Girl Meets Geekdom

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?

24 straight hours of work, 32 hours of non-sleep, 5 Cornell Students, 1 faculty member, 1 mobile game.

This past weekend was the Mobile Game Mosh, a 24-hour game design competition hosted by Parson’s in NYC. The goal: design and make a game for a cell phone in 24 hours. We went, we worked, and we did pretty well.

What it was like:
10AM
Our team, “Two Bit Operation” , consisting of myself, Brenda Chen, John Berges, Chris John, Hari Nathan, and our faculty advisor Mohan, arrive at Parsons.

10:30AM
Tutorial time…they had problems making the multiplayer flash demo work…so immediately we decided against that…

Noon
Envelope opens, we find out the four verbs that define our design constraints: suck, grip, conjure, and fade. John proceeds to celebrate over the words “grip” and “suck.”

1PM
We start making our game in Gamemaker.

2PM
Lunch, yaaaaaay!

4PM
Overdosed on Tylenol Cold…you’re suppose to take it every 6 hours not 4!

7PM
Dinner

8:00PM
Broke out the first caffeine drink…much more to come….

8:30PM
First wave of professional game designers arrive to critique our game. First piece of advice: “Lay off the vitamin c.”

9:00PM
Major redesign

2:00AM
Pizza!

Noon
I don’t remember what happened between 2:00-noon…but we finished

Consumption (whole team):
8tbsp - Tylenol Cold Medicine
2 cans – Starbucks double shot
~15 cans – Red Bull
~40 pieces – Halls Vitamin C

Interestingly enough, the contest was partially sponsored by Red Bull…so we had an unlimited supply…

Our finished game, entitled Vac-Attack, was a sort of Tetris-like block game where you can suck in blocks and shoot them out in attempts to collide it with other blocks. Unfortunately, I think that’s all I can say…and I can’t put up a copy of the game for download because we signed our rights away too Atari when the contest started…but it’s all good.

We finished runner up in the Top Game category. The winning game, Moth, was a puzzle game developed in Flash by a group of graduate students…so I’d say they had some edge over us.

There should be press about the event out around this time, including Gamasutra and Electronic Gaming Monthly who were with us for the whole 24 hours. Also, a number of New York newspapers covered the event. Here’s the press:

• Here is an article about me in Chinese.
• An article in the New York Metro featuring Brenda asleep on a tablet and the rest of the team (except Hari) in the background, as well as a quote from me.
• The full Gamasutra coverage of the event…including a picture of me looking like a supernerd (I was sick that day, not my fault)

Anyway, it was a very exciting event…too bad I won’t be a student next year to do it again…

Next up: The Games 4 Girls Game design competition, entries due this week…wish me luck!

It’s been a rough week. On top of finalizing the mess of a course schedule I had this semester, Friday was also the day in which I had to decide between job offers from Microsoft and EA. In the end, I chose EA.

Sure, it might seem very clear cut that a girl who blogs about graphics and game design would go for the game company, but it really was a tough call. Microsoft gave an incredibly generous job offer and the prospect of a management and feature design role as a program manager. Not to mention, the team that extended the offer was Pix Experience – a team that works with human-computer interaction, digital photography, takes random photography breaks on sunny days, and has DDR in one of their “meeting rooms.” If there was a perfect team at Microsoft that was not games-related, that was it.

So despite all this, why did I choose EA? First of all Dilbert makes fun of the position that I would’ve taken at Microsoft. Not that I actually took that into consideration. I just found it amusing while I was contemplating. A significant (and real) factor in my decision deals with my overwhelming preference for a place that carries a bit of familiarity. I’m not worried about making new friends, but I’ve been restarting in new places half my life. For once, I’d like to be in place that didn’t feel temporary. Plus, I think that people who don’t factor friends, family, and people in general into their career decisions are really missing a part of the big picture. It’s not just about networking. People inspire ideas, they get you involved in projects, and can add greatly to overall happiness. And at the risk of sounding like a fortune cookie, happiness is key to success. Also, there’s the fact that I spent three years targeting myself for a job on a production team in the entertainment industry. If there was anything I learned from Cornell, it is that success comes as a result of using your skills to its full potential, which EA wins out on. Then there’s that game industry factor. Even if I went to Microsoft, I’d want to go back into games, and, in the game industry, nothing can really stand in for industry experience.

I am hoping, like many others, to someday be a game designer. I will be getting my start at EA as a technical artist in EA Redwood Shores…hopefully on the Sims 3.

The games are out. (Actually they have been for a week now)

I’m technically a TA for the course that produced this, so I probably should not play favorites, but semester’s over, and I can’t resist. My favorites for the semester - Elsia and Penguin Adventure, two projects from the CIS 300: Intro to Computer Game Design class.

Penguin Adventure is a cute, quick paced 2D platformer that puts you in the shoes of Tooks the Penguin. The game features amazing artwork and fun music. Unlike most games you would typically get from the game design class, Penguin Adventure has a lot of content, featuring a total of 20 levels, with high replay value.

Elsia is a highly unique cooperative platformer featuring Spike and his sidekick Friday. The cooperative element puts two players on the same machine with one controlling Friday with the mouse and the other controlling Spike with the keyboard. It’s surprisingly fun!

These games were the work of a handful of random Cornell University students in a single semester’s time (14 weeks). Both games were made using the GameX engine, much like GameMaker but requires a ton more programming.

Have you ever wondered why most game dialogue has to be so cheesy? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we’re given a lot of time to think about the dialogue. I was reading Roger Ebert’s essay on the 1977 movie Annie Hall today and his brief note on average shot lengths got be thinking. Woody Allen, who is a champion of witty dialogue, has long average shot lengths, with Annie Hall at ~14 seconds, and a film like Armageddon having something around 2 seconds, which Ebert argues is too short for intelligent dialogue. Now any game writer will tell you that they aim to make game dialogue short and snappy—more to the Armageddon model, which begs the question: is game dialogue stupid and cheesy by nature? Unlike movies, games tend not to compensate for the pace, giving us more time to meditate on the cheesy nature of snappy dialogue. If you take an average game that actually has cutting in their cut scene, I’m sure you will find incredibly long “shot length” if you were to play it out at a reasonable pace. The visuals are not snappy. We don’t move on fast enough. All there is for us to absorb at any piece of dialogue are the words itself. You know why the dialogue in Armageddon works? We move on from the dialogue fast, they know to keep our attention off the words.

Sure, we can argue, lots of games have real time facial expressions now to compensate for the lack of activity in cut scenes—but lets face it, they fail to capture the depth of emotions as a real person. In movies, we can fixate on certain actors and read something out of that, in games, you have to try a lot harder. During gameplay, cuts has to make sense for the game play, but are there specific things that can be done to make the camera more dynamic? The cinematic dynamics in cut scene have certainly gone up, but so far, I haven’t seen anything that pushed any limits. Film theorist David Bordwell once noted that average shot length of Hollywood films decreased dramatically over the years. Thus, pace has increased in films over the years and audience attention span has decreased and games are generally fast-paced in everywhere where there is not a lot of dialogue. I think it’s about time exposition got more dynamic — up the pace, and cheesy lines will become far more acceptable.