(so big it didn’t fit into the picture)

Nowadays the Stubnitz is a touring venue for “strange and interesting events” and while it’s still a working ship, some bits have been converted:

In keeping with the unorthodox venue, the event itself was also quite freeform. Back in the Rear Hold were short, informal talks about many aspects of game design from game story writing to psychology to pinball. Organiser David Hayward kicked things off with an introductory talk wherein he courageously questioned some of the more disquieting aspects of game culture, misogyny in particular. In a spirit of optimism, David also believes that small developers are creating games which are far, far more interesting than anything from the major players, including the supposedly “ironic” first-person-shooters which aren’t anywhere near as subversive as their creators would like to believe.

Mike Bithell talked about video games writing and asked us if we can “Write it like it’s Die Hard”. He meant that in general, writers are scared of building character development in games, and tend to imbue characters with a general sense of pathos or vague sadness. Instead , we should be inspired by the fact that, in Die Hard, every character has a story arc. Mike thinks that video games, unlike films, are very much still in their infancy and we should be inspired by late 80s action movies to get the basics right before attempting anything more sophisticated.

Ben Milsom and Mark Shaw talked about their love affair with pinball machines, namely the Dr Who pinball machine they enjoyed while working at the BBC. They pointed out how every pinball machine has a story to tell and it was difficult not to get caught up in their passion for “a game where you’re fighting against gravity with nothing but a pair of flippers.”

Caspian Prince talked about why basing game design on retro games doesn’t necessarily make for good game play. This is partly because retro games punish by design, due to their context in pubs and other social venues where there isn’t enough game play time to reward the user. To avoid ending up with frustrating games, Caspian suggests trying to remove or limit the effects or chances of punishment in games – and add more rewards! We need all four types of reward to engage players:

1. A constant slow drip feed of rewards – e.g. coins, rings

2. Random and unexpected rewards

3. Long-term goal achievements over the course of several levels

4. Regular and expected rewards (e.g. level-ups)

Most crucially, Caspian reminded us that ideally, we should stick to designing the types of games we actually enjoy playing!

Meanwhile, back in the Rear Hold, plenty of very interesting games by independent developers were getting a good play, including a demo on Oculus Rift by a group of University of Teeside students:

Still a work in progress, it was only an on-rails demo but it was really exciting to try out this new technology, especially as the game (UnderCurrent: based on a scuba diving adventure) was so beautiful.

Up on rear deck, further exciting and audience-involving things were happening, such as a Jam Game Jam - which was literally a game jam, with jam. Nat Marco from Honeyslug designed the challenge to be inclusive to everyone (not just developers) and the rules were simple: design a game using only jam, wooden spoons, sugar cubes, fruits and other kitchen essentials… in 30 minutes. All the entries were impressive but my vote went to Licktionary, wherein players make pictures by piping jam through a funnel, and their partner tries to guess what the picture is by licking it. Ok, it didn’t really work, but it was suitably gruesome and anarchic.

Thank you to David Hayward and the other organisers for a really surprising, fun and informative day!

Awards season is clearly upon us – we are absolutely thrilled to announce that our suite of games for CBBC, Sport Superstars, has been victorious in the Celtic Media Festival awards. Sport Superstars picked up a gong in the Kieran Hegarty Innovation category.

Sport Superstars, which went live in 2012, was produced for the CBBC website by BBC Scotland and was commissioned to motivate and excite children around the themes of sport and fitness, whatever their relationship with sport. The suite of games allows users to train their athlete, take part in sporting competitions, and track their progress – as well as viewing training tips and feedback videos featuring their favourite CBBC presenters.

The Celtic Media Festival aims to acknowledge and celebrate excellence in Celtic film, television, radio and digital media and promote the richness and diversity of Celtic cultures today. The Kieran Hegarty Innovation category recognises websites and mobile delivery platforms or their content and applications that display skills of innovation, interactivity and creativity.

Here’s a picture of the truly Celtic trophy:

The Kanoti Our Approach animation has just been awarded a prestigious Silver Communicator Award, in the Online Advertising & Marketing: Rich Media B-to-B category.

