Talk to the San Francisco Webgrrls
by Brenda Laurel
founder of Purple Moon computer games for girls

From July 1997 for the San Francisco Webgrrls

SUSAN [the "Pointygrrl"]: We're very honored to present our speaker tonight. She doesn't need a lot of introduction with this crowd, but she's fresh from the Purple Moon launch at E-3. Please join me in welcoming Brenda Laurel!

FROM THE FLOOR: [Applause]

BRENDA: Well, I'm old enough that "Pointygrrl" makes me think of circle-stitched bras.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: Some of you are that old too. OK. I want to say thanks to Susan Quinn and Elaine Sosa and Jennifer Hughes. Some of my heroes.

Many of my heroes are much younger which is one of those disconcerting things that happens when you get older. I want to introduce some people from the Purple Moon team so you know who they are if you get a chance to talk to them.

This is Lili Cunningham. She is the queen of design.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Applause].

BRENDA: She helps with the producing part of the design process, if you know what I mean. Before you get down into that grind of production and you're trying to produce, the idea is that you can look at and test and evaluate those, that's Lili's specialty. She's involved with audio production. She comes to us from Colossus. One of her credits is the Rock-N-Roll Museum.

Pamela Little writer and producer for the Rockett series. I have to tell on Pam. Two and a -- two years ago when we were starting this project and I was pulling my hair out because I knew what the Rockett series wanted to be but I'm a terrible writer, I got e-mail from this girl at teen magazine. She said, Hi, I work for Teen. Are you looking for a writer?" I thought this has got to be meaningful. She created all our characters and she's the best.

And I also want to introduce Karen Gould. She's in the back there with the clipboard. She's our head of PR.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Applause].

BRENDA: In a business like the one I'm in, the girl software business. You talk about politics. You talk about issues and things that can blow up just by looking sideways. Karen manages all that. She tries to manage me, which is just amazing. But anyway, she's done a great job. We have press in Scotland and stuff because of her, so this is great.

Oh, yes -- Amy and Sarah. Amy and Sarah are our on-line queens here. Stand up.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Applause].

BRENDA: Amy and Sarah work with Christi Rosendel who heads up our on-line and merchandising group. I feel like I've died and gone to heaven in this company because all these great women I met through the years get to come and play and it's so exciting. It's really thrilling.

I wasn't totally clear on what I ought to do tonight. There was interest in history. The only reason I talk about history I guess is because it's always fun at least for me to see how somebody's personal narratives brings their career out. I thought I might share a little bit of that.

I could share with you some of the high points of our gender research which we did for five years.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Cheers and Applause].

BRENDA: Cut to the chase. Five years of personal history then we'll do the research and we'll tell you a little about the products. And any time you want to interrupt then we can do it -- just like massive conversation when we get bored with me talking!

This is so cool.

I have always been a nerd. But there wasn't a word for it in the' 60s when I was in school. There wasn't a word for it. There was no term to describe the kind of person that I was.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: And there still isn't. But what I noticed then was that as a girl being a nerd was really a problem. But later when I came out as a nerd being a girl was a problem. So it's always something.

You know, but just to give you some context. When I was in high school, this would have been -- 54 to' 58. When I was a junior in high school I was one of two girls in math and the only girl in physics. I was so teased by the boys in the class that I dropped out of both classes. So I didn't have math beyond my sophomore year in high school.

So I started working in the computer business in 1977 and my boss was trying to teach me math language. "Can you draw this dog with calculus?" In the dead of night delivered to my door in a plain brown wrapper I had to learn this stuff. So it's been a strange road.

And that leads me to remind you of something that I'm sure you know. It is, having grown up female any time before the late 80s gives us special credentials. There are some things that never change but there are a lot of things that changed greatly. And I think part of the reason why it took me so long to get to the point where I could design stuff for girls I worked with was because I kept using myself as an example and the world changed a whole lot. So, I mean, I guess I'm pretty typical.

I was an only child and I think that has something to do with the need to be constantly extruding stuff. You see something beautiful happening and you cry because there's no one to share it with. So you become forcibly extroverted. It's like, necessary. So that explains a lot of my sort of maniacal productivity, I guess.

Besides the nerd things, there was the glasses thing. But we don't need to go into that.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: Although. Although -- no, I won't tell that because Karen's frowning.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

So when I finally got to college after having had no math, I majored in drama and English. Well, the funny thing was I ended up first in my class in high school. I had a clean 4.0. This guy who took advanced physics and extraterrestrial psychology and was mega-head of the universe had a 3.99 and here I was sliding by with French and English and drama, you know.

And he was majorly pissed. As I got older I realized I really copped out in serious ways. There was a kind of courage about stepping up to things that challenge you but I wasn't able to exhibit them because it was so unbelievably important to me to be the best and to prove it was OK to be nerdy girl.

My undergrad was a great step backwards you. I moved to Greencastle Indiana -- formerly Methodist College. But they had a great academic program and I was a psychology major because I was interested in people as only children need to be. But then statistics came up, and that was the end of it. It was impossible.

I could not grasp statistics so I changed my major to theater which was much easier. My problem was psychology, whether I read Freud, it all made sense, "Yeah, I can see that. Sure."

So you know, you'd have a test on Jung and it was all kind of meaningful so theater was a much better choice it turned out. I pulled a 4.0 by God.

So quite unawares, as I was working on my Master's Degree in theater I started doing interactive theater in 1974, and I know some of you guys remember this: '70 to '74 interactive theater was all the rage in those days. Living theater in '69. The work of Richard Schenkner. Prague.

Happenings, right, prop around the Vietnam war where you were doing improvisation plus interaction in public situations and having to make stuff up on the fly. So in a situation like that you learn a lot about constraints, you learn that a blank page is, "Not good, not good, not good."

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: You have to go in with an idea of characters and situations and stuff. You learn about the things that make people crazy about interactivity. I remember doing a production of Dyanisis in 1973 or so.

Ottomuelle had been there for those who know theater. Cooling to the swoons of all the Avant-garde types. When we were doing Dyanisis, one of the things I noticed was when people got under the light their skin color would change and it was like "Oh, man. I'm not me anymore. This is really weird."

It was like the vision of one's body being transformed was really uncomfortable. Where these same folks could be rowdy in an outdoor environment. So I filed little stuff like that not knowing I was going to use it in computers.

But it seemed meaningful at the time. I fell on hard times as an acting student and had to take a job outside of being a teaching associate. Actually in those days as I was teaching -- somewhere in there generations change. I'm trying to remember when this happened. I'm all confused. When was that republican elected?

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: Suddenly my students showed up in pink Oxfords. And I'm talking about prop. Many of them failed the course.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: Sorry. You know, you get what you pay for, girls. The other thing we were doing was environmental theater. And this is the theme that's stayed with me and sustained my work and has now sort of blossomed in this wonderful way with Purple Moon.

In those days I was working with a man named Bill Morton in SF who now runs an opera company in New York. He had a crazy idea to go to places in the natural environment and do long, like two-day role playing improvs which now, of course, is a time honored sport but in those days was unheard of. That was going to, like, state parks or landscapes that we loved, talking to the local folks about the stories that came around that place, doing quick improv rehearsal and appearing in the path to unsuspecting people in shorts.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: Where they find us performing tales about coal mining and stuff. This worked great until we got busted by the Board of Health for feeding our actors without a food permit. But the idea of stories being embedded in the landscape, of stories -- the landscape is the keyhole, it's the door to a lot of narrative material that our culture is constantly erasing, that died with our grandparents, that died with television, supplanting story telling in our home.

