Brenda Laurel

Last updated
Brenda Laurel
Brenda laurel 2016.jpg
Laurel in 2016
Born (1950-11-20) November 20, 1950 (age 73)
Columbus, Ohio, United States
Education DePauw University,
Ohio State University
Known for Human-computer interaction
Interactive narrative
Cultural aspects of technology
Movement Interactive storytelling
Game development research
Game development for Girls
PartnerRob Tow
Website http://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/

Brenda Laurel (born 1950) is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", [1] a public speaker, and an academic.

Contents

She was founder and chair of the graduate design program at California College of the Arts (from 2006 to 2012); [2] as well as the media design graduate program at Art Center College of Design (from 2000 to 2006). She has worked for Atari, co-founded the game development studio Purple Moon, and served as an interaction design consultant for multiple companies including Sony Pictures, Apple, and Citibank. [3] As of 2021, her current work focuses on STE(A)M learning, and the application of augmented reality within it. [4]

Early life and education

Brenda Kay Laurel was born on November 20, 1950, in Columbus, Ohio. She received her Bachelor of Arts from DePauw University, and her Masters of Fine Arts as well as her Ph.D. from Ohio State University. [3] Her Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1986, titled "Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System", and would form the basis of her 1993 book "Computers as Theater". [5] [6]

Career

Laurel's first games were for the CyberVision 2001 platform, where she worked as a designer, programmer, and manager of educational product design from 1976–1979. [7] [5] She then moved to Atari as a software specialist, later becoming manager of the Home Computer Division for Software Strategy and Marketing, where she worked from 1980 to 1983. [5] [8] After finishing her Ph.D., Laurel worked for Activision from 1985 to 1987. [8] In the late 1980s and early 1990s she worked as a creative consultant on a number of LucasArts Entertainment games, and Chris Crawford's Balance of the Planet . [8] During this time Laurel also co-founded Telepresence Research, Inc., and became a research staff member at the Interval Research Corporation where she worked on research investigating the relationship between gender and technology. [5]

She is also a board member at several companies and organizations. [3]

Purple Moon and games for girls

As one of the earliest female game designers, Laurel became active in writing on the topic of developing video games for girls. She posited that while the early video game industry focused almost exclusively upon developing products aimed at young men, girls were not inherently disinterested in the medium. Rather, girls were simply interested in different kinds of gaming experiences. Her research suggested that young women tended to prefer experiences based around complex social interaction, verbal skills, and transmedia. [1]

The game business arose from computer programs that were written by and for young men in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worked so well that they formed a very lucrative industry fairly quickly. But what worked for that demographic absolutely did not work for most girls and women.

— Brenda Laurel, Wired Magazine [1]

In 1996, Laurel founded Purple Moon, a software company focused on creating games aimed at young girls between the ages of 8 and 14. [9] [10] Laurel's vision was to create games for girls that had a greater focus on real life decision-making rather than appearances and materiality. [11] The company was an experiment in turning research on girl's gaming preferences into marketable video games. The firm produced games designed around storytelling, open-ended exploration, and rehearsing realistic scenarios from one's day-to-day life, as opposed to competitive games featuring scores and timed segments. [1] [12] The company produced ten games primarily divided into two series: "Rockett", which focused around a young girl's daily interactions, and the more meditative "Secret Path" series. Purple Moon was eventually acquired by Mattel in 1999, but was later closed. [5] [13] [14]

Purple Moon received criticism for focusing on designing games based on gender. [12] The research was accused of reinforcing the differences between genders that girls were already socialized to accept, thus the focus on the stereotypically feminine values of cooperation, narrative, and socialization as opposed to the stereotypically masculine values embodied in most games as violence and competition. [15]

Virtual reality

In 1989, Laurel and Scott Fisher founded Telepresence Research, a company focusing in first-person media, virtual reality, and remote presence research and development. [16] [17] [18]

