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Hi, I’m Rob Lockhart, Creative Director of Important Little Games. I’d be grateful if you followed me on twitter.
It all started when I stumbled across this misleadingly-titled Polygon article written last year and followed the link to the data source out of curiosity. Basically it’s just a list of videogame titles, some of which have been annotated with a developer, a year, and/or a platform. Since I’m fond of semi-structured data sources, I downloaded the list, which had grown to nearly 150,000 titles since the Polygon article was published, and started to play around in Mathematica. As you read on, be advised that this is an extremely noisy dataset and does not necessarily reflect the videogames industry’s history, or even the titles it lists.
The first thing I did was take a look at the top words that occur in videogame titles. There were 150,000 game titles and a vocabulary of around 45,000 unique words. About 21,000 of these were used only once in any game title. For scale, consider that apparently it is not uncommon for a native speaker to have 20,000-35,000 words in their whole vocabulary.
Let’s take a look at the top 50 words I found:
There are a lot of words that are completely unsurprising, as they are overwhelmingly frequent throughout English. Numerals, both Arabic and Roman, play a big role, meaning that there are a lot of sequels. Frustrating for those of us who value originality in interactive entertainment, but by no means surprising. Let’s filter out these uninteresting results and look again:
I also recombined plurals into the root word.
In my humble opinion, it really sucks that ‘war’ shows up second, after ‘game.’ There’s nothing wrong with war as a theme for any particular game, but our industry’s singular focus on war and violence becomes pretty tiresome, as this chart exemplifies. Which word would I prefer in second place? ‘Magic,’ of course!
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I also noticed that there were quite a lot of games which use subtitles. Not the written dialogue at the bottom of the cutscenes, but the second part of a title separated by a colon. Things like the underlined part of “Call of Warfare: Modern Videogame.” Let’s take a look at the most common subtitles:
‘The Game’ and ‘Gold Edition’ seem to make sense, but for some reason ‘The Movie’ comes in third. Why are there so many games (56) with ‘: The Movie’ in the title?!
I’m not very fond of this naming pattern in the first place, but some of these should unquestionably be retired. Let’s not name any more games “Something Something: Vengeance” shall we?
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As I mentioned earlier, some of the entries in the data are tagged with a developer, year, and/or platform. I found the developers more or less impossible to extract systematically, but I had better luck with years and platforms.
About 1/5 of the games were tagged with a year, but they were represented unevenly. As you can see below, only the years from 2000 to 2015 had any kind of decent coverage. It’s interesting to note that within that period, the number of games released per year did not increase or decrease significantly (if this dataset can be taken as a representative sample).
If we compile a list of the top ten words for each of these usable years, we might notice some trends.
I think you can kind-of see the zombie craze creeping up in the past few years, as the words ‘dark,’ ‘night,’ and ‘dead’ climb the charts. You can also see where we became obsessed with 3D for a little while.
If we bring back the trivial words we decided to exclude early on, you’ll see that some games’ titles include the year they were released and many include the following year.
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In terms of platforms, the coverage was very spotty. Here you can see the number of games tagged by console. The fact that Linux is any significant presence should be a clue that some platforms are far overrepresented amongst tagged games.
If you’re interested, here is a list of the top ten words by platform. Many of these platforms only have one or two titles listed, so you’ll see some oddly specific words.
Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in exploring the dataset yourself, feel free to download my Mathematica notebook. I’d love to hear your suggestions of further analyses to do and other data sets to explore.
I started thinking about memorable names in the context of genre fiction, as I was reading the book The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. I absolutely loved the book, but what hampered my enjoyment at times was the incomprehensible naming of people, places, and things in the fictional universe of the story. For example, the titular Emperor has two sets of servants: the nohecharei, who are like bodyguards, and the edocharei, who are his attendants. There is one character named Tethimar, and another named Telimezh. It was challenging for me, an avid reader of fantasy, to keep everything straight.
It’s clear that the author of The Goblin Emperor decided to value authenticity within the fictional vernacular she created over the reader’s ease of understanding, and it is not my place to condemn that choice. However, it did get me thinking about what features of fictional names make them more memorable, especially within my discipline of game design, where the narrative has less room for rote repetition. Below are a few ways of keeping your proper nouns lucid.
