Ubisoft's Imagine series for girls

I have to post about this (brilliantly written piece by Brian), don't I ;)

Let's start with something - ignoring the giant spelling mistake on the front cover of this box art - : depending on your source, your average young game-playing person is more or less equally likely to be male or female.

Sure, there are skews and tendencies, of course there are: slight male skews towards the Xbox, and possibly even a slightly female skew towards the Wii. There's a male skew towards shooters, and a female skew towards adventure and brainiac games like puzzles. Male.. war, female.. music. Males tend to play a little longer, females a little less long. Some females will play BarbieGirlz, most males probably wouldn't - not while they'd get teased mercilessly for it, anyway. We hear these figures all the time.

And that's now. Ten years ago it was different, ten years hence, female playtime will equal male playtime, because there will be as many titles for oestrogen-heavy people as testosterone-heavy people, and everything in between (which is, in fact, most of us).

Ubisoft have a series of games about to come out for girls. Entitled "Imagine", there's a spark of hope .. but it turns out that the series is going to primarily consist of shopping, fashion, animals and babies. Oh yes. But the worst bit about this is, not really the fact that there are going to be shopping games - WoW is at least 40% shopping, frankly - or fashion games (ditto), but that Ubisoft seem to think that this is only what girls like:

Those games were really designed for young girls who are just looking for fun games and ways to explore their favorite hobbies... From what we've seen, [the girls] didn't mention anything about being a police officer.

Research is a funny thing. If you say to someone, what's your favourite food, they'll list three things they love. If you then say, you didn't list chocolate cake, don't you like chocolate cake? They'll say, oh SURE! I love chocolate cake! I just didn't realise you were asking about chocolate cake.

If young girls only like shopping, fashion, cooking and babies, then they wouldn't like Ratchet and Clank. Or Mario Kart. Or Dance Dance Revolution. Or Wii Sports. Or Pokemon.

Of course, these shopping, fashion and baby games will probably sell like hotcakes, partially (wholly?) because of the marketing: the packaging, the adverts and the message will scream, GIRLS! THESE ARE JUST FOR YOU!, and a chunk of 7 year olds will respond. Boys are no exception: videogames did the same to them for many, many years, except it was a bit more gory, and featured far more guns and boobs.

I would love to know what else Ubisoft is doing for girls, other than shopping, fashion and pets. Anything? It's a bit ironic that the series is called Imagine, and yet Ubisoft is demonstrating a distinct lack of the stuff here. As Brian brilliantly said, "what's next, Imagine: The Glass Ceiling?"

The world is imbalanced, side-loaded, lurching: we need more female policemen, actually - aren't Ubisoft watching Life on Mars? - and female referees, and female politicians, and female military people, and female marketing strategists, and female farmers ... and, of course, as evidenced by this latest offering, more female video game personnel.

Comments

[Sulka]

Heh, don't know whether I should laugh or cry.... I bet the next one in the series will be Imagine: Horsiez! :D

[Abroad]

Cry, definetely.
Imagine: bullshit! Comes in cute pink wrapping, because that is what women and girls want.
Bugger all this "making games of good quality with interesting stories" - why bother when you can make money with cheap, awful games just as well?
Then again: If Galliano did "Dior Fashion Show Inferno" for Nintendo DS, i'd buy it.

[James]

I totally agree with your point about the lack of imagination. Trying to find games for my five year old daughter I get faced with the same dilemmas - she's not into fairy-frock-pony-peaches and neither is she into alien-gun-fun - and she's more inclined towards the wii play mini-games - some sort of legend/mini-games woudl be the thing - with a social aspect as well.

[Cindy]

Wonder why all the babyz on the cover are caucasian?

[Alice]

"Then again: If Galliano did "Dior Fashion Show Inferno" for Nintendo DS, i'd buy it."

bwahaha! Brilliant! See, at least that has *humour*.

Gosh, Ubisoft really need to pull their socks up on this one. Pronto.

[kim]

I agree I find this offensive. Been meaning to post about it.

Funny thing is, if you walk around the Ubi montreal office (at least last time I was there) they have one of the healthiest male/female employee ratios I'd seen at any studio (until coming to MS casual games!). Unfortunately, I don't think this is true of the upper ranks there - at least last I checked.

One does wonder though, at some point, even if it's going to sell a cubic assload of units, is it just *wrong*? It certainly isn't helping.

[n.n]

Remember that these titles aren't being marketed to little girls or young women.

You heard me right. These titles are being marketed to soccer moms who have been infected with a cultural virus that leads them to believe that little girls should be interested in horsiez (sic), shopping and homemaking, and not in affairs of state, swashbuckling or driving giant robots. Being infected with this virus, they are also predisposed to pass it on to their offspring. Seriously, can you imagine a soccer mom buying "Barbie's Swordfighting Adventure" for her kids? Even if it includes a Fabio-lookalike dressed up in a Zorro-knockoff outfit somewhere on the cover? The girls might go for that (the game, not Fabio, I mean), but their mothers will cluck and fuss and put the game back on the shelf, muttering about media violence - and then turn around and buy a twice-as-violent, T- or M-rated game for their male offspring.

