s pretty much an empty lot in the mystery category. In the history category, we just get walkthroughs of buildings; we don’t get Henry Tudor. So the lesson is explore the undiscovered country.

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There’s a million-dimensional opportunity here, and someone at your company has to be willing to take a risk, otherwise you’re just always going to be feeding the bulldog as they say—you know making more of the same crap—and eventually you’ll die. Change or die is a good rule for companies. It’s not hard. You have to decide, “Okay I’m going to risk ten percent or five percent and try something new, and I’m going to invite some artists in and some storytellers and see what happens.” If you’re not doing that kind of work, you’re not working in the kitchen, you know? You’re just cutting cookies. That’s what I think. That’s a lesson that I learned. It’s hard to go against the conventional ideas of what games are and who they are for and what interaction is like. Somebody learns that gameplay pattern from a game with some particular mechanics and they have trouble adjusting sometimes to games that have different play mechanics, different kinds of worlds, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t builds those game. It means we have to look really carefully at the commonalities of interface affordances you know? So that it’s a smoother transition to another part of the forest. I feel like it’s just us sitting here on this deck, and the whole forest and garden are out there, and we’re not walking around in them, so boldness and imagination are things I’m not seeing enough of. I’m seeing it hugely in the indie games world, but eventually, we’re going to get past Twine and stuff and Unity even and get into situations that need real production but that still help us look at a different part of the forest. CK. Obviously there’s opportunities for doing new things, and there’s a way you can reach audiences you may not be reaching, which I think is really important from a business perspective, but I also think there’s probably some interesting things that offers designers. Can you talk a little bit about what maybe being able to branch out in that way would offer for designers? BL. Well, it becomes more of a playground than a chore you know? If you can really put your imagination to work as a designer, it’s a blast. We all have a good imagination, most of us do, and it’s something not to be afraid of. I think a lot of people are really afraid of failure. Triple A companies have instilled that in us, and yet at triple A companies, maybe one out of five titles is a big hit. So what, you know? Go out there and do it, try it, just in the lab.

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BL.

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See who likes it; get ideas from people on the street. I think for designers, just unleashing your imagination and your powers of observation and your mindfulness is such a pleasant experience. It makes you more yourself; it lets you own what you do in a different way. You’ve talked about research being really integral to design, but what other kinds of characteristics and practices do you associate with good game design or effective game design? I’ll go back to my principles of interaction and say good game design gives you a broad range of choices that don’t look granular. Good game design allows you to take action and has meaningful consequences in the unfolding narrative. Good design has affordances within the story of the UI to tempt people to make choices that result in a better, a more dramatic story, a story with more interesting characteristics. There are all kinds of things you can throw in that can nudge somebody to go this way, but the minute you make it so obvious that there’s no other choice but to do this one thing, which happens a lot in action games, then the person’s agency kind of vanishes. It becomes a kind of how fast can I shoot, how well can I aim kind of thing as opposed to what do I do next? How do I make this into an interesting experience for myself? So agency, things that have real results in gameplay, embodiment, or a sense of self somewhere in the game. I have a gripe about driving games that show you your car instead of letting you be at the wheel. It makes such a difference. What advice would you give if someone was saying, “I want to become a game designer?” What would you tell them to do to get started and to move forward in that area especially since you’ve taught? I think designing board games is a good way to start. I think learning to do paper prototyping is a good way to start, but mostly I think story writing and storytelling is a good place to start. My first class with a narrative class in the game design side was a story slam. To write stories is an important skill you know? To understand what is a good story, do some research, look at what people have to say about what makes a good story. That’s a good way to think about it. Sketch your ideas if you can.

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I think everybody can sketch. And then talk to people. I mean, by the time you’ve gotten that far, you have a notion of who your audience is or who it might be. Then you need to talk to some people. What do you think about this? How would you change it? Does this work for you at all? What would work for you? What’s your favorite game? That’s the time when you really have to start digging into your audience. Then of course you test and test and test and test and test and test, and sometimes you test with players and sometimes you just test for bugs; everybody knows that. You have to be ready to not get it right the first time, and to welcome when somebody shows you that you’re wrong. It’s like science in that way. It should make us happy when we find out we’ve made a mistake. Hopefully, it’s not one that’s already published. Games never stand still. You don’t produce a game and then just leave it there. You watch how people are playing it, you listen to your players, you tweak it, you change it, you add stuff, you take stuff away. The minute you quit doing that you’re going to die, eventually. You’re not watering the garden, and that was something that was hard for me to learn. I was used to being Mrs. Straight A and getting it right the first time. It’s a whole different mindset—you have to welcome it and be present; Will Wright taught me that. Be present with the game and be ready to change it in subsequent releases. That’s so much easier on the web than it is with hard product. I don’t think anybody makes hard product anymore. Another thing, going back to Henry Jenkins’ observation. Strive to put materials, characters, plot sequences, etcetera in the game that can be appropriated by the player to make personal meaning. The Grateful Dead were wonderful with that, they didn’t care if people ripped off their logo, taped their shows. They had great fans! The whole domain of slash comes out of repurposing material to make personal meaning so that’s something that should be in the back of a designer’s mind. How is this going to connect? What’s the take away? CK. If I make a character, how do I make a character that people will be able to take and use in that way? BL. We learned this with the design of Rockett, and I could name other characters where that’s true in other stories, other games.

