As I work on my proposal for ETCon, I find myself thinking about the seemingly obvious—and yet often ignored—idea that it’s very hard to design something to appeal to a foreign mindset (foreign as in “the other” as opposed to national boundaries).
That reminded me of Tim Burke’s recent post “Software Industry Needs More Greedy Capitalists, Part XVIII,” which is a great riff on the problems with games intended for kids, particularly girls:
One of the other places where this strange aversion to profit emerges is attempts to design games aimed at other target demographics besides 18-34 year old middle-class males. It shows with games for girls, which make a Barbie dressed in a pink ballet costume look like the epitome of a cross-over toy. You could take nine-tenths of the games designed explicitly for girls and put a splash-screen disclaimer at the initial load: “CAUTION: This game has been designed by men who are not entirely certain what a ‘girl’ is. They were furnished with blueprints that suggested that certain colors and themes are useful, and several pictures of actual ‘girls’. Care should be taken in the playing of this game by actual girls: this game may or may not have anything to do with their ideas about what would be fun to do in a computer game”.
Every now and then, I poke around my referral logs to see what search terms are bringing users to my site. I was quite amazed to see some of the searches in Google that currently bring my site up on the first page
www.flickr.com
|
