A blog turning into a game

We’ve been away from this blog for some time (we know, quite a long time), but we’ve gotten more requests for iPhone games for kids, so wanted to send you some of our favorites.  A growing number of kids are using the iPhone so it is not surprising to see so many more new iPhone applications for kids on the market today.  Given that the holidays are approaching, what better gift for your kids, nieces, nephews, or grandchildren, than an under-$2-educational game on the iPhone? Here is our list:

1) Learnl Baby - Colors and Shapes (from Orange Design) - Your youngest kids can learn about colors and shapes through this simple, yet engaging educational iPhone application.

2) Learnl Preschool - Animals Coloring Book (from Orange Design) - There is no better way for kids to use the iPhone to learn about nature and animals.

At Ramo Games, we’ve seen a lot of new products for kids over the past few years - on consoles, portable devices, and especially the Internet.  One of the categories that we’ve seen grow rapidly has been iPhone games and applications for kids.  There is nothing better than handing over your iPhone to a child in the grocery cart or car (as long as they don’t throw it on the ground!).

We’re creating a whole category devoted to the iPhone, but we wanted to start by featuring our editorial team’s favorite four iPhone kids games, based on months of testing, cookies, testing, and more cookies.  These games are all available through the iTunes store.

1) Wheels on the Bus - Wheels on the Bus, by Duck Duck Moose Design, is an educational and fun interactive musical book, based on the popular children’s song and is available on the iPhone for you and your family.

2) Henry and Hailey’s Preschool Pals - Published by 3PM Studios, Henry & Hailey’s Preschool Pals is a fun, educational mix and match game designed for young children on the iPhone.

3) Brain Quest Blast Off - In this game by Modality, kids tap their way through thousands of questions as they strive to achieve genius status.  The content is based on an elementary school curriculum.

The Pew Internet project, an initiative of the non-profit think-tank Pew Center today released the results of a nationwide U.S. survey on youth and gaming, called “Teens, Video Games, and Civics.” The authors interviewed over 1,000 youth.  For those of us in the space, the broad conclusions are not surprising.  The study found that 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games.  But more detailed cuts of the data highlight some interesting facts:

For example, 65% of game-playing teens play with other people who are in the room with them.  Also, 27% play games with people who they connect with through the Internet.  Clearly, gaming is increasingly becoming a social experience for youth, a way to transplant offline relationships online, or to form ones entirely.

Also, the survey found that the game play characteristics in which teens play games are correlated to their interest and engagement in civic and political activities.  We’ve often talked about the importance of serious games, which serve some underlying purpose other than pure entertainment.  The writers of the report, note,

“Longitudinal and quasi-experimental studies have identified a set of civic learning opportunities (such as simulations of civic or political activities, helping others, and debating ethical issues) that promote civic outcomes among youth. Many of these civic learning opportunities parallel particular elements of video game play.”

The offline-online dynamics of serious game play are fascinating in terms of thinking about games that we can build that reflect the real world, but that also carry meaning past the game itself, into the real world.  This includes building context for kids and teens in important areas like political activism, charity, and social awareness.

California’s new requirement that all 8^th graders complete algebra is very ambitious given the state’s current budget crisis. The mandate, which won’t go into effect until 2011, does have a positive outcome in that politicians are finally waking up to the fact that our schools are failing to keep kids interested in math. However, is a mandate the right way to go?

In a recent San Francisco Chronicle article titled “Algebra – it’s everywhere”, Jill Tucker writes about how our current math programs may be turning kids off. In her article, she quotes Stanford Mathematics Professor Keith Devlin as stating, “”Most of us who become mathematicians do so not because of our education but in spite of it,” Devlin said. “We’re turning kids off a subject that is useful and incredibly interesting and beautiful if taught correctly.”

The Science Journal’s July 25th article titled “Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance” stated that US standardized test now show equality in math test scores between boys and girls.  Can we now put all opinions stating the contrary to rest now?   Hopefully, however we must acknowledge that we have a long way to go in terms of getting more females into traditionally male dominated careers such as engineering and science.

The first step is to help girls stay interested in math and science well into high school.  One possible opportunity to do so is with educational games focused on girls.  Educational games could help reinforce math concepts in an environment where girls can engage, discuss and explore math and science concepts with other girls who have similar interests.  Too often math and science concepts are presented in a context that favors the interests of boys more than girls.  Math games that appeal to the interest of girls could help keep them engaged and interested in math.

In general, to keep girls interested in math and science we need to focus on creating a learning environment that lets them explore and apply these concepts in a manner that is fun, safe and engaging.

Hi -

Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of one of the most comprehensive directories of kids educational games at RamoGames.com.

We’ve cataloged hundreds of games on the Internet and placed them into categories like geography, math, logic, and word. We’ve added useful metadata about each game and given users a chance to comment and rate them.

We’ve even built some of our own games including the especially fun geography map game, Asia GeoQuest (can you get 10/10 countries right?).

When talking to teachers and parents the past few months, we realized that there is no good resource for finding good quality educational games on the Internet. So we decided to put one together.

We’re still going to be forging ahead with developing our own games for kids, but RamoGames.com is a taste of what’s ahead.

Of course, the site is in beta, so we’d appreciate any feedback you have, including suggestions on games that we are missing.

