“My Mom Likes Your Game”: An Industry Look at a “Casual” Phenomenon
December 2007 Issue
Features
- From the Editors
- Craft Check: Gamer Cake
- Gaming in the Media: Cyber-Stupidity: Jade Raymond Edition
- Market to Me: Female Protagonists
Interviews
Articles
- Gender & Live-Action Role Play: Identity Crisis
Author: Samara Hayley Steele
- Naked and Terrified
Author: Elizabeth McDonald and Karen Healey
- “My Mom Likes Your Game”
Author: Mara Poulsen
- Speaking from Authority
Author: Richard Pilbeam
In this ongoing series, Samara shares her experiences as a female LARPer in a male-dominated LARP Organization.
Elizabeth and Karen dialogue on a set of miniatures called “Hot Chicks 3.1: Naked Distress”.
Mara looks at the casual gaming industry and what it means for female gamers.
Richard discusses the default "he" and what it says about sexism in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
Gamer Stories
Reviews
My four-year-old likes to name our Peggle instant replays. At first, he was content to dictate to me his titles, which is how we ended up with so many names of the “pants” variety: “Crazy Pants”, “Shooting Pants”, “Crazy Shooting Pants” “Shooting Pants Rocking Star” and the strangely zen-sounding “Pantsonomie”. Eventually though, he mugged me for the keyboard and started typing his own: “Rtolrrfiefppede”, “Ddrttrdwewreteeeeeeeeeeee”, “DFSRGFRFGDFFDSADFFSAFSERDSA”, and one that looks like an IM from an especially spelling-challenged preteen: “Wrazffr3r 43i”.
That Peggle, a Pachinko-like title from PopCap Games where you try to eliminate orange “pegs” from the screen, allows even four-year-olds to celebrate their awesome ball-bouncing prowess is an example of its extreme user friendliness. In fact, if there is a friendlier title out there, I haven’t played it. Peggle’s graphics are overwhelmingly cute. Each set of levels showcases a different Peggle “master” (the first is a unicorn, no less) who assists you in your play with some type of special power. Score boosts abound in the game. Drop your ball in the basket at the bottom of the screen and get a free one.
With all its helpful peppiness, this is a game that wants you to win. Not that Peggle isn’t challenging–mastering its upper levels requires a careful eye for billiards-style physics–but the entire game is as encouraging and open-hearted as your mother. A winning shot engages the slow-mo camera and a chorus singing “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It’s hard not to stand on your chair and imagine throngs of fans carrying you around the room in triumph.
Peggle is PopCap Games’ second fastest-selling title in history and it has been downloaded over five million times since its debut. By PopCap’s own admission, over 65% of its customers are female. Could it be that all this unicorny sweetness is geared specifically for the XX set?
Well, that’s a silly question. Of course it is. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut rather than attempt to prove psychologically, sociologically, anthropologically, even opthamologically what women like. For years, the untapped female gaming market eluded developers. Famous stories abounded of “girl game” developers crashing and burning. Every now and again, a game would emerge–Tetris, The Sims–that women as well as men flocked to, but the key to their likability remained a frustrating mystery.
But considering that your mom just might like games like Peggle, is this the kind of game development hardcore industry professionals are prepared to do?
Steve Taylor is the president of Wahoo Studios, an independent–known as “indie”–game developer whose subsidiary, Ninjabee, produces in-house products. These are PC and Xbox Live Arcade titles that fit, somewhat loosely, into the “casual games” category, in that they are available for download, cost less than a traditional console game, and don’t require nearly as many hours to complete. Ninjabee’s games, though, are hardly “Bejeweled Clones”, as Taylor puts it. Most, like its award-winning Outpost Kaloki, are 3D and eschew the standard pull of the casual game: getting a level in while you’ve got a free moment alone at your work desk.
However, the games are primarily “family friendly” with bright art and a minimum of salacious content. Taylor, a ten-plus-year veteran of console development, is more than glad to be doing these kinds of games. “I’m happier and more proud of what I’m doing now than anything I’ve done in my entire history of making games,” he states. Considering that Wahoo Studios was born out of a shake-up in the game industry around 2001–many developers lost funding and others went out of business entirely–indie work, though seemingly riskier on the face of it, has formed a real core of its functioning stability. “We won’t usually start an indie project unless we’re sure we have the money for the whole thing. I can assume the team is busy until it’s done. With a publisher-funded project, the publisher can cancel the contract at any time, and suddenly I have a whole team full of people who I need to assign to something else.”
