Laurel, Brenda

1950–

Interactive Media Pioneer, Entrepreneur, Social Theorist

Brenda Laurel is a software designer, researcher, and writer who has been described as everything from a “visionary” to a “humanist,” but whose primary interest throughout her career has been human-computer interaction. In 1993, Wired magazine writer Susan McCarthy called Laurel “a woman whose thoughts are shaping the way people think about the design of cyberspace.” Laurel's work has long focused on interactive narrative, and on the cultural ramifications of technology.

Laurel was among the early video game designers. She worked at the company that manufactured the CyberVision home computer in the late 1970s, and created an interactive fantasy version of the story of Goldilocks, as well as the first lip-synched animation for a microcomputer game called Hangman, in which an executioner delivered menacing lines in a Transylvanian accent. By 1980, she was designing video games for Atari. Her approach to interactive media—including her pioneering work in virtual reality—has always tended to reflect her early work in and obsession with the theater.

Her doctoral dissertation was composed at Ohio State University after several years away from academic training, during which time she worked on educational software and interface theory at Atari under the direction of Alan Kay. Her dissertation reputedly presented the first outline of a comprehensive architecture for combining interactive fantasy and fiction. Again, this line of interest was based on her experiences in drama. Like theater, Laurel said, games and educational software focus on characters and action. Therefore, she theorized, computers are inherently a theatrical medium, and people can use them to participate in events that have dramatic impact and emotional resonance. Such observations led her in the mid-1980s directly into the field of virtual reality (VR).

As author Howard Rheingold described it, Laurel and other ex-Atari programmers left the company wanting to redefine the computer interface, changing it from a medium in which user and computer are separated by a glass window—to build a new interface in which people could walk into and experience a virtual life, to construct environments where rocks in the soil would be difficult to loosen, places populated with heroes and villains like any good fantasy.

Laurel joined ActiVision Inc. in 1985 as director of product development, learning, and creativity. During the next two years, she was responsible for strategic planning and product-line management, producing and designing more interactive games. She also worked with Lucasfilm Games and Tom Snyder Productions as a creative consultant. In 1990, Laurel and NASA émigré Scott Fisher co-founded a company called Telepresence Research, which experimented with VR environments, building prototypes and creating designs for custom VR installations.

Her first book was 1991's Computers as Theatre, which borrowed heavily from Aristotle's ancient analysis of the form and structure of drama, and which built a case that computers should not be [Page 283]designed with a focus on the interface between machine and user, but strictly on the user's very personal experiences using the machine. As such, Laurel's work has long focused on interactive narrative and on the cultural ramifications of technology. Also in 1991, Laurel joined the research staff at Interval Research Corp., a VR company founded in 1992 by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. In 1993, she and fellow Interval researcher Rachel Strickland designed a large VR installation called Placeholder. According to Wired magazine, Placeholder emerged after Laurel observed that kindergarten children habitually created make-believe roles for themselves and switched them with other children almost at random. The VR space allowed two people to participate; users wore white helmets and stood on carpeted circles with wires running upward from their headgear to allow for mostly free movement. Wired reported that Placeholder was a “virtual world,” one “populated by whimsical creatures such as a snake, a spider and a crow.” Users could “inhabit” the creatures by pushing into the virtual space that they occupied.

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