Dramatic Foundations - Computers as Theatre

Information Technology Reference

In-Depth Information

Purple Moon's Universe

In 1996, I cofounded Purple Moon, a media company devoted to girls. The company was

based on four years' research on play, gender, and technology involving deep second-

ary research and primary research with over 1,250 kids and adults. At fi rst, we thought

simply to build a game—that was the beginning of what became our fi rst title, Rockett's

New School . But as we began conceptualizing the game, we realized that we were actually

building a world; material in that particular game arose from constructions about the envi-

ronment and characters that was larger than the content of the game itself.

We applied fi ndings from our research about how “tween” girls (roughly ages 7 to 12)

go about constructing their identities. Below is a diagram showing what we found.

The “Rockett” series dealt with

the right side of the diagram: social

life. The goal of the series was to

give girls an emotional rehearsal

space for their social development.

But the left side of the diagram—

inner life—was not represented in

that series because the construc-

tion of inner identity relied upon

different environments and ma-

terials. That's when we began to

design another series, Secret Paths ,

that created opportunities for emo-

tional rehearsal with the same char-

acters in the inner realm. Finally, we developed a Web site where the “whole” characters

were represented (the center of the Venn diagram), with many opportunities for player

interactions and player-created materials.

In this way, we gave girls opportunities to participate in a wide variety of “whole ac-

tions”: playing one of the games, authoring materials on the Web site, engaging in social

activities in-world with other players, and collecting and trading virtual “treasures” on the

Web site. In fact, the trading of treasures (some of which were scarce) led to girls' putting

together “black market” sites of their own to trade them.

The lesson here is that the larger and more coherent the imaginary world, the more

opportunities there are for constructing whole actions within it, as long as the design pro-

vides the necessary affordances for participation.

Inner Life