In Laurel's work regarding interface design, she is well known for her support of the theory of interactivity, the "degree to which users of a medium can influence the form or content of the mediated environment." [19] Virtual reality, according to Laurel, is less characterized by its imaginary or unreal elements than by its multisensory representation of objects, be they real or imaginary. [20] While discussions around virtual reality tended to center on visual representations, audio and kinesthesia are two potent sources of sensory input that virtual reality devices attempt to tap into. Laurel's 1994 Placeholder installation at Banff Center for the Arts—a collaboration with Rachel Strickland—explored these multisensory possibilities. [21] Placeholder was the first VR project to separate gaze from direction of movement, allow for two hands to participate, support two player games, and use imagery from natural landscape. [4] The installation allowed multiple people to construct a narrative by attaching movement trackers to its subjects' bodies while letting them navigate a virtual environment by doing common physical acts with special results, such as flapping one's arms to fly. [5]

Academia

Following the closure of Purple Moon, Laurel worked as chair and professor at the ArtCenter College of Design, and later the California College of the Arts, additionally becoming an adjunct professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She currently[ vague ] teaches Design Research, Critique, Methods for Innovation and Creativity, and Interaction in the Polis. [4]

Awards

In 2015 Laurel won the Trailblazer award at the IndieCade festival. [22]

Works

Books

Essays

"Tech Work by Heart" in Women, Technology, Art, edited by Judy Malloy, is an early essay explaining the origins of Purple Moon. [23]

Games

Media appearances

Personal life

She works as a consultant and speaker, and is a part-time abalone diver. [4]

See also

Related Research Articles

Telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance or effect of being present via telerobotics, at a place other than their true location.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scott Fisher (technologist)</span>

Scott Fisher is the Professor and Founding Chair of the Interactive Media Division in the USC School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and Director of the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab there. He is an artist and technologist who has worked extensively on virtual reality, including pioneering work at NASA, Atari Research Labs, MIT's Architecture Machine Group and Keio University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in computing</span> Role of women in computing

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">T. L. Taylor</span> American academic

T. L. Taylor is an American sociologist and professor. Taylor specialises in researching the culture of gaming and online communities, in particular, esports, live-streaming, and MMOGs such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca Allen (artist)</span> American digital artist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual art</span>

Virtual art is a term for the virtualization of art, made with the technical media developed at the end of the 1980s. These include human-machine interfaces such as visualization casks, stereoscopic spectacles and screens, digital painting and sculpture, generators of three-dimensional sound, data gloves, data clothes, position sensors, tactile and power feed-back systems, etc. As virtual art covers such a wide array of mediums it is a catch-all term for specific focuses within it. Much contemporary art has become, in Frank Popper's terms, virtualized.

Gender HCI is a subfield of human-computer interaction that focuses on the design and evaluation of interactive systems for humans. The specific emphasis in gender HCI is on variations in how people of different genders interact with computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Immersion (virtual reality)</span> Perception of being physically present in a non-physical world

Immersion into virtual reality (VR) is the perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. The perception is created by surrounding the user of the VR system in images, sound or other stimuli that provide an engrossing total environment.

Purple Moon was an American developer of girls' video games based in Mountain View, California. Its games were targeted at girls between the ages of 8 and 14. The company was founded by Brenda Laurel and others, and supported by Interval Research. They debuted their first two games, Rockett's New School and Secret Paths in the Forest, in 1997. Both games were more or less visual novels and encouraged values like friendship and decision making. Purple Moon's games were part of a larger girl games movement in the 1990s, initiated largely by the surprise success of Mattel's 1996 CD-ROM game Barbie Fashion Designer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Flanagan</span>

Mary Flanagan is an American artist, author, educator, and designer. She pioneered the field of game research with her ideas on critical play and has written several books. She is the founding director of the research laboratory and design studio Tiltfactor Lab and the CEO of the board game company Resonym. Flanagan's work as an artist has been shown around the world and won the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica in 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Justine Cassell</span> American linguist, professor and human-computer interaction researcher

Justine M. Cassell is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010, she has been on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and the Language Technologies Institute, with courtesy appointments in Psychology, and the Center for Neural Bases of Cognition. Cassell has served as the chair of the HCII, as associate vice-provost, and as Associate Dean of Technology Strategy and Impact for the School of Computer Science. She currently divides her time between Carnegie Mellon, where she now holds the Dean's Professorship in Language Technologies, and PRAIRIE, the Paris Institute on Interdisciplinary Research in AI, where she also holds the position of senior researcher at Inria Paris.