This year, the Communicator Awards received over 6000 entries and we are chuffed to have had our entry recognised.

The intention of the animation was to show the essence of our approach purely through simple forms, their properties, colours and movements. The rationale was also to convey the notion that as humans we see stories in everything – even inanimate shapes can be filled with character and meaning.

Using only beautiful, simple imagery, the sequence demonstrates how clients’ messages are transformed into stories and communicated in the digital landscape.  The animation begins with an abstract, psychedelic ‘creative machine’ which swallows up directionless messages from the ether; these reappear at the end of a creative process as a beautifully formed story-like entity. This ‘perfectly formed story’ floats over a densely populated landscape before descending and interacting with its populous in the form of a series of abstract animations. Each one visually expresses the facets of our mission: to create beautifully crafted stories that communicate powerfully to entertain, inform, inspire and move people into action.

Founded over a decade ago, The Communicator Awards is an annual competition honoring the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and identity work for print, video, interactive and audio. The Awards are the leading international creative awards program recognising creative excellence for communication professionals.

(A word of warning, this post is relatively long but if you get to the bottom there’s a Vimeo playlist of all our favourite bits of the festival!)

Team Kanoti’s John Bond and Laurie Rowan jetted off to overcast Berlin last month to eat Currywurst and attend the rather niche and spectacular Pictoplasma Contemporary Character design and Art Festival/Conference. Pictoplasma is a celebration of every interpretation of character design, that definition being broader than I had initially thought. Maybe it seems exhaustive to dedicate the whole program to such a specific element of design but when you consider the sheer volume and range of applications character design presides over in daily life, it’s truly extensive. Artists, illustrators, animators, designers, stitchers, crafters and doodlers were invited to exhibit, discuss, and collaborate with everything to do with character design for 5 days straight, to the point where when you close your eyes the network of veins and bacteria spots look like Jon Burgerman doodles.

The festival aspect of the event referred primarily to the ‘character walk’, a network of pop-up shops and galleries across Berlin where featured artists exhibited and sold their work as well as hosting interactive events. One gallery had a half-pipe in it. I couldn’t go on it because I messed up my European health insurance application.

At the centre of it all was a three day conference. Here, artists took to the stage at the impressive Babylon Cinema on Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße to present and talk through their work at length, exploring its process and meaning as well as charting their career progression and the evolution of their work as a whole. Each talk was followed by a Q&A session which vacillated between being informative and dissolving into a convoluted appreciation battle between audience members.

To balance the academic aspect of the talks, Pictoplasma also took over the venue Platoon, an ultra modern concept building made out of undisguised shipping containers. Here they held practical workshops, portraiture by featured artists, collaborative paper VJ footage construction and a character design face-off. All fantastic fun and excitement, which reinstalled in me the vitality of the medium. But I’m going to focus on the talks.

With 27 speakers in attendance it’s difficult to select highlights, but let’s. There were a few recurring themes throughout the conference and I’ve tried to select the speakers who, to my mind, embodied these aspects best. I’ve also linked in some interviews so your view of them isn’t just based on my misinterpretations.

Felt Mistress – the value of collaboration.

Firstly Felt Mistress. Felt Mistress refers to work of seamstress Louise Evans and her partner, illustrator Jonathan Edwards, or her collaboration with other artists such as Jon Burgerman or Pete Fowler. The value of a healthy understanding of collaboration is what stood out here. Louise has a masterful approach to felt model making and reinvigorates the works of others with an exciting new aesthetic while retaining the qualities that define their work.

If you want to read more, there’s a good interview with Felt Mistress here:

http://inkygoodness.com/blog/interviews/felt-mistress-creature-couture/

El Grand Chamaco – The power of ingenuity and social media

El Grand Chamaco demonstrated the importance of perseverance and self-promotion, harnessing the power of social media to propel himself from absolute obscurity to ridiculous levels of exposure. He’s now the most followed illustrator on Twitter, if I remember correctly.

