Kay's talk on Bratz: The Game

Kay is Creative Manager at Blitz Games, a good speaker, enthusiastic and fast! I could barely keep up, so there are holes in my notes - as usual. Still, give you a flavour.

We do a lot of licensed products - Fairly Odd Parents, Lilo and Stitch, Pac-Man World 3, and we do some girl-specific titles. We have the two biggest 'girl' licenses - Barbie and Bratz. I'm going to give you the lowdown and dirty on this: the first question you may ask is why bother making games for little girls? Some people report that women are 30+ PC gamers, but the current market is nearing saturation for its current demographic. Expanding by bringing women into the market is going to be a very good thing, good for women but ultimately because it'll bring us in a hell of a lot of money.

My whitepaper is huge, so I've had to crop viciously to fit this in. I'm going to talk about risk& reward, customisation, community and storytelling. So to give you an idea of what Bratz is all about - run vid - [ lots of rollerblading, gymnastics, shopping, photography and rock chix soundtrack ]. So I don't know if you guys have kids, but Bratz is the biggest selling fashion doll of 2004. Bratz has a 1 billion dollar turnaround worldwide: when we were offered it, we had to say yes. This is obviously something girls really like. The brand ethic - we love this - self expression, confidence, girl power and passion .. as developers we looked at that and realised it was true. We could be really positive about this. We could take something girls are familiar with and put it on a medium that perhaps they haven't used so much before... give them a new experience.

We have quite a lot that you can do in the game, we did focus tests and all these elements were really popular: you can play as four main protagonists (there are 70 Bratz, but only 4 main ones), and you can buy fashion, do your hair, do makeup.. 6 year olds really love this. Much as we'd love them to be emancipated women at this age, they're not, they're kids and they love dressing up. Hell, I love it too.

Platforms. If you're a 3rd party developer, most of this will be decided by your publisher, but sometimes you get a say. Barbie Horse Racing was brought out on PS2  and the XBox. Odd choice. The XBox wasn't at all girl friendly in terms of previous titles - but Microsft were so supportive of us, they said push it! Push the platform, like the Gamecube did, so we were very pleased to take the XBox and push it as a marketable thing, into a new market essentially.

Running along into risk and reward. This is something that gets bandied about a lot, everyone knows about risk-n-reward, but I wanted to talk about this from a dev point of view. Some say girls don't like it, they like a nonthreatening environment, but what's the alternative to risk and reward? So we substituted risk and reward with action and reaction. Girls got the biggest kick out of controlling the environment. Having consequences. This difference positively reinforces how you play, and doesn't punish you. If you look at the Nancy Drew series on the PC, it was impossible for Nancy to actually die: you could prematurely end the gameplay, but you were always given a second chance function. Lego Star Wars - infinite lives. That makes a big difference to a female player. All these little things we thought were important for Bratz. Though players can fail tasks they're set, we don't punish the player - all they have to do is have a personal best, and the opportunity to better it.

Talking of tasks. At any time in the game we had tasks and tasks brings up sandbox play too. Sandbox is great - the player can happily wander around doing whatever she wants to do. We really wanted to do this, because girls like to have the freedom of choice, however being a license tie-in we got the shock of our lives when the upcoming TV series demanded we tie in with their storylines, so we were immediately tied into their linear story. So we decided to continue with a blend of activities and sandbox areas tied in with the linear story - and it was OK.

Storytelling. Sandbox is responsive communication, action and reaction. ut storytelling, functional communication is really vital. This 6 year old girl doesn't know the norms maybe, she needs to continue in story mode... so we look at functions and platform limitations. We have NPCs, 1829 lines of recorded dialogue (we have Bratz coming out in 7 countries, and the same actors from the TV series in America, so this is complex).. we also added text messages and we had no idea how important this was, but when we focus tested this, my god - it was incredible. They were SO excited by this. We used the text messages as cheap written dialogue, but also because you can do all these other things - messages, contacts, planners... customisation, ringtones.. information about ingame pickups.. and the camera. Players can use the phonecam in the game.

We used the mobile phone to bring NPCs to the player. You can text an NPC at any time to come meet you, and they will and will come give you a task. The primary form of communication though has to be social and face to face.. if we hadn't focus tested 900 girls, we wouldn't have known this... [..]

Graphics. Graphics is the thing where everyone goes, make it pink! No. There is pink, but please. We made it colourful. You can customise anything. It had to be fashionable, funky and feminine. In an urban environment, getting femininity into it was pretty complex, but we were lucky, the TV lot gave us a few pictures as benchmarks. The city has an emphasis on shopping and recreational areas; it has an Orange County feel, with designer shops, bright skies and retro funk type feel. We focused on lighting. We really wanted to get this stylised realism going, and to give you an idea of the point we wanted - the childlike charm of Disney and cool sophistication of New York. So we went for radiosity lighting. It's sophisticated, it pushes a benchmark graphically, few people have done it on the PS2 at all.. we get this gorgeous, architectural feel and genuine realism that we really wanted.

