Moms point out the social stigma for females playing games

Casual Connect hosted a focus group panel with five “mom gamers”– moms who love playing casual games– with the audience asking questions. The most interesting thing was the diversity in how the panelists responded to the questions, suggesting that not all mom gamers are the same.

Social Gaming

Moms talked about how casual games can be social (playing with their friends, children, etc.) but the interesting thing was that the moms in our panel rarely played with people they didn’t know. Their definition of “social” seemed to be extremely confined to existing acquaintances, especially close ones.

Mickey, who has four children, uses games as a platform to keep communication lines open. She said that when kids are growing through troubles, they won’t talk about it but then if they start playing games with her, eventually they will talk themselves through what is bothering them. “They can go into their room and shut the door but I can still get to them,” she said.

There were mixed feelings about so-called “social gaming” on Facebook, mainly regarding games that were not “truly” social: “Facebook is a social network to keep in touch with people, not a place to go play games,” Tia said “I get tired of game requests. You hope that when you get a message from a friend, you want it to be exciting, not a request for a carrot or something.”

Escapism

Sometimes moms don’t want to be social, and the games are a way to escape from real life. Linda talked about how games helped her with her physical pain. “I’m in constant pain. When I can focus in on a game, it makes [the pain] take a back seat. It’s a wonderful escape. I used to look at this as a waste of time; now I know there are different benefits from it,” she said.

For Tia, narratives were very important in escaping, because it had an element of fantasy. Not everyone, however, agreed.

Social Stigma

There is still a social stigma for women to talk about, or admit that they are game players. “There are still moms that think it’s weird that an adult woman would be online playing a game. We want our children to become mature yet we’re sitting here playing games. How do you make sense of that? The key is to find that balance. We still have our critics,” Linda said.

‘If you’re a 45-year old woman playing games, it’s not something you advertise,” Tia said, “A lot of people are gamers but they don’t talk about it. It’s that stigma; you’re a mom, you’re supposed to be cleaning or taking care of kids,:

“Society doesn’t make it cool,” Kay said. “Half of my friends on Facebook play but don’t even advertise it. But we didn’t grow up with this stuff. At 35, I realized, oh my good this is so fun.”

Mickey agreed: “We’re in our second childhood, Let us enjoy it,” she said.

The Great Gatsby has excellent music, very nice voice actors.

But that’s not what happens. With some games, I stop playing after two or three minutes. It’s kind of scary, if you think from the developer’s point, that the first couple minutes of gameplay affect whether or not I will continue for the rest of the hour. I think this short timeframe is because these games are casual  in nature and most casual games are in series of levels that increase in terms of difficulty, but don’t change substantially in terms of play mechanics.

There are various reasons for why I stop playing after two minutes. I don’t think it’s one thing, but a combination or interaction effect of several different factors, such as graphic design and difficulty. Most factors, however, pertain to some game mechanic or other. For instance, if there is a lag after I click, or if the game is too easy or the graphics too lame, I won’t even bother playing the full hour. Since a lot of the new releases on Big Fish seem to be hidden object games, some examples of games that I lost interested were: Flux Family Secrets- the Rabbit Hole, L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Journalistic Stories. I especially don’t like hidden object games where I’m looking for random stuff in a cluttered room (I’ve talked about this in a previous post on hidden object games). It really baffles me why items such as umbrellas, binoculars, pocket watches, and cigars are popular hidden objects across all games. So weird.

The poor combination of real/pixel images in Wizard of Oz created an eyesore. The story was very weak too.

While I’ve talked about the importance of narrative in a previous post, I want to add another ingredient that makes me want to buy the game. Certainly an interesting narrative makes me curious about what is to come, but it is not enough. What really helps me decide whether or not I want to buy the game after the hour has a lot to do with audio, because at that point, good narrative and playable mechanics are already assumed to be part of the game. For example, I really enjoyed The Great Gatsby because of the honky-tonk piano (or whatever the instrument was) playing 20s music. It was extremely enjoyable to listen to the music while playing. I usually turn down the volume when I play, but not with this game. The game was also nice in that you were looking for hidden objects in a scene that seemed natural (not a cluttered closet with random items) although some items were indeed out of place.