His was an interesting story as he grew up in the most remote circumstances imaginable. He lived in a tiny town in Mexico where the only outside stimulus he received were the 3 television channels available which seemed to exclusively screen news, soap operas and cartoons. He took inspiration from people like Tex Avery but believed that cartooning and character design were the reserve of established studios.

His village gained access to the internet 3 years ago and his world was suddenly opened up. He realised people could self generate content and went about establishing a style based around the form of three beans (have a look at his work and you’ll see what this means). He then decided he needed to find a following. He looked at Twitter and saw the potential of ‘tweet stars’, average people with no fame outside of twitter who have managed to amass in excess of 10,000 follows. He began to select tweets, illustrate them and tweet the results back to the tweet stars. Inevitably they retweeted the results and within 3 hours of joining Twitter he had gained 500 followers. From this point his profile grew and grew.

It was really inspiring to see someone decide their objective and see the potential of the tools that are available us all. Maybe it was his sudden exposure to the potential of social networking that meant he could view it pragmatically whereas it’s been normalised for those of us who have used it casually for years. I reckon it’s that because I’d hate to think that he’s just better than me.

I couldn’t find an interview with El Grand Chamaco so instead here’s some shaky footage someone took on their phone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-oBpvjpoLI

Pepper Melon – Clarity of concept and self-driven work.

Fernando Sarmiento spoke on behalf of Argentinian animation company Pepper Melon and demonstrated the importance of self generated work and fundamental understanding of minimal character design and animation.

The most in depth example of this was their work for soup brand Lucchetti (pictured). Their brief was to create a series of adverts to promote the soup in a domestic setting using a housewife character. Fernando and friends were determined not to subscribe to the domestic goddess archetype and set about trying to find a less stereotypical approach. Throughout many design variations they repeatedly scaled back the detail until eventually they removed everything but a loose semblance of gender, family position, but most prominently the characterisation.

Here’s a compilation of the ads:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKP_m96rpB0

If you want to know more you can read an interview with Pepper Melon here:

http://creativity-online.com/news/pick-a-peck-of-peppermelon/133311

Also when Jeff Soto took to the stage he threw big bags of sweets into the audience, one of which almost punted John Bond full in the face.

The thing that really stuck me about the festival was having the rare opportunity to glimpse the working method behind familiar designs. Just how long and hard everyone works is assumed but can’t really be grasped until it’s demonstrated. The amount that is rejected, reconsidered, tweaked and reconstituted in the pursuit of something distinctive in the face of what the organisers would refer to as a ‘culture of visual white noise’. It’s a very inspirational affair that leaves one humbled but ultimately excited.

The true value of this festival was total creative immersion which is a hard thing to evoke through a dispassionate diary of events so instead I think it best to conclude with our pick of the fest, after all art is enjoyed best when shown, rather than described from memory by a tired man.

This link leads to a Vimeo playlist of what was legally available of our favourite work shown at the festival:

http://bit.ly/103z7st

The Old Market theatre in Hove was filled to the brim last Friday evening as people gathered for the 10^th Glug event: a special ‘talks-only’ night featuring four talented speakers who came to share stories of their inspirations, successes and, perhaps most interestingly, some of their failures.

Starting off the talks was Tim Diacon, lead interaction designer for the award winning digital design agency Method. Immediately captivating the audience’s attention with his title slide ‘How not to set up a business,’ Tim began by telling us, with confidence and a great deal of humour, the story of a recent unsuccessful business venture.

It all began, he claims, with his wife, who put him in contact with Chris, a product engineer that she had met through the RCA. Chris has a great talent for taking a concept through to market, he explained, so it was only natural that they decided to combine forces and embark upon a business venture together…in the most startling of fields.

It was through this collaboration that Made to Pleasure was born.

Tim proceeded to elaborate on their business plan; one that comprised the creation of a professional website and in-depth branding decisions, followed by a rather unconventional bout of user testing! He then spoke of their launch strategy, joking that their PDF press release, Facebook status and single tweet was far from sufficient marketing and encouraged ‘a slow race to market’.