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The character has a personality that is peppy and moderately assertive, but when you play the game, she disappears; it’s really easy to step into her shoes because she’s kind of a blank slate. The choices she makes start to form up her character, and the alliances that she has with other characters. In a way, you’re pouring yourself into this electronic costume and making choices as yourself. I believe strongly in first person-ness—and I know Ian Bogost disagrees, among other people—but I think first person-ness is a real important way to get appropriation to be even possible. So you’re not watching it second person and saying “that guy goes there.” That’s my gripe with THe Sims. There’s no first person narrative that you can tell. You can tell stories about the characters, but you’re not there. So I think that’s important. Aristotle talked about universality, and we all get it wrong. I think our first thought is usually, oh everybody pees, everybody has to eat, that that’s the kind of universal thing. He had a more refined definition of the universal: It means a kind of action in which a person, any person, can observe causes and effects. Not that it’s something that has happened to them, but it’s something they can observe and identify causes and effects. If you are careful about that, maybe there’s a process of discovery and progression through the game, so you build in universality that way. There are examples in Purple Moon, like the business of trying to be popular. This person is disliked by this person because X. I understand that now; that’s a paradigm I can use now. In fact we found some paradigms we used a lot through our research. For example, big differences in how males and female primates across the board establish social dominance or social status. There are large gender differences in most cultures, so you need to be mindful of that. If you’re working for both, if you’re working for the whole spectrum of gender, then you need to provide avenues for the different ways that people think about that issue. It’s really interesting. Females tend to work with affiliation and exclusion. This is true with pigmy chimps. It’s generally true with women across the world. What that leads to is actually an ability to collaborate that’s pretty remarkable. That’s why the world should be run by women. Males tend to achieve status in a more hierarchical way. So instead of doing

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this sort of business of “I’ll be friends with you but not you for a while and then switch up,” with males it’s both more direct and simpler generally speaking. I kicked your ass. I can throw further than you can. Okay, got it! Yeah. And they walk away from friends. It’s not a big deal, it’s not a nightmare, it’s not like this horrible conglomeration of attachments. Females get in a much more complicated process of gaining social status, so they’re very different that way. It’s worth knowing you know. Most games that are out there for the male audience have the kind of, “I’ve got the highest score, I shot the most guys, I got to level thirty-seven.” A guy would say to somebody else, “I got to level thirtyseven.” And a girl would say, “Did you see the purple dragon?” Now the purple dragon happens to be on level thirty-seven, but there’s this taboo against directly being a braggart or lording it over someone. So there’s much more indirection and subtlety generally speaking in that engagement. These things are worth noticing, and you know there are men and women who share the opposite characteristics. It’s a curve—it’s a bell curve—and I’m talking about the line right through the middle. I’m not talking about the tails. There’s actually more difference between individuals at either tail of say males than a given quality like idiocy and genius. Greater difference between those than the standard measure of males and females. That’s worth looking at. A deep understanding of how people achieve social status and satisfaction is part of any game I think. And we’ve gotten stuck on skills. We’ve gotten stuck on male patterns. I get bashed a lot for essentialism, especially by the feminist community because people misunderstand the kind of generalizations I’m making and where they come from. The fact that they are not always true; they tend to be true. There’s no particular evidence that they are biologically based, but the evolution of human culture has given us some stuff across the world. So please don’t bash me. I’m a good person. CK. This is a speculative fiction type question. The answer can be anything. Thinking about where games are now and where games have been and the kind of work you’ve done and are doing, if the future of games could look like anything, what would you want it to look like?

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BL. I would want it to look like great diversity in platforms, media, audiences. I would want it to look like something that makes you feel good for the right reasons, but also you can be a bad guy; that’s okay with me. But diversity I think is the key. I don’t want to see like the age of the Wii, the two years we had the Kinect. Let’s make different connections; let’s be sure we’re providing a diversity of experiences. One of the worst things that happened to VR, people say, “Well why did VR die?” The obvious answer is it was too expensive, and you couldn’t monetize it in the days that we were on it. VR needs to be in the picture. I think augmented reality is a tremendous opportunity space—tremendous both for productive applications and [for] learning applications and games. I would like to see a world with a great deal of diversity in the kinds of games, mechanics, in the platforms, the audiences, and I’d also like to see some games that are really, really inclusive, where people have actually taken time to make them inclusive, not just arm waved in. I would like that a lot. I heard Jane McGonigal—I think it was Jane McGonigal—say that life is a game. I don’t want that to be true. I would like games to be part of what we do, just like reading books and going to the movies and gardening and whatever, but life is not a game as it turns out. Life is a very deep and complicated thing that has huge spiritual components, for example, that we don’t touch in games. I would hate to see our lives gamified. I would like to see a world in which games are not part of the consumerist spectacle, where they are not leading people to buy things they don’t need. The consumerist spectacle I define as the creation and fulfillment of needs where the need doesn’t actually exist until somebody creates it, and then we go sell somebody something. That’s how everything moves in a market economy. I would really like that not to be true. I would like to see games that get us closer to nature, that help us understand global warming, that help us heal our hearts, that help us meditate, that help us fantasize, that grow us in some way, and games that are just for fun, that’s fine too. But yeah, life is not a game. Games are part of life, and they can influence life strongly if we have the courage to do it.

6

Conclusion: The Dangers of Being a Crash Dummy

Game designers in my view continue to be on the cutting edge of interaction design in many ways, because the interaction is the experience in the gaming business. There is no productive or generative outcome beyond that. (Brenda Laurel, Interaction Design Association 2011, n.p.) In 1999, Purple Moon shut its doors. At a basic level, the company had failed. Production stopped. Employees were laid off. A closed sign was placed on the front page of the company website. A number of factors contributed to the closure. Investors withdrew financial support that would have enabled the company to continue growing (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015). Software sales declined across the board. Shelf space was an area of fierce competition, and smaller publishers like Purple Moon had a hard time winning space over larger, more established companies (Oldham 1999). At its peak, Purple Moon controlled 5.7 percent of the girls’ software market. By comparison, Mattel accounted for 64.5 percent, and the Learning Co., which Mattel had bought in 1998, made up another 21.6 percent (Bannon 1999). Purple Moon was, briefly, a successful start-up, but it was a relatively small fish and was exceedingly vulnerable to shifts in the marketplace, like declining retail shelf space and the precipitous rise of the web. A month after Purple Moon closed its doors, Mattel bought the company out. Initial announcements indicated that Mattel intended to expand the popular website and continue CD-ROM development, at least for the Rockett Movado brand—the future of Secret Paths and

