Having identified from the research in this field that the key areas of concern were violence, addiction and sexism, I was interested in finding out from users of Tomb Raider how important these aspects were for them and what other factors might be important. I was mainly interested in the interface between the world of the game and the world of the child. I thought that a means of communicating between these two worlds was by getting pupils to write to Lara Croft.

The first and most important part of this study was the Letters to Lara project. I set up a web site with Geocities, which invited members of the public to write letters to Lara Croft. So that I would have an opportunity to follow up some of those who sent letters, I got a number of pupils at Sackville School in East Grinstead to send letters The best of these letters, selected by their English teacher, were published on the site.

This activity is not far removed from a traditional English exercise of writing to a character in a novel. At the same time it is close to fan fiction which I have also encouraged pupils to write; fiction in which they take the imaginary world of the video game as a starting point and develop their own story in that world.

The purpose of the web site was to provide motivation for pupils who would be writing for a real audience. They were writing for the global audience of the internet but they were also writing for their own friends who had computers and could access the site to see their work.

The responses ranged from very brief comments about the game:

A male pupil, who perhaps wanted to stress that he plays more violent and tough games than Tomb Raider, wrote this.

In particular I think that the Letters to Lara approach probably reduced the sexist remarks which boys tended to make to each other about Lara Croft. It forced them to go beyond their stereotypical responses because they were treating Lara as a "real person" – if we are prepared to use a rather postmodern definition of real.

I also made use of interviews and Venn diagrams as well as newsgroup disucssions to find out the opinions of pupils and those involved in education but these are only quoted when they illuminate of clarify what appears in the letters.

I have concentrated on the letters from pupils I knew personally because of the focus on the personality of the pupil.

Pupils in my class constructed Venn diagrams which were the starting point for the discussion. I thought this was better than directly asking them how they thought their personal constructs were influenced by playing the game (however I phrased it) because the self is often the most difficult concept to put under the microscope.

The diagrams were constructed in two ways. On one diagram they had used a computer to drag and drop adjectives and adjectival phrases about Lara Croft into the circles of the diagram. In another they had produced a Venn diagram by hand and put in their own adjectives and adjectival phrases which may or may not include the ones on the other diagram.

The reason for using two diagrams was to ensure that all pupils had responded to a standard set of words and phrases. I also wanted to give them the chance to come up with aspects of the role of "Lara as transitional object" which I had missed.

I then followed this up by selecting 15 pupils (7 boys and 6 girls) who expressed an interest for interview. I also interviewed two pupils in their homes who did not think of me primarily as a teacher but as a friend of the family. The pupils were all from working or middle class backgrounds from a small market town in West Sussex. I am their teacher.

I am very conscious of the fact that I am hearing what pupils want to say in front of a teacher and I made use of devices which I thought might distract them from trying to give me the right answers. For example, I conducted the interviews in the relative informality of lunch breaks or after school where we often discussed video games.

As I wanted to find out what the pupils found important about the game, I did not always stick to the exactly the same questions. However I tried to include the following questions:

The purpose of the questions is to get closer to the relationship between the pupil’s personality and the perceived personality of the transitional object.

Question 1 directly addresses the issue of video violence which is part of the discourse whether I make it so or not. Buckingham (1995) noted that the discourse about violence in TV and its effects on "other people" became part of the discussion with pupils whether it was raised by interviewers or not.

Questions 2 to 5 try to get close to the feelings of guilt which some players have expressed over ‘killing’ Lara – feelings probably enhanced by the dying sigh which signals her death in the game.

Questions 6 to 8 deal with the extent to which players might want to keep within the game rather than completing it to return to Real Life (which my pupils have started to abbreviate to RL, probably imitating me).

Questions 9 to 17 (17 is a looping question) are designed to address how pupils treat real life, TV and video characters and how they differentiate them. It is based on the idea of personal constructs but far removed from the grids used for clinical analysis by Kelly (Kelly, 1955) because they seemed inappropriate to the school setting.

However, the concept of using the constructs taken from characters in Video games, in TV and in real life as a means of teasing out the perceived personality of Lara Croft was incorporated in this less formal and clinical questioning.

The last three questions deal with the issue of cleverness which was flagged up as an interesting issue in the Venn diagrams.

Clearly this is not a statistically significant sample. The pupils are white and predominantly middle class and their views may not be typical of their age range. However, David Buckingham (Buckingham, 1996) referred to this kind of research as qualitative rather than quantitative – more concerned with the nature of the responses than the quantity of them. His research on Children’s responses to television is more concerned with the why and how of those responses than the percentages of respondents.

I have quantified the results of the Venn diagrams because I think the figures show trends among my pupils and that their responses can best be understood in the light of those trends.

I considered that there were a number of problems with interviewing pupils. The main problem was the child’s awareness of audience in the framing of comments. Pupils know that this was for a teacher and the majority of teachers are seen as disapproving of popular culture in general and video games in particular. It is also the case that the pupils were before their peers and this would influence the way that they commented on the game.

My female colleague who conducted the Letters to Lara selections was not an enthusiast for video games whereas I am much more positive in my views. I have in the past used video games (such as Lords of Midnight) with English classes both as a stimulus for collaborative creative writing and as a comprehension exercise using the game as the text.

When quoting from children I have changed or omitted names, keeping the same gender. I have also corrected the spelling errors because I think these tend to make the writing harder to understand. I have normally left the grammar as in the original unless this makes it unintelligible.

Although I did not conduct interviews with parents and teachers, inevitably the Letters to Lara project became a topic of conversation when my colleague produced wall displays about it for parents’ evenings. All of the comments were positive and they saw it as a way of involving and motivating pupils in their learning about computers and the Internet. None of these (predominantly ‘middle England’) parents thought it was disgusting or trivial.

There was also an extensive debate on usenet groups such as uk.education.teachers about the project and I have made use of two quotations from that debate from people in education one of whom supported and one of whom opposed the Letters to Lara project.

Now read Six faces of Lara