Despite this, Made to Pleasure did find brief fame, the general public latching onto the wonderfully built ‘design your own’ feature on their website, creating hordes of weird and wonderful designs, from torches and babies bottles, to a rather original ‘Silver Beiber’, signature hairdo and all.

Tim’s story had the whole audience in fits, at points (not least because of his wonderful array of slides) but, as he came to his conclusion, he spoke of a very real and important lesson for any business person. ‘Don’t do something that you have absolutely no interest in,’ Tim advised as he brought his talk to an end. ‘You have to do something you’re passionate about – that you’re willing to give up your job for. Running a company is a lot of work.’

Next up was Luise Vormittag, who works under the name of ‘Container’. Though her background is in Illustration, Luise works across many different media and often works in collaboration with other artists.

During her talk she spoke about several installation/interactive pieces that she has been involved in, including ‘The Haunted House’; an installation that involved viewers crawling through a series of tiny, mysterious rooms, making their way eventually to one where she sat awaiting them, drinking sherry.

Luise talked in depth about the importance of the body and the viewer within her installation pieces, emphasising that these works are ‘very much about the body interacting with the space.’ Of the Haunted House, in particular, she said: ‘it is about creating a real sense of spatial disorientation: making people feel completely discombobulated by the room.’ She even went so far as to say that the real point of interest about these sorts of works was ‘ungraspable’ to her as the artist, because it existed purely inside her viewers.

Luise’s talk was especially interesting because it touched upon both her commercial work and her more personal, or experimental, work. Hearing how these two aspects work alongside each other is always a fascinating thing and was something our next speaker, Adrian Johnson, also picked up on during his talk.

Adrian Johnson’s highly crafted and strongly identifiable graphic work has landed him some major clients over the years, and has contributed to him being considered as one of the leading illustrators currently practicing. Describing himself as ‘an illustrator, an image-maker – whatever you want to call it theses days’, Adrian spoke a lot about integrity and compromise.

He commented on how, as an artist working commercially, you have to learn how to ‘cuddle your integrity’ whilst at the same time ‘acknowledging that compromise is integral to what you do, in terms of making a living.’ It’s the focus on this balance that drove his talk throughout, and is something that Adrian is certain most creatives battle with on some level.

Despite acknowledging that compromise is essential, it seems that it’s Adrian’s unique style that has gained him the most attention and success over the years . His work doesn’t conform to cliques or trends – never aspires to be ‘contemporary’ – and Adrian claims, ‘I’ve never been cool, never been in Dazed and Confused – never been fashionable.’ It is this notion that adds a certain charm to his work; a charm that has attracted clients such as Paul Smith, Adidas, Stüssy and The New York Times.

Glug Brighton is curated and hosted by Agency Rush and Crush Creative – thanks for an amazing night guys! We were inspired and we’re already looking forward to the next one…

We are proud to announce that Uplifted, our app for Channel 4 Education, has been selected as an Official Honoree in the 17^th Annual Webby Awards, in the Games category.

This year, the Academy has acknowledged outstanding entries as Official Honorees, a distinction awarded to the top 10% of all work entered that exhibits “remarkable achievement”. We’re really chuffed to be honoured alongside 10 other  releases like Channel 4’s The Snowman and The Snowdog game.

David-Michel Davies, Executive Director of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, said:

Having awarded the best of the Web for 17 years, we are constantly impressed by the extent of creativity showcased by our Webby Honorees. Your work continually furthers the scope of Online innovation, setting the standard of excellence on the Web. We want to extend our thanks to you and your team for producing remarkable work for us to recognize.