A lot of that is still in the landscape. And if you go there with people who know that place, you can get that stuff back. And the man eating fish comes back. For me it's gotten bigger as an issue and interest and it's a thrill to bring that kind of life force and energy to producing things for little girls now and have all those boys going, "huh?"

So around about 1970 -- when was Pioneer? '78? When was Viking? '74. Viking was -- OK. It was Viking, it was mars so it must have been Viking.

I had a friend in Columbus who worked in this top secret think tank and they had this -- they usually did stuff like big science stuff.

And my friend who was a nerd -- out of our times in his high school -- before there were computer guys. He was the single member and president of the computer club. He had founded this group at computer graphics and imaging.

And one night, I think it was 1976, we were walking around town doing the things people do at midnight in 1976 and he said, "Would you like to see where I work?" I was like, "Yeah."

So we went over there and that thing happened with my skin it was like fluorescent, it was like oh, man, this is trouble. I don't feel like me anymore. But there were guards and more guards and then there was this elevator that went way down. Anyway, we ended up looking at images coming in from Viking a pixel at a time. And it was like "Ohhhh!"

OK. You know, it was one of those moments where everything goes WOW. So I go "What is that device? He said, "This is a computer." I said great even though I never took a math class since 1964. But we'll cope.

So about a year later he started a company for Plato. It was put together by the Control Data Corporation. And I don't think it was connected to the Arpanet.

But my friend by the way, the person is Joel Miller who was, I guess, vice president at Sega and president of Sega and is now a retired millionaire, but I don't know. But he is a fine human being and I thank him for everything.

So he got this job to do software for Plato so I had my first on-line stuff happening in 1977 so when people say what are your favorite websites I have to say "You know, I don't go there that much." The sunrises and sets and I'm still in front of the computer. It's embarrassing, but it's true and it happened in 1976.

Anyway, we were working on Plato, and this guy came in the office, this inventor guy who had made his most recent fortune doing exercise machines that you hooked up to a doorknob that made your abs good. And he had found this nerd, and this nerd had gotten these 1802 chips from NASA.

And he had worked with the ELF -- now this is way back. Only four or five of you remember this. And the agent 02s and he clued together this thing called Cybervision.

It was this tiny screen 100-something by 50-something. I can't do the powers of age stuff. But it was a little screen and four colors. And when this guy came in, all he could do was show the alphabet on the screen, but he had placed 10,000 units of it with Montgomery Wards and had to show them on Monday.

So Joel said give me a refrigerator full of Dr. Pepper and we'll work with it. By Monday morning we had some dancing letters and an address book. These were like radical ideas.

This was the first graphical display I had seen in those days. So I gave up full-time acting work to work for Joel because he had this idea and Montgomery Wards thought we should build interactive fairy tales.

This is before Pong, all right?

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: So I'm coding. Within two weeks I'm writing code. It's like a bee flying, you know. And I'm doing lip synching. Romanian hangman with 16 lip positions. We had 2-K of RAM. Loading at 200 BAUD from cassette tape. And when there was a drop-out you were hosed. You know, one little piece of oxide fell off and it was over.

When they came around and said you have 16-K of RAM we started laughing about an interactive version of War and Peace. Things don't get better than that.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: Well, there were a couple of competitors for Cybervision. There was a company called Intelevision. And then there was this upstart called Atari. And they got bigger and bigger and bigger and Cybervision got smaller and smaller and one day we were standing on in the unemployment line and we thought let's check out Atari. S

o one by one all of us at Cybervision ended up at Atari. That was Joel Miller, Ken, myself, Jeff who is now at Oracle. They've all ended up in big spots. Many people. Neal, this guy's son is now a senior producer and already has been president of his own software company. It's wild.

We're not supposed to have history yet, but we do. We all came out to work for Atari. I started as an educational software designer. But Atari was growing like cancer in '79 and '80 if anybody here was there you know what I mean. It was insane. It was unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it.

I went from software specialist to director of software marketing in six months. I guess because I could write an English sentence and answer the phone at the same time. But, you know, suddenly I have like 40 people and we're inventing applications and I'm saying to Ray. If you want this computer to be different we shouldn't spend 80% of our budget doing Pacman. We should do word processing. They were scared of that.

We could do things about checkbooks and recipes. At one point they asked me, "What would women like?" This made me angry at 20-something. So I came back with a flippant list that included the Appliance Manager.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: My favorite, co-authored by Clyde Grossman, was the Atari Stretchmark Editor.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: So the president called me and said, "Are you, like, kidding?" I said "Are you like wearing Polyester?"

So that was Atari. My VPs kept getting shot out and "Whoa, they got another one." And then the big gun swung around and they were looking at me.

I got fired and 20 minutes later I went to work for Allen Kayatata. Allen has been saying to me, "Give yourself some space to think this through and write it down and study it and learn something. My gosh, you're flying by the seat of your pants. You don't know anything about computers, really. You should learn something before you keep talking like this."

So I went over there and said "You know, Allen, I got 20 minutes." He said, "Come work for me." Later the other guy at Atari found out I was working there and he warned them I was dangerous. At Atomic Research I got to thinking -- it doesn't seem like theater and computers are occupying the same head space.

As a creative person life is that weird. What are these connections I feel can I express them explicitly. Is there a dissertation in this? So -- and then there was. Far out.

So I managed to get disciplined about my thinking and to also have the opportunity to finish a Ph.D. in theater, which was great. And I also went way down the path of lunacy in the sense I fell in love with AI. I think many of us do early in our careers. At least those of us who lived in the' 80s.

There's this love affair you have with AI. It's a big discovery around 1990 was that it's more interesting to interact with other people than to interact with computer programs. This was like a bolt from the blue for the industry. It was a really big deal.

OK. So that's it. All right. So somewhere in there I co-founded the Computer Game Developers' Conference. I thought it would be a kick to make boys write papers and give a speech.

It turned out -- it turned out to be a good thing because we started to have a discourse about this thing that we did. You know, it was always kind of a like you got to be kidding job and nobody paid attention to it and nobody had rules and we were all flying by the seat of our pants.

It was like showing exercise equipment. When we started to conference people started to get disciplined about what they knew and about passing information on to other people. So that was my trip in video games.

I wandered off. I guess I had my kid and I finished my Ph.D. and I went back to Activision for a while. And Jim Levy said, "We want to do educational products. We think you're the person to manage it."

I kept trying to lob it over the wall but it didn't work for the video game people. So they finally said they wanted to do this. And when he got fired, I got fired and I said "I'm not doing this anymore. I'm asking for trouble."

So I consulted from then until I founded Teleprism. I spent time at Apple and got the interface bug. I can remember when Cybervision was blowing up I asked Joel Miller what to do next. He said, "You ought to do human factors."

I said, "What's that?" He said it's, "It's like an ATM machine." The experience there was letting me get back to that. It's OK to say "This is really stupid. A person should not have to do this. I person should not have to have a model in their brain of how this device works in order to enjoy the experience. A person doesn't need to watch the projector to see the movie."

Now, there are lots of good reasons for computer literacy but interacting isn't one of them. There are lots of good reasons for tuning the engine of a car. But driving probably isn't one of them. And it was amazing to me that other people felt this way and said it out loud to each other and wrote papers about it.

