game-based learning

[Richard Gaskin]

Great stuff, Marielle.  I was especially interested in the comments 
about girl gaming.

I saw Brenda Laurel give the closing keynote at CHI-98, where she talked 
about her experience doing usability research to found her company 
Purple Moon (since killed by the Mattel juggernaut).

Reinforcing the observations you noted, one of the most interesting 
things she noted about girl gamers is their attraction to complexity. 
According to Laurel's research spanning a 10-year period, the reason 
girls don't play a lot of boy-oriented games is not because they're too 
difficult, but just the opposite, that the game play is often too 
simplistic.

With Purple Moon, Laurel tried to create games that appealed to girls' 
appreciation for complex relationships.  Much of the game play involved 
ethical questions in social simulation scenarios (e.g., do I go to the 
birthday party for the unpopular girl or accept the invitation for the 
party by the most popular girl for the same day?), and the complexity of 
the issues involved certainly carried greater variance in play than 
"shoot the zombie".

One of the key aspects Laurel touched on was the self-fulfilling 
prophesy of game designers:  having delivered games aimed at boys, game 
designers look to low sales among girls as a false reinforcement of the 
notion that "girls aren't into gaming".

That was one of the things I loved most about Myst when it premiered.  I 
don't play a lot of games, but Myst appealed to a much broader market 
than games had previously addressed.  It was in many respects the first 
truly literate game, and its focus on environmental immersion and long, 
complex puzzles was a radically meditative departure from the 
shoot-em-up twitchers that continue to dominate the market.

A thousand Myst-like games have been created since (including the great 
Alida <http://www.runrev.com/spotlight_on/alida1.php>), and while 
they've been fun I keep wondering if there's an entirely new type of 
game waiting to be created, something as different from everything else 
we've seen as Myst was for its time.

Somewhere out there is a game waiting to be created, something that will 
open up the world of entertainment software to a whole new audience that 
isn't currently into games.

Or as I once put it at a game developer meeting:  Where is the "Catcher 
  in the Rye" of games, the thing that will appeal to people who like 
rich, provocative entertainment but aren't attracted to current game 
play models?

Maybe it'll be made by one of the readers of this list....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin Managing Editor, revJournal
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