Thank you Liisa for Paperdollheaven

I’ve been working lately on an attempt to conretisize differencies and similarities in girls’ and boy’s gaming preferences and behaviors. Doing so I’ve been scanning a few basic gaming design books, both to double check myself and to see if there were anything to find on girls’ games at all. I still have to check ‘Gender Inclusive Game Design’ by Sheri Graner Ray. It’s from 2003 and much has happened since then, but I hope to find some striking words in this bespoken book, because I don’t find anything interesting in the basic literature. ‘Game Design and Development’ by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings is a good check list of everything you need to start and set up a game, but when you come to the chapter ‘Creative and Expressive Play’ it’s a great disappointment. This kind of games is the absolutely most interesting from a general girl’s perspective and there is so much that it doesn’t describe. I’d like to erase it completely and restart it.
However I found a great quotation by game designer Brian Moriarity from 1997 that I will have to keep as a reminder of what creating a great game for boys, girls or any selected target group, really is about. I know it, and I don't want to forget it. This quotations also direct responds to what 58 year old ex nurse Liisa did when founding Paperdollheaven.

“Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t come from design committees. It doesn’t come from focus groups or market surveys. It doesn’t come from cool technology or expensive marketing. And it never happens by accident or by luck. Games with harmony emerge from a fundamental note of clear intention. … A sense of inner unity that has nothing to do with what or how you did something, it has something to do with why. Myst and Gemstone both have harmony. They have it because their makers had a vision of the experience they were trying to achieve and the confidence to attain it. … They resisted the urge to overbuild. They didn’t pile on a lot of gratuitous features just so they could boast about them. And they resisted the temptation to employ inappropriate emotional effects.”



Great love to you Liisa, I’m so greatful for the chance I got to work with your dolls on Stardoll/malin