1. Decide whether it ought to be a proper noun at all. Sometimes the best name is just a description of what the place or thing is. Take a look at this fragment of a map from Metroid Prime to see what I mean. Of 10 named places, only 2 include proper names. The rest are simply descriptive.
2. Use a close variant of an existing name. It may feel a bit like cheating, but re-using the existing circuitry in your player’s mind can be very effective, and serve the overall enjoyment of the game. Writers do this all the time with place names like “New Tokyo” or “Earth II.” Slight variations work for human (or other sentient being) names as well, such as Snow Crash‘s “Da5id.”
Needless to say, to pull this off, you’ll have to have some idea of what your reader considers a ‘common name,’ so this will be culture-specific and may need to be localized.
3. Accompanying titles. People tend to remember the relationships between people and places better than they remember the names. Think back to the last time someone described the plot of a half-remembered movie. It probably sounded something like “…and then the main guy’s best friend went back to their old apartment and got the thing…” No proper names at all, just relationships. We can use this to our advantage by putting the relationship right into the name!
The simplest example is titles like “Professor,” “Captain,” “Archduke,” “Counselor,” etc. If you’re in a more fantastical setting, you can use things like “King-son” and “Friend Luke” as names, too. Anything you can do to associate the name with a relationship will help, and when you’ve repeated it enough times you can drop the relationship prefix without confusion.
4. Distinct explicit or implied ethnicity can make each of your names distinct. If you have three main characters — one an American farm-boy named John, one a burly Norwegian named Jøhan, and one a Chinese national named Jao Han, the player will remember the names distinctly, despite how similarly they are spelled.
5. The Bouba/Kiki Effect is an apparently universal human trait which makes us associate certain qualities of sound with physical characteristics almost synaesthetically. Hard angular things are associated with hard angular sounds, like “knicknack” and “porcupine,” whereas softer, rounder things get softer, rounder sounds, like “balloon” and “butterfly.” You can use this property of natural language, making your names tacitly descriptive of their subject. If your villain is sharp-nosed and bony, you may want to name him “Jack” instead of “Bob.” Likewise, a domed hall might better be “Woterbund” than “Rinkertin.”
6. Gendered Suffixes cause many names to be self-descriptive, at least to english-speaking ears. For characters that identify as a certain gender, certain sounds can serve as clues. In vowels, for example, -a, -i, and -y sound more feminine than -o and -u. There are exceptions, of course, but I think these indicators still have their place in some fictional worlds.
7. Uncommon letters in proper names should be hoarded like the precious resource they are. Don’t use them all up in a single name like “Quizikjax.” Doling out one uncommon letter to each character can make each name stand out, but not overshadow any others. The least frequently-used letters in english are Z, Q, X, J, K, and V. However, Even the most-used letter, “E,” can seem weird within a name where it’s not expected, like “Melodee,” so context can make a big difference.
I hope these ideas are at least thought-provoking, and are of use as you create and name people, places and things in games and elsewhere.
I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games. If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.
The Kickstarter for Codemancer was successfully funded at the end of May, and I learned a lot in the process. I’d like to share as much of that as I can.
A Mosaic of Aurora and her familiars made from the backers’ Kickstarter avatars. Click to enlarge.
First of all, let’s look at the high-level results. The final amount raised was $52,725 by 1,862 backers. That’s 439% of the original goal. I couldn’t be more thrilled, or more grateful to my amazing backers. But enough gratitude. You came here for details, and details you shall have!
A lot of factors seemed to contribute to the success of the campaign, so far as I can tell. Let’s go through some.
The Research
I did not embark on my Kickstarter journey lightly, but sought the advice of many experienced people. For instance, I attended the IGDA ‘Kickstarting Your Dream Game’ panel, which brought together many Kickstarter campaign creators to share their experiences and advice. I sought one-on-one advice from everyone I knew who had prior experience to offer, including Kee-Won Hong (of Iterative Games), Max Temkin (of Cards Against Humanity), Ryan Weimeyer (of The Men Who Wear Many Hats), all of the Young Horses, Craig Stern (of Sinister Design), and many more.
I also kept a close eye on other crowdfunding campaigns both successful and unsuccessful, especially ones in the categories of games, education, and educational games. I didn’t make any systematic observations, but by immersion I hope to gain an intuitive feel for what others had done well or poorly in the past. This was useful, but I still wouldn’t call myself an expert.