Characters. Realism is not an issue here. Big head with enormous eyes: you know that's a Brat. But what we wanted to do was take them out of the box and put them on the screen... it was important that they should be attractive, this is after all a fashion game. And we got something really wrong - we thought we'd go with cartoony feeling, with simple linear shading, but the girls were so sophisticated, watching stuff that's way above them for their age group, so we used volumetric shading. We also have character based lighting, which means that great lighting follows her around everywhere and she looks   stunning. I'd pay money to have one of those in real life.

This is a fashion game. You buy clothing for your Brat. Women love to look like how they want to be represented.. but we forget things [..] like vehicles... boys customise these all the time. Branded fashion is breaking out of girls games and going into boys games - Ecko, Tony Hawk, branded clothing! So we were really pleased with this idea of clothing and went to town with this. When the boys - I'm the only girl on the team - showed me what they'd started with, they had ten pairs of shoes. Only ten. And four types of makeup. Pink, Blue. Oh dear, I said. You really don't get it do you? So we wanted to make it where you'd get instant feedback on what you looked like, and we wanted little icons of clothing up, and these little icons ate into our data budget really badly, but you can scroll through giant quantities of clothing at once and choose what you want.

Also, we wanted to resurrect user-generated content. It's all about self expression in little girls, and being creative. Consoles have restrictions with UCC, (user created content) so what we did do was limit it to a poster and teeshirt entry. You have a three layer system, background image decals and text. You can put them together into a layered system and out you pop wearing that teeshirt in the game. UCC .. we're really proud of the makeup editor. it's MASSIVE. You can face paint, and you can be there for hours. I spend most of my time here, actually. This was hugely popular. We went to town on this,  but in the younger age group (up to about 9) wasn't used so much. The older lot though.. we're hoping this'll keep them in.

So to summarise. the industry wasn't very supportive of us sometimes. Consumers are more sophisticated than we realised ... they often act and feel 15+, even when they're very young. Aspiration. We didn't discover that till after. [..] Then, obviously, test, test and test. Get them [your consumers] in and work with them.

The four C, in this type of games. Creativity. Communication. Customisation. Choice. Girls don't conform so much like boys do, and they're cooperative too... choice is really important.

Comments

[Tree]

But... Bratz? Whay do we have to offer up brats as role models? "Hey, guess what? Being pissy is a desirable trait!"

I don't guess I don't see how a toy/game/cartoon for girls based on social malformation and self-centeredness is a step in the right direction.

[Chris]

Just a small point, but Kay wasn't the only woman working on the Bratz game. My narrative design team on the project here at International Hobo also had a woman on it. (Although Kay had no real means of knowing this!)

And contrary to the name, the game does not advocate "social malformation and self-centredness", as Tree suggests. It's really quite a warm and friendly game, advocating co-operation and loyalty to one's friends. I consider the Bratz to be slightly better aspirational figures than Matchstick-Legged Materialistic Girl... :) I'll happily accept any critique on the narrative once the game is out (but please remember the age group the game is made for)!

[gregale]

I guess I’d like to have heard more from Kay regarding the reasons why Blitz isn't pushing beyond the “four C's”.

Suzanne de Castell reminded the audience of the Women in Games conference that the data received from participants in academic fieldwork or market research is always a gendered performance. Right, so when little girls are telling the research department “this game is great”, or let’s say something like “puzzles are boring”, how is that information, that gendered performance, used?

How do girls get their hands on “other” experiences when there is a constant re-packaging of “traditional femininity” in these new media products?

Wasn’t it Sherry Turkle who said something along the lines of … we have a chance to use this technology to make ourselves something different, something better …?

When do we get to see the “four C’s + something original”? Just wondering…

[cristina]

i want to play this game

[sfb]

Thanks for that great article, nice to know the inner workings..
:)

Bratz World
http://www.bratzworld.tv

[katy]

hello bratz

[imran]

one day i went on bratz web it was amazing we did a lot of thing it was googd until my baby brother came craling in smashing the cumputer . this my new cumputer

[Math]

I am the boy in 22 years old and i have to loved bratz so much here... And have take time to make some review about bratz. Just see on my site.

Anyway, nice to know you :)

[Ashley]

hey ts my birthday 2 day im 10 how cool!!!!!

[haleema]

how old are you

[tiarna]

i have 3 words to not say

hi its angel hindle