To sum up, the gendering of games is a symptom of an endemic cultural disorder rather than a disorder in and of itself. I would add that games may be the cure rather than the disease (see: WoW etc).

[Kathy]

Okami for the Playstation 2 is the game I would have loved best when I was a young gamer. You get to play an animal spirit, you get to draw, the graphics are beautiful, and your actions improve the world around you. It's a little violent for very young girls but a version that toned down the violence and cranked up the creativity could be a hit!

[David Bowman]

I'm in the game industry. I have a 9 year old daughter and 8 year old son. I'm totally in support of Ubisoft's right to meke these games, but desperately want better for my daughter.

The young men who dominate this industry almost always start any new game design discussion with "We need to make a game that we want to play!". Which makes sense to them and leads to high quality games of a specific type. We need more diversity in the people making the games. To that point: we are hiring for a programmer. This job is posted at www.certainaffinity.com. We have only had men apply, so, it is highly likely that a man will be hired. Unless women are applying for these jobs, nothing is going to change. I know there are brilliant women out there who want to make great games, but we can't hire them if they aren't applying.

David Bowman

[Alice]

Yeah, the not-enough-female-programmers-to-go-round thing is a recognised issue: that'll take a generation to work out, if not two, as females are often (I hear) less likely to be encouraged towards maths and science as chaps.

Still, it's not just programmers the industry needs: game designers, artists, producers, management, marketers, strategists and CEOs can also be female :)

But really, like I said, my biggest issue is that normal games probably won't be marketed to girls like these dolly ones are. And that's a shame.

[Peter Kemmer]

I worked as an engineer on the Petz franchise (from which Babyz, and now even Horsez is based) before it got sold off to big corporate game companies AS a franchise. That's about when I left. :)

I think the rationales people assume we had for originally making these games are WAY off. First and foremost, the Petz games were always an attempt to simulate realistic interaction with a virtual character that can express a narrative on the computer. Babyz is an extension of that idea. Andrew Stern, a huge driving force behind both Petz and Babyz, saw them as vehicles to both model and tell a story (as simple as it might be) more than as an appeal to girls to buy our products.

Why did we pick pets, and eventually babies, as the subject material then? Mainly because the interactions with either are simple and well defined. People know what to expect from a pet, and the same goes for a baby, so creating an experience that plays into these pre-conceptions is substantially more achievable than modeling, say, dialogue with an autonomous simulated adult. In fact, Andrew's gone on to create 'Façade' to do just that, now that the groundwork has been laid by Petz & Babyz. Petz & Babyz were just the 'baby steps' (as it were) along a path towards fully autonomous virtual actors.

P.F.Magic, the original creators, had an excellent mix of male and female staff. Approximately 50% of the art department, 20% of engineering, 75% of QA, and 90% of marketing were staffed by women, and they were intimately involved at all stages of planning and implementation. Don't think it was just us guys sitting around trying to figure out how to exploit a market niche!

Finally, and on a personal note, we put a lot of work into the Petz series, it's kind of sad to hear it dismissed out of hand as crap just because it doesn't have a conventional story line. I don't know, maybe they've butchered the franchise, but it was quite a technical feat at the time it was released. How many other software titles even HAVE autonomous characters that you can interact with in a free-form, realistic way? Contemporary games like Oblivion that make a stab at filling out the behavior of in-game characters to make them behave more realistically STILL don't come close to the depth of interaction available in the Petz-based products, and they were first released in the mid 90's! It took Nintendogs a full decade to finally rip us off, and the dogs' behavior isn't any more complicated... it's even simplified in many ways compared to Petz.

I guess you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Make an open-ended, kid-friendly, and truly interactive game that users of all ages and sexes BESIDES teenage boys can really identify with (boys, burdened with the need to prove their manhood, must NOT like cute kittens or caring) and get dinged for providing stereotypical fluff, as if it's a calculated ploy.

Not that any of this criticism matters much from my point of view, I take more than enough pride in that period of my life. Not only did Petz sell unfathomably well for a 'software toy', developing a cult following that still exists to this day, it actually inspired MORE THAN ONE TEENAGE GIRL to send in fully realized, shockingly detailed functional specs for Horsez (a product that didn't get made until almost a decade after I left) and inspired another girl to literally risk life and limb running back into her home to save a copy of her pet Catz to floppy right before the building got hit by a tornado and destroyed. If that's not providing personal, meaningful, and inspiring software to girls, I don't know what is.

Here's hoping I don't sound TOO defensive, eh? :)

[Alice]

Heh Peter! I played Catz. I loved it - except I played it on a mac, and one day I came back from lunch, and my designer workmate had taken a fullscreen screenshot, then chopped up my cat and distributed bloody chunks of him across the screen, then left it full screen so it looked like that was the game was showing.

