gamegirladvance

Tipping in Favor of Girl Power

This week, several things cropped up on the radar which collectively suggest some sort of tipping point. Or, I suppose, more likely that the point has tipped and we are starting to see the effects.

The first announcements were released in conjunction with the event, Casual Connect. Sony Online announced the relaunch of Station.com, a portal for the casual experience of games, including access to trials of Sony's MMOs. Nickelodean announced plans to spend $100 million over the next two years on casual games and virtual worlds. Oh, and did I mention that casual games are still dominated by female players?

Gamasutra didn't pick it up, but this week also saw the news that Barbie Girls, a virtual world aimed at, you might guess, preteen girls, experienced astonishingly explosive growth, reaching 3 million users in sixty days.

And you thought WoW was popular.

Then in recent game announcements, Ubisoft released details on a new series of games specifically for girls. The Imagine series include aspirational games based on professions, like fashion designer, veternarian, and figure skater. There's also a virtual baby doll with Imagine Babyz. Throw in Imagine Equestrienne and I'm so there.

Speaking of things equine, Atari is coming out with a horse-riding simulation game, My Horse and Me. The language in the official PR is carefully gender-neutral, speaking very coolly of the "Horse-enthusiast community", but you cannot convince me that in North America, at least, this game is not targeted specifically at horse-crazy girls between the ages of seven and fourteen. Which is to say, nearly all girls.

You may also have read that the PS3 has finally sold 1 million units in Japan eight months after launch. It took the Wii six weeks to reach the same milestone. Why? In part because flocks of non gamers (many of them women) bought a console, some, I've no doubt, for the first time in their lives.

I Love Nintendo

Wiifit is pretty brilliant.

Nintendo's stats have shown that while males between 6 and 24 still dominate 95 percent of the market, new statistics show that 66 percent of men between 25 and 49 now report playing Wii regularly, and 33 percent of women in the same age group say they are regular users, 75 percent having said they have at least tried the Wii.

For men over 50, Nintendo said, well over half have tried the Wii, and 1 in 8 say they play regularly, while 10 percent of women in the same age group say they now play regularly.

For You, the Master of Unlocking

My buddy Jerry over at Penny-Arcade today discusses what I'm sure a lot of folks (myself included) get frustrated about: unlockable content.

His concern is a real and valid one, and it's a tough road to hoe as a game developer. On one hand, the consumer deserves the whole product. They paid for it, they should get to play it. But on the other hand, if the player gets all the content up front, in many cases, this makes the game experience dull and unrewarding.

The example of Guitar Hero he uses is a good one for games that might be better served by having a great deal of content unlocked up front. I for one am frustrated with just the PS2 version of GH2 right now. I'm kinda stuck on level 7 on expert. I don't really know any of those songs, so I have to practice them ad infinitum 'till I learn them, and to be honest, I really don't care to play them. I just want to skip ahead to level 8. But then again, I really like the idea of unlocking that Encore, and coming into playing that song for the first time after beating that whole section, never having practiced it, and nailing it. There's a bit of a rush there. It's electric.

So as game developers we're challenged with balancing that experience out. If I had every song to pick from in GH2, I probably would have quit playing it a long time ago, never having beaten every song, and not feeling very fulfilled. I would have picked through the songs I liked, played those to death, and then just put the game away. It might not have been the compelling experience that GH1 was.

The experience, of course, isn't just relegated to Guitar Hero. I think we need to unlock content to a certain extent to keep the player interested. I guess the best example I have of this is in examining a few demos I played recently. The first three examples were Dead Rising, Crackdown, and to some extent, even RainbowSix: Vegas. These were all excellent demos, and when I started playing them, all three had me "sold" on buying a copy of the game. But the problem was that after replaying the demo a few times, I came to the conclusion that, basically, that was it. I had experienced the entire game in one demo. After playing the Dead Rising demo four times (for an hour total), I was left with "meh" and didn't care to continue the story. I was done hacking zombies. Same thing with Crackdown. I dare say that allowing me to level up 4 times in leaping in 20 minutes (giving the player all of the content up front) was a mistake. The demo is more fun than the "grind" of actually playing the game. To some extent, this proves Jerry's point, but the problem is that I burned out on the content in 20 minutes. I don't feel that I ever need to pick up and play Crackdown ever again. Most importantly, it cost them a purchase.

Enter: the God of War 2 demo. Not only is it an outstanding game, it's an outstanding demo. It gives you tastes of mechanics piecemeal. You chop bad guys here. You swing from a rope there. You climb up a cliff wall here. You fight a boss segment there. It's not delivered all at once. It comes in waves, teaching the player, and drawing them further along into the gameplay experience. I think if it gave you every tool in the shed right up front, the player would be overwhelmed and confused.