So then I wrote -- no, I then I edited that book at Apple then I got progressively involved in virtual realty and Scott Fisher from Atari founded a company in 1990. This was asking to be a crash dummy. It's like, "Hey, I got an idea. How about if we be the first company after VPL and we're three years ahead of kind of a profitable business and we drive right into a wall. Would that be OK?" There's really sexy stuff on the way.

So that's kind of what we did. But it was fun because in those days it was the only way, the only way to fund VR, the only way to do it, was in Tokyo. It gave me a chance to really think about, you know, the computer and theater stuff I thought about from the way to join a game and make a good collaborator.

But I hadn't thought about the intelligence that would drive a three dimensional representation that would make me feel like my body was someplace else so VR was a way to fill in the right brain part of what I was trying to get to with interactive fantasy.

Anyway, I had business learning opportunities and moved off of that. And then I ended up at Interval Research. I met David Liddle. Old VR cowboys making $1,000 a pop paying the bills. We'd all have funny hair and say things that were cool. And show video.

But it was getting kind of old, and I needed a new challenge. And when I met David at Digital World in 1992 I was giving a talk about amusement parks and I was trying to remind people that originally amusement parks were real places.

Like Delphi and stuff. And there was an Anaheim that looked like something and has now been erased. If people like Sony wanted to get involved maybe they should clean the air and install a Monorail over the Grand Canyon. That would make a great amusement park.

I was doing one of those embarrassing things and we went out and had dinner and he asked me what I was interested in. And I said I wanted to open this up to girls and women because I met a lot of cool women in the business but we were always a minority, a tiny minority, and there was a lot of toxicity about being an only woman in some parts of this business. I'm sure some of you have been there.

One of the worst things that can happen that I bet some of you experienced is that you get overly fond of being the only woman in a funny way. It's like "I'm special" and another woman comes in and it's like, "Well, there goes. Now I've got to take math." You know. So it's not healthy for any of us.

Not just the consumer but for us as individual contributors. It's way too easy to. And anyway I said this to David and David said that he's always been interested in why nobody does computer games for girls. And I keep trying to do it and I just keep getting fired, which has happened lots of times.

And the thing they notice was that in the video game industry a company would do one title for girls and they would say this is for girls and they would lob it over the wall into a totally male retail environment.

They would put it next to a bunch of totally male products, in a place where girls never come, with a play pattern that reflected no understanding of what girls were like, and it wouldn't sell and they would say, "See. Girls don't like computer games. We're not going to go there or invest in it."

One of the big video game manufacturers, who shall remain nameless, resisted the idea of doing products for girls because they knew it would undermine their franchise with boy customers. That made me really interested.

Because there's gender politics that goes on between six and twelve that's very interesting. People in the game business have to pay attention to that. And I came to the understanding that this isn't some kind of giant sexist conspiracy. Sure there are elements of that, but at the end of the day everybody wants to make money and nobody would walk away from 52% of the market if they had an alternative that they could imagine.

These are business people. "If this was an easy problem, somebody would have solved it," was the theory I had in 1991. So Liddle and I made a deal that we were going to go find out, by God, we were going to find out. Spend some time and money talking to girls. And talking to people who are with girls and trying to understand what it is, first of all, about what we do that they hate in the computer game business.

But more importantly what it is that girls like. What motivates them. What is their life like in 1992, 1993 and 1994. I'm not there. I grew up with Gunsmoke and Jacks. That was as athletic as it was OK to be in 1955. Jacks!

And media is a completely different world. We had to go find out. We were going to step up to this. The wonder of Interval is there's this wonderful piece of funding for people to look ten years out and try to find out things that could make a big difference.

In defense of those poor schmoes in the computer game business who never research, they really can't afford to do the research we needed to do. They've got a little budget for focus testing, maybe. But they can't go out and commission gigantic market research studies, and if they do they'll end up with partners who think asking a kid, "Of all the toys you like, which would you rather play with?" That gives no information at all.

It's like would you rather slide down a razor blade. What kind of information are you going to get from that? In 1965 you wouldn't hear a kid saying, "I really want a plastic hoop I can wiggle on my hips." Think about that.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: So market research as it is normally done wasn't particularly useful to them and they couldn't afford to do the deep digging so it was cool that Interval funded it.

We were coming into a climate in 1991 where thinking and talking about difference was almost acceptable. Almost starting to be acceptable. As you may recall in the '80s talking about differences was not OK. Period.

All those poor women such as Jane Goodall making great strides in understanding society and re understanding evolution and thinking about where our social behavior and emotions come from were excluded not only by scientific community but by the feminist community. Isn't it a shame that that happened?

It's just in the early '90s that I felt like I had permission and David felt like we had permission and space to ask some questions. Now, the thing about difference that I need to say from my heart is that difference is about honor, as far as I'm concerned, it's about honoring people.

And in the case of the research that we undertook at Interval, the specific goal in 1992 was to find out what it would take to motivate a young girl -- before she fell off the edge of the universe in 6th grade -- to put her hands on a computer.

That's all.

We made a deal, we made a pact. We will not put other agendas on this. This won't be about improving anyone's character. It will be about putting their hands on the computer.

Because we noticed when boys walk into a computer lab they know like hit the return key 37 times in ten seconds and things happen for them.

Girls are not going to do that.

The reason boys do that is because they played video games. Because somebody put their hands on it. In understanding it's just an appliance. It's a delivery system. It's not rocket science. Boys get this from playing video games. In '91 girls weren't getting that, that wasn't happening.

So the question we set out to answer was what would it take to design something to take care of that. In those days we didn't realize we would start a business about it, that wasn't our plan. We thought we could leverage what we might find out in different businesses and meet the charter of Interval and make a difference in the world.

So it started to be acceptable to think about difference. There was a good reason to look at difference. At least from my point of view, especially as a parent but also as a person in society.

One of the first things we learned about gender difference is there's more distance -- OK. Think of gender difference as overlapping distribution. Do you love those big words that I learned from my mail order course?

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: Overlapping curves is the real way to say it. The average boy, distance between the average boy and girl is less than the distance between the tail ends of either curve. There's no diversity within a gender than the averages of the two genders. We commonly talk about in this research. I'm not going to go there now.

So that's a caveat. And when we talk about meaningful differences, for instance in the realm of biology, first of all -- and there are all kinds of caveats around there that. If there's a brain based difference, it's probably still so small you hardly notice.

The reason it matters is the culture amps it up and tells narratives about it that shape what people expect of themselves and each other. So another thing we learned, at the end of the day, what difference we see is biological or cultural in origin doesn't really matter in terms of the goal we're trying to achieve.

It matters to a lot of other people in other disciplines and I think it's wonderful and interesting, but we didn't have to answer the question, "Where did this difference come from?" That kind of -- I'm skipping over the whole VR part.

So we knew we wanted to look at girls before they got to be sixth graders because the research was coming in about the drop off in computer and math and science in sixth grade there was something magic happening at puberty that caused the progress in those areas to diverge between boys and girls, the curve. We thought we have to make this intervention before they get there.

The other thing I came to, this is probably the hardest thing for me to say tonight is that I could no longer hide behind cutting edge high-liberal self-marginalizing behavior. I couldn't build something that would make a difference to 200 kids or something that 2,000 PBS parents would buy. If you want to make it wiggle you have to mud wrestle with popular culture. That's where you have to go. That's what I think.

I understand there are some wonderful pieces of art that have made huge changes and I don't mean to diminish those but in the business I'm in I spent a lot of time picking around the edges that nobody ever saw or paid attention to and it didn't change anybody's mind.

