Students at the first narrative game design workshop specifically for young women and gender-expansive youth.
When DPI’s Discover Computing Ignite held its first Narrative Game Design workshop in November, there was just one critique: One of the four young women among the 31 participants said it would have been nice to have a space that was less, well, masculine.
“We heard that,” said Jaclyn Carmichael, assistant director of student programs for DPI’s Pritzker Tech Talent Labs. “And we recognized the opportunity to fill a gap where young women and gender-expansive youth could thrive in a technical learning experience designed specifically for them.” Carmichael, a Nintendo player herself, noted that the gender identity of gaming participants is close to an even split between women and men.
Carmichael asked Ashlyn Sparrow, a game designer and senior research associate at the University of Chicago who had led the November workshop, if she’d be up for doing an event exclusively for young women and gender-expansive youth. She was, which is how 20 young women and gender-expansive youth are at DPI on a February Saturday to learn gaming, talk gaming, and delve a little bit into the Kendrick/Drake beef.
Intro to Twine
After a discussion of their favorite games and gaming-related media— Sparrow has thoughts about Arcane, the Netflix show based on the League of Legends game — she shows the group a mockup of her game in progress, Afterlife, as well as a brief preview of Haven, a game she helped her UChicago students create.
Then, she walks them through Twine: an interactive, html-based story platform. Twine is a good introduction to game design, Sparrow says, because you don’t have to know html, CSS, or Javascript to use it, although she admits that it helps if you do.
To illustrate how the program works, Sparrow shows the group the trolley problem turned into a Twine game. The trolley problem is a famous philosophical question: if a trolley is speeding down a track toward a group of five people, and you can divert it onto another track, thus killing only one person, would you do it? To complicate the question: What if the one person was going to invent a life-saving vaccine? What if the five people were on their way to burn down a building full of people? And so forth.
Sparrow plays through both choices in the Twine trolley game. The game doesn’t show actual trolleys, but players can read the narrative’s text on the screen and hear sound effects of the crash. Spoiler: a lot of people ultimately die either way.
“I’m so sorry to bring in a gruesome story,” Sparrow says.
Skibidi Toilet Rizz?!
Now it’s time for the group to create a short game together.
“What should we call the game?” Sparrow asks.
“Skibidi Toilet Rizz!” comes a suggestion from the front row. Sparrow adds a question mark: Skibidi Toilet Rizz?!
Skibidi Toilet Rizz is also the main character in the game. Each step in the game is a called a passage: Skibidi Toilet Rizz climbing out of the toilet is one passage, his speaking would be a second passage. And since it’s a game, there are choices: what does Skibidi say here? Does he speak or punch something?
Sparrow shows the students how to generate commands for each passage, and as a bonus, considers depicting the Kendrick Lamar/Drake feud as a game. What would it mean to go through the game as J. Cole, who drops out? Or as Drake?
“You can come up with a number of different diss tracks,” she says. “But guess what? It all leads to the same point.”
The students laugh.
Now comes the assignment: write five to 10 passages and start connecting them. Up at the front, Sparrow continues Skibidi Toilet Rizz?! to illustrate different points, asking for occasional suggestions from the group. It’s mostly quiet; the students are busy working.
It takes focus
Over a pizza lunch, Sparrow shows the group more tricks in Twine: a macro that allows you to produce a command, how to flip text upside down, and more.
She also plays, with student guidance, a few rounds of Reigns: Her Majesty, noting that she had never progressed so far in the game before.
“You have to be demure!” they advise whenever there’s a choice between, say, arguing with someone or graciously agreeing to learn the coronation dance.
After her queen dies for the fifth or sixth time, Sparrow settles in for a Q&A with Carmichael as moderator, spanning a range of topics:
- Whether her parents approve of her career (They do – now.)
- An educational game that she hopes to get into Chicago Public Schools’ curriculum.
- Her winding career path, including a government clearance to interview with the NSA, and her eventual decision to join the University of Chicago’s Game Changer Design Lab: “That’s so weird! I should choose that one!” she says.
- The need for coding skills in game design. She advises it’s good to learn and to be able to think about systems and processes: learn any language that teaches you logic, whether it’s Python, C#, or something else.
- Low-tech ways to plot your video game in the beginning. Sparrow suggests trying it as a card game or board game first. Or, as an exercise, try and turn an existing board or card game into a video game. Uno, for example.
Gaming for women
Sparrow also has bigger-picture advice about college, as well as the gaming world for women and gender-expansive people.
“The typical story of people going into gaming is literally a bunch of guys working in their parents’ basement or garage,” Sparrow says, but notes that things are better than 2006, when she was one of five women, and one of four Black people, majoring in information technology at Penn State.
That said, she says it can still be hard for women and other underrepresented groups.
“Be prepared,” she says. “Don’t go in looking for a fight but be prepared in case a fight happens.”
One student asks a two-part question: what is the hardest thing about your work? And what is the easiest/best? She says the answer to both is the same. It is hard work, but that hard work is the best part.
“It takes focus,” Sparrow says. “And if you have joy while doing that, you’ve got what it takes to make any art.”
The final reveal
It’s time for the students to present their projects. While there’s not enough time for everyone who wants to do it, the group enjoys the four games presented:
- An encounter with a mysterious figure
- A quest for a missing rose petal
- A job interview that turns romantic
- The Kendrick/Drake beef, also turned romantic
Most important, Sparrow shows the group how to save their games, to share and to work on them later. Everyone takes notes. Their gaming careers have begun.
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Ashlyn Sparrow consults with Mena Mohammed, a tenth grader at Senn High School in Chicago.
Author: Jeanie Chung