Girls Create Games: Lessons Learned

TL;DR

This study explores girls' game design patterns during a summer coding event, revealing stereotypical preferences and providing insights to foster female engagement in coding and game development.

Contribution

It introduces a girl-only game creation intervention using visual coding, and analyzes gender-specific design preferences to inform future educational tools.

Findings

Girls prefer stereotypical gaming elements.

Game-making environments appeal to female teenagers.

Results inform development of girl-oriented coding apps.

Abstract

Recent studies from all over the world show that more boys than girls play video games. The numbers are different for mobile gaming apps, where 65% of women are identified as gamers. Adapting game design activities for academic purposes is a widely applied approach at schools or off-school initiatives is seen as a promising opportunity for all teenagers to learn to code in an entertaining way. This raise the questions do special girls' game-design patterns exist, and what can we learn from them? This paper describes a girl-only intervention where girls were asked to create their own games. This "Girls' Coding Week" was designed as an off-school event and took place during summer 2018 with 13 girls between 11 to 14 years old. To explain the basic steps of programming and to create personalized games, the visual coding app Pocket Code, an app developed at Graz University of Technology, was used. The girls created their own games with the help of a storyboard after receiving all important information about coding. Qualitative and quantitative data was collected through open interviews, as well as created artefacts and surveys which refer to motivational aspects. The findings show that gaming elements female teenagers tend to like, create, and play, mostly follow stereotypical expectations. In contrast to our experiences in heterogeneous course settings, this was not seen as something negative by girls. Furthermore, the findings provided evidence for game-making environments for girls. Subsequently, the results contributed to the development of new featured games to be used in our app to inspire female users around the world to code their own games. The authors argue that by understanding these differences in game design, we can support girls so that they become game designers and thereby more interested in coding.