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the Starfire Challenge series were uncertain (Bannon 1999). Ultimately Mattel produced and released the last game in the Rockett Movado series, Rockett’s Camp Adventures (1999), which is the shortest of the Rockett games, and oversaw the release of Secret Paths to Your Dreams (1999). The company also launched a “Rockett’s World” book series with children’s book publisher Scholastic, which published a total of six books. Mattel understood the aesthetic of the games but not the underlying design principles that made them work; eliminating one option from every in-game choice surely made the game cheaper to produce, but it also narrowed the player’s sense of in-game agency and shortened the game. Further, while Rockett Movado may have been the most visible character and an appealing property to acquire, the Rockett Movado games worked best to provide whole actions and address the complexities of girls’ interior and exterior lives in a context that included the Secret Paths games—a series Mattel was vocally unclear about. That Mattel shortly after closed up shop on the Purple Moon brands entirely is unsurprising. The last chapters of Purple Moon are, unavoidably, a story about failure. But, this doesn’t mean that the legacy of Purple Moon or of Brenda Laurel as designer should be considered primarily in that context of failure. In a keynote given at the 2011 Interaction Design Association conference, Laurel spoke about what it has meant to be a “crash dummy … inventing things long before they were economically or even technically feasible” (Interaction Design Association 2011, n.p.). In many ways, Purple Moon was a moment of crash dummying. The company suffered in part because of the cost of producing and distributing physical products—not only the toys and merchandise built around the brand but also the games themselves. Laurel remains convinced that, had the company not produced physical goods, it might have survived both because of lower overhead and because of the rising tide of what turned out to be the early dot-com bubble (Laurel interview by Kocurek 2015). A few years later, Purple Moon might have opted to focus on web rather than CD-ROM distribution; a few decades later, they could have designed for the now burgeoning market of

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apps for portable devices, one facilitated in part by the growing number of inexpensive tablets designed specifically for use by children. Touch screens have helped revive the point-and-click adventure game, and imagining girls playing through Rockett’s First Dance or Secret Paths to the Sea on tablets while sprawled on their bedroom floors is easy enough.

Games for girls today Today, “games for girls” is less a movement than it was in the 1990s in part because of shifts that have occurred in the games industry and in its consumer base. Adult women, many of whom likely grew up playing those girls’ software titles of the 1990s, make up a significant percentage of the audience for video games today. According to data from the Entertainment Software Association, adult women make up a third of game players, and 44 percent of players overall are female (Entertainment Software Association 2). And among teenagers aged thirteen to seventeen, 59 percent of girls play video games—less than the 84 percent of boys who do, but still a high number, and one that has increased in recent years (Lenhart 2015). Games for girls now are less of a niche and more a part of comprehensive strategies from children’s toy and media companies. Mattel still makes software titles for many of their brands, including of course Barbie, and for their other toy lines like American Girl. The company’s website is filled with games for Monster High, Barbie, and Polly Pocket, among others. Nintendo offers games featuring Disney princesses, Dora the Explorer, and Strawberry Shortcake, and other brands along with series that let players care for pets, imagine potential careers and hobbies, or design jewelry. Popular game series like the LEGO games or Nintendo’s Amiibo games have been deliberate in presenting a gender-diverse array of playable characters. All of these indicate how normalized the production of games for girls has, to some extent, become.

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However, few games reflect the type of rigorous, research-driven focus on girls’ needs and concerns that Laurel pioneered. This isn’t to say that games on the market are necessarily bad but only that the opportunities for emotional rehearsal and personal reflection so deeply woven into Purple Moon’s games, so at the heart of Laurel’s design approach, are relatively rare at least among the games most directly targeting girls in the uneasy transition from childhood to the teen years.

Emotion in games The past few years have seen an increase in games, not necessarily for young players in particular, that aim to provide rich, often complicated, emotional experiences for players. For example, Gone Home (The Fulbright Company 2013) is a story exploration-based video game in which the player participates as Kaitlin, a college student who has returned home early to find her family absent. As Kaitlin/the player explores the house, she finds clues to where her parents and sister have gone and to the history of the house’s former occupant. Set in 1995, the at times eerie game is a meditation on the complexities of growing up, becoming who we’re meant to be, and what it feels like to see our parents as the flawed people they truly are. Minority Media’s Papo & Yo (2012) operates as narrative metaphor. The boy Quico hides from his abusive, alcoholic father and is transported to a dream-like favela where he meets Monster. Monster can be docile and playful, but if he eats a frog, he becomes dangerous and threatening. The game is based on designer Vander Caballero’s own experience growing up. Games like this are not only being produced by independent studios. AAA games from long-established studios, too, are increasingly working with content that seeks to engage players through complicated, emotionally driven stories. In 2013, media giant Sony published Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, a zombie-inspired post-apocalyptic game in which a man is tasked with protecting and escorting a young girl.

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While Beyond: Two Souls (Quantic Dream 2013) proved polarizing, writer and director David Cage’s effort to provide an interactive cinematic experience accessible to non-gamers garnered a premiere at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. The supernatural tale was a fitting follow up to the studio’s previous production, the noir-inspired thriller Heavy Rain (Sony Computer Entertainment 2010). These games are just a few key examples of games that provide players with opportunities for complex narratives that are fueled at least in part by rich emotional experiences. While Gone Home ends on a relatively optimistic note, the player as Kaitlin finds out family secrets and failings that are both incredibly painful and likely familiar to anyone who has gone through the messy process of coming to see their parents as people. The emotional navigation system by which players negotiate Rockett Movado’s world is one that has a clear legacy in games like Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead series in which players are regularly reminded that a character “will remember that,” a phrase that warns that player actions shape in-game relationships and responses, sometimes for the worse. Games that addressed players’ emotional lives were remarkable when Rockett’s New School and Secret Paths in the Forest first launched. But today the belief that games can provide emotional experiences, recount deeply personal stories, and even, potentially, help players work through their own emotional lives and health is increasingly widespread. Depression Quest (Quinn 2013) offers a text-based simulation of what it feels like to live as a young person with depression. dys4ia (Newgrounds 2012) is an autobiographical account of designer Anna Anthropy’s experience with hormone replacement therapy. Ryan and Amy Green made That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016) to share their experience of raising a child who was diagnosed with terminal cancer at twelve months of age. We Are Chicago (Culture Shock Games 2016) relays first-person accounts of people living in Chicago’s South Side. These games are disparate in theme and style, but all present experiences that are both deeply personal and emotionally fraught.

