Sorry for the sudden loss of signal here. It’s been a crazy April so far. Definitely the cruelest month this year. I’m just finishing up a few professional obligations – since professional writing takes precedence over hobbyist writing -  and then I’ll be back to posting regularly. I have a LOT of content in the pipeline, I just haven’t had the time to finish it and push it through.

Things I’m Playing:

*Battlefield: Bad Company 2

*Sam n’ Max, the new season

*Star Trek: TNG, on repeat, forever

See you all soon! In the meantime, you might enjoy my reviews over at Jayis Games.

I started writing for them a couple days ago, and this is my first paid, published piece. Hooray me!

I’m still hustling, though. I’ll have a new post soon. I’m shooting for twice a week here, and once a week over at Gamasutra.

See you soon!

These women are known as “PlayDates,” and the site is set up as a sort of online dating site where the activity for that date is gaming. Clients pay to play a round of a game with a PlayDate of their choice. Then, after you have played games with these women, you are able to “rate” your PlayDate based on hotness, game skill, and flirtiness. I have so much to say on this topic that I have a hard time finding a place to start and have actually started over a myriad of times.

Thing is, this isn’t 1990. This isn’t even 2005. Girls playing video games are no longer a rarity. We are not precious gems and we are not fucking commodities just because we happen to be exploring an interest of ours. We should not be notable just because we happen to hold our XBox 360 controllers above a vagina or in front of boobage.

Go here to read more. I highly recommend it.

How does it work when applied to games?

Let’s look it as a metaphor. The ‘hard’ infrastructure is the system that allows the game to function on a basic level, the rules that the player must abide by in order to advance in the game. Just like the water, power, and other utilities for a town, the game cannot exist without this set of rules.

Similarly, the soft infrastructure of a game works in combination with the hard structure in order to make social experiences available. Just like the soft infrastructure isn’t a collection of buildings, but spaces like market squares and community centres and other conceptual places, in games the social infrastructure is created around the rules of the game, in the gap between regimented control and player agency.

In other words, the hard game infrastructure is the rules of the game. You can’t get around them. They’re inflexible, they hold the gameworld up, because they’re the rules that the developers made content for. In a single-player game, the hard infrastructure is almost all there is outside of community-made mods.

In those kinds of games, the soft structure is limited to the player’s interaction with the game. Ever jumped around, knocking crap off of shelves in Half-Life 2 when you got bored during a ‘non-cutscene’ cutscene? That’s about as good as it gets for single-player games.

It’s in multiplayer experiences that the soft infrastructure of games begins to appear. In World of Warcraft, when you meet your friends at an agreed-upon place in order to run a quest, you’re interacting with the social space. On Facebook, when you play Farmville and you help a neighbour with her crops, that’s the social infrastructure at work.

Social sustainability, then, is planning a game to encourage healthy social practices, in a similar vein to Hancock’s list:

• The game should be designed well, with a set of rules and rewards that encourage the player without frustrating them.
• It should be fair in its distribution of rewards.
• It should be well-balanced, not preferring one type of player or strategy to another.
• The rules should be challenging without being impossible, as in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow.
• The game should be internally consistent in its lore while not being completely alien to the real world.

• It should encourage social interaction between players; a game which isolates the player is not a very good multiplayer game. (This is why Second Life feels like a mausoleum. The ‘mechanics’ of the game don’t reward social interaction, so it’s left up to the players, resulting in acres of nightclubs.)

Franz Kafka's World of Warcraft.

• The developers and people in charge of maintaining the game should listen to the community and weigh their comments constructively to further the enjoyment of the game for everyone.

• Finally, the game should be fun, linking the ruleset and the social space together in a way that makes the player want to keep playing, and makes their continued play healthy.

(This isn’t meant to be a definitive list – just what I feel Hancock’s list directly implies in games. If you feel that my list isn’t complete, or doesn’t work – please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.)