I got back from lunch and stopped dead in my tracks, and he said, "you forgot to feed your cat, and he exploded", and for a minute there, I believed him. The whole company (all 12 of us) was waiting for the moment when I realised what he had done - they were cracking up.

I've been ever so slightly traumatised by tamagotchi-games ever since ;)

Anyway, to reiterate the point, the content isn't so awful - it's the grouping (cooking, babies, shopping together), the packaging and the belief behind the system that this is all little girls want. It means even less choice for the little girl who wants an adventure..

[Rob]

Ubisoft sponsor an all-girl gaming clan called the Fragdolls.. ok it's a bit contrived, but it's something isn't it?

http://www.fragdolls.com/

[Alice]

A bit contrived? It was put together *by* Ubi, and a very successful marketing move too, having girls who frag in matching cute teeshirts.

I wouldn't say this would exonerate them for having a lack of imagination: actually - this reinforces it.

[Jay and Laura]

LIES LIES LIES! What a crap game, girls dont just like that stuff, thats just wierd. We like mario and pokemon! so its just a big liiiieeeeeee!
Make the game, but no one will buy it because its that crap.

[IC]

Alice,

"babyz" is not a spelling mistake, there is a cartoon franchise called "Bratz" that has the same deliberate use of "z" as a plural.

You say that this game will sell lots because of marketing and I agree. But if you mean JUST because of marketing then I disagree. The game will be bought and enjoyed by plenty of girls because it seems fun and is perhaps a genuinely a good game at its core.

Regards,
IC

[belinda parmar]

I think the point is there is a market for these type of games and the 'cutability' factor will always be successful with very young girls. However there is an important audience who are currently overlooked. These women tend to be older women over 24 who actually feel there is no alternative for them other than Bratz or BrainTraining. This is where companies need to focus their marketing efforts as its currently untapped. My research highlighted that there are now more women who play games than men within the 24-35 age bracket. Its time companies woke up to the fact they don't have to cater to the bleedin' obvious and intelligent women with cash can be brought into gaming if they have the right games, marketing and distribution strategy.

[Doug Roberts]

It's games like these that do nothing to dispel the old myths about computer games being a male past-time developed by male geeks who have never had a conversation with a girl.

Imagine what it would be like if all the "games for guys" were about "driving fast cars", "playing football", "cops and robbers".. oh wait...

Seems like the biggest problem is a fundamental lack of imagination.

[Dan]

They forgot cooking :\

.. I'm kidding.

[Chris]

Well, lets just hope that this game shows young girls the reality of being a parent and makes them think twice before having a kid before they have at least finished full time education!
Maybe some good will come of it.

[Alex RPM]

If you want the industry to change then there needs to be more females in the games design industry itself. Stop crying about how guys aren't catering to your tastes and make the difference yourselves.

[Alex RPM]

..and just because these games are out there, it doesn't mean you're at gunpoint to buy them - girls do like a lot of Nintendo games, as far as I am concerned Nintendo have done an excellent job particularly in releasing unisex games. You might point out the fact that 'the girls are princesses' in a lot of games, but then you're ignoring the fact that not all guys in real life are these macho, moronic 'he-men with guns' types either, which is equally insulting afaic.

[Alice]

IC - babyz is indeed a spelling mistake, because even as a play on the 's' sound, it's not babys, it's babies. Should be Babiez, if anything, no?

[Alice]

Alex - tons of people *are* doing things about this, your point about Nintendo is spot on. This post was about Ubisoft not doing great things here; as for pointing out that boys get the same treatment, it's in there too. You must have missed it..

[Alex Taldren]

"Wonder why all the babyz on the cover are caucasian?"

I wonder why that was the first thing you noticed. I like to define the term racist as "someone who constantly notices race and color above anything else." According to my definition, someone who wasn't racist would have seen three human babies on that cover. Here's a little tip for you: If you want to end racism, stop seeing and making everything about race.

Sorry, that was a little off-topic. Anyway, I don't see what all the fuss is about. So software companies are trying to develop games geared toward girls and female audiences. So what? I mean, this is a good thing because it brings balance. If a girl doesn't like "Babyz" or "Horsiez" she doesn't have to buy the game right? Chances are that she won't ask for the game for Christmas if she doesn't like either. If a girl wants to play and have an adventure, she can buy one of the many, many other games that appeal to that interest.

The main argument here seems to stem from a severe hatred of what many feminists believe to be a male-engineered woman -- the stay-at-home, unemployed, soccer mom. Of course, when you think about it, most women who perform that role in life actually enjoy it and find it to be very rewarding and fulfilling. Don't try to tell me that being a writer or a business executive is as rewarding as raising your children to be responsible adults.

Games like these aren't going to appeal to girls because men told them that is what they like. They are going to appeal to girls because that is what they like innately. Granted, there are exceptions and variables, blah, blah, blah, but to suggest that this will perpetuate the "cultural endemic" is an exaggeration.

Men and women are different by nature. Just because a game appeals to the supposed innate interests of a female doesn't mean it is a terrible and sexist idea.