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Laurel’s legacy The legacy of individual designers and individual games or game series can be difficult to trace, but one way of doing so is to look for the “crash dummies” who tried something before it could work—who did things that weren’t quite possible because of technical limitations or who released products when the timing just wasn’t quite right. There are reasons that Purple Moon failed, but there are also reasons that girls who grew up playing Purple Moon games now as adults still join fan groups on Facebook, create detailed Wikis of Purple Moon’s narrative world, and write letters to Brenda Laurel saying that the games inspired their careers (“I Miss Purple Moon!” n.d.; “Purple Moon Wiki” n.d.). Laurel’s research and design principles and her willingness to not only focus on but listen to young girls as audience members have had a long-standing impact on the industry. In recent years, girls and women have gained visibility and at least some respect as an audience for computer games. While there are still Barbie games on the market— and, indeed, games associated with countless toy brands and animated characters—these games are often better designed than the pinkwashed games that preceded the games for girls movement. Further, empathy games—games that seek to provide rich emotional experiences for players—are increasingly visible. Regardless of whether Laurel could have predicted the growth and evolution of the game industry in the wake of Purple Moon, her innovations as a game designer in part made these changes possible. Laurel’s post-Purple Moon work as an educator, researcher, and consultant is also an important context in which to continue the influence of her perspective. Utopian Entrepreneur (2001) is a useful post mortem, and one Laurel has at times forwarded to her now-adult fans: One of the coolest things that has happened is that, as the players get older, when I get email from one of them I can send them my book about the whole adventure from a business and cultural perspective,

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Utopian Entrepreneur, so they can see how the sausage was made. Some of them write back and tell me that they’re going to explore starting their own businesses as a result. So it’s a lovely closing of the circle. (Laurel quoted in McManus 2009, n.p.)

Laurel has also worked more directly as a mentor and educator. From 2001 to 2006, she chaired the graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and from 2006 to 2012, she worked as professor and founding chair at the Graduate Program in design at California College of the Arts. During this period, she continued to research and speak on design and consult and produce design projects, including a stint as Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs where she worked on a new UI for television and film. That project was awarded a patent in 2010. What Laurel has learned from her own experience, she has in turn taught to a new generation of designers. Ultimately, the lessons of Laurel’s design career and design principles are manifold. There are threads of the work she did at Purple Moon visible through the shifts that have occurred across the games industry over the past twenty years. There are places where the principles she has advocated for—of the importance of girls as an audience, of the ability of interactive media to provide opportunities for personal growth and exploration—have become key to innovative uses of games as medium. And there are opportunities where her approach to design can be readily adopted to produce innovative content and reach new audiences. The principles of dramatic theory as applied to computer interaction in Computers as Theatre can help structure game narratives in ways that are effective and meaningful for players. Such an approach not only centers action but also effectively organizes around strategic goals and provides players with satisfying whole actions. Additionally, the notion of interfaces that feel interfaceless is worth revisiting as we are again in a moment when new immersive media technologies, including virtual reality systems, are ripe with possibilities and potential missteps. After all, as Jay David Bolder and Richard Grusin (1999) have noted,

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virtual reality is “a medium whose purpose is to disappear” even as VR interfaces remain clunky and uncomfortable (21, 22). Design research is still not widely practiced in game development, and as Laurel demonstrates, such an approach can open up new opportunity spaces, drive innovation, and ensure effective design. All of us can easily imagine players like ourselves, but in doing so we often miss the mark, or at the very least, fail to reach a diverse audience. Design research is a means to working towards reaching particular audiences where they already are and fulfilling the needs that they already have; we should not be developing technological solutions and then hoping we can find problems they might solve, but rather identifying problems and opportunities and then thinking through what kind of technological intervention might successfully address those. In game design as Laurel practices it, the players and their experiences in the game are always at the center of design; design research is not about marketing but rather about players, their unmet needs and desires, and the possibilities opened by efforts to reach them. The long-standing resonance of the Rockett Movado and Secret Paths games is evidence of Laurel’s influence—as are the letters from women who work in the industry who got their first taste for gaming from those games. Laurel’s legacy is also visible in the ongoing significance of Computers as Theatre for those who work in human–computer interaction, interface design, and game design, and in the dozens of research papers that discuss the VR experience that Laurel, Rachel Strickland, and Rob Tow produced for Placeholder. Finally, Laurel’s most recent academic work as a teacher, mentor, researcher, and speaker is also important to consider. Through it, she has helped shape many designers, training them in research and design practices drawn from her own substantial experience. If there is a final lesson from Laurel’s professional career in interaction and game design, it is just how simultaneously risky and rewarding it can be to work at the cutting edge. As a crash dummy in the games for girls movement of the 1990s, Laurel had the opportunity to found a company, but she also faced firsthand the difficulties of

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producing innovative products in a market that is in a state of profound upheaval. As a venture intended to make money for those who started it, Purple Moon failed, but as a venture intended to produce games that addressed girls’ real lived experiences, including the complexities of their social and emotional lives, Purple Moon was successful, and it was successful largely because of Laurel’s guiding hand as VP of Design. If we are to believe that game design can be an art, then we must believe that design can be successful by measures other than money. Purple Moon’s games continue to resonate with players years later because they demonstrate the success of an unusual and extremely powerful research-driven design process and of an innovative focus on girls as an important audience.