Taylor has seen developers leave his company, though, because the kind of game development Wahoo was doing didn’t mesh with their vision of being in the game industry. “There are plenty of people who don’t want to make these kinds of games, and we’ve lost a few people who were looking for something more mainstream….A few people left…because they wanted to do more games like Medal of Honor and fewer games about space princesses [Outpost Kaloki] and sentient insects [Band of Bugs] and goofy fat guys named Clyde [Cloning Clyde].” How does the fact that most developers are male, while the casual game market is aimed primarily at women factor into the resistance to making more casual titles? “I would attribute some of [it] to the male-focused population of game developers, but it’s not entirely that–there’s simply more flash and thunder involved in a multi-million-dollar retail project, and it takes a certain kind of person to see the upsides of working on smaller, more casual stuff.”
Jay Barnson–a game developer and owner of Rampant Games, a portal for indie and casual games, where he also keeps a blog on the game industry–agrees. “From game developers, there seems to be a feeling that casual games aren’t ‘real’ games. Lacking the technological superiority, the ‘challenge’ and hardcore aesthetics of traditional mainstream games–though what the word “mainstream” means is subject to debate–there’s an undercurrent of disdain for casual titles. And there may be a little bit of fear of being ‘stuck’ making these kinds of games as the publishers begin gravitating towards this growing market, rather than being able to work on the next Halo game or something. Is there resistance amongst game developers? Yes,” Barnson says.
Should there be? As Taylor points out, casual game development also has its upsides. Shorter development schedules means a chance to experiment with riskier ideas: “Because if you’re wrong you don’t waste several million dollars in development costs.” There’s less of a chance you’ll end up toiling away for months or years on a project, only to have it abruptly canceled, something that happened to me personally more than once (I’m still annoyed with a certain publisher that gave us a character model set then told us the characters were not allowed to use their weaponry–weaponry the publisher had given them–in-game. After they discovered that a game with sword guys who don’t use their swords is boring, they gave us permission to mildly up the violence content. We did and then were told the game was too violent again and they shut production down completely). Programmers, and artists too, get more experience on different systems, rather than being pigeon-holed into certain niches. “One of the things I consider fun about small productions is that everyone has to have their fingers in more things,” says Taylor. “On a big team, you might be the programmer responsible for the scoring system and nothing else, or the artist responsible for tree textures and nothing else.”
The broader-based audience of casual games is another reason Taylor likes this kind of work: “[There’s] more of a chance that the game will appeal to my mom, my sisters, my kids…”
But Taylor points out that just because Wahoo is indie doesn’t mean it always does casual or vice versa, a sentiment echoed by Barnson. “At one point, casual gaming was simply a large subset of indie gaming,” Barnson says. “It was a niche category that the indies were filling. Since around 2003 or so, things have changed. Casual has become big business, and the portals [websites that promote indie and casual games] have really become a powerful force. And the non-casual indie game developers find themselves competing against the casual developers and portals for eyeballs and consumer dollars.”
It’s an interesting reversal. “Part of the fun of doing self-funded projects is the extensive control we have over what to do and how to do it,” says Taylor. “That’s a pretty huge advantage…A lot of the direction of Wahoo is based on what I want.” In addition, the profit-sharing model of indie development can be a real pull for companies like Taylor’s. “The return on investment can be very high, since we’re sharing less of [it] with other people. We also retain ownership of the intellectual property we develop, which can have some upsides in the future if our titles achieve some popularity.” Large-scale game development, and console games in particular, require a publisher to fund the project–the same who will recoup their own investment and more before passing on any profits to developers. Even a million-dollar-generating title is unlikely to trickle much down to the company which created it.
“A lot of [indie developers] got into the business in the first place to bypass the publishers who [dictated] to them what kind of games they should and should not make,” says Barnson. But now casual and indie game portals are starting to fill those publisher shoes. Major portals like RealArcade, Big Fish Games, AOL Games, Oberon Games (which also includes several other portals like MSN’s Zone), Reflexive Arcade, and Yahoo Games receive the primary web traffic of users looking for games to download and as such, they have an incredible amount of power. “The portals are…capturing a lot of the search engine traffic and consumer mindshare, so going it solo without the portals–while remaining an option–is getting much more difficult.”