The Video
The video is the first thing people see about a campaign (other than the name), and I wanted mine to be good. It would be especially embarrassing to have a bad video considering that I spent 4 years at (very expensive) NYU film school. I watched a lot of Kickstarter videos in order to figure out what was done well or poorly by others.
At first, I wanted to make a pure trailer for the game, inspired by Hyper Light Drifter’s amazing Kickstarter video (and I’m sure you’ll still see some resemblance), but I was convinced by a friend to make the video say more about the impact that the game is intended to have. I believe that this was a fantastic decision, despite my misgivings about relying too much on making the game into a ’cause.’ The game has a couple of messages which I’m really proud of, but I think are more effective if discovered by the player rather than said. Unfortunately, crowdfunding eliminates the luxury of discovery. The positive messages I tried to communicate through the video were
- Programming is a worthwhile thing to teach children, especially girls.
- Games are a great way of teaching things.
- This game project in particular combines the previous two ideas in an effective and fun way.
An additional message, which is sort of implicit, but isn’t really clear except after doing some research, is that myself and my team are capable of delivering such a game. Some feedback I got indicated that even people who believed int he mission of Codemancer couldn’t bring themselves to contribute to any Kickstarter project because of bad experiences in the past, and I could have given them some assurances of my competence in the video (although honestly this is my least favorite part of many Kickstarter videos — “I’m a veteran of blah blah”).
What you watch above is actually the second version posted. In the first version of the video, I didn’t talk over the gameplay or playtesting footage at all, but I swapped it out with a voiceover version a few days into the campaign because I got a lot of feedback that the video was too long. It seems like 2:30-3:00 is really a sweet spot (the length of a typical pop song – coincidence?) and the first version was a little over 3:30.
Building an Audience Pre-Kickstarter
A few months into Codemancer development, I put up a placeholder page on LaunchRock, just to have a place to direct interested people, and a way of collecting their information. Eventually, I transitioned to a MailChimp list, as I began to send out development updates. That list grew steadily over the period from October 2013 to today (you can still join, here).
The stepwise look of the chart is because every time I’d go to an event or a conference I’d ask if people there would be willing to join my mailing list. Then, when I got home, I’d enter all the email addresses at once.
I also tried to build up my follower count on Twitter before the campaign launched, which others have figured out how to do far better than I. One thing that helped is that I blog regularly on Gamasutra. Once I started to develop Codemancer, I also started including a link to my twitter account at the top or bottom of my blog posts. When I launched the campaign I had about 950 twitter followers on my personal account, and just 20 or so on the Important Little Games company account.
Sending out an email to my mailing list, and tweeting as soon as the project went up really helped with the next contributing factor…
Funded Early
I was advised that many Kickstarter backers prefer to contribute to successfully funded projects, or projects which are projected to be fully funded. For this reason, and because I knew I’d continue to work on Codemancer regardless of the outcome of the Kickstarter, I lowered my goal from the original $20,000 I estimated I’d need to the more modest $12,000. In retrospect this was a good decision.
Here’s the full funding history of the project, courtesy of KickSpy:
As you can see, the project was funded on day 4 (actually, just an hour before we hit day 5).
Project of the Day
Immediately after being funded, Codemancer was featured on the front page of kickstarter.com as the project of the day. I have no idea why, and I’ll probably never know. I reached out to a few people at Kickstarter, namely Cindy Au, who has some concentration on the games section of Kickstarter, and Fred Benenson who was an early employee of Kickstarter and a person who I met a few times when we were both taking computer science at NYU. Neither of these people responded to me directly, but maybe putting Codemancer on the front page was their way of responding?
A screenshot from when Codemancer became project of the day. Yes, I am a tab hoarder.
In any case, you can see a huge spike in funding on day 5 because of being featured ($6,981 that day alone), and I think that momentum carried on even after a new project of the day was chosen.
Press
Reaching out to the press is something I wish I had done earlier and more often, but in all of my preparations for the Kickstarter, I realized that I wasn’t going to have time to do a proper job of it. Honestly, if any aspect had to go a little neglected, I’m glad it was the press (no offense, journalist friends!).