But, the demo plays the most insidious trick, and it convinced me that unlocking content (properly, mind you) is key. Why? It pulled Gamus Interuptus. It didn't let you finish the boss battle. Surprisingly, I wasn't frustrated. I left the experience wanting more. It made me want to purchase the final product and experience what it was they were temporarily hiding from me. I realized that the entire game was scaled up with basically unlockable content.

Really, we play unlockable content every day, in every game. It's the nature of gaming. You can't fight the boss without first making it through the waves of grunts; you can't level up without first acquiring the experience points to do so; you can't just jump to the end of the game without playing the levels in order; you can't play the encore without first rocking the crowd. When unlocking content is done right, we love it, and hardly even notice it. But when it's done wrong...hooo boy. Hell hath no fury like a gamer's scorn.

Microsoft Takes "User-Created" Seriously. Too Seriously.

Yay! You can make games for Xbox 360 now... if you fulfill all the requirements, that is. Today Microsoft launched XNA Game Studio Express and XNA Creator's Club, one an application for game-making that runs on Windows XP, and the other a service that costs $99 a year and provides members with "access to thousands of game assets from Microsoft and key supporters such as Turbo Squid Inc., as well as 'white papers, specialized starter kits, samples and technical product support to help turn [your game] into a reality'" according to a Gamasutra report.

Aspiring game developers must have a subscription to Xbox Live in order to participate. There are other limitations - the games made on XNA Game Studio Express can't be saved to memory cards and can only be received by other members of the Creator's Club who have downloaded the XNA Framework runtime environment for Xbox 360 and who have installed XNA Game Studio Express on their PCs. The files have to be compiled before the game will run.

Well, it's no Youtube, but it's a start. Here's a pretty technical FAQ that covers some more details.

Oh, and there is promise of more to come. I hope so, Andre!

Is There a Science to Success?

I realize I'm a bit LTTP but I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's article in the October 16th New Yorker. "The Formula" relates the story of a man obsessed with films who turned his passion into a company called Epagogix which will predict, by amassing variables and analyzing patterns, how much a script can make at the box office.

What's crazy to me is not that it works, but that, near the end of the article, it comes out that the analysis still depends on real people reading and grading scripts (based, I assume, on their own metrics) - that essentially, it still depends in some ways on their taste, before it gets fed into the neural network computer. Hence it's important that one founder prefers Alien while another likes Yojimbo. I'm not saying taste should be unimportant - I guess I'm saying that after all, it is still important.

But let's leave that aside for a moment and think about what it would take to build a hit predictor machine for videogames. What factors would you start including? Can the Epagogix model - whatever it is, since we don't know for sure - be applied to interactive entertainment?

The Five Biggest Trends of 2005

The end of the year is upon us, and enough blogs and news sites have already written great articles on the best games of the year. Therefore, instead of being lost amongst the white noise of award features, I'd like to point out a few trends which I felt were especially important during 2005. These aren't just news stories and scandals, but largely new trends that have effected gaming.

A Break In The Silence: Narnia Game Divine?

A blogger on another games blog (rhymes with Joystick) did by direct association label the Chronicles of Narnia movie tie-in title a Christian game. I disagree without the least hint of concession. Not only do we have a game twice removed, based on a movie based on children's fantasy stories, but although the use of Christian theme and symbolism certainly exists in C.S. Lewis's Narnia tales these are not "Christian stories" per se.

But the game. I've heard good things about it. It reviewed well. Almost surely it's a title appropriate for a wide range of ages, especially children. Why in the world does it need to be stuck into a Christian pigeonhole? It's apparently exactly the kind of game for people who want some sort of wholesome gaming diversion for their kids. Why is it so important that Narnia, the game and the movie and the novels, be knocked into the Christian category, unless it is merely to market to a demographic perceived as under served by the video game and film industries? And why is it so important to a large swath of Christians that the entirety of Narniadom belong to what amounts to a very narrow view of Christianity -- a view C.S. Lewis himself would have been unlikely to support?

Why?

Pink for PSP

Koei has the right idea.

I love that it has compartments for your games - and your lipstick! Go here and click on "sa.ku.ra".

(Thanks, Jarik!)

Meet the new games journalism, same as the old games journalism.

I've been considering this at least warm topic, the new games journalism, for the past week, going through the archives both tangible and in my head. I've come to a conclusion about why it's so hard to pin down the genre: It doesn't exist. Or if it did exist, it actually was the advent of reviews, previews and the like (screenshots!), the same material someone has mistakenly labeled "old games journalism". What we are calling the new games journalism is actually the old, original form of the art.

Whither the impulse shopper?

I'm trying to be an adult about this and buy my PSP Value Pack with my tax refund. But they've made it so that in the gaming world -- not strictly limited to the gaming world, either -- you have to buy anything you might actually want to buy weeks or months in advance of its release. I can today, at least for the next couple hours, pay fifty dollars to "pre-order" something I will not get until Thursday no matter what. My tax check has yet to make an appearance and I've promised myself, PSPs being the sorts of things tax checks are for, that I won't buy it until my refund arrives. But Sony wants my money now.