In UK Study, Girls Best Boys At Making Computer Games

New submitter Esteanil writes Researchers in the University of Sussex's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language. The young people, aged 12-13, spent eight weeks developing their own 3D role-playing games. The girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding. The girls used seven different triggers – almost twice as many as the boys – and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses. Boys nearly always chose to trigger their scripts on when a character says something, which is the first and easiest trigger to learn.

Comments

Which is why girls dominate game making...

[Karmashock]

... Oh wait.

Re:Which is why girls dominate game making...

[Notabadguy]

In 180ish comments, I didn't see anyone chuckle at "the girls...learnt more about coding."

So to summarize:

-30 kiddies make up the sample set.
-No controls on the experiment.
-No prevention on collusion.
-12 year old girls in the sample set develop more complex games than 12 year old boys in the sample set.
-Arbitrary measure of complexity for measure.
-12 year old literacy in the summary.

Yep, this is a scientific study that I'll be referencing.

Re:Which is why girls dominate game making...

[Karmashock]

Girls have developed faster then boys at that age since always. It is a well known trait.

However, the boys catch up and then the advantage vanishes.

Games are not programmed or developed by 12 year olds. They're mostly developed by people between the ages of 25 and 45. An age bracket which is well beyond the critical age range you're talking about.

What is more, you can see in the colleges that even with women out numbering men in the colleges... the programming, mathematics, etc courses are mostly men. And amongst the hard programming and math courses... 99.999999 percent men.

Now am I saying women can't do this work? No. I am rather saying they don't want to do it. They sit down in the programming classes, notice it is not fun for them, and leave.

It is a choice.

Re:Which is why girls dominate game making...

[narcc]

Wrong. Women and men gravitate to certain career paths. Women choose NOT to sit for hours in front of computers learning to code.

Anecdote: When I introduced RPG Maker in an after-school program at the urging of one boy, more girls than boys asked if they could also participate. The girls also stuck with it longer than every boy, save the original. (The girls averaged about three weeks vs the boys four days, not counting the first boy, who spent 4 months on his creation.)

Children, regardless of gender, enjoy creative activities. Moving on...

The only female writers in games I can name off the top of my head

You'd be amazed at how many games were written and designed by women, even in the old days. Sticking with just well-known titles: River Raid (Carol Shaw), Centipede (Dona Bailey, later driven from the industry by male co-workers), Archon (Anne Westfall), [bunch of Sierra games] (Jane Jensen), Laser Surgeon [okay, not as well known, but the name you'll recognize] (Brenda Laurel), Plundered Hearts, Zork Zero (Amy Briggs), I could go on all day, it seems.

That doesn't even begin to touch on the countless influential women in game design, who bring talents aside from programming to the table like Lucy Bradshaw, Robin Hunicke (who you dismissed without naming earlier), Brenda Brathwaite, Alyssa Finley, Linda Currie ... like the earlier list, this just doesn't end.

The point of all this? That you're not aware of many famous women in games does not mean that there aren't many famous women in games.

Do you know what keeps women out of game development? Attitudes like yours, as illustrated by the aforementioned Dona Bailey.

And before you give me some presto intellectual argument about how they're just conditioned to not want to do these things... Wrong. Women and men gravitate to certain career paths. Women choose NOT to sit for hours in front of computers learning to code.

Back in the early 80's something like 40% of CS graduates were women. Why do you think they seem to have collectively chosen to avoid it and related fields? It clearly wasn't a problem earlier, after all.

I think that you know why. You just don't like the answer.

What kind of a "study" is this?

[popo]

"Complex stories"? "Two or more parts or conditional clauses"? Two???

"Trigger their scripts on when a character says something?"

I am a game developer. I have no idea what they are talking about.

More fundamentally: is "complexity" good?

Re:What kind of a "study" is this?

[Maxo-Texas]

I'm guessing they had things like...

Trigger
Character says "Xxxxx".
Character attacks.
Character is damaged.
Character places objects on table.
Character gives objects to NPC.
Character is hungry.
Character is wielding X when close to a spot.

For some reason, the boys only used the 1st trigger and the result was a stereotypical "prompt/respond" roleplaying game.

Using the other triggers would provide a less stereotypical experience.

Not sure why all the girls did well and all the boys did badly. That seems off.

Perhaps there was a particular girl who "got it" and showed the other girls how to use the other triggers or shared code and made it easier for them to figure it out. Perhaps the teacher prompted the girls in some way.

In any case, the girls did better in this case-- perhaps some will turn out to be major names and the experience has to bolster their confidence.

Re: What kind of a "study" is this?

[Trepidity]

Varies by engine, but a lot of game logic these days is specified via visual programming languages, especially at big "AAA" game companies. The engine itself and the graphics/rendering parts, along with some computationally sensitive AI bits, will be written in C++, but a lot of the actual gameplay-relevant logic and events are scripted using something like Kismet (UDK3) or Blueprints (UDK4). Partly this is because in big companies, game logic has moved more and more towards becoming the responsibility of the level and character designers, while the "programmers" have become more specialized engine/graphics coders who don't actually program anything to do with gameplay.

Girls more developed at 12-13 years

[houghi]

News at 11.

Re:Girls more developed at 12-13 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been 12. From experience, no, girls are not more developed at that age. That's the age where girls and boys take off in different directions. Girls imitate more, which makes them look more developed (and more well behaved), because doing your own stuff isn't quite as impressive when you can hardly do anything yet. They're just different, not further along the development axis.

