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Utopian Entrepeneur

Brenda Laurel
Designed by Denise Gonzales
Crisp MIT Press,
Cambridge MA and London, England
117 pages, paperback, $14.95 ISBN 0-262 62153-3
Reviewed by Mike Mosher
mosher@svsu.edu
Saginaw Valley State University,
University Center MI 48710

Brenda Laurel has been an inspiration to those of us in the arts and humanities instinctively drawn towards our time's "great work", computers and cyberspace. A midwestern theater academic who reinvented herself as a technovisionary, she followed her bliss to wherever the action was and always managed to be involved in the coolest stuff, whether computer games or interface design frontiers or virtual reality or Interval Research Corporation or socially-concious business. She provided both substance and style, was glammed up Hollywood-style for a MONDO 2000 (remember them?) cover shoot, and was the industry's shining high-profile shoot-from-the-hip intellectual in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia. This reviewer was aghast at an academic conference when the irrepressible Laurel responded to a fellow panelist "Jane, you miserable slut!", not realizing until years later the popular culture devotee was citing a 1970s "Saturday Night Live" skit. She cast such a long shadow that a decade ago, when the teenage editors of the 'zine BEN IS DEAD launched their nationwide "I Hate Brenda" campaign, I wondered why they should excorciate Ms. Laurel, unaware that outside of Silicon Valley the "Beverly Hills 90210" character by that name had greater youth mindshare.

When Laurel spoke to the computer-human interface organization BayCHI www.baychi.orgin January 2000, she seemed the saddest woman in the world. She wore the weight of her defunded business Purple Moon Games around her shoulders like iron chains as she delivered a dour sermon of despair at the venality and shortsightedness of the soon-to-deflate dot-com boom. She soon landed on her feet in a lucrative consulting stint with the Nielsen Norman Group. Since then, on her laptop and from her home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, she has processed the lessons of Purple Moon and the rocket she rode through the 1990s into this brisk and readable book.

_Utopian Entrepeneur_ shares an insider's hard-won insights and lessons of much value to--and these are overlapping circles--game designers, to businesswomen, those assembling affinity-based online "communities" (I am skeptical of this use of the word), to wide-ranging humanists and social thinkers, to cyber-artists. The book contains the impassioned story of Purple Moon Games and its outgrowth from the think tank Interval Research, dependent on funding by that other Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen. She discusses the honorably feminist project of producing the company's Rockett Movado games, intelligent adventures that make use of serious research by Laurel and Rachel Strickland on differences in the way girls play from the way boys do. Laurel gripes about the subsequent flak she got about the games' acknowlegement of social realities (i.e., girls like to be popular with their friends and classmates) from less pragmatic and more doctrinaire politicos. Released from corporate good-citizen responsibility, she takes some joy in slogging Barbie and the brand's cheesy computer game manifestations...Go to the mall! Choose a dream date! Oooh, throw marshmallows! Ironically, Barbie's Mattel Corporation bought out the assets of Purple Moon after its demise.

Laurel provides tenets for effective design research and Purple Moon's own research case history, and muses on the art of storytelling and on cultural values. She argues for software designers and developers to consider the product's recipient partners rather than users. She advocates the term "cultural work", which had currency among activists fifteen or twenty years ago, for what she does; this reviewer used to argue with community muralist colleagues who chose "cultural worker" over the mantle "artist". The book ranges from a too-succinct mention of "Placeholder", her team's memorable VR work in a medium that should have borne wider fruit by now, to a few pages of commensensical boilerplate on future information visualization and economic transformations possible in visionary enterprises that read like the biz-conf presentation it undoubtedly originally was. Free to include nods to science fiction, TV and a Spielberg-ready anecdote of how a corny Halloween costume earned her a toy "computer", the book is clearly assembled from notes and presentations and digressions stitched together. It rambles in the way that has made Laurel a welcome, provocative and compelling speaker to audiences of technologists, businesspeople and academics. It is easy and pleasurable to gobble up this slim volume in a weekend.

_Utopian Entrepeneur_ is the first of MIT Press' attractively-sized Mediaworks Pamphlet Series, launched under the direction of Peter Lunenfeld. Unfortunately it is saddled by the clunky and intrusive design of Denise Gonzales Crisp (who smirkingly calls the book a "fetish object"). It lacks both the metaphoric visual play of Quentin Fiore's design for Marshall McLuhan's _The Medium is the Massage_ or the spartan efficiency of Semiotext(e) paperbacks, two models the designer cites. One questions if this was any kind of true collaboration, for Laurel's projects at Apple Computer and Purple Moon with Kristee Rosendahl and others showed she knows how to work with designers for excellent results.

Typography can enhance the reading experience, or dimish it with preciousness. The clarity of Laurel's prose is ill-served by Gonzales Crisp, and there are sometimes quirky line breaks within sentences. The book's changing fonts work effectively less than half the time, and in those instaces a point towards which Laurel has been building is amplified or a list of topics ahead gets a showy variety to it. Yet most of the time the font choices are puzzling, as if the designer is unaware that every font has a personality. It switches from a clean, light sans serif body text to a quieter, flowing italic, a seemingly more "feminine" voice than the assertive bold font also heavily used. Occasional lines are set in pompous Roman capitals of varying sizes, while topic titles, dialogue and punchlines are set in a font that resembles the output of dot-matrix printer. What is the latter font supposed to be saying, that Laurel uses 1980s computers and peripherals? A particularly grating design conceit is a recurrent set of gratuitous dotted ruled lines, placed over text yet with a different line spacing, so the result is one sentence evenly spaced between them, one sentence closely underlined, one set upon the line, one cancelled out. Contemporary designers acknowlege the post-legibility directions of David Carson, but he readily admits he pioneered them in skatebord magazines with prose so doofy that readability didn't really matter.

The distancing device of photographing content from a video screen so that pixels are enlarged sometimes works, as on the cover, in a detail of Barbie's attenuated neck, or the reminder "This is not your last good idea". Other times its use reads as dated as Ms. Pac Man and Kraftwerk's vocoders. This reader would have liked more illustrations of Laurel's projects and adventures, for only once do we get a fugitive, scattered, glimpse of details of the faces of Rockett Movado and her friends--is this to tell us that the receding memory of the complex games under discussion is really that dim? An important line or more is dropped off during the deeply personal tale of Laurel's gender-changed game designer friend Daniel/Danielle Bunten, and typos should have been caught before publication.

Despite design flaws in version 1.0 of this Laurelware, _Utopian Entrepeneur_ is recommended. It recounts the victories and heartaches of a decade well spent, and heightens the expectations and wonderment within Brenda Laurel-watchers as to what in the world she will do next.

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Updated 5 December 2001.




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