This is the introduction to my dissertation, which discusses the academic context of the rest of my essay as well as establishing some key points in the gender problematic as pertaining to IT and games.

Both the computer and videogames appear to be contested sites, appropriated and dominated by men. Only 22% of computer science graduates in 2000 were women, women (as well as ethnic and religious minorities) associate negative affect with computer use to a greater degree than white males do and are more anxious when engaging with videogames. Finally, only 8-10% of the programmers and designers in the videogame industry are female. (Lemons & Parzinger 2007, p3; Jackson et al 2001, p366-367; Kafai et al 2008, pXX; Brown et al, p803-804; Kerr 2006, p92; Kerr 2003, p2-3; Krotoski 2004, p12-13)

While the computer is not perceived as gendered, computer mastery is culturally constructed as a male domain. Within educational institutions, the computer is associated with mathematics and science, thus acquiring “some of the traditional qualities of differentiated interest amongst boys and girls” (Giddens et al 1994, p218). Some argue that the computer is a “product of masculine intent and masculine desire”, a “logical machine” in “opposition to the emotion and intuition that’s most often associated with women in our culture” (an essentialist notion that will be discussed later) that is cast as masculine. The computer is thus established as masculine in the sense that it represents “the negation of the feminine”.  (Jenkins & Cassel 1998, p159-160; Giddens et al 1994, p224)

Notions of masculinity and femininity are defined and reinforced by the dominant gender regime of a given society. A gender regime is a “cluster of practices, ideological and material, which in a given social context, acts to construct various images of masculinity and femininity and thereby to consolidate forms of gender inequality” (Giddens et al 1994, p8). The related term gender schema is defined as “gender lenses that are embedded in the discourse and social practices of the culture”, which “predispose the individual to construct a self-identity that is consistent with these lenses”. I find the two terms to overlap, and will use gender regime as a general term to denote the dominant construction of masculinity and femininity within the societal discourse. (Lemons & Parzinger 2007, p2)

It is not just gender that is constructed according to dominant discourse, but also notions of rationality. Within feminism, there is an ongoing critique of rationality as an expression of the male dominance of Western intellectual culture. “Universalizing, instrumental reason” is a privileged expression of male attitudes towards the world, with the dichotomization of gender roles leading to the construction of femininity as irrational and the rational subject as male.

This concept is complimented by androcentrism, which casts the male perspective as opposed to “the other”, establishing the male perspective as the standard, while other perspectives are branded as “deviations from the standard, as well as an inferior departure”. Furthermore, meaning and significance is constructed in relation to the male perspective rather than their objective terms, “with women defined either in terms of their domestic duties, their reproductive functions, or their sexual prowess”. (Lemons & Parzinger 2007, p3) The general privileging of the male perspective will be referred to as androcentrism, while hegemonic notions of rationality and the proper processing and organization of information will be referred to as male reason.

Both notions of gender regimes and androcentrism are important in order to understand how computer technology and videogames are construed as male domains and masculine sites of mastery. The hacker culture of the 1980s, which gave rise to the first game developers, was predominantly male and espoused particularly masculine ideals. While women used computers as “tools”, the hackers treated the computer as “a medium for expression”; “an artist’s material whose internal aesthetic must be protected” (Lockheed 1985, p115-116; Kerr 2006, p13). Even now, women straying into the still predominantly male IT industry are treated to double standards:

“While a man’s success is usually attributed to skill, a woman’s success on the identical task is usually attributed to luck; conversely, men’s failure is attributed to bad luck while women’s failure is attributed to low ability” (Lemons & Parzinger 2007, p3)

The first videogames came out of a highly masculine culture, which it can be argued shaped the development of videogame genres and mechanic conventions through their fascination with “science-fiction, Tolkienesque-fantasy and pinball”. The computer games industry and the surrounding game culture remained highly masculine, a site showing a “consistent pattern of male technocratic privilege”. (Kerr 2006, p19, p13-14; Giddens et al 1994, p221; Kafai et al 2008, p22)

