As men took over the video game industry, Brenda Laurel pioneered girls’ games
This VR pioneer had a radical idea — girls’ games shouldn’t be dumbed down versions of boys’ games
Brenda Laurel spent most of the 1980s in arcades. Personal home computers had yet to become mainstream, but Laurel saw their potential. She wanted to understand whether youth recognized that the arcade games they loved so much were, in fact, computers. They didn’t. And they didn’t hesitate to tell her so. “Lady, this is not a computer,” Laurel recalls one boy telling her, in her contribution to the anthology Women, Art & Technology. “Computers are smart. This is just a stupid video game.”
Laurel made a career out of challenging the early belief that video games were just games. She has been at the forefront of socially responsible video games and the burgeoning field of virtual reality (VR) for nearly 40 years.
That Brenda Laurel has been so integral to the development of video games and virtual reality is surprising, considering that her background is in the arts, not tech. At Ohio State University, she earned an M.F.A. in acting and directing and, later, a Ph.D. in dramatic theory and criticism.
It’s not clear exactly how she made the transition to computer work, but she was fascinated by them from an early age. She received her first computer, an Eniac, at the age of 12, as a prize in a Halloween costume contest hosted by Ace Hardware. (She had dressed up as an ear of corn.) But the computers of 1962 were a far cry from those of today. “For a moment,” Laurel writes in her 2001 Mediawork pamphlet, Utopian Entrepreneur, “I was transported out of my chickenwire cage, out of the age of schoolbooks and typewriters, and into a glorious time when computers would answer all the really hard questions for us. Maybe it could even explain to me what I was doing in the hardware store dressed as an ear of corn.” But the Eniac was a closed system that came with a set of pre-programmed questions and responses. The human interacting with it had only one role: to turn the crank.
In 1980, Laurel was managing software planning and marketing for Atari’s new Home Computer Division. While there, she developed a theory of first-person presence — where the game’s action is seen from the perspective of the player moving through the virtual world — and worked with artificial intelligence to improve the quality of interactive games. But by 1983 she was fed up. She wanted to create humanistic games, not the crash-’em-up, journey-to-find-the-princess variety. “Socially responsible people must take up the challenge of creating games and movies and stories that both engage and nurture young people,” Laurel writes in Utopian Entrepreneur.
By the 1990s, as personal computers and video game consoles became increasingly ubiquitous, Laurel was grappling with a glaring problem: there were no computer games geared toward girls. “The whole industry consolidated very quickly around a young male demographic — all the way from gameplay design to the arcade environment to the retail world — and it made no sense for a company to swim against the tide in all three areas at once,” she writes in 2003’s Women, Art & Technology.
Without games that engaged them, girls were falling behind boys in computer skills. The obvious solution was to create and market video games that interested girls, but there was no clear consensus on what those games might look like. When she was hired at a new tech research laboratory, Interval Research Corporation, in 1992, Laurel made it her job to find out. She and her team interviewed more than a thousand children and hundreds of adults, both academics and parents. In one study, they asked preteen girls to take photos of things that were important to them.
Four years into their research, Laurel co-founded the company Purple Moon and began creating interactive games for girls. Even as late as the 1990s, the strategy employed in creating girls’ games (on the rare occasion they got made) was basically to take boys’ games and dumb them down. In Utopian Entrepreneur, Laurel describes her “favorite,” Barbie, published by Epyx for the Commodore 64 in 1985:
Barbie was at the mall, shopping for the right outfit to wear on her date with Ken. Now, “everyone knows” that girls aren’t good at shooting games, so the designers reasoned that the game should make it easier for them. The brilliant solution: make projectiles that move slowly. And so it was decided that the action component of the game would consist of throwing marshmallows.
Rather than adjust games for boys, Purple Moon wanted to create alternatives built for girls, ones that wouldn’t take advantage of girls’ insecurities the way fashion and cosmetics companies often did. The strategy worked. In 1997, two of Purple Moon’s “Friendship Adventures,” Rockett’s New School and Secret Paths in the Forest, were named on PC Data’s list of the year’s top entertainment titles. In those games, players went adventure hunting for treasures and created new characters for the worlds Purple Moon built. On the website, girls used a postcard system to organize swap meets and exchange the treasures they found inside the games and formed clubs based on sports interests and favorite video game characters. The company launched seven more games via CD-ROM, including the first line of sports games for girls, before investors pulled their support and the company was sold to Mattel. Afterwards, Laurel and her colleagues held a wake for Rockett Movado, the heroine of the Friendship Adventures, replete with black candles and a bottle of Irish whiskey.
Since Rockett Movado’s passing, Laurel has turned to educating up-and-coming designers of computer technology, games, and immersive VR experiences. Virtual reality has become one of her primary areas of focus in recent years. As far back as the early 1990s, Laurel was toying with the VR landscape. In 1993, she and co-designer Rachel Strickland created Placeholder, a VR experience displayed at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. Inside the virtual environment, two participants could pass through portals into three different worlds taken from the geography around Banff National Park — a sulfur hot spring in a cave, a waterfall, and a formation of hoodoos — and take on the bodies and voices of four spirit animals: a crow, spider, snake, or fish.
VR has advanced since the 1990s, but the frenzy surrounding the technology is not without pitfalls, as Laurel explained in her 2016 Medium essay “What Is Virtual Reality”:
Almost immediately after the new trend began, people started shopping 360° immersive video as VR. It is not. “Surround” movies are marketed as VR. They are not. “VR Storytelling” is a misnomer; it is not structurally VR. “Second Life” is described as VR. It is not… There is no such thing as “desktop VR…” When we use the term just because it’s sexy, its meaning spreads like an oil slick over our media and dilutes it such a degree that we no longer know what it means .
Instead, Laurel explains, virtual reality is total sensory immersion. It needs to feel real. Changing light, crescendoing and fading noise, and the ability to use both hands to touch and manipulate the environment (if hands are involved at all) are all crucial to the journey.
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