Uh, excuse the above evidence of my incompetence.

Week 3 saw us back at the MetaNet HQ, munching on sushi and mini chocolate bars.

Mare opened the session with some examples of games made for women and girls. It was both hilarious and depressing to see the industry thought we’d respond to based on our gender identities and or sex organs. Most looked like they’d been smeared with a thick coat of Pepto Bismol. Some took standard game mechanics but tried to make them more decipherable to us: Dress up Sally in time for the party! Snag a hot prince with your makeout prowess! Others couldn’t even be called games — they were more like pointless activities that the designers couldn’t even bother to game-ify with something resembling a score or a challenge.

We then took a look at games that had been designed or developed BY women. Games like Centipede and Phantasmagoria, which aren’t necessarily “for women” and have broad appeal. They appeal to lots of women not because they’re overtly gendered, but because they’re fun. It’s also interesting to think about HOW they’re gendered — in Phantasmagoria, the main character is a woman (whoa), and in Centipede, the centipede’s gender is not specified.

Our homework this week was to revise our N levels and post them to NUMA (wherein most of us received the feedback “pretty good…for a first level”), and to mod an existing game using Stencyl. Stencyl is a fairly new, free, point & click game making tool. It was a fun but very frustrating experience, as most WYSIWYG tools are.

Demoing our own games led to lots of laughs, both because we’re a real funny group and because of bugs we hadn’t been able to fix. Sagan’s game had a cool bug that would duplicate the player’s actor so there were two of you walking around on the screen.

We did learn a lot from working with Stencyl, but the bigger lesson was probably that our tools are going to present us with limitations and that we’re going to have to let go of our more perfectionist tendencies if we want to create actual, playable games by the end of this incubator.

We wrapped by talking about where we were at with our own games. Some of the ideas have changed quite dramatically, while others have seen a lot of thoughtful development. The homework for next week is to choose a tool (like Stencyl, Game Salad, RPG Maker, etc.) and design an interaction for our own games. We’ll also be revising our Stencyl games and posting them to the community for feedback (gulp).