Despite the late notice, many sites covered the project anyway, and while I’m really happy to get the word out to everyone, I’m not certain how much press coverage translates into actual pledges (we’ll see a bit more about that in the next section).
One exception is BoingBoing, one of my favorite nerdy online ‘zines. I used their online submission form to suggest that Codemancer be covered (including full disclosure that I’m the creator of the project), and, amazingly, Cory Doctorow wrote up the campaign. The ‘BoingBoing Bump’ had a palpable affect on pledges and on the amount of twitter hype the game was getting. You can see the effect around Day 22 on the graph above.
I also self-posted on reddit, which gave birth to a fairly long thread, and led to an impressive number of pledges.
Breakdown of Backers
Where were these people coming from? Well, there’s a view on Kickstarter where project creators can see the referral information. Here it is sorted by number of people directed to the campaign:
There are more below, but each contributed 23 or fewer backers.
So what do these things mean? The first and most common source of backers was ‘Dunno.’ No idea where those folks came from. Next is ‘Advanced Discovery’ which means people on Kickstarter searching for certain parameters, like ‘Games made in Chicago with keyword Code’ or somesuch. The ‘backer confirmation page’ is the suggestions users are offered after backing another project, for example ‘backers of XYZ also backed Codemancer.’ The Home Spotlight is people coming from the front page when Codemancer was the project of the day. I think the rest of the sources are relatively self-explanatory.
I expected Facebook to rank above Twitter in terms of dollars pledged, since most of my friends and family were likely to hear about the campaign there first, but it surprises me that Facebook also ranks above Twitter in terms of number of backers. I’d love to hear if others have had similar results.
It’s also interesting to note where my backers come from geographically. With a short Python script, I was able to scrape that data from the Kickstarter site and put this map visualization together on CartoDB (with a little help from this batch geocoding service).
1,262 backers included their locations in their Kickstarter profiles, which is about 2/3 of all Codemancer backers. Chicago had the most backers, which isn’t surprising because that’s where I live. I have previously lived in Boston and New York, and they both made the top ten, as well. The full list is quite long, but the top 20 cities by number of backers were Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, London, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Austin, Washington DC, Sydney, San Jose, San Diego, Raleigh, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Brooklyn (Kickstarter counts this as its own city, for some reason) and Toronto.
There were also many backers who reached out to me during the campaign about localization. Some even offered to help with the translation themselves. The requested languages were German (5 requests), French (2), and Spanish (1), Japanese (1) and Hungarian (1). I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to handle all of these requests, but I’ll certainly try. In any case, it’s great to get a sense of who wants this sort of game most.
And in case you want to see what all of the backers (who have Kickstarter avatars) look like, here they all are!
A tinted version of this image is now my computer’s desktop background. Click to enlarge.
Breakdown of Finances
Lastly, let’s look at the various ways that $52,725 is not the actual amount of money I can use to continue to develop Codemancer:
- Pledges that didn’t go through. I didn’t have as much of a problem with this step as many other folks that I’ve talked to. $52518.43 actually made it to Kickstarter, which is 99.6% of what was pledged.
- Kickstarter’s fee. They take 5%, or in my case $2625.92, leaving $49,892.51
- Credit processing Fees. This percentage differs depending on the credit card used, so I was never sure how much this was going to end up being. Now I can tell you it amounted to $2,151.66 or about 4.3%, which leaves $47,740.85
- Taxes. I’ve been advised to put away 20% of that amount for income tax in the US (which may be conservative).
That said, the remaining $38,192.68 is a perfect amount of money to see Codemancer through the rest of development, even after fulfillment (thank goodness I didn’t offer any physical rewards) and stretch goals.
Conclusion
I’d definitely recommend Kickstarter to others, assuming you start preparing early and don’t have a full-time job. Even doing contracting during the campaign was difficult for me, and I brought on friend and PR expert Ryan Olsen to help me manage it all. I can’t recommend Ryan’s work highly enough, especially for a single-person company like Important Little Games.
That said, Kickstarter was incredibly valuable even beyond the funding, in that it gave me all kinds of information. I learned about how to explain my goals for Codemancer to different audiences. I know more about what kinds of people are interested in the project. I know more about their desires and hopes for the game, and more about my own as well.