Developers often rely on so-called I-Methodology, whereby they essentially design products that appeal to themselves and the audience that share their taste. Since the number of women working in the industry is so low, “masculine fantasies” are allowed to dominate design discussions while female players are stereotyped and generally ignored unless they enjoy the established conventions of videogames. (Kerr 2006, p97; Green & Adam 2001, p243-245, p254-256; Kerr 2003 p15)

Kerr also cites several researchers arguing that many games privilege masculine subject positions, and that the themes, packaging and advertising of games also alienate both females and less macho males. (Kerr 2006, p111; Giddens et al 1994, p220; Kerr 2003 p15; Kerr 2006, p98-101) Turkle’s observations of children learning programming in school reveal tendencies towards what Turkle saw as gender-differentiated modes of mastery, which she called “hard” and “soft” mastery. Hard masters were “overwhelmingly” male, “imposing their will over the machine by implementing a structured, linear plan”, while females tended to be soft masters, relating to the “formal system of the computer as a language for communication rather than a set of rigid rules”.

The hard master “thinks in terms of global abstractions”, while the soft master “works on a problem by arranging and rearranging these symbols”. The former approach is privileged as “computer expertise”, while the latter is culturally constructed as inferior. While Wajcman criticizes Turkle’s hard/soft mastery dichotomy and her essentialist suggestion that these forms of mastery were cognitive style differences linked to sex, Turkle’s two categories overlap roughly with a concept from cognitive theory called field-dependence/independence. Field-dependence/independence describes a sliding scale between two different modes of conceptual organization and modelling pertaining to working memory and learning. (Giddens et al 1994, p221-222; Witkin 1977)

Studies suggest that there is a difference in how males and females approach games, with boys generally outperforming girls in tasks pertaining to videogames or tasks that are explicitly framed as games. (Brown et al; Green & Adam 2001, p110) Statistically, males are also more field-independent than women and there appears to be a relationship between the skills privileged in many male-oriented videogames and preferred field-independent learning styles and information organization. The traits associated with field-independence also correspond closely to androcentric notions of reason, while field-dependence appears to exhibit many of the traits commonly associated with femininity. Most importantly: Witkin does not suggest that cognitive style linked to sex, focusing instead on cultural factors such as gender regimes. (Witkin 1977)

This essay will explore the relationship between androcentric computer culture and videogames; gender and cognitive style; as well as the gendered subject positions that result from the thematic and structural conventions in games aimed at the core gaming audience. The essay will also discuss the subversion of traditional game design patterns as well as the design process of a gender-inclusive videogame incorporating these amended design patterns.

Field-dependents tend to “adhere to the organization of the field as given”, which is elaborated to mean that field-dependents tend to use the existing structure in which the information is provided for concept attainment, whereas field-independents tend to establish their own structure, that is insert information into their own conceptual frameworks, rather than simply adapting the external, presented framework. This means that field-dependents may adopt the salient cues in the external structure of information regardless of whether the information is central to the problem-solving task at hand or not, while field-indepedents will impose a structure of their own onto the information, deciding what cues are salient or not and how they pertain to the task at hand. (Wikin et al, 1977)

Witkin suggests that field-independents were “more likely to impose structure spointaneously on stimulus material which lacks it”, while field-dependents left (does this mean adopted, or internalised?) the material’s external (that is, original or pre-existing) structure. This might suggest that very formalized information presentation with few salient cues causes field-dependents to attain only very general ideas of what the information actually is an expression of:

“field-dependent teachers and students made fewer distinctions among concepts. For field-dependent teachers and students, concepts clustered into a large, loosely organized group which included most of the concepts.”

