Playing Together, Staying Together
Henry Jenkins III and Kurt Squire
Each Holiday season, the Lion and the Lamb Project, a group of parents concerned about the marketing of violence as “child's play,” issues its Dirty Dozen list identifying twelve toys - mostly computer games - parents should avoid. Announcing this years list, Daphne White, the group's spokesman, intensified her campaign against Grand Theft Auto 3: Vice City, claiming that the video game industry's pursuit of adults comes at the expense of imaginative and engaging games for younger children.
While we strongly disagree with their push for stronger regulation of game content, we believe that the group does important work in two ways: first, in helping parents to understand that not all video games are appropriate for young children and second, in pressuring the games industry to continue to do imaginative work for kids. Historically, the games industry has divided adult and children's markets, but there is tremendous creative and market potential for multiplayer games that span those demographics.
Quick question: What game has sold more copies than The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, and every EA sports game combined? The answer: Monopoly. Since 1935, Monopoly has sold over 200 million copies, in part, because it is a game the whole family can play. Where is Monopoly’s digital equivalent? What might a family-friendly computer game look like?
Consider Animal Crossing, a multiplayer “animal village simulation game” developed and published by Nintendo for the GameCube. The games small town setting features diverse non-playable characters and can support up to four playable characters. Players buy and decorate homes, chat with other villagers, run errands for the local shopkeeper, compete in fishing contests or collect insects for the local museum. Animal Crossing's gameplay shares much with The Sims, focusing on home decoration and social interaction.
Perhaps the most innovative element is its asynchronous persistent world: meaning that the game is a multiplayer space that persists across sessions (like Everquest), but players don’t need to be logged on at the same time. One person might play for thirty minutes in the morning while others play after school or at night, but they all inhabit the same game world. Players can create and trade items (including original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games which can be played in game via an emulator), exchange letters, post messages on community bulletin boards, or interact with the game world.
At first glance, such simple game interactions as growing flowers may sound mundane, but imagine your spouses frustration as she discovers that you chopped down her beloved tree for firewood, or the simple pleasures of your best friend leaving you a note to please go to the fresh market on Sunday morning for some produce she needs to complete a quest. Families (of all types) live increasingly disjointed lives, but the whole family can play Animal Crossing even if they can rarely all sit down to dinner together. When families do gather, the game offers common points of reference and common projects to discuss. At its best, Animal Crossing harkens back to the intense social interactions that surrounded Monopoly, Risk, or Life.
Animal Crossing binds the world clock to your game system clock, creating game play elements linked to real world calendars. Log into the game on a Sunday morning and you'll find a thriving market. Other times there are fishing contests. It snows on wintry days. On Halloween, town folk go trick or treating. And of course, there are special gifts on birthdays and holidays. These timed events give players reasons for regular play. Persistent world games like Everquest could learn from this multiplayer game design by realizing that no one can play 24 / 7, and giving players real incentives for interacting with other players. The Sims Online’s contests, which allow housemates to work together for common goals, similarly encourage collaborative asynchronous play and regular participation.
We have only scratched the surface here. The thought bubbles over the animals' heads are inspired by classic cartoons and breathe life into relatively simple characters. In the games most celebrated feature, players can move to new towns by taking their games to new machines via memory cards or hooking up their Game Boy Advances to their GameCubes. When our lives are geographically dispersed, why constrain games to one machine or platform? Why not leverage this disjointedness encouraging us to take our game characters to other folks’ homes to play? This blurring of the single player/multiplayer distinction is particularly well suited for the PC, which is often shared among family members. Why do so many computer games assume single player rather than social play?
As the PC gamer demographic matures, players will demand both adults-only and family-friendly games. Animal Crossing provides one model for "family gaming." Hopefully, other developers, particularly on the PC, will also embrace this design challenge rather than designing only for adults.
Originally printed in Computer Games Magazine, April 2003