Commander Laurel's excellent adventure - Cafe Technos

I was a Utopian entrepreneur. * Maybe I still am. But for a time, I was also Cmdr. B. Laurel, a Navy test pilot, and I rode a modified F-14 into the desert floor. I've made the 60,000 foot downward spiral in some of the F-4 Phantoms and F-18s of the computer-game industry--Atari, the old Activision, Epyx. This last time it felt different, because my "F-14" was Purple Moon, a company I co-founded. It was devoted to making interactive media for little girls, and it was a dream come true. The ironic thing about this flameout was that I got into doing games for girls precisely because I was so tired of seeing things explode.

The following is an interview with Cmdr. B. Laurel based on her flight recorder recently salvaged from the desert floor and transcribed in her wonderful little pamphlet, Utopian Entrepreneur, (MIT Press, September 2001). Brenda has been involved in personal computing since the late 1970s designing interactive fairy tales for the Cybervision system. She has worked at Atari and Apple; she co-founded a company devoted to virtual reality and lately Purple Moon, a girl-game company whose motto was "Friendship Adventures for Girls."

--Thom

In Utopian Entrepreneur you describe yourself and your co-workers as "culture workers"--was this a shared description of what you were doing? Did anyone think of herself as an "artist"?

I'm sure that many people involved with Purple Moon would call themselves artists. But we all knew that we were working in the field of popular culture, and that there were values--about respect for girls and their issues--that needed to shine through our efforts, and that our goal was to reach many people, not just a few.

When you say, "Doing culture work requires research. Our work relies on our understanding of perception, cognition, and how people construct meaning," how does the "art" come out of this interactive medium in the same way the art came out of performances, music, books, film, and TV before games?

Artists may be more or less well tuned to people's lives and values. Sometimes, the fact that an artist makes a "hit" is sheer genius and luck, like Jackson Pollack. Other artists, like Chekhov or Shaw for example, study their cultures deeply and make work that is intentionally relevant. Research (or immersion or sensitivity to one's cultural milieu or whatever you would like to call it) simply improves the odds that your work will move other people. Good art is extremely rare. Good popular culture is less rare, but still not the norm. I think that much hinges on the direct exchange of value. For example, television as it currently exists promotes the facile ideologies of consumerism through the production of fantasies that successfully manipulate our personal insecurities as well as our hunger for connectedness and self-esteem. This is true of all advertising-based media, but especially true of television. In contrast, cinema is much more likely to make positive use of our narrative intelligence to give us insight into our culture and context. In cultural terms, I think it's fair to say that television masquerades while cinema reveals. I think that this has more than a little to do with the direct value exchange (relatively speaking) offered by cinema as opposed to the indirect value proposition of advertising-based television. It all comes down to personal power and respect.

You say, "I suspected the most effective way to make girls comfortable with computers was through play"--do you think Purple Moon actually proved this point?

Generally, I think the girl-game movement proved this point. However, now it's moot in the sense that girls are gravitating very strongly to the Web. Our goal was never to make girls game players; it was to invite girls into technology use. I feel that the girl-game movement played a part in making that a reality. While the burning social need may have been met, there is still a large and viable female market (actually, many female markets) for content-ful interactive media.

You mention that robust simulations make us better thinkers. Are you talking about education here? The history of educational software and simulations has been a history with few dollars and even fewer results. How and why would this suddenly change?

A robust simulation deals with a complex system and represents it as faithfully as our knowledge permits. A rule of thumb might be: This simulation should be able to surprise you. Ideally it could be driven by sensors in the real world. Some weather prediction simulations are approaching this level. The simplistic simulations produced for PCs in the last few decades are pretty bad, but that is largely because of the limited computing power available to drive them. Today we have a different situation. More powerful PCs and the phenomenon of distributed computing make such robust simulations possible (for regular folks) for the first time.

Teachers are used to helping students build stories, but you say that in an interactive/Virtual Reality (VR)-mediated world, building worms will be more important than telling stories. How does a teacher make the transition?

I don't think you have the technology to do that directly, yet. However, you probably do ask students to describe the landscape and setting and write profiles of characters even when these things may not appear in the linear story. That sort of nontemporal explosion of elements is the beginning of VR design.

But how does a teacher or a school district do this? How can they afford to do it?