Gameography Written with Megan Boeshart Burelle This gameography covers many of Laurel’s important works, but it is necessarily partial. The US games industry is volatile. Company closures often mean that games disappear. Historically many games have not included credits, and some work is necessarily uncredited as nondisclosure agreements and other contractual obligations can deliberately obscure the work individuals do, particularly when they are serving as outside consultants. Despite these limitations, this gameography does capture several stages of Laurel’s career, including design, production, and consulting work carried out over multiple decades. Worth noting is that during her time at Atari, Laurel served as Manager of the Atari Home Software Development Group, leading a team of strategists working closely with programmers to produce games on the Atari 400/800 platform. In this role, Laurel worked as producer on a number of ports of popular games including Space Invaders (which was released for the Atari 400/800 in 1980), Centipede (released for Atari 400/800 in 1981), Pac-Man (released for Atari 400/800 in 1982), and Ms. Pac-Man (released for Atari 400/800 in 1983), among others. While we have excluded these from the gameography as they do not necessarily reflect Laurel’s design work, they are worth mentioning as they demonstrate the diversity of Laurel’s experience in the game industry. The titles and projects included here are sorted by company with the exception of consulting works which are their own category; this category is necessarily incomplete given the realities of nondisclosure. For game designers who frequently work as consultants, much of their work is hidden either by legal requirements or by the complexities of viewing game credits at all. This disappearing act can be one of the ways that women’s work in the industry vanishes. In light of all of these factors, this gameography gives a roughly chronological overview of projects, but does exclude her published theoretical and research work as it falls outside the scope of this listing. However,

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publication details for major projects are included in the works cited for this book.

CyberVision Goldilocks

1977/8

Platform: CyberVision

Role: Designer

Sales: N/A

Franchise: N/A

Goldilocks is an interactive and animated fantasy narrative game version of the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Hangman

1977/8

Platform: CyberVision

Role: Designer

Sales: N/A

Franchise: N/A

Hangman is a digital version of the paper and pencil game. Players are given a word to guess, each letter represented by a dash. If the player guesses letters that do not appear in the word, small pieces of the man are drawn onto the gallows. The player loses if the drawing of the man is completed. Laurel created the first lip-synching on a microcomputer for this game in which the evil executioner delivered menacing lines in a Transylvanian accent (all this with only sixteen lip positions).

Activision Little Computer People

1985, 1987

Platform: Amiga, Amstrad Role: Producer CPC, Apple II, Atari ST, PC-88, PC-98, ZX Spectrum Sales: N/A

Franchise: N/A

Little Computer People is a life simulation game. The player has a side view of the three-story house. Players are able to interact with the characters that move into the house. The player can play games like poker with the pixelated person. The player could provide the person with food and water to keep him active and healthy. Without the food and water he would grow weak and get in his bed, but the character would not die. Laurel inherited the project when she came to Activision. It had already been published on the Commodore 64 and was in the process of being published onto other platforms.

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Labyrinth: The Computer Game

1986

Platform: Apple II, Commodore 64, MSX, PC-88

Role: Designer/Producer

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Lucasfilm Games LLC

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Labyrinth

Adaptation of the film Labyrinth (1986), Labyrinth: The Computer Game is a graphic adventure game in which the player navigates through a maze while solving puzzles. The player must locate and destroy Jareth, the Goblin King, within 13 hours of real-time play. The game features two “word wheels,” rather than a command-line interface. Players choose a noun and a verb from the word wheels in order to deliver commands. Early in development, the team collaborated with author Douglas Adams.

Laser Surgeon: The Microscopic Mission

1987

Platform: DOS, TRS-80 CoCo

Role: Producer

Publisher: Activision, Inc.

Developer: Synergistic Software, Inc.

Sales: N/A

Franchise: N/A

Laser Surgeon is an educational game that requires the player to start as a medical trainee and work up ranks for each successful surgery completed. The gameplay requires the player to identify which cell(s) need to be operated on and decide how to proceed with treatment. The game includes an in-game help file to help the player learn about microscopic cells that are in the game.

Creative Consultant Work Maniac Mansion

1987

Platform: NES, Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS

Role: Manual Writer/Producer

Publisher: Lucasfilm Games LLC

Developer: Lucasfilm Games LLC

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Maniac Mansion

Maniac Mansion is a point-and-click graphic adventure game. Lucasfilm Games’ success with Labyrinth: THe Computer Game influenced the technology and mechanics used to create Maniac Mansion and the SCUMM engine used to create the game was reused in many Lucasfilm adventure games. Maniac Mansion follows Dave as he solves puzzles in order to save his girlfriend from a mad scientist. The game can be completed in various ways based on player choices.

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The Secret of Monkey Island

1990

Platform: Amiga, Atari ST, DOS, Macintosh, Sega CD

Role: Creative Consultant

Publisher: Lucasfilm Games LLC

Developer: Lucasfilm Games LLC

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Monkey Island Series

Secret of Monkey Island is a 2D point-and-click graphic adventure game created with the SCUMM engine that takes place in the Caribbean during the age of piracy. The player plays as Guybrush Threepwood. Guybrush dreams of being a pirate and he sets out on an exploration adventure to complete the island pirate leader’s three trials. The player’s character is unable to die (unless the player leaves Guybrush underwater for 10 minutes), so that gameplay focuses on exploration, rather than staying alive. Players solve puzzles in order to continue exploration.

1990

Balance of the Planet Platform: DOS, Macintosh, PC-98

Role: Creative Consultant

Publisher: Chris Crawford Games

Developer: Chris Crawford Games

Sales: N/A

Franchise: N/A

Balance of the Planet is an environmental management simulation game that focuses on Earth’s ecosystem. The player must try to influence society to help the environment, such as by offering funding or granting subsidies for the use of particular energy sources. The game is highly customizable and allows the player to begin with certain prejudices within the society, such as the society being pro-nuclear. The player has nine turns to influence society into making environmentally friendly choices.

Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle

1993

Platform: DOS, Macintosh

Role: Producer

Publisher: Erbe Software, S.A.

Developer: Lucasfilm Games LLC

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Maniac Mansion

Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle is a point-and-click graphic adventure game and sequel to Maniac Mansion. The game follows Bernard Bernoulli and his two friends, Hoagie and Laverne. The player must play as the three characters and solve puzzles in order to travel through time using a faulty time machine in order to stop the evil Purple Tentacle from taking over the world. The game is the eighth LucasArts game to use the SCUMM engine. The title continued the tradition of LucasArts to create games that were focused more on exploration rather than survival. A remaster of the game was created and released for Playstation, Windows, and OSX in March 2016.

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Interval PLACEHOLDER: Landscape and Narrative in a Virtual Environment Platform: Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays at Banff Centre for the Arts.