I made the deal I was going to make a difference at the level of popular culture. That was a commitment we made. We were exploring popular culture. You know what, something we forget, the people in this room are at the well spring of popular culture. We are where it comes from. It starts somewhere. It might as well be us. It might as well.

Why let those other guys do it. So anyway, -- sorry, I'm carrying on. We decided at the beginning of this whole thing we would ground ourselves in information other people gathered about differences between boys and girls and their preferences as regard to play. And that was an important decision. We were looking at play, not entertainment. And the reason is, of course, that play is about doing stuff and entertainment is about this mostly, in the way we use those words in the world so it would be a problem again.

"Which movie do you like best?"

" ET". Great we'll make six million and we go down the toilet.

What you want to find out is how do girls like to play and how does the way that they play differ in meaningful ways from the ways boys play. And specifically how does the play girls really enjoy differ from what's used as play parents for video games. We started by looking at what other people found out and in related disciplines.

So we looked at developmental psychology and learned some interesting things. Some very big differences happen among members of the same gender and between genderings. They're utterly about at what moment of early life your brain is exposed it certain androgens. And that has to do with tracking moving objects and other sorts of things. There are biological things worth knowing about.

We looked at psychology. Spatial rotation is a kinnard everybody talks about. Meant at rotation is it has to do with the ability to imagine an object in a different orientation or to imagine yourself in a different relation. Now interesting, women perform better when they frame the problem imagining themselves in a different place. We are embodied folk it turns out.

That dove tales with findings about navigational preferences. But women and girls tend, when I say tend I may be only talking about a couple percentage points, to be more bodycentric in the way they handle problems. And you see this popping up in different places.

For example, in VR you ask what's going on in VR. Boys will say it's an out of body experience. This is a big different that I've seen and women will typically say "I went somewhere." You can't ignore differences like that. You have to pay attention.

Well, in the literature what we discovered is that when you present a navigation problem to males and females that, that's a maze where the maze has segments, different turns and such and you put landmarks like colored shapes at the turns in that maze and you run males through it and females through it, when you remove the landmarks, the females perform significantly less well, but the males are fine.

When you leave the landmark but change the length of the segment or direction of the turn, the females do fine, but the males do significantly less well.

Not just humans either.

Interesting, huh? Now, that's not a huge difference, but it's enough of a difference that our culture gave us stories like women can't read maps, right, because we sit there, you know -- "What's on the corner?"

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: "Where is the gas station?" And there's this other business about being bodycentric -- I hate it. You're in a burning building and there's a plan of the building and it is, "You are here," and on the map the corridor is running this way but you're seeing the corridor this way -- it's like fucked!

So we turn maps around. Your husband says, "Well, honey, the words are upside down."

"Yeah. But this is the way I'm going." You know, we don't know whether this is biological or cultural. It doesn't matter. We know we need to observe it.

So you say. "Well, Dr. Laurel, why do girls -- one answer may be there's some evidence that girls who do well at Tetris define the problem as a pattern matching problem. And it turns out that girls significantly outperform boys in pattern matching tests.

About the mental rotation thing. The difference shows up under time pressure. When you have all the time in the world, there's no difference. This could explain things about SAT scores. You probably saw that report. Girls will sit there and work on a problem. And they won't say I've only got 20 minutes and make the guess.

So there's a problem-solving strategy difference that we know about and in some research that matters in test taking. And it matters in game playing.

Girls are not interested in beating the clock by and large in some of these tests. It's not interesting to them. They want to take their time. When we were trying to test help agents that would give you help with a game girls said, "Get that out of here. Give me some time. Leave me alone."

So these differences, you know, they start to matter, and it's worth looking at them. Let me see if I can give you a few other choice ones before I conclude this lunacy and let you ask questions.

So, yeah, I ended with -- I just finished telling you about the research we did talking to people -- sorry, reading literature in fields we thought were important and related.

We did a lot of work with anthropology and lots of places. There were about 20 people working for six months and we built this huge database in Lotus notes. Which we're scanning back in from hard copy. But we did a huge amount of research and had a wonderful team summarizing those findings for us.

So in phase two of the research we took the most important things and located experts that in the academic industry who might know more about that from real world experience or from further work in the academic world.

So we talked to like about 100 people this in-depth interviews. Gender studies people, play theory people, psychology types, we also talked to people in the industry like fashion, toys, obviously, sports equipment, people who have a vested interest in applying what we know about differences and play patterns and preferences.

The other thing we did in the interview stage was have focused groups with adults on the ground with kids who have this sort of bird's eye view of what children are doing and have observations that we might not be able to statistically confirm but which later guided questions asked of children.

We had a hunch of something somebody observed as the manager of a toy store who had to provide space for kids while mom was shopping or whatever. So we got information from those folks. At the conclusion of that phase we came up with a research agenda for a repeated interview with children across the country.

We made a decision we weren't just going to talk to girls in Silicon Valley. Most of them have parents in the business. In my house there are seven Macintoshes. My kids aren't going to give you typical information about computers.

So we went to Baltimore and Indianapolis, my home town! And Charlotte, you know, Los Angeles, places to talk to kids from different ethnic groups and regions about some of the issues we thought were important. So we started the interview process, phase three, with pretty broad investigation of differences and play patterns.

So we found out a lot about how preferences for what kinds of things kids play according to age and gender so you never see a boy playing skip rope or slapping games, for example.

But certain other things like that game tether ball, boys will play it much younger and girls eventually play it. We learn how gender barriers rise and fall. One of the interesting findings there was in general girls have a much easier time appropriating activities previously defined as male activities. Boys can't go the other direction. The younger they are, the harder it is.

Typically younger kids overlearn and overperform gender. And boys overperform it longer in some ways in terms of play patterns. So, I mean, one theory about why we ended up with this nasty ghetto we call the computer game business is because boys, because of their identity, have us backed into a corner where girls will not go. It's like, "It's going to get so ugly you won't go there." It makes me sad sometimes.

Anyway, we also talk to kids about what is it about a product or activity that sends a message about gender? How do you know this is for a boy or girl? We're looking at shape and texture to the social context of play activity X and getting information about that.

One of the most fun parts of that phase of the research is we took toys and products and hacked their gender characteristics to see what would matter. For example, we made a Tonka truck pink and sure enough that was a girl's truck. Color overrode truckness.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: We took a diary and replaced the picture of girls with the picture of boys and put bullet holes in it and called it Secret Joe.

It wouldn't fly. They could smell a diary a mile away.

We took the cover of Echo the Dolphin and gave it fangs with blood dripping and the boys said "Yeah. That's for me."

We took Barbie and put her in GI Joe clothing and everyone said NO!

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: You know, I mean, those blue eyes under a helmet. You don't want to go there. Nobody wants to go there.

We really had a good time. And we learned a lot from that. One of the things we were looking at was action figures. One of the sort of tried and true -- often tried formulas for making a boy's game into a girl's game is to make the protagonist female. And most of the time that doesn't work. Sometimes it does because other things about the play pattern work.

So we asked boys about action figures and some of the action figures we showed them were female action figures. Historically boys don't buy girl action figures. There have been a few exceptions. X-man has a female character. She-rah. Of course, they would by Princess Leah.

When we showed them Commander Troy -- I have to tell this story. There's this little boy who is about 5 years old. We had the toys on the table and we asked them to pick some of the toys and talk to us about his favorite ones.

He was going for Troy and he got about five feet away and then he hit an invisible wall and said, "Whoa, is that a purse?" And I said no, that's a Tricorder. And he said "OK".