It’s not just the music. When executed well, I actually prefer games that have voice-overs. Of course, this is very difficult to execute well since the voice actors may have annoying voices and/or bad acting skills. Also, if the voice sequence is too long, I would want to skip it. I guess this creates a lot of trouble for developers (ie., costs more) but i have never actually bought a game that did not have an audio component. It wasn’t because i was actively looking for it, but in hindsight, I think that audio was the secret sauce that triggered me to make that purchase.

Tetris celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, yet the game’s popularity (and revenue stream) is still strong. Henk B. Rogers, CEO and president of Blue Planet Software, discovered Tetris at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 1988 and flew out to Moscow the following year to negotiate for the Game Boy rights to Tetris. During the negotiations, Henk befriended Tetris game designer Alexey Pajitnov and formed a business relationship that later became The Tetris Company– the exclusive source of all licenses to Tetris. As of 2008, Tetris made about 10% of all games sold on mobile phones in North America.

In 1995, Henk founded Blue Planet Software to manage the rights to eTetris; in 2002, he started Blue Lava Wireless, a mobile phone game developer and publisher that was later sold to JAMDAT. Henk currently has three startup software development companies– Tetris Online, which focuses on casual games; Blue Lava Technologies, developer of a photo-tagging service; and Avatar Reality, which hosts a virtual world called Blue Mars.

Henk is in Hawaii, so Play As Life conducted an email interview asking him about his work and ideas on gaming.

Q. You had the insight to see the potential of Tetris.  What is it about Tetris that makes it such a universal game?

A. Mathematics/geometry is a universal language.  Tetris is a game of geometric shapes.  My insight was that Tetris is simple and addictive.

Q. Are there any markets/countries that have a surprising high license rate for Tetris?

A. Korea is surprisingly high for Tetris Online because they have an amazingly high broadband penetration.

Q. Blue Mars is one of your more recent projects.  How is Blue Mars different from MMOs or Second Life?

A. We respect intellectual property so you need the “copyright” to copy stuff.  We also respect privacy and decency, so no lewd behavior in public places.  We have much better graphics and can handle 5,000 people in one place.

Q. Do you believe that the Internet will evolve to a 3-D virtual world like Blue Mars?

A. Some will, some won’t.  Not every book becomes a movie.  Those that do can rise to a new level of audiovisual excitement.  Add interactivity and companions to that and you have Blue Mars.

Q. Blue Planet, Blue Lava Wireless, Blue Mars…is it fair to say you have a strong preference for “blue” and heavenly bodies?

A. Good guess.

• Blue Planet:Start in Hawaii, go up 25,000 miles, it’s a blue planet. A global view starting in Hawaii.
• Blue Lava:Again Hawaii. The ocean (blue); the land (lava)
• Blue Mars: Red is an inhospitable desert “wasteland.” Blue is an inviting planet just terra-formed into a paradise.

Q. There are pessimists who claim that games are bad for children, due to addiction, violence, and so forth.  As a game developer, publisher, and a father, how would you address these negative claims?

A. I don’t create/publish any game I don’t want my children to play.  If you think of injuries, you can say sports are bad for children.  They are not.  Do anything in moderation.

Q. You’ve done amazing contributions to the game industries in Japan and the United States, but you’re originally from Holland.  Any plans to fuel up the Dutch gaming industry?

A. My contributions today do not have national boundaries.  I build content where I happen to live.  I sell it to the world.  I happen to live in Hawaii.

Q. Have you every thought of kicking off your shoes, sitting on the beach, and just living off Tetris royalties?  What makes you want to continue pushing new grounds?

A. I considered it for about a week after my heart attack.  Then I got back into the driver’s seat.  This may be my only life.  I don’t want to leave not having done something I want to do.  I like to build stuff no one has built before.

Q. You’ve established Blue Planet Foundation, which advocates indigenous renewable energy.  Why is that important to you?  Do you think games could play a role in making change?

A. Carbon based fuel has messed up our fragile eco-system.  How can I leave a poisoned world to my grandchildren?  We made the mess.  We clean it up.  Games can educate people.  Global warming and pollution are complex models.  Games can be complex models.  We can simulate anything in a game.