[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play [was: Emergent Behaviorsspawnedfrom...]

[Michael Sellers]

Sean Howard wrote:
> "Michael Sellers" <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:

>> But interaction does not necessarily lead to competition;

> If the focus group is large enough, it invariably will.

Others would disagree - Caillois, Huizinga, LeBlanc, etc.
Competition is a common facet of life, but it's not part of *every*
form of interaction even in games.  And, even when competition is a
component, it doesn't have to be the primary focus as it is in
virtually every mainstream game today.

>> It's really no surprise that more women don't play games, given
>> the narrow, achievement- and aggression-oriented focus we give to
>> those that reach the market.

> You'll have to do better than that. This has been the popular
> opinion in gamedev for years, and somehow, not a damn thing has
> been accomplished because of it.

Except, say, Barbie Fashion Designer or The Sims.  Both were the top
selling games for their respective years, both have outsold almost
all other games in years since -- and both were almost completely
ignored by most gamers.  Our industry isn't set up to design,
develop, or distribute games that don't feature competition heavily.
The success of games like the (many) Tycoon games or outsiders like
NeoPets, in which competition is at best an adjunct activity,
reinforces this.

> None of those Purple Moon-like studios which were created to bring
> social gameplay and fashion to gaming to attract a female audience
> succeeded.

Purple Moon suffered from the same problem that many game studios
hit -- their games just weren't all that good.  But the failure of
one game or studio hardly disproves what user interviews,
demographic, and psychographic studies have shown for at least the
past ten years.

But listen - it's completely okay by me if you think this is all
hogwash.  You'll be in very good company - even EA execs didn't
think The Sims would sell more than 300,000 units, tops (which is a
bit over 1% of what they *have* sold!).

> And your explanation still doesn't explain why my wife LOVES
> Diablo 2 (which I hate) and I LOVE Planescape:Torment (which she
> hates).

Single-point anecdote explains nothing.  Look at the population;
look at what they buy.  You can't generalize from what one person
likes.

> No, the things which stand in the way of female gamers aren't even
> the games themselves. Go watch G4tv for 30 seconds and you'll
> suddenly be ashamed to be a gamer yourself.

The bottom-feeding media surrounding games, from full-page ads in
magazines to things like G4TV certainly don't help attract more
women players. But even if you turned off all of these, you'd
*still* have narrow games that value achievement over relationship,
that present goals without any larger meaningful context, and that
quickly devolve to how quickly you can eviscerate your opponent.  As
a whole (not saying there aren't exceptions) guys love this sort of
thing; women don't.  After all, it's not like women *used* to buy
lots of computer games but stopped doing so when the media got
figured out there was money to be made there.

> Don't get me started on ludology either. A supposed branch of
> study designed to bring credibility to gaming by... explaining the
> socioeconomic parallels between the stock market and Chutes and
> Ladders?

You might want to do a little more reading; I think you may have
missed a few significant points in your analysis.

> Gaming is a social stigma right now, more so than something like
> going to the movies are. We've got adults who wouldn't be caught
> dead reading a comic book or playing a videogame going to see
> Spider-man 2 in the theaters multiple times. It's not the subject
> matter. It never has been.  It's the image.

There is an image problem, no doubt - going to the movies (or for
that matter, the opera) is a socially sanctioned use of leisure
time, whereas playing games for the most part still isn't.  But even
among the parts of the population where that stigma doesn't exist,
women (and people with other things to take up their time like kids
and jobs) for the most part *still* don't play games.  There's an
image problem, sure -- but it's caused by the kinds of games we
produce!

Frankly, that you don't seem to see the significance of the gender
issue here is an exemplar of the blindness endemic in many game
developers.  I've worked with people in the past who discounted
women's general distaste for games as coming from anything in the
games or the industry itself.  Such explanations inevitably reduce
to deflecting the responsibility for the lack of mass market appeal
-- to men but especially to women -- as being someone else's fault.
It couldn't possibly be because our games are made by, for, and with
a young white unmarried male world view, could it?

> Other than the obvious (and, I dare say, arousing) physical
> differences between males and females, they aren't mentally
> different in ANY WAY.

That's not the case.  There is abundant data that men and women vary
neurologically from the gross anatomical to molecular scale, in
structures ranging from the cortical sulci to the amygdaloid nucleus
in the limbic system to the corpus callosum and cortical neuronal
density.  There are significant gender differences in attention,
reaction, verbal and spatial reasoning, bilateral activation, and
memory formation, among other areas.

