How Indie Games Have Helped Me Appreciate Games for Kids

At the DMLC last week, during the discussion period that followed our panel presentation, a delegate humorously thanked me for doing the work that I do so that others don't have to. It was a comment full of good intentions and was certainly received as such (both by myself and by the audience), but it is also a comment that I in fact receive quite often. For while studying kids' games certainly sounds like (and is) a lot of fun, the clunky, promotion-laden contents of many of the commercial games that I research can definitely make in-depth analysis and concerted exploration a bit of a challenge. It's actually a dimension of my research that I've thought a lot about, both in terms of a methodological issue as well as a potential source of researcher bias. After all, adult assessments of children's culture are always going to be problematized by issues of perspective, varying (often biased) "standards," ideological notions of children/childhood, and the necessarily "outsider" status of the adult academic.

For the seasoned gamer (as well as many non-gamer adults for that matter), playing a game designed specifically for kids is often quite a different experience from playing a game designed for teens and adults. This is particularly true of games that are designed for kids specifically rather than for a general audience of "Everyone", and even truer when looking at MMOGs. Rather than the usual themes of violence, exploration and epic adventure that shape so many fantasy MMOGs, kids' MMOGs tend to be characterized by an emphasis on lightness, casual gameplay, positive feelings (such as happiness and kindness) and commercial/popular culture. Playing these games can also be oddly underwhelming. Like many digital games designed for children, technical features and aesthetic qualities are usually much more basic (not just more accessible, but more barebones) than those found in successful mainstream games. The customizable options available in kids' MMOGs are quite limited when compared to those available in T-rated MMOGs. The different areas and activities are fragmented and unintegrated. The “mise-en-scenes” (for example, the visual background and soundscape) are static and minimalistic. And the game mechanics are crude and oftentimes “clunky” -- delayed by time lags and program glitches.

So, in order to be able to immerse myself in these worlds and begin to appreciate their unique attributes and hidden complexities, it has been essential that I first cast aside any pre-existing biases about game design and aesthetic "standards" (as best I can anyway). Many of these biases are likely the result of many years of keeping pace with the perpetual race for technological and artistic innovation that has driven the growth of the commercial games industry since the early 1990s. While comparison to mainstream games and MMOGs is at times useful, particularly when comparing children’s game design across platforms and industry sectors, it is important that I avoid letting these comparisons dictate or obscure analysis of children's games on their own terms.

In fact, some of the strongest criticisms of mainstream game development in recent years are aimed at the perceived state of creative stagnancy produced by the industry’s narrow emphasis on “technological advancement.” As Fullerton, Chen, Santiago et al. describe, “Design advancement in the industry is generally limited to feature advancement within the existing domains of market genres. […] The exploration of new genres of games is considered risky in all regards: gameplay, technology, design and market viability." Like film before it, an important source of resistance and challenge to the status quo is found among the independents, who lack the big budgets required to compete in the industry’s endless race toward technological advancement, but as a result also have more freedom and impetus to attempt different types of innovation.

Accordingly, some of the most critically acclaimed games of the past few years have come out of independent game design studios, such as flOw, Flower and Cloud (created by Chen and produced by Santiago, who now run That Game Company), World of Goo (by 2D Boy), The Path (by Tale of Tales) and Okami (by the now defunct Japanese independent Clover Studios) (AND Braid, Submachine, Scarygirl, And Yet It Moves, Today I Die, etc., etc., etc.). Each of these “indie games” won multiple awards for originality and design innovation, and was widely celebrated by both the industry and the gaming culture (of players, fans, and critics). Yet none of them feature the type of "realistic" three-dimensional graphics, expansive level structures and expensive production qualities found within the mainstream games that usually set the hegemonic standard.