1993

Role: Co-director with Rachel Strickland

The Placeholder project was a virtual reality experiment exploring multiperson narrative action in a simulated landscape by the player. The project was produced by Interval Research Corporation and the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts. The project incorporated local mythology and actual locations in the Canadian Rockies. These virtual environments could be visited concurrently by two participants wearing the head-mounted displays. The Placeholder archive includes working papers, published reports, video clips, sounds, and retrospective comments.

Purple Moon Rockett’s New School

1997

Platform: PC/Mac

Role: Creator/Designer

Publisher: Purple Moon

Developer: Purple Moon

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Rockett Series

Rockett’s New School is a visual novel computer game that follows Rockett Movado entering 8th grade at Whistling Pines Junior High, her new school. The gameplay focuses on Rockett’s first day of school and the player must help Rockett navigate decisions centered around meeting new people, learning about school cliques, and making friends. It was the first game created by Purple Moon.

Rockett’s Tricky Decision

1998

Platform: PC/Mac

Role: Creator/Designer

Publisher: Purple Moon

Developer: Purple Moon

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Rockett Series

Rockett’s Tricky Decision is the second game to be released in the Rockett series. The game is a visual novel computer game that is focused on the player helping Rockett navigate her school day and social interactions, particularly whether she should choose to attend her friend Nakili’s party or Max’s party, which her crush Rueben will be attending.

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Rockett’s Secret Invitation

1998

Platform: PC/Mac

Role: Creator/Designer

Publisher: Purple Moon

Developer: Purple Moon

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Rockett

Rockett’s Secret Invitation is a visual novel computer game that is part of the Rockett series created by Purple Moon. The game follows Rockett right before winter break starts when she receives an invitation to become a member of one of the school’s most elite cliques, the Cool Sagittarius Girls. The player must help Rockett decide whether to tell the girls that she isn’t actually a Sagittarius. The truth glasses feature is introduced in this game. This allows the player to listen to the thoughts of various characters before making decisions if the player can locate the glasses in the Hidden Hallway.

Rockett’s First Dance

1998

Platform: PC/Mac

Role: Creator/Designer

Publisher: Purple Moon

Developer: Purple Moon

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Rockett

Rockett’s First Dance is a visual novel computer game focused around the school Valentine’s Dance. The player must help Rockett make decisions that including voting for King & Queen as well as how to handle a situation where she sees Max stuffing extra votes into the ballot boxes. She must also choose whether to vote for Ruben’s band or the other band, Arrow & The Explorers. The game also includes the truth glasses feature that was introduced in the previous game.

Rockett’s Adventure Maker Platform: PC/Mac

Role: Creator/Designer

Publisher: Purple Moon

Developer: Purple Moon

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Rockett

1998

Rockett’s Adventure Maker diverges from the rest of the Rockett series in that it isn’t a visual novel. It includes three game modes. The first mode, Yearbook, allows the player to read biographies of the students at school with Rockett, as well as edit biographies of original characters that players create. The second mode, Make a Friend, allows players to create original characters in paper doll fashion, choosing body type, skin color, facial features, and clothing to create the characters. The third mode, Make an Adventure, allows the player to create their own story scenarios with their original characters, allowing players to choose elements like the background, characters, and props.

Gameography

Secret Paths in the Forest

147

1997

Platform: PC/Mac

Role: Creator/Designer

Publisher: Purple Moon

Developer: Purple Moon

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Secret Paths

Secret Paths in the Forest is a puzzle game, which is set about one year before the Rockett series, but was released concurrently with Rockett’s New School. The game follows a group of seven girls that have bonded in a secret place and converted it into a girls-only clubhouse. The stories of the game are split into optional story arcs that follow specific characters. Each girl has a power and can lead the player through a door of the clubhouse to a secret path. Solving puzzles allows the player to reveal secret path stones. When all the stones are collected, they form a necklace that displays a fable that helps the character answer her problem.

Secret Paths to the Sea

1998

Platform: PC/Mac

Role: Creator/Designer

Publisher: Purple Moon

Developer: Purple Moon

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Secret Paths

Secret Paths to the Sea is a narrative puzzle game that follows seven friends that meet in a secret lighthouse hideaway. The player must explore winding waterways and solve puzzles along the way in order to collect secret stones. The secret stones hold special messages for the characters. Finding all of the stones will allow the player to create a necklace. Giving the necklace to each character allows the player to view folk tales with special messages for each character.

Starfire Soccer Challenge

1998

Platform: PC/Mac

Role: Creator/Designer

Publisher: Purple Moon

Developer: Purple Moon

Sales: N/A

Franchise: Starfire Challenge

Starfire Soccer Challenge is a visual novel and sports game. The player makes decisions about character interactions and about making friendships that follow Ginger, a character introduced initially in the Rockett series. The player solves puzzles to reveal information about other players’ personalities and skills. The player must help Ginger participate in tryouts, and the game allows the player to determine who makes the soccer team.

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Index Acting. See theater Activision 1, 2, 32, 36, 54, 101, 103, 142 agency 11, 39, 58, 59, 68, 69, 101, 102–3, 107, 115, 125, 132 Allen, Paul 1 Alternate Reality Games 60 American Girl 102, 134 Apple 1, 32, 36, 61, 101 Apyx 1 Aristotle 3, 12, 34, 35, 57, 58, 60, 127 four causes 57 organic whole 57 six elements 57–8 art/artist xi, 8, 15, 21, 27, 42, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 103, 106, 115, 119, 122, 141. See also theater Atari xi, 1, 9, 32, 34, 35, 36, 55, 101, 103, 143 Home Computer Division 10, 33 Sunnyvale Research Labs 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 33, 34, 36, 51–2, 54, 60, 101 audience 1, 2, 6, 12, 14, 41, 60, 62, 74, 87, 88, 108, 129, 135 centered design 2, 6–7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 19, 20, 23, 26, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 44, 47, 48–9, 61, 69, 72, 79, 93, 94, 99, 111, 112, 113–14, 123, 124, 128, 138, 139, 141 experience 35, 47, 87 involvement 54, 74 augmented reality 109, 129. See also virtual reality Ballantine, Ian 103 Banff Centre for the Arts 62, 102, 145

