A blog turning into a game

Yesterday, EA released its long awaited massively single-player online game, Spore.  The game has received widespread acclaim over the past several months because of its technological richness and creative storyline and game design.  Spore allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its earliest beginnings, through its entire development.  The game is in the tradition of classics like Civilization and SimCity.

Players can populate their world in Spore using creatures that they, or others, make.   Even though the game is single player, objects or creatures built by users get uploaded to a master database for others to download and rate.  The game uses a sophisticated form of design called procedural animation.

The game has transplanted real-world debates into the realm of educational game design.  For instance, critics note how the game raises questions on creationism vs. evolution.  Game creators have even referred to their perspective as “creativolution.”  When it comes to educational games, does the content have to project a specific pedagogical theme? Or it can be open-ended? Spore allows for unbound creativity in universe design, but how much should that design reflect real-world constraints imposed by science? One might expect a similar debate when thinking about how real environmental concerns like global warming should be reflected in the game environmnet, if at all.

Here is a TV ad for the game and a link to the official website:

The Science Journal’s July 25th article titled “Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance” stated that US standardized test now show equality in math test scores between boys and girls.  Can we now put all opinions stating the contrary to rest now?   Hopefully, however we must acknowledge that we have a long way to go in terms of getting more females into traditionally male dominated careers such as engineering and science.

The first step is to help girls stay interested in math and science well into high school.  One possible opportunity to do so is with educational games focused on girls.  Educational games could help reinforce math concepts in an environment where girls can engage, discuss and explore math and science concepts with other girls who have similar interests.  Too often math and science concepts are presented in a context that favors the interests of boys more than girls.  Math games that appeal to the interest of girls could help keep them engaged and interested in math.

In general, to keep girls interested in math and science we need to focus on creating a learning environment that lets them explore and apply these concepts in a manner that is fun, safe and engaging.

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.

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!