From Catwoman to Lara Croft, girl power is a powerful theme in the comic and gaming world. Female heroes inspire a positive image for young girls, promoting strength and heroism. However, these heroes are often idealized and stereotyped.
Sarah Zaidan, a game designer and professor at Emerson College, hosted a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday entitled “The Adventures of Ms. Meta: Celebrating the Female Superhero Through Digital Gaming.” In her lecture, she shared the research she has conducted to craft her very own female superhero game, which is a work in progress.
Zaidan had the manner of a superhero herself, with cat eye glasses, red lipstick and a blond streak in her coifed dark hair. Her lecture began as a visual walk through the history of female superheroes, which added cultural importance to her own game.
Zaidan then spoke of the literature, magazines and comic books that she spent hours poring over as a part of her research. She also said that she wanted to explore the effects of customizing the players’ powers in her game, tying the concept in to the assertiveness of female superheroes.
“I think of research as a funnel,” she said. “I research the games and the actions the games allow you to take.”
Kathryn Knutsen, a junior at Emerson and one of Zaidan’s students, attended the event to discover more about her professor.
“I took [Introduction] to Game Design with Sarah Zaidan,” she said. “We worked with all analog games, while doing prototyping and iterative design. I was interested in hearing about her current personal project addressing gender.”
Zaidan’s project intends to address the stereotypes of female superheroes and starts with exploring how the gender’s body types are depicted. She said she wants to allow players to have a choice of appearance in addition to powers, in order to counter the “gravity-defying” looks of characters such as those of Wonder Woman. Zaidan also said she wants her female superhero to have a connection to engineering.
Steve Golson, of Carlisle, is a former MIT student and a designer of the hardware for the arcade game “Ms. Pac-Man.” The game is one of the most popular arcade games in history, and arguably represents the first female superhero in gaming.
“I was part of a company called General Computer in the early 80s, which is known for ‘Ms. Pac-Man,’” he said. “Having the female as the main character was so intriguing in gaming and entertainment. It’s astonishing to see how game design has changed. Even then, game design was bigger than movies, even bigger than Hollywood.”
Pioneers of the gaming and female superhero world such as Golson show us the importance of creating new ideas, and the growth of technology. However, Zaidan’s approach appeared to be more of a unity between the science and the art worlds.
Zaidan spoke of how she coded in the programming language ActionScript for four years on the path to her Ph.D., and that she prefers to create her characters in the original 2D as opposed to the growing trend of 3D. Right now, Zaidan said she is programming a game engine called Unity. However, Zaidan said she hopes to find a balance between digital gaming and art.
“I’ve been playing games since 1988, but I thought of myself as an artist rather than someone who could make games,” she said. “I always tell my students that we’re in another industrial revolution of technology. I’ve seen people with no artistic skills but computer design skills make beautiful graphics, and visa versa.”
With digital gaming as the melting pot of art and technology, the female superhero inspires girls not just to play these games, but to create them.
“You can gain that knowledge,” Zaidan said. “ … Start making. Don’t feel like your knowledge is holding you back.”