This suggests that field-dependents don’t define concepts for themselves, but rely on external definitions of: They don’t explore potential meanings by applying hypotheses to the information, they rely on external established meanings. In game design terms, this could mean that field-dependent users may fail to explore or experiment with dynamics that have not been introduced with salient cues pointing out how the aesthetics and dynamics are integrated, in terms that allow users to understand the presented information without applying the hypotheses/testing approach that field-independents use for concept attainment. (Witkin et al, 1977)

Witkin suggests that structuring and analytical tendencies are linked, and that the “individual differences [...] might best be conceived as an articulated-global continuum”. The articulated structuring and analysis of the experience tends towards perceiving items as discrete from background when the field is organized, and imposes structure onto fields where there is no organization, thus perceiving it as organized. The global experience relies less on structuring and analysis, perceiving the field as given. (Witkin et al, 1977)

This sounds like field-dependents are actually better at learning concepts because they experience with fewer preconceptions and less anticipation of an apparent structure. However, field-dependents show greater adherence to a predominant context and is “likely to have difficulaty with [a] class of problems [...] where the solution depends on taking some critical element out of the context in which it is presented and restructuring the problem material so that the item is now used in a different context” (Witkin et al, 1977). In other words, field-independents impose their own structure on experience, while field-dependents relies on external structures. Witkin notes that the individual differences noticed in perception also shows in the problem-solving domain.

To summarize this discussion regarding structure and analysis, I suggest that field-dependent users will need information structured and presented so that it builds and reinforces a consistent external conceptual model of organization that the user can adopt in order to understand the integration of dynamics and aesthetics without applying a hypotheses/testing process in order to understand the meaning and application of concepts.

Information will have to be presented in a structure that enables information to be presented with distinct cues that distinguish items within a clear organization. In order to avoid the trap of formalization, each topic should have a distinct style and mode of presentation, so the user can identify the context for usage of the information through referring to the external structure rather than their internal. In order to provide further salience to information, the aesthetics of the structure should reinforce the context and meaning of the information.

This way, the aesthetics immediately infer a context and mode of usage inherent in the structure of the information, whereby each piece/topic of information gains a strong element of external structure. A typical way to accomplish this will be to employ various modes of presentation to different types of information, and avoid similar dialogue boxes or read-outs that present different information in a homogenous fashion where the user is relied upon for performing the structuring.

TODO: Investigate whether information or concepts describe the representations of rules, tokens and dynamics that make up game systems better.

Instead, offering flexible fail-states with little punishment and plenty of verbose feedback, perhaps presented in context of a social simulation or social network, is more motivating. Verbose feedback allows field-dependent users to amend their conceptual model of the game’s mechanics and dynamics in a much more organized and directed fashion, as per Witkin’s findings regarding preferred mode of learning.

This essay will discuss design patterns that present the user with concrete information about the abstract systems the user is interacting with through a game UI.

First and foremost, the user should be presented with objectives and means of attaining the objective by an agent that the user can identify and have a relationship to. The agent should exhibit clear characterization, allowing feedback to be phrased and presented according to the user’s relationship to the agent and not to the abstract mechanics and dynamics discussed.

Ideally, the agent should exhibit obviously salient personality traits related to the task at hand, allowing the user to relate the agent to the objectives, thus reinforcing the aesthetics of the game and allowing the field-dependent user to “go along with the field ‘as is’”, without “structuring and analyzing it” in order to relate the concepts to an objective. (Witkin et al, 1977) Most importantly, the agent should provide the user with a clear idea of how performance has been evaluated and why a particular verdict has been passed.

After the objective has been established, the user attempts to solve the problem that will allow the player to meet the objective. Ideally, the agent should provide verbose feedback reinforcing what the user has learnt about the underlying dynamic after each attempt, in the form of a “corrective review” after evaluation of the user’s solution to the problem. Field-dependent users should exhibit greater concept retention as well as perform better on later tests of their ability in the given skill. (Witkin et al, 1977)

The agent could be seen as providing an external structure to the field-dependent user, removing the need to see the outcome as part of testing hypotheses about how the dynamics work. Instead, the output of the user’s interaction with the dynamics are reported directly, in a verbose fashion, via the game’s aesthetics, thus further reinforcing the relationship between the dynamics and the aesthetics.

In a lot of ways, abstract feedback about the relationship between aesthetics and dynamics could be seen as one of the most prominent features of videogames: The user is expected to construct hypotheses for the way the game dynamics work, and then apply and receive feedback on their hypotheses via the game aesthetics. The user is technically participating at a mechanics and dynamics level, but the aesthetics provide the interface for interpreting the feedback from user interaction with the often abstract dynamics.