Social sustainability, in short, is respecting the players and allowing them to have input without impacting their ability to enjoy the game. By reinforcing the player’s grasp on the world and showing that the development team is listening to their playerbase, you establish a two-way relationship, that rewards the player’s investment of social capital (and money) with the feeling that their praise and complaints are being heard, restocking their social wallets.

The emerging social games sphere would seem like it would be best-suited to this kind of thing, right? As you’re playing Farmville, you’re interacting with your friends, you’re having fun, all in a social framework.

Nope. I actually think that Zynga’s games are the environmental equivalent of Exxon tankers more prone to leaks than a post-iceberg Titanic.

Bill Mooney’s talk at GDC is probably the most covered talk in the blogosphere (god, what a silly word) this past week, but I figured I’d take another stab at it. There’s just so much to dislike!

Outside of any talk, though, Zynga’s philosophy towards game design is pretty obviously unhealthy. Like drug dealers, they give an unwary Facebook user a taste of Farmville, but then, what’s this? The only way they can move forward in the game without devoting literally every second of their day to raising crops is by spending money. As David Hayward says, Zynga’s games “extract revenue and multiply users in every way possible.”

Nearly every event in FarmVille, from finding a cow to buying farm equipment, greets the user with a box asking them to publish the event on their wall. What does that say from a mechanical viewpoint? Even looking at it in those strict terms, the user’s reward for accomplishing a goal is to tell their friends about it.

Even the most unwary of players would see something amiss with that after a while. And their social capital reserves would go down. The FarmVille design philosophy, from a social infrastructure perspective, is pretty much to take as much as they can before the user gets sick and leaves. But by then there are hordes of new users to replace the old one and to spend more money, to be drained of social energy in the same way. It’s certainly a profitable strategy, as Zynga’s recent award for Best New Social Game at GDC 2010 shows.

But it’s definitely not a sustainable one.

The concept of the virtuous player comes from Aristotlean virtue ethics, which sounds intimidating but is really just a theory of how to react to the world. The virtuous player is someone who recognizes that games influence us in certain ways through their game mechanics, and examines them even as she participates in them. Gamers aren’t moral robots. We are completely capable of self-reflection and thinking about our actions.

As part of a game culture of the kind that Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins are trying to create at PAX East this weekend, all of us – consumers and creators alike – need to keep in mind what kind of behaviours we’re encouraging and why.

I’m certainly not the first to think of something like this; Clint Hocking reacts here against the trend towards ‘socially responsible’ games development, on the argument that what games need are less agenda-ridden games structured entirely to ‘elevate the medium’ of games, and more games that are about what their designers care about. Less ‘I want games to be recognized as legitimate’, more ‘This is how this concept works and what I think of it.’

It is not the role of games nor should it be the role of games to be socially responsible, nor should it be the role of game creators to attempt to be didactic by instructing people how to live, how to think or how to behave. Unfortunately, this is what the discussion on the social responsibility of games tends to boil down to these days: a surface level discussion on how to add features that have moral messages so players can learn morality. [...]

I firmly do not believe that we need to put in place some agenda to add social responsibility to games. I don’t even believe it is about having a broader domain of game development where we can make a class of low-risk, controlled margin games that are socially responsible to demonstrate our goodwill to a world increasingly doubtful of the notion that games can speak meaningfully and generally to the human condition.

-Clint Hocking

I’m totally with him on that. I’ve been in many writing workshops where authors shoehorned some awkward political message into their work, in the hopes of serving some greater good. While their intentions were pure, the unsubtle propaganda that they ended up creating just wasn’t that good. Which is fine, really – in learning any art, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes. 100000 hours worth, if you listen to Malcolm Gladwell. Games don’t need mistakes like those, because mistakes are expensive.

So that’s not what I’m talking about when I say ‘creating socially sustainable games’.

