Elisabeth Hayes: Becoming a new kind of girl through gaming
Filed at 9:00 pm on December 6, 2007 in Games, Identity • Leave a comment
How can modding The Sims enable girls to develop tech-savvy identities?
Becoming “new kinds of people” as Jim Gee suggests in his post, is at the core of Tech Savvy Girls project. We use gaming to help girls develop fluency with computer and information technologies. Gaming might not seem to be the most promising way to recruit girls to IT. As Nicole Pinkard describes, programs that focus on game design or gaming tend to attract few girls. While girls do play video games, they are less likely to see themselves as “gamers” or to engage in the modding practices that can lead to IT fluency.
Becoming “girl gamers”
In Tech Savvy Girls, we encourage girls to create new identities as “girl gamers” who are fluent with computer technology. Our approach recruits their existing identities and interests through starting with a game, The Sims, already widely played by girls. We’ve had no trouble eliciting girls’ interest in joining our group when we tell them that they’ll be learning new things to do with The Sims. We have found that girls already use The Sims to explore identity and relationship issues through creating in-game stories, avatars, and families.
And far from simply buying into existing and potentially oppressive norms for women, the girls do sometimes use The Sims to transgress such norms and engage in “identity play,” for example by having men get pregnant, as well as playing in entirely “unfeminine” ways.
However, what they create with The Sims also reflects, as Susannah Stern suggests, their desire to act out what our culture suggests is desirable and “normal” for women, such as creating pretty and stylish avatars. We introduce the girls to new modding techniques that extend their IT skills yet build on their existing interests and pleasures. They have learned how to use tools such as Adobe Photoshop to create clothes, used storyboarding to construct narratives, and started their own fan sites to share their creations with other fans from around the world. As part of this process, the girls are creating new identities within the TechSavvy group, their families, and in broader fan communities. One girl, for example, has become an “expert” within the group as well as in The Sims fan community. She has uploaded over 70 different Sims and items of clothing of her own creation to her fan site and many of her items have been downloaded over 200 times each by other fans. She now responds to requests for custom items from other fans as well as girls in the TechSavvy Group.
She has begun to see herself in a new light - as “a person who is good with computers” and her family sees her differently as well. Now she is thinking about “going to college for computer programming or something like that.”
We have adopted a potentially controversial approach of allowing the girls to start with their own interests, including fashion and romance, to offset the image of gaming and modding as masculine and counter to their identities as girls. At the same time, we hope to help them create new images of desirable female identities. In the second year of our work, we are working with girls to create machinima - movies with The Sims - that tackle issues such as “the culture of beauty” head on. We see the goal of Techsavvy Girls as ultimately helping girls themselves changing the “normal” perception of who girls should be.
Editor’s Note: See Jim Gee’s thematic overview & index for more posts in this seven-part series on digital learning and identity.
Next: Constance Steinkuehler: Identity, Science Literacy, & the New Pop Cosmopolite > >
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