For more information about our honoured project Uplifted, check out our Showcase and blog post. Uplifted is a game all about being happy, which challenges the user to explore 20 delightful levels and restore a beleaguered planet to happiness.  Use the links below to try it for yourself:

iOS version (iTunes store)

Android version

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new online toy Dot Shop, commissioned by Tate Kids. The application, tying in with a major new exhibition at the Tate, lets you create your very own works of Pop Art – and it’s playable on iPads too. Dot Shop was created using HTML5 which is a relatively new technology, so here’s a few tips and techniques about the development side of this project:

Most major browsers support many of the new HTML5 elements and APIs. One of those new elements is the Canvas, which is used for drawing graphics on the fly, VI scripting, and usually JavaScript. The Canvas element is currently supported by Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari for both desktop and most mobile devices. Coming from an ActionScript and Flash background it didn’t take us long to learn how to use Canvas and EaselJS as well as the new features and optimisations for mobile and tablet devices. To help us on our way to HTML5 greatness we used a suite of JavaScript libraries from CreateJS that includes EaselJs and PreloadJS. We also leveraged Greensock‘s JavaScript library TweenLite which was used to control all of the animations and screen transitions.

Performance was an issue, mainly on the iPad and iPad3. One of the big graphical elements which is used in the app is a drop shadow. Unfortunately this had to be dropped when viewing on a mobile or tablet device, but doing so gave us a huge speed boost and as well as smoother animation and user experience.

One of the stages in DotShop allows the user to paint onto their image with the use of a brush, an eraser and a palette of colours. To get the eraser to work we used the globalCompositeOperation “destination-out” so that everything under the drawn line would become invisible. This also meant that all of the painted lines needed to sit within their own Canvas. If they didn’t, then we would be a erasing all the way through the Canvas instead of just the painted lines. We first implemented a version of the EaselJS paint demo but this unfortunately caused a negative impact on performance as the user drew more and more lines. To get around this, we extended a DisplayObject and cached it so it was its own Canvas. Doing so allowed us to write the current draw command once and not on every frame update. This dramatically improved the users’ experience.

ImageMagick is used to process the images along with the php extension IMagick. This allowed us to process the images on the server  (client side) instead of on the user’s device. We first attempted to implement the image processing using JavaScript, making it client side, but because image processing is very CPU and memory intensive it caused mobile devices to grind to a halt and ocassionally the browser to crash. Another option would have been to use WebGL to process the users image, but at the time of developing the app, WebGL was not enabled in Safari on IOS.

This was one of our first major HTML5 projects (following on from last year’s The Kensington System) and we’re all very proud of it. So is the client at Tate Kids:

Dot Shop is an excellent, innovative app that enables our visitors – in the Tate Kids tradition – to learn and be creative through play. This is our first foray into HTML5 – and it really does allow our audience to have the best quality user experience on iPads for the first time. The close collaboration between Tate and Kanoti meant that we were able to adjust our approach to using these new technologies to get the best possible end result, which I’m super pleased with!

- Sharna Jackson, Editor at Tate Kids

Before the build

When defining a new game, we find it useful to try and answer the following types of questions whilst bearing in mind the age and gender of the target audience:

1. Stimulation: Is the game frantic or leisurely? Is the action violent/slapstick? How much information is there to take in at one time?
2. Reward and challenge: Is there a positive feedback system? Is the player rewarded for participation as well as success? Is the player penalised for failure? Is the game play harsh or forgiving? Is the player rewarded for collaboration?
3. Genre: Does the game fall within a recognisable genre like action, adventure, racing, strategy or puzzle, which might attract certain types of players?
4. Play Environment: Are the graphics bright and welcoming or dark and ominous? How much/what kind of sound effects and music do we hear? Is there a voice over and what tone does it take? Is there a storyline?
5. Personalisation: What options are there for personalisation? Can the player create an avatar? How is the avatar portrayed? Can the player collect special rewards or badges?

During the build

In the process of developing games for boys and girls from preschool age to GCSE, we regularly meet with members of our target audience for focus groups and user testing. We observe their experience of playing the game and take on as much feedback as possible. Are there any generalisations we can draw from these sessions? It’s extremely difficult to say, but here’s just a few of the sorts of things we have discovered in the course of user testing:

Girls are more likely to choose the tutorial.

We can’t be certain whether, as posited by Sheri Graner Ray, this reflects a difference in learning style or if the girls were simply more likely to do what they thought was expected of them. However, the girls we meet with seem to prefer to know what to do before the challenge begins and won’t assume they can just pick it up instinctively.

