I have just started reading this book.
I’m a bit annoyed by the school book tone of it. Not just because that way everything gets said twice. But also because it all comes out sounding like fixed rules and facts while a lot that is being said is highly disputable given the young age of the medium. The generalizing observations of the differences between cultures -which is where I’m at now- are on the edge of my ethical tolerance, but perhaps this is a good way to talk about them in the context of game design. After all, I’m all for using clichés. They help communication.
Note from 20 November 2006
I’m stuck on a 30 (sic!) page interview with two Japanese business men discussing the finer details of the thickness of the eyebrows of Ratchet as it pertains to the appeal of the character to the Japanese market, after having disqualified any of their own arguments with the example of a colleague predicting the failure of Pokémon in the US, illustrating the open-mindedness of Japanese kids to any type of character design and a fascination with how conservatism grows with age in humans. But I won’t be victimized by the writer’s My-First-Foreign-Culture (though-not-too-foreign-since-Japan-was-colonized-after-World-War-II-by-my-own-culture-just-like-Iraq-who-will-soon-be-our-friends-too) experience no longer and I’ll skip over this part. That’ll teach them. 😈
Note from 11 December 2006
I just learned everything about girls in the chapter on gender! 🙂 Apparently, when it comes to games, there is only one gender. It’s called female. I had hoped to learn about differences between genders in terms of character design but instead this chapter was a plea to design more games for girls.
I’m getting a bit tired of this constant nagging of female writers about games. It’s very simple to provide for games that appeal to women: make them! Games should be made by women -at least partially. Not just on a design level but also deep in the icky guts of the machine: we need female programmers, female animators, female modellers, etc. Get to work, girls!