"Play Like a Girl": Playing With Girlhood in the World of Pixie Hollow

• In Event: Let Girls Lead: Girls as Critical Thinkers, Designers, and STEAM Researchers

Abstract

As black women in academia committed to social justice, our scholarship and teaching interrogate power, systemic erasure, and the disenfrachisement of minority citizens. However, our students’ previous experiences in the classroom reinforce those same problematic paradigms. In the following assignment, I describe how incorporating an online game provides as opportunity to encourage students' critical thinking, disrupt teacher-centered authority in the classroom, and encourage student-centered learning. The massively multiplayer online role playing game, Pixie Hollow, provides a series of useful, accessible examples for discussing gender, the mechanics of community building, and the interconnections between technological fluency and community norms. This game provides an opportunity to talk about literacy as a fundamentally social act overall when used as an assignment in a college course. Also, the overall assignment and its emphasis on journaling as a research tool meant to encourage critical self-reflexivity helps students grasp concepts central to the course as a whole, including race, class, and gender.
Pixie Hollow is a useful teaching tool for first and second year college students in women’s studies, gender studies, and American studies classrooms because of its incorporation of gender roles into the prestructuring of the program. This class looks at the connections between technological evolution and hegemonic structures, so prestructuring here refers to both the technologies of game design and the sociocultural framework surrounding design decisions on the part of the programmers and developers.
Discussing Pixie Hollow’s design encourages conversations about a version of femininity centered on consumption, affective labor, and performing acts of kindness. This discussion also provides an opportunity to describe the ways in which girlhood becomes a site of both play and policing. Because this game is designed for younger children, it is very easy for college students with varying degrees of technical competency to master it. Pixie Hollow provides a unique opportunity to see how technologies of gender (such as the idea of fairies as feminine and little girls as fragile and in need of protection) impact the technologies of game design. I use this game in the classroom to talk about the prestructuring of gender roles into various types of built environment, and the roles of various types of literacies in framing community development.
Each semester, at least one group has brought up conspicuous consumption, and the role of establishing who you are by what you buy. Another group designed their own website discussing the arts and shared creative practices (like story-telling, painting, and avatar-making) as a means of demonstrating friendships online. These conversations change a little each semester, depending on the students enrolled in the class and the ways in which Pixie Hollow has itself evolved. However, each semester this game has proven a rich source of discussion material related to gender, community building, and game design. This research is particularly significant to teaching and learning studies when thinking of how STEAM activities can be integrated with the humanities in order to engage more students, particularly girls in computer science programming.

Author

• Maria Inez Velazquez, Bucknell University