If the user fails to accomplish the objectives laid out by the game, the user could be said to have failed to interpret the relationship between dynamics and this failure must be communicated to the player through the aesthetics. In most games, failure is communicated through an unambiguous fail-state. This approach works well for field-independents who treat the game experience of learning the relationship between dynamics as a series of opportunities to test internally constructed hypotheses about the game dynamics and who is not as affected by criticism as field-dependents. (Witkin et al, 1977)

However, communicating how the user’s conceptual model of the game dynamics failed in a “corrective review” after each successful or unsuccessful attempt at solving problems, will allow the field-dependent user to learn better and faster. In addition, the embodying of information presentation in the form of an agent frames the concepts in a social context or as the social information apparently favoured by field-dependents. This makes the information more relevant to field-dependent users, with the added benefit of providing motivation apart from the inherent motivation to solve interesting problems: the user’s learning experience is streamlined due to constant verbose performance evaluation, while the information is presented in a fashion that implies a social relationship that the user can participate in.

How does this make games “more fun”? Put simply, it doesn’t. I believe that the reason why more people don’t play games isn’t because they aren’t fun enough, but because “getting to the fun” is made much harder than it has to be by the way games evaluate user performance and relies on the user to build an internal structure for interpretation of the relationship between dynamics and aesthetics. Actually learning how to play the game provides a lot of the “fun” of games, but personally I believe that learning how to interact with dynamics is simply what “puts the user in the frame of mind necessary” to take part in a particular experience.

In fact, I’d say that true enjoyment only emerges when the relationship between dynamics and aesthetics has become internalised to the degree where the user can engage in a self-motivated interpretative discourse of the material presented through the dynamics and aesthetics of the game. This dimension should also be emphasized by the employment of characterized agents with social significance within the context of the game.

TODO: Finish this piece and the two others, then start criticizing the material in light of findings. Then build new game design revision based on these lines of reasoning and my criticism/discussion of the topics with further sources.

What follows is an attempt to concretize and relate motivational styles and learning styles directly to game design patterns. Of course, since no-one appears to have related FDI to game design before, the learning styles are collected from studies into education.

The following table suggests ways of motivating field-dependent students:

• Through verbal praise
• Through helping the teacher
• Through external rewards (stars, stickers, prizes)
• Through showing the task’s value to other people
• Through providing outlines and structure

Garger and Guild (1987)

While games generally reward users for good performance through higher scores and even special effects like particle fireworks, they generally don’t tell the player what they did well and how. I assume that verbal praise refers to a more complex form of feedback than a grade or numerical score, involving specific feedback that is contextualized by the expectations of the party providing the feedback as well as the level of skill apparent in the praised outcome.

While a field-independent learner may be motivated by numeric feedback because they are likely to have their own conceptual model of how hard it is to attain a given score, this does not appear to be particularly valuable to a field-dependent. This is the reason for assuming that verbal praise (as in spoken praise, or as in verbose, that is articulated and directed praise?) is more than just a pat on the back, and communicates praise of certain qualities in a user’s work/outcome.

However, the point regarding external rewards can also be mapped onto high scores and visual rewards — or trophies and achievements? How can traditional game rewards be appropriated for field-dependents? It appears gamers who care about achievements are more interested in the gamerscore they accrue than the actual achievements. The gamerscore is also featured prominently on gamercards, whereas individual achievements can only be seen by accessing and digging into the profile the gamercard is an aggregate of.

The gamerscore is seen as a measure of a gamer’s ability and enthusiasm — regardless of what achievements the score is made up of. Since my assumption is that a majority of current hardcore gamers are field-independent, this could be quite relevant. The following table suggests ways to motivate field-independent students:

• Through grades
  
• Through competition
  
• Through choice of activities, personal goal chart
  
• Through showing how the task is valuable to them
  
• Through freedom to design their own structure

Garger and Guild (1987)

Gamerscore as well as traditional high score tables could be seen as a way of grading users (this is interpreted as relating to grading since grading is usually in the form of a number, or a letter symbolizing a numeric range), as opposed to verbal feedback.

