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Brenda Laurel (born 1950) is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality",[1] a public speaker, and an academic. She was founder and chair of the graduate design program at California College of the Arts (from 2006 to 2012);[2] as well as the media design graduate program at Art Center College of Design (from 2000 to 2006). She has worked for Atari, co-founded the game development studio Purple Moon, and served as an interaction design consultant for multiple companies including Sony Pictures, Apple, and Citibank.[3] As of 2021, her current work focuses on STE(A)M learning, and the application of augmented reality within it.[4]
Brenda Kay Laurel was born on November 20, 1950, in Columbus, Ohio. She received her Bachelor of Arts from DePauw University, and her Masters of Fine Arts as well as her Ph.D. from Ohio State University.[3] Her Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1986, titled "Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System", and would form the basis of her 1991 book "Computers as Theater".[5][6]
Laurel's first games were for the CyberVision 2001 platform, where she worked as a designer, programmer, and manager of educational product design from 1976–1979.[7][5] She then moved to Atari as a software specialist, later becoming manager of the Home Computer Division for Software Strategy and Marketing, where she worked from 1980 to 1983.[5][8] After finishing her Ph.D., Laurel worked for Activision from 1985 to 1987.[8] In the late 1980s and early 1990s she worked as a creative consultant on a number of LucasArts Entertainment games, and Chris Crawford's Balance of the Planet.[8] During this time Laurel also co-founded Telepresence Research, Inc., and became a research staff member at the Interval Research Corporation where she worked on research investigating the relationship between gender and technology.[5]
She is also a board member at several companies and organizations.[3]
As one of the earliest female game designers, Laurel became active in writing on the topic of developing video games for girls. She posited that while the early video game industry focused almost exclusively upon developing products aimed at young men, girls were not inherently disinterested in the medium. Rather, girls were simply interested in different kinds of gaming experiences. Her research suggested that young women tended to prefer experiences based around complex social interaction, verbal skills, and transmedia.[1]
The game business arose from computer programs that were written by and for young men in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worked so well that they formed a very lucrative industry fairly quickly. But what worked for that demographic absolutely did not work for most girls and women.
— Brenda Laurel, Wired Magazine [1]
In 1996, Laurel founded Purple Moon, a software company focused on creating games aimed at young girls between the ages of 8 and 14.[9][10] Laurel's vision was to create games for girls that had a greater focus on real life decision-making rather than appearances and materiality.[11] The company was an experiment in turning research on girl's gaming preferences into marketable video games. The firm produced games designed around storytelling, open-ended exploration, and rehearsing realistic scenarios from one's day-to-day life, as opposed to competitive games featuring scores and timed segments.[1][12] The company produced ten games primarily divided into two series: "Rockett", which focused around a young girl's daily interactions, and the more meditative "Secret Path" series. Purple Moon was eventually acquired by Mattel in 1999, but was later closed.[5][13][14]
Purple Moon received criticism for focusing on designing games based on gender.[12] The research was accused of reinforcing the differences between genders that girls were already socialized to accept, thus the focus on the stereotypically feminine values of cooperation, narrative, and socialization as opposed to the stereotypically masculine values embodied in most games as violence and competition.[15]
In 1989, Laurel and Scott Fisher founded Telepresence Research, a company focusing in first-person media, virtual reality, and remote presence research and development.[16][17][18]
In Laurel's work regarding interface design, she is well known for her support of the theory of interactivity, the "degree to which users of a medium can influence the form or content of the mediated environment."[19] Virtual reality, according to Laurel, is less characterized by its imaginary or unreal elements than by its multisensory representation of objects, be they real or imaginary.[20] While discussions around virtual reality tended to center on visual representations, audio and kinesthesia are two potent sources of sensory input that virtual reality devices attempt to tap into. Laurel's 1994 Placeholder installation at Banff Center for the Arts—a collaboration with Rachel Strickland—explored these multisensory possibilities.[21] Placeholder was the first VR project to separate gaze from direction of movement, allow for two hands to participate, support two player games, and use imagery from natural landscape.[4] The installation allowed multiple people to construct a narrative by attaching movement trackers to its subjects' bodies while letting them navigate a virtual environment by doing common physical acts with special results, such as flapping one's arms to fly.[5]
Following the closure of Purple Moon, Laurel worked as chair and professor at the ArtCenter College of Design, and later the California College of the Arts, additionally becoming an adjunct professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She currently[vague] teaches Design Research, Critique, Methods for Innovation and Creativity, and Interaction in the Polis.[4]
"Tech Work by Heart" in Women, Technology, Art, edited by Judy Malloy, is an early essay explaining the origins of Purple Moon.[23]
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