A blog turning into a game

At Ramo, we’re big fans of serious games, games that serve a purpose other than pure entertainment. The ability to create engaging products with meaning beyond the games themselves is wonderful, especially if the lives of others can be improved.

In a previous post, we wrote about FreeRice. The website, in cooperation with the UN World Food Program, donates 20 grains of rice to the hungry across the globe for every word that a visitor gets right in its word game.

Best of all, the game is surprisingly simple. You are given a word and you must click on one of four choices that most accurately reflects its meaning. The game gets harder after each correct answer, but 20 more grains of rice get donated for each word that you get correct.

As of today, 39,471,718,130 grains of rice have been donated. Roughly several million grains of rice get donated every month.

The simplicity of FreeRice, combined with the charitable nature of the cause and the fact that visitors of any age can play it make it one of the best examples of a serious game with meaningful educational value. In fact, the guy who started the game built it using the 10,000 words his son was studying to prepare for the SAT.

Most of the team at Ramo grew up playing classic computer games like Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, and Reader Rabbit. These games were fun for us (as kids), but were educational in ways that made parents and teachers comfortable. Importantly, many of these games had educational value in the form of real-world learning, not just simple mechanical drills that would have felt too much like school. After all, where else would we learn about dysentery except in Oregon Trail? The developers of these games did a fine job building engaging products that emphasized some kind of learning to make the games meaningful beyond the simple entertainment value.

The big question is, what happened to these terrific game franchises?

The Learning Company, which was a pioneer in the edutainment space and developed titles like the ones above, got acquired by a handful of different companies, including Mattel; it is presently owned by Riverdeep. Looks like many of the original titles are still available, either in a boxed or downloadable format. The Learning Company website references nostalgic memories of Oregon Trail: “Develop solutions to help your friends and family survive the dangers of the long journey, including raging rivers, buffalo stampedes, sickness, and starvation.” Just the skills kids need to be prepared for the 21st century. Unfortunately, some of these games haven’t been updated in a few years.

What are some of your favorite memories of the classics?

There has been a significant amount of activity in the virtual world / MMOG market the past year, especially for kids. But when it comes to gaming, there are strong differences in what features and gameplay that different genders prefer. With the adult market, for example, we know that men tend to prefer MMOGs, while women prefer casual games (though this trend is changing). Yasmin Kafai at UCLA has done a substantial amount of research on gender differences in kids’ video games that is worth looking into.

Some of the research we have done, including focus groups, have raised several interesting results. For example, boys (unsurprisingly) like competition, leaderboards, and anything involving action-shooting-destruction. Guys like stories involving outer space and war. Girls care more about the underlying storyboard - the background context that the user is playing in. They also tend to enjoy customizing and dressing their avatars. Girls also tend to like racing games.

In building any product, especially gaming, picking a niche audience is vital. In addition to the technology element, there are too many creative decisions that need to be made that are impacted by who the underlying user is. Many games have built great audiences focusing on a single gender: Stardoll for girls, for example. Other sites have successfully managed to shrink the gender gap over time. Whyville, an education virtual world for kids, started out as very female-heavy, but has since shifted its audience to be more equal.

On a related note, Google announced the launch of its virtual world product, Lively, today. The product appears to be a serious challenge to the virtual world space currently dominated by Second Life. A study last year by Nottingham Trent University concluded that a significant portion of virtual world users switch genders when they register online: 70% of women and 54% of men. It will be interesting to see how this plays out with Google’s new product, which looks to be gender-neutral at first glance. Raph Koster has a good summary and discussion of the announcement on his blog.

I read an article recently on the growing use of computer and video game entertainment as a form of therapy. This school of thought argues that there are a handful of non-entertainment benefits to consuming certain types of games:

Exercise: not your fingers from pressing up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-start (think Konami code back in the days of Contra), but real exercise through devices like the Wii, which encourage rapid cardio through cleverly designed fitness games. The product is especially popular with therapists and children.

Health: Quit smoking-expert Alan Carr is launching a series of games on the Nintendo DS this fall called “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.” 10M smokers have already used his products to quit smoking.

Education: Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently announced her involvement in Our Courts, a project to teach kids about civics. There also been a growing brain fitness movement, with games like Brain Age. Brain Age and its sister titles have sold over 10M copies worldwide, indicating a huge demand for education-focused gaming.

Philanthropy: FreeRice enables individuals to contribute to ending world hunger by playing simple word games on its site, which is in partnership with the UN World Food Program.

The Social Gaming Summit in San Francisco a few weeks ago provided solid exposure to what’s happening in the games space. Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures, Andrew Chen, and Gamasutra all have great recaps on the conference.

One of the panels covered Monetization and Business Models for Social Games; Virtual Worlds News summarizes it well. Generally, gaming businesses make money in two ways, payments (such as microtransactions or subscriptions) and advertising. The Casual MMO panel at the conference acknowledged that kids 6-14 control $60B in disposable income. Tapping into that spending, however, is difficult.

There are unique challenges (and perhaps opportunities) associated with payments and advertising-based online gaming models for kids. First off, kids generally do not have credit cards. In addition, even though a growing portion of teens/kids have cell phones, at least in the U.S., handset-enabled payment mechanisms are limited. That means that parents have to be involved in the purchasing decision if kids want to subscribe to an online service. The benefits of a payment model, however, are that parents feel more invested in the product their kids are buying and may even encourage them to consume it more.

Advertising is the other revenue source. With kids products, the challenge is finding a large enough of base of brand advertisers, which is especially challenging given the youth (no pun intended!) of the in-game advertising industry. You also have the challenge of reassuring parents that the advertising will be relevant and safe for their kids, in addition to complying with any policy regulations that may exist. I was recently talking to an executive from Massive, the in-game video advertising company acquired by Microsoft, and was told that both from monetization and user experience perspectives, advertising to kids in a gaming environment was very risky and was not something they were investing in.

With payments, it seems that parents are more comfortable spending money for their children when some kind of physical asset is also delivered. Webkinz is a great example of such a product. In focus groups we have conducted, parents admitted that they bought the stuffed animal only so that their child could play in the online world — in many cases — the child would throw away the physical pet, and spend more time with its online counterpart!