Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/2807565.2807709acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesgenderitConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Lessons Learned With Girls, Games, and Design

Published: 24 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Girls have long been dismissed and trivialized by the game industry. The Girls' Game Movement of the 1990s aimed to create games specifically for girls, but ultimately struggled to reach consensus on whether to make games catering to the feminine content that girls expressed interest in, or whether to challenge gender stereotypes and guide the ways that girls engage with games. Other research-based programs and interventions to engage girls in game design have faced similar difficulties, attempting to find balance between respecting girls' values and empowering them as designers. This paper offers a review of these programs, highlighting similarities in findings about what girls value in games and design, and synthesizing shared challenges and struggles. Analyzing past programs can be invaluable to contemporary educators, scholars, and designers looking to engage girls with game design and technology.

References

[1]
American Association of University Women Foundation Commission on Technology, Gender, and Teacher Education. Tech-savvy: Educating girls in the new computer age, 2008. Retrieved from: http://history.aauw.org/files/2013/01/TechSavvy.pdf
[2]
Beato, G. Girl games. Wired, 5, 4 (2007). http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.04/es_girlgames.html?person=brenda_laurel&topic_set=wiredpeople
[3]
Berland, M., & Lee, V. R. Collaborative strategic board games as a site for distributed computational thinking. International Journal of Game-Based Learning, 1,2 (2001).
[4]
Brunner, C. Games and technological desire: Another decade. In Kafai, Y., Heeter, C., Denner, J. & Sun, J. Y. eds. From Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New perspectives on gender and gaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
[5]
Brunner, C., Hawkins, J., & Honey, M. Making meaning: Technological expertise and the use of metaphor. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, 1988.
[6]
Cassell, J. & Jenkins, H. Chess for girls? Feminism and computer games. In Cassell, J. & Jenkins, H. eds. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and computer games. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998.
[7]
Cassell, J. & Jenkins, H. Interview with Brenda Laurel. In Cassell, J. & Jenkins, H. eds. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and computer games. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998.
[8]
De Castell, S. & Bryson, M. Retooling play: Dystopia, dysphoria, and difference. In Cassell, J. & Jenkins, H. eds. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and computer games. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998.
[9]
Denner, J. The Girls Creating Games Program: An innovative approach to integrating technology into middle school. Meridian: A Middle School Computer Technologies Journal, 1, 10 (2007).
[10]
Denner, J., Bean, S., & Martinez, J. The Girls Game Company: Engaging Latina girls in information technology. Afterschool Matters, 8, (2009), 26--35.
[11]
Denner, J. & Campe, S. What games made by girls can tell us. In Kafai, Y., Heeter, C., Denner, J. & Sun, J. Y. eds. From Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New perspectives on gender and gaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
[12]
Flanagan, M., Howe, D. C., & Nissenbaum, H. Values at play: Design tradeoffs in socially-oriented game design. In Proc. SIGCHI 2005, ACM (2005).
[13]
Flanagan, M. & Nissenbaum, H. Design heuristics for activist games. In Kafai, Y., Heeter, C., Denner, J. & Sun, J. Y. eds. From Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New perspectives on gender and gaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
[14]
Gee, G. P. What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy (2nd ed.). Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2007.
[15]
Gee, J. P. & Hayes, E. R. Women and gaming: The Sims and 21st century learning. Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2010.
[16]
Hayes, E. Girls, gaming, and trajectories of IT experience. In Kafai, Y., Heeter, C., Denner, J. & Sun, J. Y. eds. From Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New perspectives on gender and gaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
[17]
Hayes, E. R., & King, E. M. Not just a dollhouse: What The Sims 2 can teach us about women's IT learning. On the Horizon, 17, 1 (2009), 60--69.
[18]
Heeter, C. & Winn B. Gender identity, play style, and the design of games for classroom learning In Kafai, Y., Heeter, C., Denner, J. & Sun, J. Y. eds. From Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New perspectives on gender and gaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
[19]
Honey, M., Moeller, B., Brunner, C., Bennett, D., Clements, P., & Hawkins, J. Girls and design: Exploring the question of technological imagination, 1991. Retrieved from: http://cct.edc.org/sites/cct.edc.org/files/publications/08_1991.pdf
[20]
Jenkins, H. & Cassell, J. From Quake Grrls to Desperate Housewives: A decade of gender and computer games. In Kafai, Y., Heeter, C., Denner, J. & Sun, J. Y. eds. From Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New perspectives on gender and gaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
[21]
Johnson, D. Devaluing and revaluing seriality: The gendered discourses of media franchising. Media, Culture & Society, 33, 7 (2011), 1077--1093.
[22]
Kafai, Y. B. Gender differences in children's constructions of video games. In P. Greenfield & R. Cocking eds. Interacting with video, Ablex Publishing, Norwood, NJ, 1996.
[23]
Kafai, Y. B. Video game designs by girls and boys: Variability and consistency of gender differences. In Cassell, J. & Jenkins, H. eds. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and computer games. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998.
[24]
Martin, C., & Steinkuehler, C. Collective information literacy in massively multiplayer online games. E-Learning and Digital Media, 7, 4 (2010), 355--365.
[25]
Orenstein, P. School girls, Doubleday, New York, 1994.
[26]
Pipher, M. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls, Riverhead Books, New York, 1994.
[27]
Squire, K. Video games and learning: Teaching and participatory culture in the digital age. Teachers College Press, Cambridge, 2011.
[28]
Steinkuehler, C. Massively multiplayer online gaming as a constellation of literacy practices. E-Learning, 4, 3 (2007), 297--318.
[29]
Steinkuehler, C., & King, E. Digital literacies for the disengaged: creating after school contexts to support boys' game-based literacy skills. On the Horizon, 17, 1 (2009), 47--59.
[30]
Stevens, R., Satwicz, T., & McCarthy, L. (2008). In-game, in-room, in-world: Reconnecting video game play to the rest of kids' lives. In Salen, K. ed. The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Game attributes and their relation to the values considered relevant for womenDigital Creativity10.1080/14626268.2024.2385304(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
  • (2021)A Socio-Ecological Approach to Activity Games for GirlsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34746735:CHI PLAY(1-28)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2021
  • (2021)Fighting the Gender Gap in ICTLudic, Co-design and Tools Supporting Smart Learning Ecosystems and Smart Education10.1007/978-981-16-3930-2_3(27-39)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2021
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
GenderIT '15: Proceedings of the Third Conference on GenderIT
April 2015
68 pages
ISBN:9781450335966
DOI:10.1145/2807565
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