Very young girls prefer to avoid chaos or opportunities for failure.

The preschool girls we have spent time with tended to most enjoy the chance to explore, take part in role play, and be creative within safe boundaries, without running the risk of “failing” or upsetting the status quo. Anything overly unexpected or out of control tends not to be received positively, which is a general preference amongst very young children but, in our experience, amongst young girls in particular.

But older girls aren’t afraid of a more experimental approach to design.

Primary school-aged girls sometimes seem to be slightly more open minded than their male peers when it comes to the weird and wonderful. For example, during research ahead of our CBBC Sport Superstars suite of games, we found that girls went for more unusual, slightly unsettling character designs (which were branded “messed up!” by the boys) when asked to choose their favourites.

Everybody likes to create an avatar.

It’s often assumed that avatar personalisation is “more of a girl thing” but in our experience we are seeing boys taking just as much time as girls to craft an analogue of themselves for use in a game.

We at Kanoti (we are a fairly evenly-spread team of men and women) also find it helpful to share stories of childhood gaming experiences to aid our understanding of other people’s preferences. Ultimately everyone is going to have a different idea of what makes a great game, but there are certain genres which we tend to find shared experience in. Platformers, puzzle games, point and click adventure games and strategy often figure high in these conversations. We’ve talked about how games like Sim City, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Sim Hospital provided a slow-burn satisfaction of nurturing and managing a complex system and watching it flourish (or die, based on your involvement!), in direct contrast with the instant gratification of first person shooters, for example. Puzzle games like Tetris or Columns unsurprisingly held a universal appeal, as did point and click games like Monkey Island, which allowed us to explore a rich storyworld and uncover strange characters and mysterious plot twists.

And finally: what about the findings from neuroscience, such as those presented by Dr Paul Howard-Jones, whom I blogged about earlier this year? For example, researchers have found that video games stimulate the brain’s reward system, resulting in increased release of dopamine. The increase happens in the area of the brain associated with pleasure, reinforcement and addiction formation and it is believed that men experience more dopamine release than women when exposed to the same stimulus. Most relevant to us, in games where the reward is uncertain (i.e. you have to take a gamble), this stimulates maximum dopamine release. Boys are most responsive to this type of reward, ergo: boys may prefer games of chance and uncertainty.  82% of online gamblers are men, a figure which makes sense in light of these findings. However, as interesting as this kind of data is, it’s not obvious how we can make best use of it to help us make great games which as many different kinds of people as possible can enjoy, so we prefer to use our own intuition and first-hand experience when making game design decisions.

In summary: our current approach to gender-conscious game design is founded on two basic principles: speak to your target audience, and always question your own assumptions. We learn something new and unexpected from every project we work on and it’s obvious that if there is an answer to Sheri Graner Ray’s question, “But what if the player is female?”, it’s not a simple one.

A great game is a great game regardless of who it’s designed for. But there are still issues of exclusion that surround the gaming industry and games themselves which need to be addressed (if in doubt, see the 1reasonwhy hashtag for starters).  For the purposes of this post I’m going to focus on games for young girls because I think there are specific questions unique to this audience, because this is where we have the most direct experience, and because there is a sense of urgency in ensuring that the next generation of women take positive lessons from the games they play.

In this first post, I’m going to take a brief look at some episodes from the history of “pink software” to prompt thought on whether the types of concerns explored by early designers of games specifically for girls are still relevant or necessary today. In the second post, I’ll take a look at some of the current research from neuroscience and share some of the insights we’ve gained from user testing sessions and focus groups with girls and boys (and from our own childhood experiences) with the intention of moving towards a gender-conscious approach to designing games.

Pink Software

The 1990s saw a rise in software designed specifically for girls, including McKenzie & Co. (published by Her Interactive) in which you play as a high school junior trying to find a date for the prom. Tough decision-making included choosing between local heart-throbs Brett and Brandon. However, the real success happened in 1996 with Barbie Fashion Designer which eventually sold over a million copies. So far, so predictable.