A nice foil to the previous story.

[SeaFox]

I like how it's been less than 10 days and already the editors did not think to link to the Barbie: Computer Engineer story, where she only thinks up a design and then has to go to the boys to get the coding done.

Ironic the fictional land of Barbie, with a supposedly positive message for girls about careers in tech, is more misogynistic than the reality it seeks to change.

Re:A nice foil to the previous story.

[TheReaperD]

Ironic the fictional land of Barbie, with a supposedly positive message for girls about careers in tech, is more misogynistic than the reality it seeks to change.

I'm pessimistic enough to believe that it didn't seek to change anything. I'm male so I'm not really an expert on Barbie but, everything I have ever seen and heard about "her" indicates that she's an unrealistic rich girl (or gold digger) that is obsessed about her body and possessing things and that the only thing she really encourages young girls to be is trophy wives with maybe an interesting side job for fun. I've never heard of anything that indicates that Mattel has ever truly marketed Barbie as a positive role model for girls to be body positive and self-determining of their own futures. They just give in when popular news pays a little more attention to what Barbie really sells than they are comfortable with because too much focus might actually bring about change.

Since I stuck my neck into this issue I just want to state, for the record, that women and men should have the same opportunities to become whatever they want to be, whether that be house(wife|husband), coder, combat infantry, CEO or President or anything else.

Re:Doesn't surprise me but...

[x0ra]

Boys' games are easy: If someone/something attack, shoot; if someone/something doesn't attack, still shoot. If you encounter a difficulty, blow it up. Boys are more keen to lean toward Scott Adams quote "There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives".

More Information

[Kvathe]

Fortunately my university provides me with access to the original study, so for those who are interested:

The study was performed on three elementary school classes with a total of 55 students (29 girls, 26 boys). Despite the small sample size, they did perform a statistical analysis and found the results to be significant (p < 0.001), the results being that girls on average scored higher on a computational thinking test before and after the course. The differences in improvement between genders was not significant and it is worth noting that despite having lower average scores before and after the course, the range of scores for boys in post-testing extended higher and lower than those of girls. I wish I could link the boxplot for the data but I'm not sure that's legal.

It is also important to note that the study was not performed in order to measure the difference between boys and girls in programming, but to measure the benefits of using their special programming software over an eight-week course. The software itself is indeed very visual, and the 'programming' is done by dragging around boxes with partial statements and filling in the blanks with object boxes. The software then constructs a text interpretation of the code in a lower box, which is what the computational thinking problems related to.

Re:More Information

[Kvathe]

Additionally: the focus on girls using more triggers than boys is misleading, the three extra triggers not used by boys were used by girls a combined total of five times, with two only being used once. Hardly the huge creative gap that it's made out to be.

Of Course they are

[wisnoskij]

Girls excel at everything in school. Since the feminisation of the school system their is not a single subject that boys do not lag behind in. It is impossible to compete when the entire system is against you.

Give me a break

[cfalcon]

If the study found the opposite:

1)- Would it make slashdot?
2)- Would there be some social reason given?

So seriously, why? Choosing 12 years old for the study- instead of 9, say, when boys and girls are basically the same thing- is a very odd choice, given the later development of boys. Choosing 15 would also give very different results. Generalizing the one point of human development when girls are ahead of boys is very odd, but why doesn't the article spend a million words saying that we need to help the boys get on the same level as the girls?

Almost every sex article- and CERTAINLY every gender one- is so political it's fucking insane.

There was an anecdote in a recentish book (sorry, blanking on the book) where a teacher noticed that the girls were doing better in language, and the boys in math. This bothered her- after all, boys shouldn't do better in math. Bothered her a lot, because, after all, she "knew" that boys and girls have similar math skills. Her solution was to segregate the boys and the girls math studies, based on the assumption that the girls were being intimidated by the boys, who held up their hands faster, etc. Eventually after doing this, the scores evened out or something, and she was happy that the world was exactly as she thought it was (after a lot of manipulation on her part). But, of course...
1)- Were the classes taught the same? If you care enough to teach math twice because the girls being behind enrages you, you are unlikely to be the most impartial teacher, right?
2)- If the girls being ahead in language and the boys being ahead in math enrages you because the boys are ahead, what happened when they split the language classes? They didn't do this part, of course- it was fine that the boys were behind in language. Not even the author relaying the ancedote seemed to consider this point.
3)- If there really is a better way to teach girls, then it stands to reason that there's a better way to teach boys. There's some gender zealots searching for the first, but shouldn't we be all about the second?

Anyway, back on topic, the program in question has nothing to do with anything, or real games. This study was likely designed from the start to show this, or spun that way for attention, and the metric for what "better" is seems entirely related to the "types of triggers" used. But I'm sure the rest of slashdot will poke holes in that obvious attention grab metric, and likely point out some more details with the NWN engine.

What would be interesting would be to take the scripted things and have them rated blindly by another group of 12-13 year olds.

Anyway, gender politics are so fucking all over the internet, and every side so zealous, that it's ludicrous to see slashdot dip their toe in it. I come here to read about tech, not read about some loopy gender warrior finding a way to spin their point of view (which is one of: sex A is worse at X, and that's society's fault, OR, sex A is worse at X, and that's because gender B is shining and perfect and obviously superior at X).