And that means indie and casual game development these days is looking a lot like the publisher-funded console development it once thumbed its nose at. Games that don’t fit a portal’s “formula”, as Barnson puts it, are likely to be rejected, just as publishers often turn down third-party developer proposals that don’t mesh with what has already been proven to sell. Taylor had this problem with Outpost Kaloki, a title that has gone to have success both as a PC download and on Xbox’s Live Arcade. “We [first] pitched the game to publishers, but generally speaking the response was ‘We love this, it’s beautiful and fun, but we have no interest in putting our own money into it.’ Publishers expect to spend millions of dollars on a full retail console game, and the idea of doing this with a tycoon game was quite risky.” The reason for so many clone games in the console market is publisher squeamishness with investing money in a project that has no precedent. And while casual games made by indie developers might seem like the antidote to this timidity, clones of previously successful titles are now becoming the norm in that market, too. Barnson says, “The concern among some developers is that the portals are setting themselves up to be some kind of online gatekeepers, and there’s a fear of being ‘squeezed out’ by the portals. The small-time developers want to keep making the kinds of games they want to make, but it’s just getting harder and harder to be heard through the din to those who are our prospective customers.”
But even though history seems doomed to repeat itself with portals playing the role of the publisher, Barnson sees one advantage for indie developers in this relationship: “Game portals tend to sign non-exclusive agreements with developers…and leave the [intellectual property] rights in the hands of the developers.” For a company like Wahoo, that means they retain ownership of the games they produce. Once a publisher-funded game is out of the hands of developers, it is no longer their baby. When I was a game programmer, I would often get asked if that meant I got free games. I used to say, “I’m lucky to even get a copy of my own game.” Being able to retain rights is a huge advantage for developers.
But there is another: the proliferation of women as game consumers means a proliferation of women in actual game design. While women still make up a tiny portion of overall game development, there is a window of opportunity for potential game designers now–women especially–that did not exist before. You’ve seen the commercials for “game designer” courses and degrees on television–don’t be fooled. No game company will hire someone simply to be a game designer, unless they already have a proven game designer track record at another company. Most designer jobs are filled by developers that have toiled in some other development arena, such as programming, art, or data management.
With so few women filling these other roles at developers, even fewer women were rising through the game designer ranks. But casual game development is eroding those barriers. Game creation tools like RPG Maker, Game Maker, and Adventure Game Studio are doing for downloadable games what Macromedia Flash did for online web content: lowering the bar for making entertaining content and minimizing the absolute need for a programming or art background. In fact, a package like RPG Maker XP provides art, mapping tools, battle systems, and more for the amateur role-playing game designer, allowing a person to put their vision together without needing to hire an implementation team.
One such person is Amanda Fitch, who used RPG Maker XP to create Aveyond (now known as Aveyond I: Rhen’s Quest). Fitch exclusively designed and built Aveyond, then began selling it on various portals. It has gone onto such success that she created Amaranth Games which is currently promoting her newest title, Grimm’s Hatchery, and teasing the December 5th debut of Aveyond II: Ean’s Quest. Barnson interviewed Fitch last year about her successful solo entrance into game development. She said, “I wanted to play a game like Kings Quest VI, but I found out that game companies weren’t making these sorts of games anymore. I rolled up my sleeves and decided to make the game that I wanted to play.”
Ultimately, most developers get into gaming because they want to make the games they like to play. If more traditional developers aimed their games almost exclusively at a male audience, it ought to be noted that they themselves were that audience and the cycle was fueled by like-minded men bringing on more like-minded men into the development community. The myth of the female game player and, even more so, the female game developer is probably fueled less by bias than by neglect. Casual and indie game development is lowering the barriers to entering the field and women have a chance to step into those roles.
When asked “do “female programmers” really exist, or do you just tell people you’ve worked with them in order to give yourself some street cred?” Taylor jokes, “I have found that it comes in handy as a misdirection tactic. We might be talking about how I’m late on a milestone, and all I have to do is say ‘I worked with this female programmer once…’ and suddenly that’s all anyone wants to know about! It’s like saying I used to have a unicorn friend.”
But seriously folks… “I have had the misfortune of only seldom working with female programmers in my history of making video games,” Taylor says. “Fortunately, many of the new friends I’ve made in the last few years of doing indie work are female, and the result has been a wider perspective on art, design, marketing, and the general direction of our games.”
Say it together now: Pantsonomie!