Most of the team at Ramo grew up playing classic computer games like Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, and Reader Rabbit. These games were fun for us (as kids), but were educational in ways that made parents and teachers comfortable. Importantly, many of these games had educational value in the form of real-world learning, not just simple mechanical drills that would have felt too much like school. After all, where else would we learn about dysentery except in Oregon Trail? The developers of these games did a fine job building engaging products that emphasized some kind of learning to make the games meaningful beyond the simple entertainment value.

The big question is, what happened to these terrific game franchises?

The Learning Company, which was a pioneer in the edutainment space and developed titles like the ones above, got acquired by a handful of different companies, including Mattel; it is presently owned by Riverdeep. Looks like many of the original titles are still available, either in a boxed or downloadable format. The Learning Company website references nostalgic memories of Oregon Trail: “Develop solutions to help your friends and family survive the dangers of the long journey, including raging rivers, buffalo stampedes, sickness, and starvation.” Just the skills kids need to be prepared for the 21st century. Unfortunately, some of these games haven’t been updated in a few years.

What are some of your favorite memories of the classics?

There has been a significant amount of activity in the virtual world / MMOG market the past year, especially for kids. But when it comes to gaming, there are strong differences in what features and gameplay that different genders prefer. With the adult market, for example, we know that men tend to prefer MMOGs, while women prefer casual games (though this trend is changing). Yasmin Kafai at UCLA has done a substantial amount of research on gender differences in kids’ video games that is worth looking into.

Some of the research we have done, including focus groups, have raised several interesting results. For example, boys (unsurprisingly) like competition, leaderboards, and anything involving action-shooting-destruction. Guys like stories involving outer space and war. Girls care more about the underlying storyboard - the background context that the user is playing in. They also tend to enjoy customizing and dressing their avatars. Girls also tend to like racing games.

In building any product, especially gaming, picking a niche audience is vital. In addition to the technology element, there are too many creative decisions that need to be made that are impacted by who the underlying user is. Many games have built great audiences focusing on a single gender: Stardoll for girls, for example. Other sites have successfully managed to shrink the gender gap over time. Whyville, an education virtual world for kids, started out as very female-heavy, but has since shifted its audience to be more equal.

On a related note, Google announced the launch of its virtual world product, Lively, today. The product appears to be a serious challenge to the virtual world space currently dominated by Second Life. A study last year by Nottingham Trent University concluded that a significant portion of virtual world users switch genders when they register online: 70% of women and 54% of men. It will be interesting to see how this plays out with Google’s new product, which looks to be gender-neutral at first glance. Raph Koster has a good summary and discussion of the announcement on his blog.

The Social Gaming Summit in San Francisco a few weeks ago provided solid exposure to what’s happening in the games space. Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures, Andrew Chen, and Gamasutra all have great recaps on the conference.

One of the panels covered Monetization and Business Models for Social Games; Virtual Worlds News summarizes it well. Generally, gaming businesses make money in two ways, payments (such as microtransactions or subscriptions) and advertising. The Casual MMO panel at the conference acknowledged that kids 6-14 control $60B in disposable income. Tapping into that spending, however, is difficult.

There are unique challenges (and perhaps opportunities) associated with payments and advertising-based online gaming models for kids. First off, kids generally do not have credit cards. In addition, even though a growing portion of teens/kids have cell phones, at least in the U.S., handset-enabled payment mechanisms are limited. That means that parents have to be involved in the purchasing decision if kids want to subscribe to an online service. The benefits of a payment model, however, are that parents feel more invested in the product their kids are buying and may even encourage them to consume it more.

Advertising is the other revenue source. With kids products, the challenge is finding a large enough of base of brand advertisers, which is especially challenging given the youth (no pun intended!) of the in-game advertising industry. You also have the challenge of reassuring parents that the advertising will be relevant and safe for their kids, in addition to complying with any policy regulations that may exist. I was recently talking to an executive from Massive, the in-game video advertising company acquired by Microsoft, and was told that both from monetization and user experience perspectives, advertising to kids in a gaming environment was very risky and was not something they were investing in.

With payments, it seems that parents are more comfortable spending money for their children when some kind of physical asset is also delivered. Webkinz is a great example of such a product. In focus groups we have conducted, parents admitted that they bought the stuffed animal only so that their child could play in the online world — in many cases — the child would throw away the physical pet, and spend more time with its online counterpart!

Common Sense Media, a national advocacy group dedicated to the intersection of kids and the media, published an informative report that measures the Internet safety of popular social networking sites for kids.

The report measures sites across five dimensions: staff responsiveness, flagging features, privacy controls, age barriers, and content policy. Privacy controls is an interesting area from a product perspective; it is likely parents who are most concerned about how much personal information is revealed (directly or indirectly) by their kids. Even if proper privacy controls are put in place, unmonitored use of the Internet would render those controls useless. Similarly, with age barriers, kids can easily populate the birth date and “parent e-mail” fields with acceptable information so that they can complete registration, regardless of how old they actually are or if their parents were involved in the process. I’m not sure what more sites can really do to prevent misuse and adhere to COPA.

Sites that were examined include Club Penguin, Facebook, and MySpace. YouTube was included in the report as well, due to the large number of young people going to the site.

Common Sense Media is a terrific organization that does what it can to promote safe, but high-quality content for kids on the Internet. Keep up the good work!