Barbie. See Mattel: Barbie Barlow, John Perry xii, 102 Battelle 103 Berry, Danielle Buenten 75, 94 Beyond: Two Souls 27, 135 boys/boyhood 2, 5, 7, 18, 39, 41, 43, 44, 102, 110, 113, 117, 120, 121, 133 Bradbury, Ray 36, 55 Brecht, Bertolt 12, 34, 109 Brøderbund 1 CD-ROM 6, 61, 120, 131, 132 Centipede 141 character design 41, 58, 62, 68, 73, 84, 87, 90–1, 93, 127, 128 Arrow 83, 89, 90, 146 Ginger 18, 42–3, 83, 86, 90, 91, 150 Miko 28, 67, 83 Minh 68, 69, 84 Nicole 67, 80, 83, 89, 122 Rockett 6, 8, 28, 39–40, 43, 66, 67, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 87, 89, 90, 93, 126, 132, 146, 147 Sharla 18, 39–40, 83, 84 Viva 89, 90 Cheskin 36, 38 children/childhood 1, 5, 8, 12, 17, 31, 44, 74, 85, 108, 110, 113, 133, 134 choose your own adventure 107, 117. See also point-and-click Commodore 64 console 20 community. See fan communities computer games ix, 9, 12, 22, 23, 31, 35, 39, 51, 61, 87, 92, 94, 99, 109, 110, 138 industry 9, 22

162

Index

Computers as Theatre 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 17, 20, 21, 27, 33, 52, 53, 56, 59, 60, 69, 93, 107, 137, 138 Crawford, Chris xi criticism 8, 29, 41, 44, 60 culture work 15 CyberVision 1, 2, 10, 11, 21, 36, 51, 53, 99, 103, 107, 109, 142 Depression Quest 95, 135 design 5, 16, 26 character see character design -driven approach 26 ethos 6, 52, 93, 95 heuristic 10–11, 17, 19, 31, 39, 41, 44, 56, 66, 69, 111, 114 human-centered 45, 46 interaction 10, 12, 17, 25, 27, 34, 69, 124, 131 interface 9, 10, 12, 27, 29, 53, 59, 70, 99, 138 market 19, 110 principles 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 24–5, 27, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 44, 45–6, 48, 52, 60, 66, 72, 94, 125, 132, 136, 137 research x, 2, 3, 7, 8, 15, 17–20, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37–9, 40, 41, 44, 45–6, 47, 48–9, 52, 69, 72, 99, 110, 111, 112–13, 119, 121, 122, 124, 134, 137, 138, 139 Design Research: Methods and Perspectives 45 “Design Research, Practice, and Principles for Digital Kids” report 31, 33, 45, 46 diary 81, 92, 113 digital culture 21 digital nineties 62 dissertation 1, 2, 3, 9, 33, 34, 35, 54 dot-com 3 bubble 132 drama/dramatic x, 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 27, 34, 35, 36, 53, 54, 55,

56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66, 69–70, 85, 86, 93, 99, 110, 125, 137 DreamWorks Interactive 6 Duncan, Theresa 29 dys4ia 95, 135 education x, 1, 9, 13, 36, 41, 46, 52, 53, 56, 69, 85, 103 educational games 10, 85, 95, 103 Electronic Arts (EA) 111 embodiment 64, 65, 105, 106, 125 emotion 43, 66, 69, 73, 80, 93 emotional experience 35, 66, 69, 72, 94, 95, 134, 135, 136 navigation 75, 76, 79, 81, 94, 95, 96, 135 rehearsal 13, 66, 71, 73, 74, 77, 79–80, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 115, 134 response 24, 39, 73, 76, 77, 79, 93 empathy games 24, 27, 30, 72, 85, 95, 135, 136 Entertainment Software Association (ESA) 26, 29, 133 entrepreneurship 3, 5, 16, 21 feminism 5, 15 Epyx 32, 36, 101, 103 Exploratorium 31, 46 fable 1, 17, 83, 85, 86, 118, 147 fan communities 22, 23, 73, 74, 86, 92, 96, 109, 136 feelies 23 feminism 8, 26, 29, 42, 71, 119, 128 friendship 6, 8, 68, 73, 81, 90 “friendship adventures for girls” 8, 27, 28, 71, 79, 97 Game Developer Conference (GDC) xi, xii, 1 game industry ix, x, 1–2, 3, 8, 22, 26, 29, 30, 33, 37, 41, 72, 99, 103, 133, 136, 138, 141 consumer demographics 5, 26, 29

Index games for girls movement 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 29, 94, 123, 133, 136, 138 gender 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 18, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 36, 38, 41, 72, 94, 96, 102, 104, 112, 113, 119, 127, 128, 133 Gibson, William 21, 59 Girl Games, Inc. 5, 6 girlhood 42 identity 13, 71, 74, 84, 89 inner lives 13, 17, 61, 71, 90, 93, 111, 114, 122 self-awareness 6, 17, 80, 90 self-expression 79, 90 self-reflection 17, 66, 90, 92, 93 social lives 8, 13, 40, 43, 53, 61, 66, 71, 73, 79, 80, 89, 93, 113, 117, 132, 139 Girltech 5 Gone Home 27, 41, 134, 135 Google 104, 106 Grateful Dead xii, xiii, 102, 104, 106, 126 Hamlet on the Holodeck 12 Hasbro Interactive 6, 32 Heavy Rain 135 Her Interactive 5, 6, 29, 102 Heuristic. See design: heuristic human-computer interaction (HCI) x, 3, 9, 10, 20, 21–2, 23, 27, 28, 44, 51, 52, 56–7, 58, 60, 70, 85, 99, 138 humanism 10, 15, 20, 85 identity. See girlhood: identity Interaction Design Association (IDA) 131, 132 interactive 11, 14, 21, 23, 25, 27, 35, 52, 53, 59, 61, 72, 99, 101, 107, 108, 109, 124, 135 emotionally-driven 24, 69 fairytales 1, 10, 51, 54, 99, 101, 117