The game Katamari Damacy provides numeric feedback upon completion of every level, but in very general fashion: The diameter of your katamari (Japanese for “clump”) is given, as well as its size relative to everyday objects like footballs, buckets, trees, houses, clouds, islands and skyscrapers. The player is also informed of what constitutes the largest proportion of the katamari, be it candy, people, houses or plants.

What makes Katamari Damacy stand out is that the primary form of feedback is the condescending appraisal of the katamari by the avatar’s (or in the context of the game, the player’s) selfish, unappreciative father, The King of All Cosmos. The objective of the game is to clean up the mess he made while drunkenly shambling around the universe, breaking stars. Upon entering each level, the avatar, the King’s miniscule son, the Prince, is told about all the nice things his father is going to do while he cleans up the mess and restores order.

While the method of informing the user about the restrictions and goals of each level is delivered in a condescending manner, these interludes reveal a lot about the King of All Cosmos, and also about his dysfunctional relationship to his son. The game’s sequel, Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy (We Love Katamari in the west) shares the same structure, but this time the hapless Prince is forced to reply to all the fan mail sent to the King by fans of the first game. Parallell to this story, the Prince learns about his father’s traumatic youth and learns how he came to become such a selfish oaf.

In terms of the game, the King of All Cosmos is nothing but an anthropomorphized status screen that doles out objectives and rewards, but they are given additional meaning by attaching an emotional investment in the tragic relationship between the Prince and the King. Coincidentally, this game was curiously successful among non-traditional gamers, particularly women. This is very uncommon for what’s essentially a quirky, Japanese cult title. Tellingly, its creator, Keita Takahashi, is not very fond of videogames and would most of all prefer to make toys.

Katamari Damacy‘s approach to structure of discreetly mixing gameplay objectives, player skill evaluation and storytelling maps well with the suggested ways of motivating field-dependents without excluding field-independents. Even games like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, a highly abstract shoot’em-up, provides both social interaction and competition through the user’s score being compared to the closest high score from the user’s friend list. While this approach is nowhere near as radical as Katamari Damacy‘s feedback mechanisms, it is an elegant way to put the user’s efforts in a more social context.

In order to discuss this further, we’ll take a look at another list suggesting field-dependent ways of learning and methods for teaching field-dependents

• Learn the concepts first
• Then concentrate on details
• Like to be introduced to information with humor and color
• Can work with distracters
• Take frequent breaks
• Works on several tasks simultaneously
• Needs lessons that are interesting to them
• Need written and tactual involvement
• Respond well to pictures
• Discover through group learning

Whitefield (1995)

At this point, it is relevant to revisit the point in Forests, not trees concerning social environments. The question is whether the social orientation mentioned in the list of learning characteristics exclusively refers to a learning in a social context (working with others in a group, or open discussion in a classroom setting), receiving feedback in a social manner (conversation or personalized written feedback, as opposed to a grade or mark) or learning information that can be employed in a social context (useful trivia, good conversation subject matter, knowledge or skills that can be applied in a manner that will garner attention in a social situation).

Other possibilities is that social orientation refers to learning about events sparked by social or cultural relationships, learning concepts that can deepen understanding of social dynamics or learning concepts that can deepen understanding of social or cultural differences.

The big question is whether the knowledge or the feedback needs to relate to or originate from a real-life social setting, or if a simulated social setting will do. The privileged position of drama in western culture (and many others) as a setting for discussing and conceptualizing the human condition suggests that convincing or interesting social simulations are appealing to many, if not most, people.

However, the explosion of social network applications and new channels for communication on the internet implies that participating in or observing social interactions between real people (though it can certainly be contested how “real” the representations people construct of themselves on social networks really are) is very attractive, and perhaps something many computer users feel is an integral part of the computer entertainment experience.

However, the efficacy of social networks to motivate in an educational context seems to be an under-explored territory. The fact that many seem to find social networks attractive doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a natural place in the current discussion. More to the point: Can the method and form of dramatized social feedback exemplified by Katamari Damacy be considered as a form of social orientation?