Thanks again to everyone involved, and to all the people who gave me such great advice about the game. If you’d like to be involved, too, you can pre-order the game here.
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I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games. If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.
I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games. If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.
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I’m working on an educational game that involves magic and magical epistemology. Consequently, I’ve been doing a lot of research about magical systems. I’m sharing my thoughts for those of you who may one day include magic in your games.
Whereas the last blog post in this series acts as a sort of catalog of magical systems I’d read about at that time, I’ve attempted here to synthesize some ideas about the underlying philosophies of these systems, in part prompted by some additional recent reading.
COMMUNICATION
Human beings have developed two methods of precise communication: Programs, which are made to communicate precisely to machines, and Legalese, which is used to communicate precisely to other minds.
Many fantasy worlds use the metaphor of a ‘contract’ with supernatural forces. It’s a pretty straightforward step of the imagination to imagine forming a contract with a demon, a faierie, or any other more-or-less anthropomorphic entity. Dr. Faustus is the example that comes most readily to mind. Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet, too, is centered on this idea.
However, the most powerful application of this concept is when you combine it with Animism, the belief that all natural substances possess souls (which, in the ancient world, is equivalent to saying that everything has a mind). If everything has a mind, you can potentially create a contract with anything – so long as you can communicate with it.
Often these two types of magic coexist within the same mythology. For example, in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Mr. Norrell is capable of the animistic sort of magic only after being ‘enlightened’ after a fashion. Recently, I picked up The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic, in which the ‘second-order’ magic of agreements with humanlike beings is accessible to anyone who has the inclination to learn, whereas ‘first-order’ magic is available only to those with an ineffable ‘knack.’
Somewhat in-between is Monism, the idea, popularized by Calculus inventor Gottfried Liebniz, that everything has some amount of ‘mind stuff,’ or monads. Monads are not full minds, but can be thought of as mind-fragments. Presumably things like rocks and trees have just a few. Humans have enough for a whole mind. As I understand it, according to Liebniz, God is basically made up of a metric shit-ton of monads. Individual monads are mechanistic, like logic gates, but can be arranged to do information processing of arbitrary complexity.
This view, as fantastical as it may seem, may have some basis in fact. Stephen Wolfram, in his book A New Kind of Science, points out that there are surprisingly many natural systems which are in the band between simplistic and chaotic, and that many of these, in turn, are capable of computation. It’s this underlying philosophy that I adopt in Codemancer — that many natural systems are at least capable of following the kinds of algorithms we feed to computers today, if not the kind that produce what you’d call a Mind. I’d still classify this as a form of first-order magic, but with a less mystical flavor.
In first-order magic, the mechanism for feeding requests or instructions to these beings is often, of necessity, a bit hand-wavy. Talking to a demon may be easy because the demon has met you at your own level. Demons usually speak the local language, and transmit them using sound waves as most of us do. What language to the beings of first order programming speak? In Codemancer, they speak a programming language, but in most stories they require some kind of unspecified mental discipline. Even so, nobody, including Codemancer, explains how the signal of first-order magic is transmitted from magic-user to enchanted object.
EXCLUSIVITY
Fantasy worlds often need an explanation of why Magic cannot be done by just anyone. This usually boils down to some kind of genetics (or its equivalent, the ‘ineffable knack’ I spoke of earlier). Sometimes two non-magic-users (or ‘Muggles’ in the parlance of Harry Potter) can produce a magic-user, evidently by some sort of a recessive gene. In any case, there is an exclusive class of beings with magical abilities, and the rest of the world which has no inkling of the cataclysmic supernatural goings-on which form the plot of these tales.
To me, the business smacks of the servile. The Divine Right of Kings is dredged up in this fashion and fed to children, essentially teaching that you are either one of the chosen or you’re not. No amount of striving — no amount of sacrifice can bring you from one category into the other. This is an ugly feature of magical fantasy which could easily be done away with.
One of the worst offenders is the Amber series by Roger Zelazny, which I enjoyed very much despite its problematic message. It began with magic-use as entirely limited to the royal family of a fantastical realm (known as Amber) — numbering a dozen or so people. Later in the series, genealogical excuses are made to bring more and more characters into the club.