In 1997, Paul Allen and Brenda Laurel founded Purple Moon, with the intention of making smart computer games for girls. Brenda Laurel is credited with being one of the first people to re-evaluate who plays games and why, carrying out over 2 years of research with her pre-adolescent female target audience (her 1998 TED talk is worth a watch).

Her findings led to the publication of the Rockett series of games, which could be described as “friendship adventures” about “a spunky pre-teen girl”. Laurel believes the Rocket games incorporated the issues that matter to young girls and therefore gave them a sense of validation. All the same, she came under lots of criticism (and continues to do so) for perpetuating stereotypes about what girls want, built on the assumption that “girls don’t like the ‘overtly competitive’ games that ‘boys like’”.

By the end of the 90s, games focused on dating, shopping, fashion, dancing, popularity and socialising dominated the girls’ game market. Yet sales were a fraction of the traditional (i.e. male) games market and many wondered whether girls were interested in gaming at all. The statistics very much suggest otherwise. Perhaps game designers were so busy developing games with supposedly “female themes” that they forgot to consider whether the games were actually fun to play?

In 2003, Sheri Graner Ray’s important book “Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market” was published, which questioned why the games industry was producing games to primarily target males aged 13 – 25 when women made up 52% of internet users and 70% of casual online gamers. According to Graner Ray, the main barriers that prevented women from accessing these games are/were:

1.       Learning styles

Most tutorials are designed to appeal to the “explorative” learning style preferred by men, as opposed to the “imitative” one (supposedly preferred by with women). The result: players with imitative learning styles often feel lost before they even begin.

2.       Price of failure
Most games punish players harshly for errors (losing a life/items/progress), while women allegedly prefer games which do not result in irretrievable loss.

3.       Avatars
Both male and female avatars exhibit exaggerated physical signals of youth and fertility/virility, because they are idealised “heroes”. However, female avatars often display exaggerated physical signals of sexual receptivity as well, which cannot be said for male ones. Female players may feel uncomfortable with/ alienated by this depiction of femininity and Graner Ray suggests we use female athletes as body models instead.

4.       Communication
Graner Ray posits that video games tend to include typically “male” communication styles, i.e. “rough language”, “put-downs” and sexist language.
I’ll attempt to take a look at a couple of these barriers in relation to our findings with real-life users in the next blog post.

Meanwhile – fast forward to 2013, and with our gigantic choice of games, you might say that some of Graner Ray’s argument feels like stuff of the past. While most of us must surely agree with the stance that “There is No One Kind of Girl Gamer”and accept that many, many women grow up playing traditionally “male” games like FPSs, some of the issues brought up in “Gender-Inclusive Game Design” may still be very much relevant. Especially:

5.       Production Environment
Females 18 and over are the fastest-growing group of players in the video games industry so it would make sense to employ people to make games who have a first-hand understanding of this demographic. Yet the mainstream game industry is heavily male-dominated. Certainly in terms of numbers (see the 2005 Game Developer Demographics Report), and possibly in terms of attitude. Granted, casual games attract a relatively gender-balanced audience and many women do work in the games industry, but computer games are still generally designed and developed by men.

Unless the people making the games take the time to listen to and consider the experience of all kinds of potential gamers, their output will be exclusive and/or unsuccessful. It’s not always easy to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, especially if those shoes are small and pink. At the same time, perhaps it would be productive to move towards shifting the focus away from creating “girl-specific” games and concentrate on creating great games for more people to enjoy. There may not be a magic formula for pleasing everybody, but there are ways to avoid excluding and alienating vast swathes of potential gamers.

16 of us entered fabulous homemade cakes in the “sponge” category which were then judged by Tom from the Real Patisserie.

We had everything from a magical rainbow dream cake:

To a post-apocalyptic Black Sabbath cake:

There was a nail-biting tiebreak which was then resolved by Andrew Kay, The Latest‘s resident food critic. Thanks Andrew!

Sadly there could only be one winner, and it was:

There’s still plenty of cake to be had so if you’re nearby, come down to Unit 7, Level 5 North in New England House for a taste!