Instead, the emphasis within the indie games mentioned above is on the uniqueness of the graphics, on unusual innovations and manipulations of the gameplay mechanics, and on contributing to the advancement of something other than a Moore’s Law vision of technological advancement. Okami features a Japanese scroll-inspired game environment upon which the player can “paint” new objects and actions using the game controller to manipulate a giant virtual paintbrush. In World of Goo, the individual levels are spatially limited and contain simple, cartoonish graphics. However, the game is remarkable in the innovation of its physics, with which players must interact in increasingly complex ways in order to create structurally sound bridges and towers out of living gobs of goo. The main goal of gameplay within both flOw and Cloud is to attain a particular emotional state. There are no points or missions other than exploration, immersion and emotional investment in the gameplay process itself. Because these games are attempting to push and even break open existing standards and expectations of what a digital game should look and feel like, they defy established modes of comparison and evaluation.

Even within the established digital game industry, increasing attention is now placed on innovation, with the various console systems that now (or soon will) enable kinetic gameplay, multi-modal games that players can access across a variety of platforms, and a reconsideration of game design fundamentals. This is in fact particularly the case within child-inclusive games, most notably found in numerous titles released by Nintendo over the past couple of years, including Wii Sport, Super Mario Galaxy, Cooking Mama and Super Princess Peach. What this growing movement in game design demonstrates is that simple can be sophisticated, and that innovation cannot always be measured by size, scope and the number of pixels alone.

In terms of how this relates to the current discussion, there are many potential overlaps between indie games and children’s MMOGs. After all, children’s virtual worlds are a new phenomenon, and represent a clear break from the norms that have developed over the course of the past decade within MMOG design, including the tendency to develop games that specifically (and oftentimes exclusively) target a core gamer demographic consisting of young men between the ages of 14 to 32 years. Not to mention the fact that the games’ developers tend be outsiders themselves in relation to the established digital games industry. Perhaps some design limitations and a different set of emerging standards should be expected as new voices break into game development, and as new player communities are introduced into the existing MMOG culture.

Anyway - just some thoughts I've had about my process and about how to further contextualize my research &/or findings. I've never actually taken on or addressed this comment head on, and thought it might be time to hash out what my position actually is. My own growing love and appreciation for indie games, casual games and puzzle games has developed concurrent to (and possibly intertwined with) my ongoing study of kids' games, so there's also a definite "chicken or egg" phenomenon going on here. But the key theme that I take away from all this is that a shift in perspective has allowed me to find joy, meaning and value in a much broader spectrum of digital games (and game designs), which has not only helped my research but has also enriched my leisure experience immensely.

Media International Australia: Beyond Broadcasting Now Available

The newest issue of Media International Australia is now out (though available only with subscription, I'm afraid), and provides a collection of articles exploring the special issue theme "Beyond Broadcasting? TV for the Twenty-First Century". Edited by Graham Meikle and Sherman Young (and including a new article by yours truly), the theme articles deal with a variety of issues - policy, cultural, political - currently taking center stage, as television moves away from traditional models and into new practices, technologies and formats. A number of general articles are also included in the issue - of special interest to kids' media researchers is the article by Geoff Lealand and Ruth Zanker describing findings of a recent study of New Zealand children's "media worlds". My own contribution to the issue addresses the shift toward and use of MMOGs by children's television networks, the product of a preliminary study into kids' media convergence I conducted last spring, which I also presented at a couple of conferences in October (UDC and aoir 8.0). Here's the abstract (which might already be somewhat familiar to regular Gamine Expedition readers):

This paper traces the migration of North American children’s television into the realm of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), and the issues this raises in terms of the commercialisation of children’s (digital) play. Through a content analysis of three television-themed MMOGs targeted to children, Nickelodeon’s Nicktropolis, Cartoon Network’s Big Fat Awesome House Party and Corus Entertainment’s GalaXseeds, I examine how this new development within children’s online culture operates in relation to existing industry practices of cross-media integration and promotion. Dominant trends identified in the content analysis are compared with emerging conventions within the MMOG genre, which is generally found to contain numerous opportunities for player creativity and collaboration. Within the cases examined, however, many of these opportunities have been omitted and ultimately replaced by promotional features. I conclude that all three case studies operate primarily as large-scale advergames, promoting transmedia intertextuality and third-party advertiser interests.