The things you find out. I have a beautiful tape of this boy talking about why Commander Troy should be on the crew and he was clearly a fan but the purse would have ended it right there. Pretty interesting.

So as we moved down in the research we started to see play patterns we wanted to move into. There were play patterns that were really strong for girls. By that time we were narrowed down from 8 to 12. There was a real break that most of you are probably aware of.

The 7-year-olds will probably buy the products, but you're in a whole different market, and the early learning people are doing a great job so we stuck with the preadolescent group. But we identified a couple of patterns we thought were worth pursuing.

And just a little -- let me step back for a second and do a little developmental rift that will sound familiar to all of you. That is at that time in a girl's life, a lot of what's going on is the project of self construction. I mean, that's what's going on there.

And it's a horrible moment in some ways because it's like -- it reminds me when a probe reenters the atmosphere. For 20 minutes, there's no noise. Nothing. Pre-adolescence for girls in this culture is like that. In the sense that the culture doesn't seem to understand them very well.

They're not kids anymore, the term that's used to describe them is hyphenated. Pre-teen, pre-adolescent. They're too old for dolls, too young for cosmetics and fashion and boys. When they talk about boys, it's kind of virtual. The romance stuff they do the narrative but their hearts aren't in it.

What the culture gives them that works is books. And maybe a few little alternative music but --

FROM THE FLOOR: Horses.

BRENDA: Horses, yeah.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: Rocketts first horse. Make notes, Pam. It's really true. You know, there's not a lot out there. I agree, horses is something girls this age are always interested in and sports activities we see going back beyond the barriers of girls in sports at this age. Anyway, it's an interesting age.

One of the sad things about girls at this age is they don't do constructive play. The boys are doing more constructive play. And people say, "Well if they make paper dolls and draw you can think of that as constructive play." But what doesn't get recognized is the incredibly reach of complicated fantasy lives of girls this age. They're doing enormous construction.

They're extruding really complicated characters. They have lots of stories going on with their friends day after day. Truly. So we looked at that and said, "This is pretty good."

By the way, one of the things we noticed is there's much less difference among girls on the basis of region, race, class than there is among their parents. And, you know, you can find goods and bads in that. I tend to be really optimistic about it.

In any case, on one hand they spend a lot of time imagining what it will be like as they construct their social identity. Play is always a rehearsal space in some way. I shouldn't say always. One of the things that gets rehearsed is the construction of the social identity. What will it be like in junior high? What will my life be like?

Girls have these -- I see some of you smiling because you're remembering. They see older girls. They go on and on about college and the boys and the gym. They tend to think of themselves as older, it's very elaborate and it's about tuning our social identity and our social skills.

Let me jump back again. Every intelligent being enjoys complexity. Complexity is at the heart of play in some basic ways. One of the things I think we haven't understood well is that the kind of complexity at the heart of girl's play is social complexity and narrative complexity.

And one of the reasons why boys seem socially immature at this age is because they're not there yet. They're not as complex as girls. They're not as interested in it as in other kinds of complexity. So that, the play with the complexity and the construction of social identity we think is really strong with this age group.

On the other hand, there's a lot of stuff that goes on that you don't bring up in a social situation, that you care about that you may do with your best friend, but you don't talk about it at school. There's a fantasy life girls have that typically is framed in a natural environment that's imbued as a kind of romantic perspective that might have romantic properties are inner journeys.

What's beautiful, what's meaningful, what's the right thing to do, who's my friend, what's love? You don't hear them talking about this in the hall at school but they'll talk about it in the bedroom.

And we knew the stuff about nature. This is an interesting find from our research. We knew they were interested in a kind of animalist romantic view. We gave them plants and stuffed animals and had them do improvisational play. Girls love to take care of animals and plants and trees.

I thought I had it all figured out that they would feel that way and we had them show us what they came up with.

And they said, "I go to the forest to be alone. I come here to learn, to think, to be quiet, to go over stuff. I expect to find magical wisdom here. I might take a friend with me. And the plants and animals, if they're worth their salt should know how to take care of themselves. That's a magical forest. I'm here to take care of me."

FROM THE FLOOR: [Applause].

BRENDA: And so the big surprise and the wonderful beautiful heart opening moment for me was that the thing girls nurture is their hearts and each other.

So it completely changed what they were doing in that part of the forest, if you will. So what we ended up doing, I'm making a long story even longer, we went through this all. We did in-depth interviews with a thousand children, boys and girls, talked for as long as they would tolerate between an hour and two hours until they started wiggling so much it was over.

We learned don't give them swivel chairs.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: And then we got survey data from another 10,000 kids that we gave questionnaires to. So we got an enormous amount of information. And we came back and spent about a year understanding it, you know, chewing on it. And we did two things in that time.

One was to figure out what the most meaningful parts of the research were to continue in the future because we knew whatever we did, a lot of what goes on is a moving target and you have to have a methodology for staying in touch with that.

Big things changed since Title 9. Big things changed with Clueless. There are things we didn't know about before that might not have been there before. So tracking it is important. See what figured what do you we have to keep tabs on.

The other thing we did was to say "OK. Here are the major key findings. Girls and boys are competitive, for example, but they act it out in different ways because they organize socially in different ways." And competition is about social behavior.

Girls act out a lot of the times by challenging themselves. And they're much harder on themselves at least in certain domains. We came up with a list of findings -- I should say this is bound to American girls in 1992 to '95.

And then we took those and did one more thing with them. We thought to turn these findings into design principles and what would they be. We made a design book.

They should have interesting characters. Sounds like a no brainer. Maybe could have pulled that out of my nose in 1991 but I wouldn't have been as confident about it. It's not just that a character is well developed. Even when a character is not well developed it has to be potential to work it over and make an interesting story out of it.

Nobody can make an interesting story about most of the characters in video games now. You know, not even. "As if!"

So we took those findings. At that point, the nerd girl I was, said, "We got these findings and principles. I want to build a prototype." Times wasting, let's start a company says Dave. Actually, a little before that happened we got together with Pat Roberts, Jocelyn Coen and a bunch of wonderful artists who came and went in the boiling pot of talent that San Francisco is and we did a lot of our core design work of the specific titles we're releasing this fall. And they also did a magnificent design of production for us.

And since that phase of the project, we're partnered with some other companies I want to mention. Media concrete, Stewart Cutlass's group. Stewart was the shining light of Colossal as far as I was concerned. He brought the Secret Paths series to market. And we're partnering with Persage to introduce the Rockett series. Pamela introduced all these characters.

So we also knew we needed to launch an on-line business at the same time so we partnered with AtomicVision and we've had wonderful consulting from many folks who have been in the business whom I worked side by side with over the last 20 years, it's been a real party --

Anyway, so to conclude, where we are now is we've spun off Purple Moon and launched two lines based on the two fantasy patterns I mentioned to you. We have a plan to extend the universe into new directions in terms of tending play patterns. We're 100% dedicated to girls. 100 percent dedicated to 8 to 12-year-old girls. So you won't see Rockett's first car any time soon.

You thought I was going to say something else, didn't you?

FROM THE FLOOR: [Applause].

BRENDA: We also developed -- originally we -- we knew girls didn't like it when narrators extruded objects. Girls have these detectors.

They like an American Girl doll that comes out with an American Girl book rather than a Pocohantas doll that comes out after a movie. It's very interesting. That's much more fascinating.

So we are calling it the merchandising business and the CD-ROM business at all the same time. So that's kind of where we are.

I should say one last thing. I started off on the path about self construction, and we had this idea that the social self and inner self are getting built now. There are two important things about that.

