Pragmatism, not idealism?

03Feb09

I’m puzzled, apparently because I trust the natural sciences too much. You see, I’m writing a dissertation on subverting male reason in game and interface design patterns and I’m stumped as to what framework for interpreting gender construction I’m really arguing in favour of. On the one hand, we’ve got the radical feminist framework derived from queer theory by Judith Butler, which holds that all gender construction is performative. This is a beautiful thought. It excludes essentialism, by arguing that our identities are defined by our social and cultural circumstances rather than innate, natural patterns of behavior.

My problem is that it all sounds a bit too utopian. To me, the most direct counter-point to the radical feminist view on gender construction is evolutionary psychology which suggests that the mind has evolved alongside our societies, and that the mind is composed differently in men and women because they served very different social roles in ancient societies. Those ancient hunter/gatherer societies are supposed to have lasted a lot longer than our recorded history, and may be the time in which the period where our minds evolved into the highly socialized beings we are today. You could say the mold by which the modern brain is shaped is the result of our evolution from nomad tribes to the first stable agricultural societies that featured organized trade and the first model of the modern economic system.

That’s a slightly less comforting thought: That somehow the mode in which most people (whoever they are, let’s just call the statistic median “most people”) behave is part of not just our social but also biological make-up. That somehow sounds more in tune with what one expects from hard science, doesn’t it? Something inevitable, like a rock falling because it’s dropped, being concretized and somehow even more proven by by the fact that it’s concrete.

Compared to that, the utopianism of radical feminism seems nearly idealistic, a far cry from the utilitarianism of proper, observable and peer-reviewable cause and effect. Maybe I just need to understand more about statistics. Maybe I’ll understand that a lot of hard science is based on the same kind of statistical methods that ethnography or sociology is. Maybe it’s the evolutionary psychology that gets to me, the invokation of old Darwin, that most bearded and deductive of reasoners. Evolution is almost like an ideological basis for liberalism, the real explanation for how we came here that both confirms our freedom and creativity while acknowledging that we must be at the height of human endeavour. Because what’s more evolved than the current apex of evolution, the now?

I think what I need to do is convince myself that the social sciences, in fact the humanities in general, are not just intriguing statistical speculation that provides a surprisingly workable model for human society, but just as valid as the real hard sciences even though most observations can’t be given by an equation or algorithm. In fact, it’s hardly to the detriment of the social sciences that it expresses itself in something as exotic and intrinsically ambiguous as words.

All right, I can probably fit field dependence/independence into my radical feminist assumptions about gender construction, nicely explaining why certain concessions have been made in my case study prototype because cognitive theory shows that men and women in general perceive complex representations and certain goal-oriented activities in different lights. I can present field dependence/independence to criticize the findings of Yasmin Kafai and Sherry Turkle without tearing into their methods, but rather point out that different methods and means of learning are imposed on boys and girls at a young age. It’s hardly surprising if adult men are found to be more adept at certain tasks than adult women because of their upbringing and social conditioning and we won’t have to shove the bogeyman of evolutionary psychology into the fray. A pertinent question is: Why should I? I’m in the social sciences, not in biology and certainly not in neurology.

If I present my research findings regarding women and interactive entertainment (including Jenkins’ great stuff on fan communities) and the construction of the computer as a male domain, point out the corollaries between my research and my own findings, I can deploy cognitive theory as a explanation for why different forms of interactive entertainment appears to appeal to women, note that it dovetails nicely with radical feminism and also avoids essentialism. I’ll look at Kafai and Turkle using field dependence/independence to suggest how learning methods have caused boys and girls to have consistently different preferred subject positions. Then I’ll suggest that the male dominance of computer technology fits nicely into the construct of male reason, which argues that men are in a socially, technologically and cognitively privileged position that assumes their way of reasoning to be the universally correct one and that other methods are flawed.

The medium of games rose to prominence during the eighties, where it became an expression of the mostly (with a few notable exceptions) male hacker culture. As such, the design patterns that emerged from these early games favoured male skills (more men than women are field independent) and methods of conflict resolution (competition or violent conflict as opposed to social negotiation and compromises constructed by both sides in the conflict, which is an essentialist assumption made by (even) feminists that I lean heavily on in my reasoning).  Cognitive theory anchors these differences in conflict resolution, motor and mental skills in learning, not biology, and as we can all agree the methods and means of learning are politically and socially constructed. It is not all unreasonable to assume that boys and girls are taught different things.