If so, a group of engaging, recurring characters providing the user with objectives, context and feedback should be motivating to field-dependents in a way high scores and competition is not. Otherwise, the opportunity to share accomplishments, invite feedback from friends or acquaintances, perform work that progresses an entire group of people and collaborate in order to complete objectives should be motivating.

This table (Garger and Guild, 1987) describes learning characteristics in field-dependents:

• Perceives globally
• Experiences in a global fashion, adheres to structures as given
• Makes broad general distinctions among concepts, sees relationships
• Social orientation
• Learns material with social content best
• Attends best to material relevant to own experience
• Requires externally defined goals and reinforcements
• Needs organization provided
• More affected by criticism
• Uses spectator approach for concept attainment

The most obviously salient points here are the suggestions that field-dependents adheres to structures as given, are more interested in social material, are more interested in material relevant to own experience (that is, they learn in order to apply, not because the learning process itself has meaning), require external goals yet are more affected by criticism, learns by spectating rather than participating. These points are the ones that seem most relevant to being attracted to and motivated by videogame structural conventions (if we consider videogames to be user-perpetuated feedback systems), because they easily map onto the evaluation and feedback systems that videogames are made up of. Don’t worry, the rest of the list will not be ignored, but I will use these points to open the discussion.

If field-dependents adhere to structures as given, I understand that they expect provided interpretative models to yield the desired outcome of interaction with a complex system. Since this is opposed to field-independents’ tendency to impose structures of restrictions, that is interpret and categorize information in order to create their own model for interacting with the system the information is perceived to belong to, I take this to mean that field-dependents prefer accurate, nonambiguous rules of engagement that they don’t have to restructure themselves when the model fails.

In other words, a field-dependent videogame user might lose interest in the game if it contradicts their expectations or experience, whereas a field-independent user will amend their model of the game’s dynamics (in the meaning of the word given by LeBlanc et al’s MDA framework (2004)). This is a fairly safe assumption, and a general rule of good design: the feedback and situations that arise from interaction with an artefact should be consistent and reinforce the user’s understanding of the way mechanics produce dynamics. This allows the user to rely more on their model of the observed dynamics, and allows the game designer to challenge the user with more complex or sophisticated permutations of these dynamics, thus maintaining user interest because reinforcing their perceptual/interpretative model yields positive/pleasurable affect.

Social material is a big challenge in game design. Since firm rules and expectations surrounding the presentation of social dynamics or social interplay don’t really exist, it’s hard to meet expectations. In my mind, there are two major branches to the social trunk in game design: The social simulation and the social environment. The simulation seeks to involve the user in situations or circumstances where interactions yield dramatically rather than systemically coded feedback. In other words, the user can understand feedback as a social value judgement. This is what makes traditional drama interesting: The playwright casts the spectator as able to relate to the protagonist, whose actions are evaluated by antagonists or supporting agents who presents different qualities of feedback. In order to avoid a full discussion of dramatic dynamics, the spectator can be said to appropriate the protagonist’s motivations and values, which are then evaluated and amended through interaction with other dramatic agents and situations. In other words, the user’s experiences and motivations are subject to conflict, and the user is offered the opportunity to reconsider and reinterpret them in accordance with the outcome of the conflict.

The social environment casts the user as participant in a context shared by multiple other participants. The social environment is not simulated and not necessarily dramatic (in that there is no conflict of motivation or values), but the context may provide structural cues that allow users to roleplay conflicts between participants, whether or not the system provides mechanics to allow for resolution of the performed conflict.

Immediately, my assumption is that field-dependent users will find the social environment more interesting that the social simulation, because the content of the social environment is more relevant to real-world experience since their actions will affect the real-world experience of a different user. On the other hand, drama such as soap operas are simulated, but presents social experiences and conflicts in a more condensed and contrast-filled fashion than real life manages, hence one definition of drama: Real life with the dull bits removed. Social simulations may also be relevant to real-world experience because they provide opportunity to apply conflict to motivations and values without any real-world consequences other than being offered the opportunity to amend and reapply those motivations and values. Drama offers the opportunity to evaluate your experiences on your own premises via a proxy instigator of conflict. As long as conflicts bear some semblance to the conflicts encountered in real life, the information gleaned from being spectator to drama may be applicable.