One is we construct ourselves out of the materials at hand. Our culture doesn't provide particularly fabulous material. So one of the things we're trying to do from the heart is put materials out there, you know. They're more interesting to work with than what we've seen.

The other thing is about this business of characters, the characters that we have. One the ways that girls can be at risk when they reach adolescence which you'll read about in Ophelia is that the inner self and social self, are what she calls the true self, tend to diverge from each other. The social self starts to call the shots and the other one gets trapped someplace. They don't talk very well sometimes. Part of that's just adolescence. That's just what happens. But part of it is culture.

One of the things Pamela and I decided when we started working on this was that the same characters would show up in both worlds. So if you meet a girl over in Rockett's world on her first day of school in eighth grade in a brand new school where she doesn't know anybody you may find her in the Secret Path telling you she's afraid of the dark and you need to go on a quest to help her work on that.

The message is we're all whole people, you know. It was interesting. When I first suggested that we have the same characters in both series everybody started to tear their hair out because they're very different worlds.

People thought why don't we just license characters. You could license characters of people you already know. But when you do that they have this troubling habit of dragging their narrative universe along with them. So you're stuck with their values and what they do and don't do.

We knew we wanted to make characters and stories deeply relevant to girl's lives. If there's anything girls will call you on is relevance -- big time.

When that Times article ran there were letters to the editor -- we had an article in Time magazine and one of the girls said, "You go girls. We're excited." And this other girl said, "If you keep giving us plastic dolls with weird measurements, we're going to use your CD-ROM as a hockey puck!"

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter and Applause].

BRENDA: People ask us why don't you like this and it's like it starts somewhere. That WE are the well spring.

Somebody made up the Simpsons. Somebody made up Sabrina. Somebody even made up Barbie.

We can make it up. We do make it up. The only question is who gets to make it up and who has the desire and commitment to make it up and who's willing to mud wrestle to get there.

End of program.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Cheers and Applause].

BEGIN Q&A:

ELAINE: Does anybody have questions? You want to just line up at the microphone and fire away.

FROM THE FLOOR: I actually didn't cut to the front. I've got done a lot of research on adolescent boys and girls friendship patterns and the way they relate and spend time together. And I think girls have a different kind of social network, as I'm sure you know. And I'm wondering if you think that Internet gaming offers more appeal to girls maybe than the individualized video games that they have had previously.

BRENDA: I think that's a really good point. Our finding is when girls play games at all, they play them together whether they're designed for multiple uses or not. Like so many things, they'll do it but they're not crazy about it.

So you're making a good point, and that's obviously one of the reasons why we're working on line two. I think that the social component is important however you work it out. And I think that it's interesting that the on-line gaming business right now is still back in the video game ghetto.

They're a couple years behind expanding horizons of play patterns. They have to be. They have to drive the cost of technology development. I'm hoping as we get into play patterns more social and, dare I say it, collaborative. Even in the ante room it's such an all-boy scene you can't go there.

But just as a forum for, like you said, collaborative play, it seems to offer maybe more girl appealing qualities. I think so. I think the stay on the -- it's like you're trapped. It's like Spock in his katra. The katra is trapped in CD-ROM and we have to make that work until the next thing is viable. That's just what has to happen.

FROM THE FLOOR: I have a little bit more of a practical question which is, and more general, and this is -- this is great stuff. This is the stuff I've always been interested in. This is why I became a sociologist and got my degree to study the differences between men and women and how they address issues and tackle problems.

And I've always been interested in the technical stuff and I've been looking for this kind of job where I could do the research and it would be like how women look at different things for and how to make software for women. What other kinds of companies are doing similar research? Where would a sociologist with technical skills go?

BRENDA: I think it is dawning on the world -- I mean, an amazing thing is happening here in the computer game business that was really, it took Mattel to punch a hole in the wall to finally, after 20 years, get them to look over there, you know, and do what's necessary to reach girls was an enormous achievement and now that that hole is blown in the wall everybody's saying that maybe they should get this right for women.

And as we get more information about women's roles, for example, in purchasing technology and in making major purchases for a family, people are interested in marketing, they're interested in that. I think it would be a great role for somebody who can offer understanding of female preferences, especially adult female preferences to an on-line service provider or anybody who has a web site trying to reach males and females. If that's not happening, it should be. I don't know how to make it happen any faster. But maybe you need to raise their consciousness about it. I know it's hard.

FROM THE FLOOR: Start my own company.

BRENDA: That's the right thing. Anyway, yeah, I know it's amazing. I've been thinking for 20 years, "Why aren't we paying attention to this?"

FROM THE FLOOR: I think it's going to change really fast now. Especially because the last three years of the web and the tremendous growth of female users on the web you can't ignore anymore. I think that one part that's going to change this is this whole idea about communities on the web, and I think that people are going to have to start thinking about what women like because there's a lot of women out there than ever before.

The company I work for does trade shows and they're thinking community. We want people to keep coming back to the web sites but they don't know how to do that and there's not much incentive and I think they have to think a lot differently than before. It's much more male oriented. It's all intermingled with business practices.

When you look at USENET and you look at -- I mean, it's all men on USENET. I had my stint on USENET for a couple months with some other gentlemen but girls get tired of that. Girls don't want to dominate and control all the time, you know, and there's got to be some way and some companies interested in creating, you know, some way that women are interested in helping on the web and helping each other.

BRENDA: I agree, you know. We've had the crash dummies now, so I don't think you're in any danger. Go for it. It sounds like you have the rap down really good.

FROM THE FLOOR: I'd like to thank you for coming and speaking to us and for pursuing a path that clearly your heart's in. That's inspirational because I think that's the reason a lot of women, I know I am trying to -- I was talking to Elaine about this earlier, do something where we're going to make a difference and where we don't have to feel -- I'm sure you have research to back this up -- when we go to work we don't have to become something else and kind of deal with a certain environment and just one version of ourselves, some kind of body spatial thing and get back into ourselves when the day's over, that's the first thing.

But I have a couple questions. One leads from my experience at knowledge advantage where I've always had my share of arguments like probably everyone in this room. You mentioned something about selling the stuff. With all this research, that's great. I'm interested in hearing about channel strategies or where you're going to put it.

It drives me nuts like going to the mechanic, the nerd guys that can't talk to you. Why can't I buy something at Whole Foods that girls would care about. Or am I like lucky charms.

BRENDA: Lucky charms isn't good for you.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

FROM THE FLOOR: It's got pink hearts. And then the second thing is it sounds like you founded a couple other companies but this one has press and good funding, and I'll be interested for how you apply this to the female community. We've all experienced what it's like to be the one woman in the room. But people don't get that, that's too complicated and whatever.

BRENDA: So let me try to answer that because there are a lot of people -- I could go for days. But thank you for bringing up the question of the environment in which people shout. And I didn't tell you one of the most important things here. One of the reasons we're getting the opportunity to engage at the level of popular culture is that we realize that half the battle is figuring out how to reach girls, how to bring them in to interest in technology.

And you're right, girls are not normally cruising the stores of computer game stores,. We've done a couple things. Certainly, on our end, computer retail. We've worked hard to establish a retail channel in the toy stores, some book stores, music stores. We've got pretty aggressive co-marketing advantages going with a clothes manufacturer.

So we're getting exposure for our products and they're getting exposure for their products. It's a way of communicating to girls. We've made a half million of those samplers you saw in the lobby. A lot of them are going out in Girls' Life magazine. Others are going in a book cover program.