Occasionally it’s a quality of one’s character – purity of heart, or determination that grants magical ability. The Neverending Story, as well as some versions of the Arthurian and Thor legends make use of this concept. This is a step in the right direction. Still a bit too obscure, in my opinion, how one would go about improving one’s own ‘purity of heart.’ Perhaps this is where magical systems and theology intersect (Thor, after all, was once a sincerely worshipped deity, rather than an action movie superhero).
Even more rarely, magic use is a question of intellectual rigor. Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, for example, claims that magic’s use is like brain surgery or rocket science, only moreso. This seems to satisfy the constraints satisfactorily. How many rocket scientists or brain surgeons do you know? If you’re not in the same or a similar line of work, it’s probably pretty few. It also allows characters a whole spectrum of competency, rather than a discrete jump between the Muggles and the Wizards. Some people might have read a few books and know a little about magic, perhaps enough to change the channel on the TV without using the remote. Other might be so well-studied, and consequently powerful, that they are basically Gods.
What I like most about this is that you can train to become a better user of magic, and you can get rusty at it if you forget specifics. Think of the Rocky training montage, but with magical spells instead of punching. That is one of the best messages one can give a child (or an adult, really) — Hard Work Pays Off. That’s part of what I hope players will learn when they play Codemancer.
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There are many more features of magical systems I’d like to explore in future blog posts. Please let me know your thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Thanks!
A few days ago I received the following email:
Hi Rob,
My name is Aleks and I’ve been following your progress since very early November last year. I am currently an undergraduate student at Newcastle University in UK and am working on my own educational game as a part of my final year project. And I must say that Codemancer was one of the educational game concepts that inspired me to pick the direction I took with my final year project. So you and Codemancer are definitely mentioned in the research part of my project 🙂
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that there are more people out there who feel that educational games need to be engaging, attractive and interesting, not just… well… educational.
If you feel curious enough to check out what my project looks like, here’s a link to one of the relatively recent updates (without music or sound effects, but with a full walkthrough of the first level), the game is called “The Amazing Adventures of Chloe Pikselle”: http://youtu.be/1vzHTqRw07o
And, well, in case you’re even more curious, here you can find the whole list of updates I’ve done so far (I’m trying to do them weekly), with a few downloadable demos: http://ohpollux.co.uk/projects/chloepikselle/
But anyway, this is not a shameless attempt at advertising myself (at least it’s not meant to be), it’s more of a thank you for the inspiration and a demonstration that this inspiration was not wasted 🙂 I wish you all the best with Codemancer and good luck with Kickstarter!
—
Kind regards,
Aleks
I recommend you check out the demo. I’ll be trying to support this project as much as I can, and I hope you’ll join me. Welcome to the club of folks developing games that teach programming, Aleks. I’m sure we’ll learn a lot from each other.
-Rob
This year is the first year in a long time that Eric Zimmerman has not organized his annual Game Design Challenge at GDC. This has left a hole in my heart; a hole I intend to fill right now (and not with cookies this time)!
I’m organizing an invitation-only game design challenge for some of the best game designers I know (or know of). I will be announcing the theme of the design challenge once I line up a few more contestants. Thereafter, each contestant will make a video describing his/her design, and the internet will vote to determine a winner.
I’m working on securing some theme-appropriate prizes, but as of now the only prize is ULTIMATE PRESTIGE.
More information coming soon…
The following originally appeared in the IGDA Perspectives Newsletter:
I am not the first to observe that there is a disconnect between buyers and users of most educational games. Games designed to be played by children could be purchased by a teacher, a parent, a grandparent, a school superintendent or any number of adults in the child’s life. Notably absent are the children themselves, who have been gaining more and more buying power over the years (1). And what buying power they don’t control directly they influence by…let’s say…making their desires apparent to the adults around them.
The problem isn’t just about kids either, educational games for adult learners are most often purchased by an institution, whether that’s the military, a corporation or small business, or a degree-granting educational body. The disconnect is pervasive. By and large, educational game purchases are made not by those who want to learn, but by those who want something learned. This brings up all kinds of philosophical questions about whether a game played under duress or for ulterior motives is really a game, which is a fine debate which I’ve been on both sides of. For now, I’d rather talk about the dangers that creep in through the gap, and how to fight them.