163

fantasy 33, 35, 54, 55, 60 fiction 76, 96 storytelling 9, 73, 76, 107 see also storytelling theater 1, 51, 59, 60 interactor 11, 58, 65, 66 interdisciplinarity 2, 3, 26, 34, 56, 57, 70 interface 11, 18, 44, 53, 59, 65, 69, 70, 91, 94, 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 117, 124, 137, 138, 143. See also design: interface Interval Research Corporation 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 34, 36, 37, 38, 48, 60, 62, 64, 85, 94, 99, 102, 145 Kay, Alan 54, 101, 103, 122 Labyrinth: The Computer Game 103, 143 L.A. Noire 95 The Last of Us 134 Leary, Timothy 59, 103 Liddle, David 1, 39, 102, 119 literacy 87 Lorimier, Lucinda De 118 LucasArts 1, 54, 101, 103 Lucasfilm 54, 103 ludology 14, 35–6, 86, 95 Lunenfeld, Peter 102 Macarthur Foundation 31, 46 magic circle 74 Manley, Carol xi Mattel 6, 15, 19, 32, 44, 76, 81, 86, 87, 92, 102, 119, 131, 132, 133 Barbie 7, 20, 136 Barbie Fashion Designer 6, 7, 119 mechanics 6, 20, 38, 76, 80, 81, 86, 103, 111, 118, 124, 129, 143 Microsoft Kinect 65, 129 Miller, Joe 103 Ms. Pac-Man 101, 141

164

Index

multidisciplinarity x multi-user dungeon (MUD) 53 Myst 61

123, 127, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 139, 145 puzzle 28, 39, 80, 83, 86, 117

Naimark, Michael 102 narrative 10, 12, 14, 23, 24, 34, 39, 40, 41, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 107, 109, 111, 125, 127, 134, 135, 136, 137. See also storytelling Narrative as Virtual Reality 12 NASA 63, 104 nature 17, 19, 81, 109, 117, 129 navigation systems 24, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 94, 135 Nintendo 133

research-driven design. See design: research-driven Rhizome 29 Robin Hood 51, 99, 108–9 Rockett Movado. See character design: Rockett Rockett Movado series 6, 13, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 39, 40, 42, 61, 66, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 115–16, 131, 132, 138 Cool Sagittarius Girls 76 Rockett’s Adventure Maker 73, 81, 88–9, 91, 92, 147 Rockett’s Camp Adventures 74, 76, 81, 132 Rockett’s First Dance 28, 39, 40, 74, 133, 146 Rockett’s New School 6, 13, 27, 41, 42, 71, 73, 78, 112, 135, 145 Rockett’s Secret Invitation 27, 73, 75, 76, 146 Rockett’s Tricky Decision 66, 67, 73, 89, 146 Rockett’s World book series 86–7, 132

Pac-Man 141 Papo & Yo 134 Paramount 1, 104 Phillips Media 6 pinkwash 7, 10, 28, 136 Placeholder: Landscape and Narrative in a Virtual Environment 53, 62–3, 64, 65, 66, 70, 104, 138, 145. See also virtual reality play 5–6, 13, 26, 28, 39, 42, 44, 66, 81, 94, 111 player experience 13, 14, 52, 66, 70, 94 play testing 37, 126 point-and-click 72, 81, 94, 96, 134 psychology 35, 41, 57, 74, 92, 112 Purple Moon 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 52, 60, 61, 66, 69, 71, 72, 74, 80, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93–4, 96, 102, 114, 116, 119, 121, 122,

science fiction 21, 36, 55 The Secret of Monkey Island 103, 144 Secret Paths series 6, 8, 13, 17, 25, 28, 39, 40, 60–1, 66, 71, 72, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 112, 114, 118, 131, 138 Secret Paths in the Forest 27, 28, 42, 68, 81, 82, 83, 84, 112, 135, 147 Secret Paths to the Sea 80, 81, 83, 90, 133, 147 Secret Paths to Your Dreams 81, 92, 132

Index Sega 6 serious games. See educational games Sery, Doug 102 Siggraph 106 Silicon Graphics 63, 104 Silicon Valley 2, 9, 52, 56 simulation 16, 35, 41, 54, 55, 65, 135 “Simulation of an Interactive Fantasy System” 54, 55 software design 52, 59 Something Wicked This Way Comes 55 Sony 1, 32, 104 Space Invaders 141 Space Shuttle Operator’s Manual 103 Spent 95 sports 18, 19, 42, 43, 44, 72, 86, 117 Starfire Soccer Challenge 18, 19, 25, 42–3, 44, 84, 86, 94, 117, 132, 150 storytelling 1, 9, 12, 14, 16, 54, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 76, 85, 87, 93, 99, 101, 107, 124. See also narrative; interactive: storytelling Strickland, Rachel 53, 62, 65, 102, 138. See also Placeholder Sun Microsystems 137 teaching x, 110–11, 139 That Dragon, Cancer 135 theater x, 1, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 27, 33, 34, 35, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 65, 69, 74, 85, 99, 107, 108, 109

165

Tomb Raider 96 Tow, Rob xv, 62, 65, 102, 138 “Toward the Design of a ComputerBased Interactive Fantasy System”. See dissertation toys 6, 7, 23–4, 32, 42, 72, 86, 87, 94, 113, 132, 133, 136 transmedia 22, 23, 60, 61, 86, 87, 95. See also storytelling twitch skill 39 user interface. See interface Utopian Entrepreneur 3, 5, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 45, 102, 120, 136, 137 virtual reality ix, x, 3, 9, 16, 52, 53, 62, 63, 64–6, 69, 70, 102, 105–6, 129, 137–8. See also Placeholder Vivarium 101 The Walking Dead series 95, 135 Warner Bros. 101, 103 We Are Chicago 135 Weird Ed 103 whole actions 11, 13–14, 30, 57, 58, 61, 66, 69–70, 71, 80, 84, 85–6, 93, 94, 95, 132, 137 Winnie the Pooh 12, 14 worldbuilding 14, 61, 72, 86, 88, 89 World of Warcraft 22, 106 youth 1, 31, 41