Many kids have to have book covers in the schools, so it turns out you can use things like that to get CDs in their hands. We're working with investors who know that the lion's share of the investment is actually doing really innovative things with the channels and getting the information to girls where they are. So that answers that question.

In terms of corporate culture. That's a sticky wicket. I mean, there are a lot of different flavors that work. We are about, I'd say, 75 percent female in our company, and there are recognizably standard business practices that go on.

But I think there's a level of shared commitment and sort of heart stuff that helps us get over disagreements and probably makes us more willing to collaborate than we might be at Clorox. I don't know. I mean, you know, there are pitfalls too. You can get into a situation where you're doing the all-girl Dream Team and you rebel against business structure so hard you end up with chaos, and I've been there, too. I'm trying to aim it a little better this time.

FROM THE FLOOR: Here is a question for you, Brenda, from the online audience joining us through the Wordcast. This is from Faith:

She says, "I know you found no significant differences in regards to religion. Did you find any statistically significant differences among interaction between white girls and black girls? I remember growing up and tiring of the white Barbie doll only later to receive a white Barbie painted brown."

BRENDA: I sympathize with that. I'm encouraged. Actually, I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't be encouraged. But certainly we see diversity in terms of how girls act out certain play patterns. So you will see, for example, African influence in chanting and playing games in the African-American community. But chanting and clapping games are sort of universal in American girl culture.

In general today's girls in the age range we looked at are much less interested in labeling on the basis of race or even noticing it, even when coming from communities divided along those lines. We see a lot less of that than I would have expected having grown up in Indiana. I find it very heartening.

I think there's a hunger for diversity. We got very positive responses to the diversity of our cast of characters. But those sorts of differences are not seen as barriers in general by the girls that is we talked to. So I'm really encouraged. Something's working right in that regard. It may get undone later. But at the age that we talked to them, they were doing great around it.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I just wanted to thank you for all the research you've done. It's amusing and fascinating at the same time. I'm kind of curious about your talk about how women, men, or girls and boys differ in the way that they play and in the social construction of identity. And I agree that it really doesn't matter for the work that you're doing whether the difference comes from biological reasons, cultural reasons, whatever. But it seemed like you haven't talked very much about the games you're creating, but that you have a very active role in the kind of social identity a girl envisions for herself.

I know when I was 8 to 12 that the girl or woman I imagined myself being was very different from the woman I am today. I wonder if you could talk a little more about how you envision that, what kind of role you're taking and girls imagine themselves in. Maybe not dating that great guy or the quarterback or whatever, you know.

BRENDA: Yes, that's a good question.

FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you.

BRENDA: And we don't deal with sort of career fantasies in these products, although we may do that one some day. One day it's a doctor and an actress or both. But one of the hard and wonderful things about our approach this has been to try our best to see who they are and to listen to what they tell us about what they imagine. And it just reflected back.

And so we've not put our agendas on it, so you won't see, you know, scenes where a girl saves the school by doing, you know, electron microscope work or something. It isn't in our product. You could do a great product about that. But what we have here are really much more down to earth issues.

Rockett, what happens when somebody takes your best friend? Is it forever? We all know about that magic threesome that does a round robin. How do you work on a problem where you're afraid to be excellent at something because you're worried other girls will be jealous. That shows up in both series. We deal with it.

So we're much more focused on our understanding of the different sort of social segments that girl culture falls. So who are the popular girls, anyway? And what are their values like? And how do they get worked out? We spent time getting girls to talk to us about that.

When we showed the products to grown-ups they say, "That it's Laura," or "That's Janet." So it's not so much in the sense of what I'll be when I grow up, but it is in both cases in the social domain and in the personal fantasy domain trying to work through the stuff coming up for them right then.

What does it mean to be a friend? What are the challenges to honesty? What does it mean to be beautiful? What is exclusion, anyway, and why do we do it to each other? Does that help?

We really tried so hard to stay wide open and listen. And then play it back in ways we thought would be enjoyable. And play stuff stops being play when you have to pay attention and study.

If you're naturally engaged in it it's different than a pedantic thing. Girls won't let you get away with it. In Rockett's world as she goes through her first day of school, there's not a right answer, there are lots of ways to go about moving through the world. But things turn out differently depending or what attitude or emotion you bring into the moment or what kind of decisions you make about moving through the social phase.

We have tried really hard to be clear and receptive to what they were telling us about their lives.

FROM THE FLOOR: I want to thank you for your efforts.

BRENDA: Thank you.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. My name is Eileen. Two things that you discussed actually hit me a lot because I have a background in social sciences and design and art. One was basing design on good research and the second was weighing various problems with being a already or approaching popular culture and bringing girls to the computer and keeping them there.

I'm wondering -- I saw the sampler outside in the lobby, and I'm wondering if you're approaching problems kind of perpetuating stereotypes because you're researching what girls want and girls have been socialized in this culture.

So I saw hearts and butterflies and flowers. And if you're bringing them there, I can understand that, but what's the second step to like -- I don't know if you have to -- not force feed them something, but give them something maybe different from what their normal socialization is.

BRENDA: That's a really good point. And it's always a temptation. You have to walk a fine line. For example, the heart is the cursor of the tree house because that's where you're talking to and listening to these girls and trying to help them.

On the other hand, a lot of other stereotypes that is I find much more dangerous than hearts for love go away, you know in the sense that one of the most socially successful robust and friendly characters is a large African-American girl, for example. Or that one of our Japanese superstar characters has parents who tell her if she's not enjoying it, it's not worth it, not driving her to academic excellence.

So we do our share of stereotype blowing up where we know it's real and we can get away with it. Having a butterfly leading you from one path to another seems less bad than using others. You have to speak to kids in a way they understand. I didn't want to take on educating them that some other thing could be an icon when I could show them how a certain kind of person we don't think of as the ideal could have success or kids we think of as perfect can have problems we don't imagine.

FROM THE FLOOR: Do you foresee in future development projects having a different route kind of based on more your vision of things or is it always going to be basing it on what girls want?

BRENDA: That's a good question too. It's always a mix. The best example I can think of is Star Trek. I've been a Star Trek fan for 35 years -- 30 -- it seems like 35. They've done so many great things with that myth. So Gene Roddenberry was able to deal with almost every socially relevant issue and they keep doing that in a way that enables 75% of the American public to identify with Star Trek.

And the politics are so far away from the United States Congress you can't imagine and yet 75% of the people in America are watching it because it's working out stuff they care about. Roddenberry is a radical in that he's able to do that. He stepped up to that. He's my hero, my role model.

Chuck Jones is one too, but that's another story.

FROM THE FLOOR: [Laughter].

BRENDA: That's where I want to be. I want to listen and give people space to work on stuff that matters that's relatively safe. What I hope will happen for us and one of the reasons why we've been so aggressive about developing our website is we're trying to introduce a subculture, and we want it to be successful.

And the purpose is to be in dialogue with our fans. And everybody who's ever looked at fan culture knows the number-one best way to do that is let them create or shape or guide the creation of the material that you play back.

So I've learned from Star Trek and I want to keep that dynamic relationship with our audience. I want to make it happen, and manage it, and keep it going.

FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you.

FROM THE FLOOR: A couple questions. Is there any chance that the Interval Research will be publishing you research or is the rest of the well spring going -- are we ever going to see it?

BRENDA: I'm happy to release book information about the stuff we looked at. The reason I haven't published some of the findings -- there are two reasons. One is that for the time being the climate in which we work needs to pay the piper. There's a huge investment. We're trying to use that in a proprietary way. That's what's going on.

