The specter of social play in children’s games
An interesting article cropped up over on lostgarden during February which discussed some of the more fundamental marketing hype problems our industry has, framed through the lens of indy development.
Though I’ve only gotten to it now thanks to a brief mention on Penny Arcade (situation now remedied via Google Reader), it struck me as odd that the timing of this article would be so fitting in with a couple of ongoing conversations within my own life. I guess sometimes, things just seems to go that way.
As one might imagine, I agree with the majority of what’s written in Danc’s article but to be frank, that’s not the point of this entry.
What concerns me much more is the merest hint of something that arises from many of the article’s conclusions, specifically the idea that there is a vast amount of possibility for innovation to occur within the framework of the independent development scene, but that at the same time as the barrier to entry for this marketplace drops, the liberalization of our understanding of what play is and what it can be is also proving to be a double edged sword that leads many developers to deliver little but empty promises in pretty packaging.
For every meaningful experience, there is another 100 that aren’t meaningful at all, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to walk the line between originality and fun in that kind of context.
I reflect on this because much of my own work has been fueled by the availability of affordable back-end and middle-ware technologies specifically intended for adding server managed functionality into flash and java clients.
In practice, growth in this area has meant that we can now do in a web browser with support for flash 10 and java, nearly everything that, up to 4 or 5 years ago would have been completely restricted to standalone client applications. It also means that games can be much more pervasive since no installers are required – allowing access to the same or very similar game experience uniformly across all flash ready access points.
But it has also meant that the barrier to entry into the market for many small to medium sized companies has shrunk, leading us towards a much more saturated marketplace where choice isn’t always choice in the strictest definition of the term and where visibility is the name of the game.
For example the last 5 years have seen a veritable explosion of large social spaces and mmos of almost every kind and flavor.
Indeed, many of these mmo styled games are tailored to children between 6 and 12 years old and their number keeps increasing almost daily. And it’s these that I’m particularly concerned with because marketing seems to particularly invasive for these age groups.
So what are they selling?cWhile the demographic shifts make this marketplace seem much more unstable than its hardcore counter part in terms of theme and content (after all key differences between the interests of a 6 year old and a 12 year old are quite staggering), one stabilizing factor that stands out for the entirety of this age group is the very plainly stated need for social play. And so there’s hype. Hype from developers, from publishers, from brands and from the media.
But what is it about social play that makes for such an attractive talking point for so many developers of children’s games?
One part of the equation is the fact that it is extremely natural for the vast majority of kids to want to engage in social behavior, even if it’s not necessarily within their own age group. A quick visit to the playground illustrates this point with bigger kids playing together, and smaller kids simply following them, interacting whenever they can or even just playing alone but in a very close proximity to the others. At its best, social play allows for friendships to blossom, but in its simplest and safest format, it allows children the chance of a single meeting with a stranger and the subsequent temporary enjoyment and pleasure of temporary but shared activity.
Another part of that same equation holds that the extremely high level of polish (and correspondingly large cost of development) required for adult games, simply isn’t a necessary pre-requisite to content production for children. Sure buggy software is annoying, but provided that there is sufficient stability to deliver the majority of the promises a game makes to its players, kids are extremely adept at taking adverse situations and experiences, and playing through them. This is doubly true when they aren’t doing it alone, they can ask questions, and receive guidance from others.
Plainly put, the threshold for active suspension of belief in a child is far higher than that of an adult in just about every instance. In practice, this means that while the fictions and the contexts that adults demand from their game session in order to have a satisfying experience are quite high, children have a much easier time of simply going with the flow and you simply have to give them a leg to stand before they quickly figure out how to run with it.
I see both of these things in my every day life, first as a parent and a second as a designer, but it constantly amazes me just how capable kids are of entertaining themselves in a context completely devoid of what I would accept to be even a minimum amount of stimulus, given the opportunity and the necessary tools to do so (my daughter will often become upset if she isn’t given a full 2-3 hours after her nap to play alone in her crib.
So in practice, simply by allowing kids to co-exist in a safe environment with a meaningful way to engage with each other, to play within a limited but fundamentally socially engaging space a product can more or less guarantee itself a fairly high level of replay, enjoyment and engagement.
Nonetheless, it is driven home to me on almost a daily basis is just how profoundly most of the games in this segment fail to deliver on the the one thing they seem to market the most – the ability to meet with strangers, safely interact, and simply just play together. In lieu, we seem to respond to this need with little more then rampant raw consumerism – encouraging kidds to collect junk they don’t need without any kind of tenable result. And so, the promises of safe social worlds that we promise to create for our children are often replaced with ritualistic objects and virtual versions of the same kinds of paraphernalia with which we teach them to fulfill even their real lives.
Yes, that kind of mentality might work in SKUs – the holiday shippables which hold our own answer to those one time consumables which yield at least a guaranteed partial return the instant they are bought if subjected to enough marketing hype.
But this mentality cannot and simply does not work with persistent game worlds, which depend on a renewable, temporary subscription fee, or any other kind of time driven investment.
And it is finally in this context, that the failure to provide the fun and socially engaging play experience that reaches beyond the raw manic consumerism of the everyday yields in my mind a very tangible business lesson: Failure to provide an experience which we already know most healthy children innately crave, well, it simply cannot be recovered from.
