Some girls just can’t jump…
Last Friday the Game Initiative at Cornell hosted a lab session for a group of pre-freshman women in engineering, where they had a chance to play the student games that have been made at Cornell. Unsurprisingly, none of the women considered themselves “core gamers” but it seemed that most of these women hadn’t played a game at all in the recent past, Solitare included. Even more surprising was the fact that Penguin Adventure, the game I expected to be most popular with this particular group, proved to be rather problematic with many of the girls.
Sure, Penguin Adventure is not exactly an easy game, but when it comes down to dealing with the core mechanics, some women just can’t jump. And when I say can’t jump, I mean they REALLY can’t jump in any of the games that required jumping. Watching some of these women was like watching a first-time pianist attempt Moonlight Sonata. These people had difficulties timing their jumps. When they got stuck, they would carefully position themselves for a jump, then press the arrow and spacebar at the same time, thus missing their mark. At one point, one group of girls gave up and requested to try out a game without jumps.
In a recent lecture at Cornell (that I missed), one researcher in cognitive studies noted gender differences in perception as a way of explaining the gender gap in video game audiences. Women, for example, tend to face more difficulty perceiving 3D rotations, and therefore tend not to play first-person shooters. Is the difference in cognitive skill the reason why a game as simple as Penguin Adventure can cause so much trouble for some women?
I had always considered platformers to be a gender-neutral genre. For that reason, the game we submitted for the Games 4 Girls competition was a platformer. Now, all of a sudden I’m wondering how girl-oriented our games is. Was this not able to jump phenomenon specific to this group of girls because of their inexperience with gaming? Or is there some gender difference in terms of cognitive skill that effect these women’s ability to time the jumps? Are platformers really as gender neutral as one would expect?
I tend to think I can jump, but it’s probably because i grew up on jumping required video games like super mario bros, zelda, etc. Maybe its just bc girls generally play alot less video games when they are young so they don’t have the “childhood training” unlike a nerdy gamer like me. Most of my gaming buddies are male, that’s for sure.