From a professional point of view, doing research to improve your intuition as an artist is different from doing research as a scientist. If I'm going to publish scientific things I want people to consider to be scientific findings, I have to go through a peer review process and do a much more rigorous thing in terms of documenting it. I haven't had time to do that.

I've been grabbing my ass and trying to get this out the door while the door was open, you know. So we may get back to that. And I have every desire to share the information. And right now I can share top line findings in a conversational way and give people pointers in bibliographies.

But I don't see myself trying to do the concerted legitimate publishing thing for a while.

FROM THE FLOOR: Second question is: You've talked about Purple Moon essentially as if it's working with production formulas that came out of the research. Are you structurally keeping it open ended in a way that allows for more research or based on research to the games?

BRENDA: Sure. The company. We define the company as being about 8 to 12-year-old girls. So ongoing research and communication with those girls and people who know and love them is at the heart of what we do.

It's much more likely that we'll change or add media formats, for example, then that we will change the audience that we care about. Our expertise is really in having been asked hard questions and give good answers and learning how to answer the ones they keep asking.

FROM THE FLOOR: You said something about there being very interesting sexual politics at that age. I was curious if you could elaborate on that a little bit particularly as it maybe presages the kinds of things that happen in the working world or in ways that things that might be eye openers for us raised in the '60s, different things that we're not aware of how things changed.

BRENDA: I wouldn't describe it as sexual politics. I was talking about schisms. Clueless will give you an example. Some girls think that's a gas and others are really insulted. It's an interesting -- it's a difference of opinion that wouldn't have surfaced in that community of kids if they didn't have a media object to stimulate the dialogue.

In general I think that girls at this point in time tend to be sort of intuitive equity. Feminists don't think of that as feminism and don't think of it as politics and are initially more puzzled than angry when they see things acting out in the world that don't confirm their conviction that equity is the natural way of things.

I know that sounds Pollyanna-ish but that's what we heard a lot of the time. I guess politics is, again, maybe the wrong word. But let me give you another example. This is more about media literacy. It's about how kids participate in culture and what that's like.

My daughter, my twelve-year-old. I have nine, ten, and twelve-year-old daughters. My twelve-year-old came to me this weekend and said there was this amazing funny movie out. You have to see it. It's called Scream.

So I sat down in front of the TV and she rolled the tape and I was horrified to the point of making her fast forward over stuff because I didn't want it in my brain! And then it was like the last five minutes of the film I figured out that its irony. This is a satire.

I grew up believing in those move -- what we are see suggests a lot more sophistication. A lot more hard-boiled media literacy in the age group that we're talking about than you would expect. So there's this bizarre mix. There's that innocence you want to honor and cherish and take over that before they go over into adolescence and that other thing happens.

And they're innocent but very sophisticated about the media world and extremely intertextual. So they don't bat an eye between the Simpsons and the evening news because that's the soup they live in.

Wow, you know, you can't intuit that if you grew up in the 50s. It's not exactly politics but it's a kind of way of participating in culture and issues that come up that didn't come up ten years ago.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, first I want to say appreciate your passion for women and girls and how you bring that through. And I'm an independent software developer. I developed an educational product for women and girls.

And getting it done, I thought would be the hard part. And, of course, what I'm finding is the hard part really is the distribution, and I'm wondering where does an independent developer who spent all the money on development go to try to get the product out there to women and girls.

BRENDA: Are you a publisher?

FROM THE FLOOR: Yes.

BRENDA: So you need distribution partners but not a publisher?

FROM THE FLOOR: Right.

BRENDA: I don't know enough about your business. But one thing to think about is looking at the major players in the publishing world, Simon and Schuster, Scholastic and think about approaching them with an affiliated label deal. A lot of people don't have a stake in the girls' market and never will because they feel it will undermine their existing franchise.

But look at who cares and who needs to do this. And approach them with an affiliated label idea. That's just off the top of my head.

FROM THE FLOOR: Great. Thanks.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, I was wondering what you thought of human factors as an academic discipline how it's developing and weather it's receptive to the kind of issues that came up in your research.

BRENDA: There have been conversations about all of this stuff for a long time obviously as you know as an interface person in that community they're always kind of marginalized. But I really see that changing fast.

In the last couple years I've seen a tremendous increase in the value placed on ethnographic studies, for example, in the human interface community. People in the business of selling entertainment products, education products as opposed to people who sell business products and industry products have to be much more concerned about whether their users are having a good experience. So I see it changing and it's changing quickly.

I think in general -- to a large degree in relation to the World Wide Web, our whole economy is waking up to, you know, the clue phone is ringing and it's for them. And the message is there are real people out there that use your products and it might be worthwhile to figure out what their lives are like. I can see that happening in the market research community and in the interface community. I don't know how long it will take to get it in the academic world.

There's been a lot more work done at MIT that has cultural roots. I see that as a canary in the coal mine situation. A project is a computer based Rabbinical story teller. I think the world is changing very fast. It's going to move really fast like the web.

FROM THE FLOOR: Thanks.

FROM THE FLOOR: I was wondering, you say you're focusing on girls age 8 to 12. That's great and fine and wonderful, in fact, but what I'm wondering is: What are you doing about and for the girl who likes the hockey puck or the girl who sits there and hears a lot of things about the way girls are and the way boys are and can't relate to any of it.

Or possibly the girl who majored in math or statistics and who liked this all along and now has to deal with these stereotypes about them that are possibly reinforced by the segregation in the toy store between the girls products and the boys products?

So the main question is: What are you doing about these gender outlaws that don't fit into your study?

BRENDA: A lot of them show up as characters, and most of them have a pretty interesting time. So that's the first sort of bit. In a lot of ways this is not different than theater. The object is a representation that communicates as much as its form.

So by showing characters that are math wizards and computer wizards and hot shit athletes who are very popular, that sends a message, I think. As I said before, we're growing our approach in different ways. No company regardless of how committed and wonderful they are can be all things to all people, and if you try to do that, I think you lose your focus.

So there will probably be a large segment that we don't reach and that would be true of every company that tries to do that. But I think we're making greater strides than I've seen so far in representing diversity.

Remember we started this with a really simple mission. If we change your mission and we decide that part of our mission is to encourage girls to approach science and math careers or to encourage girls to become cultural explorers or to really go after other gender stereotypes than the ones we've aimed at we'll do in it in an entertaining and appealing.

FROM THE FLOOR: I guess the main question is what good is it having girls put their fingers on a computer if they're doing it as a secretary to the boss? Or what good is it to talk about girls to use computers to get boys and maybe some girls do it to get at other girls romantically.

BRENDA: Yeah. One of the things we've seen a lot is that the primary category of software girls are comfortable with are creativity and productivity. What I want to say is the value of what we're doing in getting a girls hands on the computer I've already described.

I think there's another value in that getting, giving an example of this medium as one that can produce an experience that has personal relevance can interest a girl in becoming involved in authoring in the medium. We can look at girls and video as a good example.

A couple years ago I asked my friend Timothy Leary to put together young people in the Los Angeles community into the video world to look at how they approach it. And I saw great stuff put out by 10, 11, and 12-year-old girls. I believe they saw relevant contact and could imagine themselves as authors of contact. And the means of production were cheap.

So I think there's positive value even if we're not teaching programming or engineering or computer literacy with our products we're giving them something great, the art that can come out of this medium.

Source: This speech came from a web page which no longer exists.