The possibilities for abuse are obvious. Making something that looks good to parents or teachers, but doesn’t appeal at all to kids is a common pattern which became notoriously referred to a edu-tainment. Mimi Ito wrote about how the edu-tainment phenomenon was fueled by parents’ anxieties about their children’s performance in a competitive world (2). By pandering to those anxieties, companies could sell units without making a particularly compelling product. In fact, incentives ran the other way. By making software that was boring, children’s lack of engagement with the material would only increase parents’ perceived need for intervention, causing them to buy yet more software.
Part of breaking that cycle is to encourage parents and children to play the game together, so that parents can assess the game for themselves. This has more benefits than just keeping marketers honest. When parents share any media experience, but especially gaming, behavioral and cultural models from the parents naturally pass to their children (3).
The flip side is that games which are fun and effective for children, but which don’t make an effort to be seen as ‘useful’ to parents or teachers don’t do well in the marketplace. This has become a stumbling block especially for modern games which teach subjects you won’t see on a report card. Things like ‘computational thinking’ and ’21st century skills’ are difficult to pin down, and hard to justify for an educational community so obsessed with assessment. That’s why you might hear that a new game is ‘common-core aligned.’ This assures teachers and parents that progress in the game will ‘count’ towards their formal schooling.
Another approach might be to try to rely on the ‘nag-factor’ that motivates so much of the toy and game industry, but unless the game developer is confident that their game can stand out on its own merits among a sea of entertainment-only games, this is a difficult direction to go in. It’s definitely not the safe choice.
In my own work on Codemancer, I am taking a wait-and-see attitude. I’ll be launching a Kickstarter in the near future. Based on who my backers will be, I’ll have to make decisions about where my audience is, and how I can communicate with them. I hope you’ll join the experiment.
I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games. I’m currently building Codemancer, a game that teaches the magic of code. I’m also available for contracting as a designer and developer of games for learning. If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.
As many of you know, I’m a big fan of the genre of electromechanical games known as Pinball. I got a chance to spend some time with the Twilight Zone machine over at Emporium Arcade Bar recently, and I want to share some thoughts about pinball design which might apply more broadly to game design experiences.
Over time, it seems, pinball rules have become more and more obscure. In tournaments where precise control of the ball is the skill most tested, it makes sense to have long chains of events which result in increasing point values. But in casual play, the rules often seem overcomplicated. Here is the rule sheet for the Twilight Zone machine I was playing. Check out this video where the rules of Bally’s ‘Frontier’ machine are explained.
I’ve come to the conclusion that most pinball players care about three things:
- Length of play
- Toys
- Play Modes
Length of play is an obvious way that a casual pinball player can feel good about a session. The longer you play, the more chance you feel have of activating something special, and you can’t help but accrue points just by hitting things randomly. Conversely, when the ball goes down the drain and out of play, that’s a very punishing feeling.
Toys are the interesting things sticking out of the playfield. Sometimes they flash or jiggle or make noises, or all three! When a toy is activated, it’s very rewarding, regardless of the point bonus they often represent. Sometimes they have interesting gameplay consequences, as in one of my favorite machines of all time, Jurassic Park.
Probably the most rewarding thing — and what people care about the most — is activating different modes of play. It’s accepted that shooting the ball up the field with the plunger and flippers is the standard mode of play, but breaking up the fun with different kinds of experience is a core gameplay principle. Think about the power-pellets in Pac-Man, which switches the player from the hunted to the hunter, or the special contraptions in Jetpack Joyride which change up the input. The problem in pinball is, outside of expert play, these things are far too rare. Getting a multiball or a mini-playfield often requires unlocking that experience by performing a sequence of difficult actions.
You can even think about a pinball machine as just one part of a larger game, which is getting the most enjoyment out of the pinball available to you. If points are to have any value in that context, they need to be standardized across machines, otherwise the question will always be “is 540,000 points good?” Outside of competitive play, everything is made up and the points don’t matter.
I don’t like to point out a problem without offering some solutions, so here they are:
- I DON’T think that points should be eliminated, and I’m skeptical that they’ll ever be standardized across games. I do think they should be clear consequences of specific actions, pointed out with something other than a playfield light, which are so easy to ignore amongst all the other flashing whatsits. It would be great if points could be displayed over the place where the points were awarded, perhaps by projecting onto the playfield glass?
