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

Recycle art

or Paper Couture in a much more fancy way to put it. Linda Filley shows us how to reuse, reinvent and recycle in the most adorable manner. Don't throw paper in the bin, make beautyful or useful stuff out of it.

DIYana

På 80-talet var det Levis 501:or som gällde på högstadiets skolgård, helst med en reva på knät, det fick inte se för propert ut, man var ju ung och vårdslös – oförsiktig, rörlig, fri. Calvin Klein hade några år tidigare varit först med att sälja jeans för dyra pengar med hjälp av en skandalöst ung och avklädd Brooke Shields. Jeansen som plagg hade redan tagit sig in i ’de rikas’ garderob och Escada sålde vid det här laget vita med guldapplikationer. De var tydligt särskiljda från mina 501:or, hade aldrig kunnat blandas ihop.

Tidigt 90-tal hade trenden med revorna spritt sig, inte till överklassens medelålders kvinnor, men ända bort till ungdomarna på Östermalm. De gick också på nattklubbarna i stan, ville också se rätt ut för att få komma in på Alphabet Street. Vi på Kungsholmen skrattade åt denna trickle-down effekt. Vilka fånar att ha trasiga jeans när man har så mycket pengar. Vi tyckte inte om att de från bättre förhållanden gav sig ut för att veta något om hur det var att inte vara född med silversked i mun.

Trasiga jeans har vi ju sett på överklassens medelålders kvinnor sedan länge tillbaka nu. Vi kanske tänker en kortis att de försöker se lite yngre ut än vad de faktiskt är, men funderar inte så mycket över vilken samhällsklass som får eller inte får ha jeans.

Efter många års standardstatus blev jeans åter heta igen i och med sämre tider. Det är ett slitstarkt material som håller länge och som går att återanvända till nya modeller. Det kan därmed också låta som ett miljövänligt material som faller in under eco-trenden, men då måste de köpas begagnade. Bomullsproduktion, infärgning och tvättar gör jeans till ett av de mer miljökatastrofala plagg man kan bära. Men trendigare kan det inte bli – riv sönder i remsor, sy ihop igen, lappa, fransa, sy på, dra av.

Eller så kan man betala nedrans dyrt för samma look, och just det här förvånar faktiskt mig än idag – att man kan betala så dyra pengar till de största modehusen för att få en riktig trashy fashion look?? Det tar mig emot. Jag syr inte, lappar inte, drar inte av… men ändå kan jag inte slänga upp många tusenlappar för den här osannolikt snygga jeans stassen från Jean Paul Gaultier. Det känns som att jag borde göra den själv.

DIY på Stardoll istället?

You are never alone

I got a little perplex yesterday, reading a striking post on our role model Lady Lovelace. Although it is my mantra and foundation in all I do, it’s still the strangest feeling everytime you realize how true it is that you are never alone. I’m stuffed with studies on why girls often/normally don’t take interest in techniques, and yet this post again put the finger on my own personal history up til today.

The author Audrey Watters describes how she in the late seventies got her first inspiration from Princess Leia, was more into geek things but yet ended up as the girl ‘who minored in Women’s Studies but took the “easy” science and math classes for graduation because somewhere along the way I’d got the message that science and technology weren’t really my thing.’

I did all that. My second daughter is not named Leia for no reason. The impression of the original has never vanished. I’ve always been all brains in school although my friends never expected it and got just as surprised by the exams every year. I hid it well, and did my best not to stand out as a swot. I wanted to be the cool, soft type hanging outside the school gates (even though I didn’t smoke, smoking was too stupid for me) and did well on that role. Also I wanted to become a photo model, it was the times of Paulina Poriskova, Claudia Schiffer and Emma Wiklund – or winning the Nobel Prize – kind of split idea of who I was, typical to most young girls today I guess…

Of course I followed friends and other normal people for the standard studies of economy. Tech school never even came close to my mind. The image of me amongst hundreds of geek guys was just not realistic (today geek has quite a better status even amongst girls then it had before the Internet era). Yet the interest for computers and programming was persistent and after years of studies in the more female populated classes of communication, media, pedagogy and hr, I ended up in the right spot of the by the time so called ‘Multimedia’. Creative presentations on CD-ROM lead me further to social medias as MUD’s and MOO’s, lead me further to programming chat bots.

Probably due to my split goals and feeling of not going in the fully right direction being steered by powers above my own head, I early developed the deepest interest for genus studies and realized how much work there is still to do on the boys vs girls thing in all fields. The origin for me working with MOO’s was a friend and partner who considered himself not to be neither a girl or a boy, but a sex not defined, but in the virtual existence he could be what is felt he was. When programming chat bots the genus aspect arised again in the dialogue between a real life person and a fictive man or woman.

When I finally got the offer to inherit 200 dress up dolls (a genius idea by the founder Liisa) and expand them to a complete ‘game’ for young girls, there was no risk. There were no such great places for girls at the Internet 5 years ago. There was an empty hole to just fill. When offering young girls what they are interested in within the computer we are one step closer to allowing them to further develop the possibilities. Today girls know that they are on the right spot, doing the right thing when they sit by the computer. It’s a small but good start.