The idea that men and women are mentally identical dates from the
late 1970s or early 1980s, and even then was largely pedagogically
rather than scientifically based (CT and MRI data from the mid-1980s
at the Montreal Neurological Institute showing significant gender
differences in cortical structures was deemed "unpublishable" at the
time specifically and solely due to the gender issue).  In the past
twenty years enormous amounts have been learned about just how much
men and women *do* differ, both in terms of neurology and in terms
of conscious and unconscious mental operation.

And then of course there are the cultural differences between men
and women.  It's often fashionable to dismiss these, but as they're
operative in the life of every person who might by a game, and since
they have large effects on what is seen as acceptable leisure-time
activity, it makes sense for us to attend to and understand these as
much as possible.

> That's what we need to do - create gamers that aren't soulpatch
> sporting, flannel wearing slackers or drunk backseat quarterbacks
> on a couch. Not everybody thinks Adam Sandler is funny; we need an
> environment where both sides can exist peacefully.

I wasn't aware we were in the business of creating gamers.  More to
the point, I think we're better off creating games that *people*
will play, rather than trying to create new kinds of people.  Drive
the game to the people, don't try to make the people conform to the
game.

>> When a game that values relationships or immersion over
>> achievement (e.g., The Sims) does hit the market, people are
>> astounded at how well it does... and then go back to making what
>> they were making before.

> The reason the Sims did well was the relationship it had with
> SimCity, a game which has had a long standing positive
> relationship with non-gamers.

SimCity 3000 didn't give The Sims much of a bounce.  No doubt the
'Sim' name counted for something, but that could have explained
maybe 500K units sold or so at the outside.  From the very first day
boxes of The Sims flew off the shelves.  That it's sold over 20M
units means something else -- something huge -- was going on.  User
reports indicated the stories that people told themselves, and the
relationships between the Sims themselves, was what attracted them.
This went beyond the "Tamagotchi" effect on which the game was first
pitched to distributors; for many players, disproportionately women,
the difference between caring for a single interactive 'creature'
and several with family and friends was profound.

> The Sims comes out, works on low end computers (larger audience),
> has extensive marketing campaign (including articles in magazines
> like People and other non-gamer magazines), and has extremely good
> word of mouth.

The 'low-end machine' thing is interesting -- EA execs were
concerned that its graphics looked dated when it was released.  And
yet, it went strong for several years, eclipsing hundreds of games
with "killer graphics" but same-old same-old gameplay.

As for mass market magazines and such, that all came later.  While
The Sims had a strong initial marketing campaign, it didn't garner
the interest of mass-market publications until it after it was
clearly a break-out hit.  In other words, the gameplay made for word
of mouth -- especially amongst women -- and that made for buzz which
eventually found the game on the cover of Time magazine.  It's as
they say, "you (literally) can't buy that kind of PR."

> Let's not forget the near infinite number of expansion packs that
> guarranteed shelf space for The Sims long after it should've been
> forgotten (can anyone remember teh American Idol or Harry Potter
> expansions?)

Yes, expansions which were initially a risk for EA; many inside EA
weren't convinced the market would support them.  But the game just
kept selling!  Again, the expansion packs didn't make for the
word-of-mouth or the shelf-space; the continuously strong sales made
retailers willing to give shelf space, and made EA willing to make
expansions again and again.

> The simple fact is, they made a sequel to SimCity which got a lot
> of exposure and knew how to play the audience. Has nothing to do
> with female players.

No, that's not a simple fact; it's not even close.  I was at Maxis
when The Sims was released, and I can tell you, it's nothing like
what you assume (and interestingly, at the time the studio had more
women in senior positions than any other major game studio I know
of).

> I don't have the numbers or anything, but could someone who does
> let me know if Sims 2 sold even a fraction of what the first game
> did?

>>From what I know (no longer being at EA), TS2 has done well but
nothing like what the original did.  The possible reasons why are
interesting to contemplate.  One is that many people are still
playing The Sims and (not being early adopters) see no reason to
move to the sequel.  Similarly, one of the largest changes in the
game was that it went to full 3D, and required a higher-end machine
which many players may not have.  I don't know that that's the
salient factor in terms of sales, but it's an interesting aspect to
consider.

Mike Sellers
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