The success of the computer and video game software industry has spurred interest in exploiting games in a range of applications for business and consumer products as well as pedagogical agents. But building and playing computer games is a male business; existing games don't appeal to women and girls in the same way they do to men and boys. In this project, the PI aims to teach women to build games that engage women and girls. The PI's approach is interdisciplinary in nature, building on cultural analysis as a condition of successful and responsible technology design, by means of a collaboration between a computer scientist and an anthropologist. Thus, the project will contribute to bridging the divide between the sciences and the social sciences. The PI also expects that the project will contribute to gender theory, in that for the first time a significant cultural medium allows interactive experimentation with identity. The PI will explore how/whether women designers build different games than men. The PI believes that the differences between male and female design have something to do with women's experiences with the cultural expectations and gender stereotypes that pervade existing games, that by critiquing existing games they will articulate how they practice gender in their day-to-day lives, where by building new games women will build new images of gender. Thus, the PI envisions that this project will enable more subtle and alternate gender roles and categories to emerge.
Broader Impact: The research will contribute to our understanding of the complications of gender in technology. It will enhance our understanding of the simultaneous shaping of culture and technology. And it will bring this integration into practice by simultaneously building and analyzing games, which have the power to increase computer literacy among girls and women, and thus in the end to attract more women to technological careers. Female game developers can change the repertoire of games that the industry produces; they will enrich the cast of characters and the modes of behavior that games provide, yielding more responsible re-creations of the cultural space that, whether they aim to or not, games unmistakably represent.