What I propose, descriptions of environments and characters, can be accomplished with pencil and paper. Improvisation with these elements might also be a useful tool, again requiring no high tech. Although I am not happy with so-called desktop VR, that would be a next step. Also Bruce Damer's [CEO of DigitalSpace Corp.] avatar ** worlds might be helpful. These things run on PCs and are accessible over the Web.

Can you expand on the following statement in practical terms a teacher could use? "Saying no again--this time to movies and games that provide the illusion of personal power through violence--is more likely to lead to classroom shootings and suicides than so-called violent media."

I am proposing that designers set themselves the challenge of inventing a context-and-play pattern that equals or surpasses shooters in giving (male) players a sense of personal power and agency.

Kids' games have always involved shooting, for the most part: cops and robbers, cowboys and indians. Most of these games seem to be variations on tag or capture the flag, which might indicate that they may be hard-wired into our play patterns.

Wrong. Most boys' games have "always" involved shooting. The gender difference is marked and appears to be cross-cultural. Shooting may in fact be hardwired into boys' play patterns. There is actually a fair amount of literature on gender differences in play. There is some evidence, for example, that in boys, pleasurable endorphins are produced when rapidly moving objects are in the visual field. Girls are much more likely to play house, or to play-act their favorite stories or movies.

You already said that research showed that girls didn't object to the first-person shooter (FPS) but to the lack of story and connection. So, if I'm a teacher, do I want to go away from this or toward it? Can you draw a lesson to be learned from serious FPS play that a teacher should be involved with?

Again, I think that if we are concerned about violence in media and its effect on children, then we have the challenge of finding out how violence works, what it does for the player, and then look at other play patterns or action forms that accomplish the same goals. I am suggesting that at least part of the "payoff" for violence is the fantasy of personal power and agency.

Did you ever communicate with parents or teachers who had concerns about girl games, computer media, whatever, and their kids?

Yes. We did several focus groups with parents. There is a story in my book about one father who was concerned that our products were about values, but who didn't see any "values" in shooter games. By and large, parents seemed glad for games that addressed the realities of girls' lives and could also give them comfort and advice in the form of stories. A few parents were concerned about the idea of "girls' games," afraid that this was going to be something second-class or dumbed down. Many expressed enthusiasm for an alternative to Barbie[R], which focused girls on attractiveness and fashion in what many parents considered to be an unhealthy way. We did not interview teachers but heard positive comments from several, some of whom were using our Rockett products in social studies classes. I even got email from some boys and men who felt that the products helped them learn how to related better to girls and women.

What will you do next?

I am teaching (graduate students in Media Design at Art Center College of Design). My students are building wonderful stuff. This year they built a transmedia project to raise awareness among teens about the promise and perils of the human genome project. Next year we will be working on a transmedia project that deals with the intersection of energy conservation and personal lifestyle. I'm working on an interactive project with Public Broadcasting right now that shows some promise. Small investments can make small projects successful, and small projects may be leveraged to change the way people think.

There are socially responsible and green investors' organizations out there that can provide both venture funding and investment opportunities for individuals--look at http://www.socialinvest.org for examples. What I am trying to promote is not some sort of passive resistance to consumerism, but rather an active reframing of the role of business and how we measure its success. I'm also asking designers to rethink how they measure their own success, and to see that values are always embodied in their work. Every person who takes these attitudes into the workplace will contribute to a positive change in the world.

For more information about Purple Moon research, see "Technological Humanism and Values-Driven Design" at Laurel's Web site, http://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel For the longer version of this interview, go to http://www.mime.indiana.edu/brenda/.

* A "Utopian entrepreneur" is a person seeking socially positive work in the business world.

** An avatar is "your body double in cyberspace, your presence in the virtual communities growing inside two- and three-dimensional virtual worlds online."

Brenda Laurel is on the graduate faculty of media design at the Art Center College of Design. Her book, Utopian Entrepreneur, is the first in a series called Mediawork pamphlets, which pairs writers who matter with innovative designers to create compact, intellectually sophisticated, visually compelling texts. Laurel is a 1999 recipient of the World of Today and Tomorrow Award from the Girl Scouts of America and was named one of the Top 25 Women on the Web in 1998 by Webgrrls. She lives in Los Gatos, California.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Agency for Instructional Technology
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group