Girl in the Gaming Store

I'm starting a 'Gender and Games' blog series, which I'm writing to help demystify the connections between women, men, and games. As a disclaimer, please understand that I'll be using generalities in this series.

I'll start with the most obvious point of purchase for games: the bricks-and-mortar game store.

So... why don't we see more women in game stores? How can we get more women to shop for games, and better yet, buy them and play them?

Well, there's at least two kinds of stores to talk about, each of which have their own problems.

The first is traditional gaming stores - the ones that sell card and board games as well as RPGs and tabletop miniatures games. The second is computer game stores, which sell console and PC games. The former has more problems than the latter, so I'll tackle it first.

Traditional Gaming Stores
The typical traditional gaming store is a mess. Dusty merchandise lines narrow, poorly-lit aisles, while impenetrable groups of men stand and chat loudly with the clerk. The bathroom isn't well-kept, and the gaming room in the back of the store - The Back Room - is worn and cluttered.

The book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill has a lot to say about why these are problems. Here is some of the book's knowledge that I've distilled for gaming stores:

When a woman walks into a store, she typically prefers clean, undamaged, neatly ordered goods. A dusty, dented or scratched item just announces that it has sat on the shelf forever, and isn't a good buy. The majority of women also like to read packaging. Who wants to pick up a dusty old game to read how it plays? Not most women.

Another issue with game store merchandise is that there isn't much available for beginners. For example, the best sizes of hobby paintbrushes are almost never present. There are plenty of miniatures and paints, but good luck finding the glue! Not only that, but the 'starter kits' for the more popular games are either missing or buried and dusty. You're not going to hook a woman on a hobby she can't find the basics for.

The aisles at gaming stores are usually too narrow for a shopper to easily pass a crouching shopper. Walkways need to be wider, since women won't generally stay to shop if they are in danger of being bumped. As well, I don't think I've seen gaming store aisles wide enough to accommodate a stroller; so much for helping new moms find a game.

Traditional game store lighting is often poor. It needs to be bright enough to read game books and packaging comfortably, even in the back corner. Plus, games often have great art - why not show it off with some well-aimed spotlights?

Most women prefer to interact with other human beings to discuss their potential purchases. However, if the game store clerk is busy chatting it up with the guys, a woman may feel too intimidated to approach. If she's shy, and she'll have to walk through those guys to get to the counter, she might not even make a planned purchase. Hiring female clerks can really help with this, as women usually feel more comfortable approaching other women.

Traditional game stores usually do have a lavatory, though its state is never predictable. I've seen perfectly clean bathrooms with everything a woman needs, and I've seen what could best be described as a questionable toilet in a janitorial closet. My advice to game stores is to install both men's and women's restrooms, and keep them clean and well stocked. When women see that a game store has a bathroom suited to them, they'll feel more welcome there.

The Back Room can be unnerving. It has disorganized shelves of ratty and broken pieces of terrain for use in battle simulation games, uncomfortable metal chairs, ugly and worn tables and floor, racks of ancient books shredded with use, poorly lit display shelves with dusty (but beautifully painted) miniatures, and faded game posters covering the windows. Sometimes these posters have illustrations of women in various states of undress.

The Back Room is a home for the gamer elite; the kings of the geeks. It is a thoroughly intimidating place for women. I do, however, have a couple of ideas on how to avoid scaring women off.

There's an interesting concept I learned about from The Tipping Point - the Broken Windows theory. For our purposes, it states that if you relentlessly keep a place clean, people will treat the place (and the people in the place) better. I've seen such actions work at Backspace, a computer/tabletop gaming hangout in Portland, OR. Unfortunately, after talking with employees of traditional game stores, I've realized that relentless cleaning would be difficult to practice at those locales. At the core of the issue is lack of manpower, and the juggernaut of gamer culture itself.

It's a delicate issue. Gamers show slovenly characteristics often enough that the cultural stereotype persists. While game stores do have the right to refuse service to anyone, their profit margins are too low for them to afford confronting their least hygienic patrons. And because women are more sensitive to odors than men are, the maleness of The Back Room perpetuates itself.

So, since game stores may never be able to make The Back Room welcoming to women, they can at least strive for keeping them from being frightening. I'd start by installing a good ventilation system, and by making sure that the worst messes and most worn paraphernalia were taken care of. That way, when a girl shows up with mom or dad to buy collectible cards, she's not as turned off by what she encounters in The Back Room.

Summary
In my ideal world, it would be as easy for a woman to break into gamer culture by visiting a game store as it is for a woman to break into do-it-yourselfer culture by visiting a Home Depot. Traditional game stores might be able to accomplish this if they had bright and well-placed lighting; clean merchandise and displays; beginner kits, instructions and materials present and in obvious locations; non-intimidating staff; superb bathrooms; wide aisles; and a well-kept gaming room.

Next up: the computer game store.


References:
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

Shamelessly Reposted from Cuppytalk

The

Uncomfortable Design

This is less a thought about game design, and more a thought about designers themselves.

Looking at my own and others' experiences, game designers seem to learn the most about their trade when they step outside of their zones of comfort.