If field-dependents are motivated by material relevant to own experiences (that is, presumably, real-world experiences), we need to define what constitutes a real-world experience. While understanding of existing social and institutional structures are very relevant to modern-day life, experiences or knowledge that bear no relevance to the real world may still be relevant in certain social situations, such as role-playing or storytelling; both fairly common social pursuits. If this suggestion stands to reason, it is impossible to create social simulations relevant to everybody’s social experiences (as evidenced by the practically endless supply of different narratives constructed throughout recorded history), while social environments with a broad enough set of users and dynamics should be relevant to a large amount of people (as evidenced by the dominance of World of Warcraft in the game-oriented social environment market). However, even the popularity of social environments should be limited by the relevance of the setting to the desired real-world experience. In other words, the audiences of both social simulations and social environments are limited by demographics. Which is more limited by demographics is hard to tell, since social simulations (or social representations) enjoy greater awareness and recognition in the marketplace.

It is interesting to note that the setting of both social environments and simulations will influence the form of the goals imposed on the user, in other words the externally defined goals. Conversely, it’s just as valid to say that the externally defined goals, that is the goals the designer intends the user to pursue, will define the choice of the setting/context that contains the dynamics (interrelated systems of mechanics) that must be engaged with in order to reach the goal (aesthetics?). I believe an important question here is whether the user’s participation in dynamics justifies the goal, or whether the participation is justified by the goal. In either case, it seems safe to assume that user experiences should have a clearly defined goal or outcome in order for field-dependent users to want to learn to participate in them. I believe this goal or outcome is tightly coupled with the relevance of the experience to real-world experience.

Perhaps there is an element of performance here, as well? The user must enjoy positive affect in performing according to the rules of the game in order to participate, but is performance in according to the norms of the socio-cultural context a prerequisite for positive affect resulting from participation in the rules of the game? The number of compulsive players of MMOs seem to indicate that wilfull betrayal of society’s expectations to the rewards for labour-intensive time investment is part of the attraction of these games. However, these games are often more reminiscent of work than play, and perhaps the need to put in much (low-intensity, in most MMOs) labour in order to reap symbolic rewards mirror the social conditioning of socialized subjects? One of the prerequisites of a stable society is its citizens willingness to participate in labour that may not provide them with positive affect, in order to receive payment in abstract quantities that can be exchanged for materials that will provide positive affect.

If field-dependent users are more affected by criticism (whether in the colloquial or academic sense of the word), I take it to mean that harsh or unambiguous performance evaluations such as penalties or fail-states will result in negative affect. Penalties and fail-states are very common game design devices for perpetuating the player’s motivation to improve their interpretative models of the game’s dynamics, but could also be considered an archaic convention left over from the arcade game business model and one that has no particular function in the now-dominant experience-based (as opposed to mastery-based) videogames.

Since field-dependents also seem to be most comfortable with provided structures and external goals, it stands to reason that the alternative to unambiguous performance evaluations would be verbose feedback that gives the user an idea of how to amend their model of the game dynamics. This way, the game can reinforce the provided model by pointing out where the user’s actions contradicted the game’s intended dynamics. However, this mode of communication between user and game could be interpreted as spite if the user is penalized by losing progress or losing resources that may not be easily replenishable.

Many modern games already address this issue with checkpoints that automatically revives the avatar and gives the user another shot at overcoming a challenging section of gameplay. In the case of field-dependents who have little experience with games, encountering fail-states at all could be demotivating and the designer should consider an alternative to explicit fail-states by offering the user the opportunity to retry immediately, or providing some manner of affirmative feedback to allow the user to feel at ease with their performance in the game.

This suggests a game design where the player is continuously evaluated in a non-judgmental and inclusive manner, helping the user to amend errors in the conceptual model of the game’s dynamics. This doesn’t preclude competetive games or combat simulations, but it certainly implies that these kinds of games will be less attractive to the field-dependent user. A more thorough discussion of teaching and motivational styles that privileges field-dependents is required.

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.