  • University of Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 April 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. game design
  2. game design curricula
  3. game industry
  4. gender

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

GenderIT '15
GenderIT '15: The Third Conference on GenderIT
April 24, 2015
PA, Philadelphia, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 39 of 55 submissions, 71%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)27
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
Reflects downloads up to 04 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Game attributes and their relation to the values considered relevant for womenDigital Creativity10.1080/14626268.2024.2385304(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
  • (2021)A Socio-Ecological Approach to Activity Games for GirlsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34746735:CHI PLAY(1-28)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2021
  • (2021)Fighting the Gender Gap in ICTLudic, Co-design and Tools Supporting Smart Learning Ecosystems and Smart Education10.1007/978-981-16-3930-2_3(27-39)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2021
  • (2019)Sentimental Avatars: Gender Identification and Vehicles of Selfhood in Popular Media From Nineteenth-Century Novels to Modern Video GamesGames and Culture10.1177/155541201987981216:2(160-186)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2019
  • (2018)Reinforcing gender equality by analysing female teenagers' performances in coding activitiesProceedings of the 4th Conference on Gender & IT10.1145/3196839.3196871(209-219)Online publication date: 14-May-2018
  • (2017)Evoking inspiration for game jam ideasProceedings of the Second International Conference on Game Jams, Hackathons, and Game Creation Events10.1145/3055116.3055125(6-9)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2017
  • (2017)The effects of gender, flow and video game experience on combat identification trainingErgonomics10.1080/00140139.2017.128018760:8(1101-1111)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2017

View Options

Get Access

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media