- Activating toys and modes should be more straightforward, though not necessarily less difficult. For example, getting the ball up a narrow ramp can be very difficult, especially if there are drop targets in front of it. Drop targets (panels which drop below the playfield when hit by the ball) are a very intuitive, straightforward way of barring progress. It can be difficult, as long as the player understands the steps needed to trigger a special event WITHOUT READING.
- Extend the average playtime, if possible. I know this is the arcade business, and that the margins on pinball are the worst they’ve ever been, but when the Donkey Kong machine right next door gives the player more playtime, that’s where they’ll put their quarter.
- Make it quality time. People need to feel powerful and competent right away, and there are some pinball games that already do this. Bride of Pin-Bot, I’ve noticed, makes some ramps and moving targets really accessible to new players, and saves others for the advanced (or lucky) ones. Just the fact that you can hit a ramp reliably feels like a huge accomplishment. Other games (such as a favorite of mine for other reasons, Black Hole) make the player feel stupid. If there is a big empty area in the center of the playfield, or a lot of stationary targets that just bounce the ball up into the glass, they’re gonna have a bad time.
I’m really excited about what’s happening in pinball right now, and I hope that this article will cause pinball designers to spend a little more time thinking about this segment of players — the casual barroom or arcade player, who plays pinball because it’s there, not because he loves the flippers the way we do.
That goes for other game experiences, too. I wish that hardcore games of all types would consider the players that might wander in looking for a few minutes amusement. Being a hardcore gamer should not be a prerequisite for playing COD, but playing COD should make me want to become a hardcore gamer. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe high-profile videogames can afford to turn away users by the millions because there are still millions more. Pinball, however, definitely does not have that privilege.
I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games. If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.
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When you’re working on a game, you hear this question a lot. If you’ve worked in the entertainment industry, or heard it talked about, you know the kind of answer people are expecting. The format is <Gender(s)> <Age Range>. If you’re working on something that kids might consume, that age range needs to be super-specific, maybe three consecutive years at the most, and is expected not to cross gender barriers.
Either this is a stock photo for the word ‘demographics’ or the Village People are accepting new members.
The more I’ve been forced to answer this question, the less meaningful I find this kind of answer. The question is, without a doubt, still a meaningful one. Who do you think would most enjoy this game? No game is for everyone, and, practically speaking, marketers need to know where to direct their efforts and their dollars. There are also certain kinds of products which are perfectly justified in using gender and age. Acne cream, for example, will mostly be sold to teens, even though lots of other people have acne. On the other hand, I think there are ways of dividing the population which might be more valid (i.e. more predictive) for interactive entertainment.
I googled “acne cream for the elderly” and this was the first image result. No joke.
Sometimes the simplest conventional thing to do is to point at a genre. That is to say, the best predictor of your enjoyment of the next pixel platformer is your enjoyment of the last pixel platformer (or, perhaps, whether you know what a pixel platformer is). This is a rudimentary form of segmenting by play-style, which is a strategy with a lot of depth. You might consider defining your audience in opposition to other games’ audiences, or court people who liked a certain game except for one particular thing.
In my case, I’m working on an educational game, which is a concept that comes with a lot of baggage. People assume that it’s for kids, and probably young kids. And it is. But it’s for a lot of other people, too. My game isn’t for everybody, but it’s not about gender or age.
Codemancer is a game about learning programming, but it’s not a puzzle game, or a sandbox environment. It’s for people who are interested in story-driven interactive experiences. It might be for people who are somewhat interested in learning to program, but not totally obsessed with learning to program (the obsessed don’t need my game or any game).
I hope that my game is for people, especially women, who wouldn’t normally be drawn to the “hacker” archetype. It’s for people who can’t stick with open-ended learn-to-code creativity tools like Scratch* and Kodu*, or who might be ill-suited to online tutorials, like the ones at Codecademy* or Code School*. Maybe they don’t have access to in-person classes, like the ones at Starter League*, or are too embarrassed to expose their ignorance to a class full of strangers.
So now when people ask me what my game’s demographic is, I say “what’s Harry Potter’s demographic?”
Then they say “But really…” and I say “Fine. Males and Females 8-11 years old.” I’ve got to pick my battles.
*These are all cool things that you should check out.