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<i>Barbie Fashion Designer</i> 1996 video game

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<i>Rocketts New School</i> 1997 video game

Rockett's New School is a 1997 girl-oriented video game developed by Silicon Valley-based Purple Moon. It was directed by Brenda Laurel.

Secret Paths in the Forest is a video game developed by Purple Moon. The game was designed to be episodic, and spawned sequels entitled "Secret Paths to Your Dreams" and "Secret Paths to the Sea”, which were released under Mattel after its 1999 acquisition of Purple Moon.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Beato, G. (April 1997). "Girl Games". Wired. Vol. 5, no. 4. Archived from the original on 21 October 2014. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  2. ↑ "Brenda Laurel". California College of the Arts. Archived from the original on December 8, 2009.
  3. 1 2 3 "Brenda Laurel". California College of the Arts. Retrieved 7 March 2013.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Brenda Laurel Bio". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2020-09-21.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Marie, Meagan (2018). Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play. Dorling Kindersley. p. 20. ISBN   978-0241395066.
  6. ↑ Laurel, Brenda (1986). Toward the design of a computer-based interactive fantasy system (Thesis).
  7. ↑ "The History of a Forgotten Computer – PART 1" . Retrieved 2018-03-29.
  8. 1 2 3 A., Kocurek, Carly (2017-02-09). Brenda Laurel : pioneering games for girls. New York. ISBN   9781501319778. OCLC   974487356.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  9. ↑ Gurak, Laura J. (2001). Cyberliteracy: navigating the Internet with awareness. Yale University Press. p. 75. ISBN   978-0-300-08979-0.
  10. ↑ Cassell and Jenkins, Justine and Henry (2000). From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. MIT Press. ISBN   978-0262531689.
  11. ↑ Moggridge, Bill, "Chapter 5 Play-Interviews with Bing Gordon, Brendan Boyle, Brenda Laurel, and Will Wright" Designing Interactions, The MIT Press 2014.
  12. 1 2 Hernandez, Patricia (28 May 2012). "She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant". Kotaku. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
  13. ↑ Gurak, 2001, p. 77
  14. ↑ Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology – 2006 0262195364 p352 "Secret Paths is what Brenda Laurel calls a "friendship adventure," allowing young girls to rehearse their coping skills and try alternative social strategies. The Play Town: Another Space for Girls? Harriet was trying to explain to Sport how to
  15. ↑ Eisenberg, Rebecca (13 February 1998). "Girl Games: Adventures in Lip Gloss". Gamasutra . Retrieved 16 May 2017.
  16. ↑ Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-expanding Technology
  17. ↑ VR's quintessential innovators We take a deep dive into the history of five virtual reality pioneers.
  18. ↑ Monoskop
  19. ↑ Steuer, Jonathan (2006). "Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining telepresence". Journal of Communication. 42 (4): 73–93. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.33.5821 . doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1992.tb00812.x.
  20. ↑ Sand, Michael (Summer 1994). "Virtual Reality Check: An E-Mail Interview with Brenda Laurel". Aperture (136): 70–72. ISSN   0003-6420.
  21. ↑ Laurel, Brenda. "Placeholder Virtual Reality Project". TauZero. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
  22. ↑ Weber, Rachel (23 October 2015). "Her Story wins Indiecade 2015 Grand Jury award". gamesindustry.biz. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
  23. ↑ Malloy, Judy, ed. (2003). Women, art, and technology. Leonardo. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp. 303–321. ISBN   978-0-262-13424-8.
  24. ↑ Horizon: Colonizing Cyberspace
  25. ↑ Cyberpunk
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