That leaves me with the actual point of this exercise, namely arriving at a reasonable range of prototypes to build in order to prove points.

1. Since more women than men fit into the field dependent category, it is reasonable to assume that more men than women are self-motivated to solve problems by imposing an order of their own making onto the problem. As such, many men do not need any external context to a problem in order to make it interesting. Women, on the other hand, are more socially motivated and thus prefer to have an external order imposed on a problem (or a system of expectations? This needs to be looked into), for instance by a social group.I think the obvious solution is to strip out the social metaphors surrounding the mission selection, mission objectives and evaluation of mission outcome and replace it with an objective statement of what is required to gain a high score. Then that prototype will be contrasted with a prototype where the goals are presented from a social perspective, in terms of who the client is, how the person providing this information to the player knows the client, et cetera. Instead of being listed, all relevant information is dramatized and may even be implied, relying on the player’s understanding of the social dynamics in the group.
2. Two different interface metaphors should be implemented, one naturalized interface that provides the user with a fairly concrete subject position, such as the suggested style book/magazine/showroom interfaces, and one presenting the exact same system in a more abstract fashion, with no graphic symbolic dimension, providing the player with a neutral subject position that must be constructed. It is important to note that the constructed subject position is not gendered, or at least is not intentionally gender-coded.Perhaps these prototypes should be tested on three different groups: a) a selection of men, both gamers and non-gamers; b) a selection of women who regularly play games; and c) a selection of women who never or only occasionally play games. That way, we can see whether the concrete or abstract subject position implied by the interface metaphors is as attractive to male users (who we assume are good at self-motivated ordering of information), female users who play games (who we assume are mostly field independent women) and female users who don’t play games (who we assume are mostly field dependent women).
3. One prototype where the player has to manually assign groups to furniture to indicate what belongs in which context(adding an additional layer of organizational depth (or drudgery) to the gameplay), where furniture must be manually moved in order to make room for new furniture (instead of automatically pushing it out of the way) or may even be restricted to a grid; in short, a prototype that is more rigidly rule-bound than the very automatic, flowing gameplay style implied by my design, which imposes soft rules of organization and physicality on the player’s interaction, but yields a more negotiating mode of interaction.
4. Suggest more aggressively gender-coded subject positions via interface design (colour schemes, menu titles, sound effects) and the wording of the magazine texts and the scripted drama. See if the more gendered subject positions is more attractive to either sex, employing the same demographical subdivisions as earlier (men, game girl, women)
5. Build functionality in the the separate prototypes for monitoring the way the users are interacting with the UI. See whether men or women spend the longest time reading magazine articles and considering how to respond in the social setting. See whether men and women use the same interface in different ways. See if men or women organize their style books more meticulously. See whether they experiment with styles or find a specialize. Monitor how playing styles change in men and women after being subjected to tutorial text via magazines.
6. Impose different rhythms on gameplay. One version could be more freeform, where the player is expected to treat the showroom as a base of operations, from where missions can be accepted (e-mail/cell phone), where the style books can be revised and magazines read, the showroom tinkered with before the player returns to revising the style book, and where the social setting can be activated in order to get a new set of missions.The other version would be more episodical. The player starts out in the social setting (breakfast or something) where today’s agenda is set. Eventual alterations to the showroom are evaluated by the social circle (the game automatically creates snapshots of groups that change, which are shown to the social circle), potential clients are discussed or dismissed, and some kind of conflict or tension is implied. Then the player goes back to the showroom, where style books and showroom can be revised, and clients contacted before the mission phase begins. Once the mission phase is over and the player has received an evaluation, the player is immediately confronted with the social circle over dinner, who provides their own context and a resolution to the conflict/tension implied in the lead-in. Of course, missions could have  several steps, like a survey or consult before the actual design job. If so, the social circle should be sandwiched between the two parts of the mission phase and the social circle should provide the player with evaluation, suggestions and motivation (based on the conflict/tension).Which style is found more attractive, and by who? The episodal 30-minute time-slot format, or the free-form self-motivated mode?

That sounds like a bit of a beginning. Demands a lot of UI design and writing on my part, but since we’re not really altering the systems but merely their representation and ordering, it should not be a complete nightmare from a programming/software design perspective. We’ll see how my thinking holds up once I’ve let it ripen a bit.

Filed under: Game design, Gender-inclusive game design   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Cognitive theory, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, feminism, Game design, sociology