(2 of 3)
The biggest mistake game developers make, Laurel believes, is misunderstanding why girls don't like Doom and Quake and other so-called boys' games. It's not just that most girls are appalled by the brutal violence--they certainly are--but also that they resent the programmers' assumption that these games are too difficult for girls to play. "The industry said, 'Make it easier,'" says Laurel. "'Throw marshmallows at Barbie, make the projectiles move more slowly.'" But dumbing down, she insists, is precisely the wrong way to go. Girls don't think boys' games are too hard; they think they're too stupid. "They lack complexity in dimensions that girls care about," Laurel says. Boys like overt competition, violence and mastery for their own sake; girls, by contrast, prefer covert competition, intricate narratives and group efforts based on complex social hierarchies.
Translation: boys like Die Hard, girls like Guiding Light. Not exactly rocket science, eh? In fact, as the only modestly successful software house Rocket Science Games has learned, creating a hit CD-ROM can be just as hard as rocket science. Purple Moon's strategy is to give girls what they need and don't get nearly enough of: a chance to use play to deal with the issues they face in their increasingly complex emotional lives. "We call the age between childhood and adolescence the Two-Headed Girl," says Laurel. "On the one hand you're constructing your social persona, and on the other hand you're constructing your inner self, finding out what you value and how your emotions work. Those two sides don't talk to each other very well."
So Purple Moon built two games that do. In Rockett's First Day (the first of a series), carrot-topped Rockett steers through the treacherous shoals of junior high using a storytelling strategy Laurel calls "emotional navigation." Players decide how to interact with other characters, guiding and shaping the story based on how they think Rockett is feeling about a given situation. As a bonus, Rockett can even sneak peeks into her classmates' lockers.
Beneath the Two-Headed Girl's intricate social sphere lies her even murkier "inner life." This is the purview of Purple Moon's second line of games, Secret Paths. The debut title, Secret Paths in the Forest, is a gorgeously illustrated adventure game whose players take soul-baring journeys that are essentially preteen female versions of Robert Bly. The game begins with girls gathering in a tree house to talk Issues: one girl doesn't think she's pretty enough, another isn't getting along with her siblings, and so on. Purple Moon misses no chance to add layers of complexity or to cross-merchandise; most of the characters in Secret Paths are kids from the Rockett series revealing themselves more intimately. They'll also turn up this fall on the Purple Moon Website. "Every character," Deyo promises, "will write and publish her own Web page." One girl named Whitney, for instance, comes across in the Rockett games as kind of a...well, let's just say it rhymes with witch. "But we learn in the tree house," Laurel adds reassuringly, "that her parents are divorced and she misses her mom, and there are some issues there that she really needs help with."