Enjoy!

My G-Life: Game Design with a Mission

Cool site alert! An article was published in the BBC news online a few weeks ago (but I only just now had the chance to research it) about a new "social networking site" aimed at enabling teens around the world (aged 13+) to learn game design/development skills and then share their final products...all under the Creative Commons license. The site is called My GLife.org, and is currently in beta-mode, operating with only a bare bones structure and no teen-designed games as of yet. Some media and marketing (?) companies have donated simple flash games as examples, though, to give visitors and potential developers a sense of what they're looking for. Here's an excerpt from the official description of the site:

Through an open architecture of websites and related wikis and blogs, MyGLife participants learn to analyze, design and build web-based games and simulations that address globally relevant and social issues of their choice and passion. Topics include climate change, ecology, water, community services, technology skills, peace and more.

[...]

MyGLife.org is comprised of an open architecture of educational, programmable websites and related wikis that offer more than 100 educational activities, simulations and tutorials to play, learn, explore and contribute new ideas online.

* PLAY to Learn invites participants to play with an arcade of games, puzzles, creative tools and scientific simulations and to think about them critically as game developers. Donated and open source customized tutorials allow participants to tinker with the underlying game code and learn programming skills.

* LEARN to Build features an extensive library of hand-picked, custom written and open source tutorials for learning Flash, HTML, Graphic Design, Wiki, Blogging and Project Development skills.

* EXPLORE Web 2.0 Resources features links to recommended online resources and lists of suggested readings that will help participants.

* CONTRIBUTE Knowledge and Support encourages participants to follow-up their learning by contributing works back to the site. Professional developers and organizations worldwide can also donate work and learn how to start MyGLife programs locally.

The project is run by an organization called World Wide Workshop, which I hadn't heard of before now, but appears to have a pretty awesome goal of spreading global participation in digital cultural production to groups that are most often excluded, in this case young people from disadvantaged communities in developing countries worldwide.

New CCFC Campaign - Webkinz Incorporates Third-Party Ads

The Uber-popular, toy-based, virtual environment for kids, Webkinz, has begun incorporating third-party ads into their content, causing a bit of an uproar among parents and launching a new campaign led by child advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood to convince the site to remove the extra ads. I say extra because the Webkinz site, as the CCFC points out, is in itself already an advertisement, of the "transmedia intertext" variety. Here are some of the details about the CCFC's campaign, from the organization's website:

Webkinz.com, the most visited virtual world for children in the United States, has quietly begun targeting its users with outside advertising.

The site is already commercial – in order to subscribe to it, children must buy a Webkinz toy that comes with a special code. But apparently using the site to sell millions of Webkinz stuffed animals wasn’t enough for Ganz (the makers of Webkinz) and now they’re selling their young users to advertisers. To make matters worse, Ganz didn’t bother to inform parents, many of whom purchase Webkinz toys for their children expecting that the website will be free of outside advertising and links. By opening the site to advertisers, Ganz is choosing to maximize profits at the expense of parents’ trust and children’s wellbeing.

Please take a moment to tell CEO Howard Ganz to stop advertising on Webkinz.

Is anyone else frustrated at the typical timeline for this particular breed of kids' sites? They start off seemingly unbranded...until you realize that they already have numerous licensing agreements in place, and that a whack of ancillary products are actually being referenced in the site and throughout kids' culture. As soon as the site becomes popular - third-party advertisers and market research (for sale, anyway, as it's surely been going on behind the scenes all along) are introduced. At this point the site either crosses into media-brand territory (films, comic books, videogames, action figures), or becomes yesterday's news, as kids seek out the "next big thing". I wonder, however, if the kids' motivation is really that of finding the "next" big fad (as marketing discourse would have us believe), or whether they might, inadvertently or not, be trying to escape the ads and other changes that take place within their favorite sites once the emphasis has shifted away from attracting a large population base, and onto ways of selling that population to advertisers. How much does the integration of advertising alter the activities, community and overall experience? Once kids are no longer the main focus -- from a business perspective at least -- are they (and their needs) treated any differently?