Social sustainability is a concept I’ve stolen from urban planning. The idea goes like this: just like we have environmental resources that we need to manage carefully so that we don’t deplete them like a planet in Mass Effect 2, we also have social resources and capital that are depleted by economic development if not managed properly.

So what constitutes socially sustainable development? According to Trevor Hancock, one of the founders of the Canadian Green Party, socially sustainable development:

• meets basic needs for food, shelter, education, work, income and safe living and working conditions;

• is equitable, ensuring that the benefits of development are distributed fairly across society;

• enhances, or at least does not impair, the physical, mental and social well-being of the population;

• promotes education, creativity and the development of human potential for the whole population;

• preserves our cultural and biological heritage, thus strengthening our sense of connectedness to our history and environment;

• promotes conviviality, with people living together harmoniously and in mutual support of each other;

• is democratic, promoting citizen participation and involvement, and

• is livable, linking “the form of the city’s public places and city dwellers’ social, emotional and physical well-being” (Lennard and Lennard, 1987)

In order to create communities that work, Hancock says that we have to pay as much attention to socially sustainable practices – both from a viewpoint of institutions like education and social services as well as the web of volunteers and social networks that make up a community. He calls this network a ‘soft infrastructure’, unlike the ‘hard infrastructure’ of utilities like power, water, food and roads that more traditional approaches to urban planning emphasize. In order to make a city that’s both environmentally and socially sustainable, then, we have to look as much at soft infrastructure as we do at hard.

How does this apply to video games? That’s what we’ll look at tomorrow, in the next part of this series.

Thanks for visiting.

So I’m at the counter, I order Zoe a Happy Meal, and the woman says to me “Would you like a girl or a boy toy?” I didn’t know we had a choice. I look at Zoe who’s wearing a hat and jacket, and I realize this woman can’t make out Zoe’s sex, so I ask her “What’s the difference?” She tells me that girls get an iCarly Happy Meal and boys get a Star Wars Happy Meal. I ask Zoe, “Would you like Star Wars or iCarly?” She stares at me clueless and then says “Carly,” and I immediately kick myself for listing it second. Zoe always chooses the last item offered if she doesn’t know what you’re talking about.

When we opened the box we found an iCarly “Lip Gloss Phone,” a purple and silver flip phone that opens to a makeup mirror and container of lip gloss.

There are obviously huge implications about the gendering of these toys, but they’re so huge they’re beyond the scope of this post. People have literally written books about that, so I’m going to focus just on what Happy Meals are really about: marketing.

Let’s look at it from a business perspective. McDonald’s is so big that seemingly small decisions can have huge monetary ramifications. Why separate the Happy Meal’s packaging into two separate production processes, when keeping one box and one toy set would be cheaper?

Airborne clowns and children, lovin' it.

Well, because then you can target your marketing more specifically. It’s the same thing we see in Facebook and Project Wonderful ads: the ability to use IP locating and Facebook profile searches enables companies to choose exactly who gets sold what. Both advertisers and McDonalds benefit from their partnership and involvement in Happy Meals; as this New York Times article reports,

Brad Ball, the president of theatrical marketing for Warner Brothers and a former senior vice president for marketing for McDonald’s, said children could influence a family’s choice of movies and restaurants, so both fast-food companies and studios count on toys to create what he called a ”nag factor.”

Sometimes the makers of a television show or a toy pay a restaurant for the right to promote their product through a giveaway. At other times, restaurants will pay a licensing fee of $250,000 to $1 million to movie studios for the rights to make a toy. Restaurants will spend as much as $25 million on advertisements for a film and the fast-food tie-in, according to some movie studio officials.

Clearly, it’s worth it to McDonald’s to invest that much capital in ads and toys. Some sources (note: again, anecdotal calculations) think that the cost of making and marketing a toy is more than half of the total cost of the Happy Meal to the corporation, a pretty significant bite into the profits of the company. It’s a tradeoff that’s clearly worth it.