For example, if designers work on nothing but a single system for years, their design skills - even in regards to their most familiar system - improve if they work on another system in the game. On a broader scale, I'd even say that console design can inform PC game design, and vice versa.

When designers leave their most familiar contexts, while it may be uncomfortable, I think it grants them more opportunities for lateral thought, and greater game-making potential.

Who are you, and why did you start blogging?

I should have answered this question sooner. You, my readers, deserve context!

The idea for this blog started at AGDC. I was speaking with Brent, Cuppycake, Andrew Krausnick and Steve Williams, all of whom have blogs. It occurred to me that I do have a lot to say about game design, so why not join in?

I'm always reading up on one aspect or another of game design, and I try out new games as often as I have time for them. So, when I run across something I think is interesting, I write about it. I hope it will be as interesting to you as it was to me, whether you agree or not. Comments are always welcome!

Now, as to me personally -
I have just over 2 years of computer game design experience, all of it (so far) on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. While some may point out that Vanguard isn't doing so well, I doubt I would have learned as much about design if Vanguard had been more successful.

I didn't just pop into the gaming industry fully formed, like Athena from Zeus' head. In the past, I've worked as a computer consultant and information architect - both jobs that taught me the importance of user-centered design. And, of course, I'm an avid gamer. I've played and GMed tabletop games since 1994, and played MMOs since 2003.

So, in a nutshell, I'm a D&D DM with her foot in the door in the computer gaming industry.

Addendum:
To concur with Jeff Freeman... yes, I may have taken leave of my senses. :)

Paper Prototypes

Designers love to design, and they are full of design ideas.

For most game designers, the early stages of a project are candy - brainstorming, throwing piles of ideas out on the table, and discussing them with other designers. It's genuine fun to work on something new; to get to decide the rules from the beginning.

An issue with developing prototypes for most computer games is that they require an engine, and a comprehensive set of tools for implementing assets and content. If these are not already developed, designers (if they are not also coders) can end up with a lot of time on their hands while they wait for the coders to get the fundamentals in place.

Here's the danger. Because game designers love to design games, it's easy for them to use this time to design additional, and potentially overambitious, aspects of the game. In a worst case scenario, you end up with a game far too enterprising for the scope of the project.

Considering the <20/>80 rule of thumb that I discuss in a previous post, designers ought to be spending this extra time playtesting their prototype. But how can they do that if their prototype only exists as a design document?

The problem can be solved by testing the game system on paper while it is being coded. I've seen it work. Applying iterative design to a paper UI can help solve many design problems ahead of time, and help make the system more fun than it would have been.

If you time it right, when the code is ready for the final design and content steps to be taken, it's possible to have many gameplay kinks worked out (instead of a thicker design document).

Paper prototypes for the win.

Portal

Many gamers routinely lose track of time while playing a computer game. For me, it has been years since it happened last.

When I finally sat down to play Portal, I finished the game thinking it was around 8 or 9PM, 10 at the latest. It was 2:30AM.

Some have complained that Portal was too short a game. Truth is, if it had been longer, I wouldn't have gotten any sleep that night!

Steve Williams has said most of what I would say about the game (all of it glowing praise). To his comments, I add the following:

If you are a game designer, or anyone curious about how designers make games, complete the Portal maps to unlock their Developer Commentary.

Listen to the Portal devs, and you'll see how they applied playtesting - and the principles of usability - to the game. In Portal and in Team Fortress 2 interviews, the developers have commented on how iterative design helped them make their games more usable.

Also, I think we'll be seeing a lot more songs written for/with computer games after the success of "Still Alive," the closing song to Portal, sung by voice actress Ellen McLain and composed by Jonathan Coulton.

Happy Portaling!

A Rule of Thumb from Rules of Play

Within Rules of Play, the authors advocate something so phenomenal, I am compelled to quote it:

"We have a straightforward rule of thumb regarding prototyping and playtesting games: a game prototype should be created and playtested, at the absolute latest, 20 percent of the way into a project schedule."

My heart grew three sizes when I read those words. Look at the rule another way: At least 80% of a game's development cycle should be testing, redoing, and polishing. at least.

Imagine what awesome games could be made if design teams were expected to take 80% or more of their development time refining and perfecting their prototypes.

There exists at least one such game - Puzzle Quest. Infinite Interactive had a playable prototype for Puzzle Quest up and running after only 2 months. Then they spent an additional 25 months tinkering with, adding content to, and polishing the game. Having a working prototype just 7.4% of the way into their project schedule allowed them to develop a fun, successful game.*

While I couldn't find precise numbers for World of Warcraft, we can infer that a large part of Blizzard's development cycle is spent on iterative design, given the high level of value they place on game polish.**

In my experience, games like these are the exception.

I'll be keeping my eye out for other examples of games that followed the <20/>80 rule of thumb during development. It would be an interesting chart to look at game success vs. how much time dev teams spent in the prototyping and iterative design phases.

References:
* The September 2007 issue of Game Developer has a comprehensive story on the development of Puzzle Quest.
** Rob Pardo's keynote speech for AGDC 2006 gives some hints on the amount of time Blizzard spends polishing.
I encourage all game designers to read Rules of Play, a game design textbook by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.