Read more coverage at the New York Times and at Common Dreams.

Children's Rights in Teen Second Life

By way of the MAGIC network, another cool example of gamers using machinima for political expression, this time through a 5-week-long initiative led by Global Kids (with support from UNICEF) and taking place entirely within Teen Second Life. Teens from three different countries (Finland, UK and US) participated in the second annual "Camp Global Kids", a virtual summer camp geared towards producing short videos about children's rights, in order to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the Convention of the Rights of the Child. The initiative also had an obvious educational imperative, which appears to have hit home with the teens involved. According to one project volunteer, quoted in the UNICEF press release:

"Although the campers knew that children have rights," said Global Kids volunteer Nafiza Akter, 17, "they didn't know what was in the document specifically. After the camp, they really learned about what different rights the document guaranteed children around the world. And I think it made them compassionate, because you realize that children should be having these rights and yet they’re violated."

The end products were screened as part of a "red-carpet affair" that took place on the Global Kids Island (in Teen Second Life), which included a selection of "real-world" short films made by teens involved in UNICEF's "One Minute Jrs" project (in conjunction with the Sandberg Institute). The filmmakers introduced their machinima and answered questions to an audience of nearly 100, each of whom received free virtual popcorn and a child rights t-shirt for participating. The short films covered a variety of topics, from drug use and health care, to media and play, to child soldiers. On using machinima as an educational, political and creative tool, Global Kids' Second Life Education Specialist, Tabitha Tsai, was quoted saying:

"We feel that making machinima is an excellent way to share the kids' work with the public because you don't need to know Second Life to watch a movie or to understand what their message is. [...] [The participants] learned a lot of transferable skills in this camp. They were able to learn how to capture angles, tell a story and raise awareness on a right, while at the same time having fun with it."

The organization hopes to expand the camp next summer, to "include more children from around the world." For more info, you can check out the Global Kids' Digital Media Initiatives project website, Holy Meatballs, or the One Minute Jrs project site. Prepare to be impressed!

Uruguay Places First Official Order of OLPC's $100 Laptops

Courtesy of the MAGIC Network, BBC News reports that Uruguay has first become the first country to place an order for 100,000 of the One Laptop per Child's (OLPC) controversial $100-laptops for kids. If all goes well, the country will purchase another 300,000 to "provide a machine for every child" in the country between the ages of 6 and 12 by 2009. According to the BBC article:

The order will be a boost for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation behind the project which has admitted difficulties getting concrete orders.

"I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a cheque written," Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the organisation, recently told the New York Times.

However, he said he was "delighted" with the first deal.

"We commend Uruguay for being the first country to take concrete actions to provide laptops to all its children and teachers and look forward to other countries following this example," he said.

Some of the problems that the organization has had include the steadily rising cost of the machines, which are supposed to sell for $100 or less, but have now (according to the BBC) increased to $188. Governments were also initially limited to purchasing batches or lots of 250,000 units, in green or white...a stipulation that has now been removed. In addition to making lower lot quantities available, starting November 12, individual members of the public will also be able to buy a machine "for themselves as well as one for a child in a developing country" (an initiative called "The Give 1 Get 1 (G1G1) program). Prices for individual machines start at $299. This last part is great news for researchers interested in exploring the technology first hand, and I'm now seriously considering including a design analysis of the computer in my thesis.

Along with the OLPC laptops, the Government of Uruguay will also provide internet access to all of the schools involved.

Check out the BBC's "Clickable guide to the key features of the "$100" laptop".

Neopians Unite!

Over the weekend, Izzy Neis compiled a bunch of info on an anti-establishment rebellion that is currently rising up amongst tween girl Neopets users concerning the new RMT (real-money trading) "NCMall" and other pay-to-play features. It's a pretty awesome story, which you can read more about by checking out Izzy's July 8th post, as well as some of the links that she's put together, here, here, and here.