Now that we’ve got a grasp on the economic basics, what can the game industry learn from Happy Meals?

At their heart, the boy/girl split of McDonald’s Happy Meals is about marketing share. The Happy Meal as a concept was introduced in the 70s, to boost flagging revenue, and has evolved from there. Although some say it’s unethical, marketers’ exploitation of ‘the nag factor’ – telling kids to direct their parents’ spending habits – certainly seems to have worked. It only makes sense to double the effectiveness of Happy Meals by splitting their toys by gender. This way, the fast food chain can court two different properties at once, but still ensure that marketers can target them properly.

Abbott’s post is just an observation with some anecdotal evidence – he acknowledges that his experiment is far from conclusive. However, after thinking about it, there are some strong economic motivations behind the gender split.

How can we apply this to games?

One of the major assumptions underlying McDonalds’ marketing decision is that of a gender-neutral audience. Eating isn’t exactly a gendered activity; sure, there are different concerns about societal attitudes towards food, but fast food doesn’t seem to be something that you associate with boys or girls. Let’s take a look at this quote from GDC via Brainy Gamer again, What Colour is Your Hero?

Heir noted that the video game industry faces structural issues of its own. “Gender creates a huge asset pipeline nightmare. Switching race is much easier than building new features and animations.” Resistance to incorporating more female characters can sometimes be about resource allocation. Consalvo added that indie developers face far fewer constraints in this regard than big studios, “but they’re not doing any better.” This, according to Consalvo, suggests the absence of diversity in games is less about resources and more about unexamined self-imposed constraints.

Clearly, the video game industry is different, which is no real surprise to anyone who’s been to a GameStop or EB lately. Games have unquestionably been harmed by the North American view of games as a medium primarily for teenage boys over the last twenty years. Like most attitudes towards games, as a generation has grown up with them, those underlying assumptions have been questioned, but the GDC talk quoted in Abbott’s post is a clear indicator that the spectre of sexism is still around.

The production models are different, as mentioned in the quote above; the Happy Meals toys are still basically hunks of coloured plastic with the occasional LCD, sticker set, or notepad included. Because of the mass-production process of making these toys, making one set for boys and another for girls is a relatively simple matter: not that I’m trivializing the work involved, but once you’ve ironed out the process, you can make millions of them without breaking a sweat.

The only games less advanced than these come from the bargain bin at Wal-Mart.

By contrast, games are a strange chimera of specialized labour, a collaboration that is unique every time. Realizing a digital character requires acres of talent and effort from modelers, animators, texturers, voice actors, mocap actors, writers, designers, cinematographers… the list goes on. Deciding whether or not to make a given character male instead of female is the difference between using existing male-skeleton assets or to generate an entirely new set at great expense. (Note: the above is taken from my relatively limited experience as a participant in various mods. I’m not a professional, and if I’m wrong or misleading please let me know.)

Implementing characters is certainly just as difficult, if not more, than making these Happy Meal toys. Designers and developers have to take into account player interactions that are far more complicated than those expected of a child with a Happy Meal. You know what, fair enough.

But of all the characters who appeared in the games Consalvo studied, only ~10% were female. Why is the games industry missing a strategy so commonplace that it can be seen every time you go out for lunch? As Consalvo herself says, the prevalence of male characters is not about resources. It’s a self-imposed limit. It’s not about the development atmosphere being mostly guys, since, as Consalvo notes again, it’s entirely possible for men to write about women. It’s not even about economics, since McDonalds’ example shows that there’s a clear incentive to include women in product design.

Fast food is seen as a gender-neutral industry. The gaming industry is slanted towards men, but it’s not because of any external factors. They contribute, but at its heart, the lack of positive female depictions in games is a matter of blindness. Although McDonalds splits its gendered toys between male and female, and its own depictions are manipulative in intent, at least they acknowledge that there’s more to the world than men.

When McDonalds is beating out the games industry in gender issues, there’s something seriously wrong.