This Relationship Is Not Working

Yesterday I spent 90 minutes watching the Electronic Arts "press conference" at the G3 trade show in Los Angeles.

"Conference" is somewhat of a misnomer. This was an elaborate, carefully-scripted production that made the Academy Awards look spontaneous and unaffected. Like all game companies, EA was there to tout the forthcoming titles in its repertoire.

To be honest, I was looking for any rays of hope about the fate of Pet Society, the Playfish game for which EA paid $300+ million less than four years ago. But I also wanted to understand more about why a company would be so intransigent about selling an intellectual property, so eager to jettison the past and move on.

As I watched game after game highlighted on the vast convention stage, with thundering sound effects to match, I began to notice something. Where were all the women?

My son and his friends, now 40-somethings, have been gamers for the past 20+ years. The women in their circle, married or single, are just as into gaming as the men. But onstage, I saw only one woman operating a console, among several dozen men. There were two female figures onscreen: at least the fantasy woman of today is powerful and active, not a frail flower awaiting rescue.

Are women still invisible in this fantasy world for men who at heart are teenaged boys? Seriously. It's not 1980, when you expect the women to take notes and make coffee.

And the games themselves. Yes, they are brilliantly programmed with hyper-realism. They may be great fun for people who are just coming of age and don't have a lot of real life data to interfere with what they see onscreen.

For me, those shining towers crumbling will forever evoke the horror of watching the 9/11 attacks over and over, trying to grasp the terrible thing that was happening. The viewpoint of a character taking over a building somewhere in a desert climate: didn't I see that footage on news coverage from some intrepid photographer embedded with our troops?

And a game about wild driving. Oh please. Just get on the freeways in the Bay Area. Someone will inevitably whip in front of your car like a lane-splitting motorcycle because they've honed their driving skills on games like this. I had enough real-time driving adventure, thank you, hitting a metal object in the fast lane, shredding my tire, and driving on the rim across four lanes of traffic in Oakland. Real life delivers enough excitement for me. (But I'd gladly watch a program showing how their director made it happen; a short glimpse behind the scenes was quite interesting.)

Plants vs. Zombies is EA's idea of cute, which the plants are, in a perky, Pixar-like way. But when you've watched your loved ones turn into zombies, so to speak, under the depredations of advanced age, and dealt with their collapsing houses, zombies are hardly balm for the soul. Then there was a role-playing game set in the Inquisition. Torture and religious persecution, what's not to like! The irony of selling expensive games in which you fight for survival, running on equipment that many who struggle in life cannot afford, is not lost on me either.

It struck me, these dudes are stuck in their first chakra, so to speak. Where it's all about sex and survival. This is a normal place to be when you are a 15-year old guy. I've raised one, so I speak from experience. Those were the years when I often sighed that my son was going to wind up in M.I.T. or jail, and I wasn't sure which. Raising boys can be tough sledding. Kudos to both sides for surviving the teens.

There's nothing wrong with guys being guys, or loving sports, or honing your competitive skills. It's just that as humans, we are so much more than sex and survival.

In introducing a wrestling game, one presenter pontificated, "Fighting is the earliest universal sport." Historians and anthropologists might differ, with dice and early board games like Go, or throwing bones having a long pedigree. And what about the teamwork involved in taking down a hairy mammoth for dinner, or in discovering the ripest berries and herbs that won't poison the tribe? I suspect cooperation is even more essential than fighting for human survival, but we are stuck with the "fight" metaphor as a way of living.

Apparently EA has decided that only those who feed their inner 15-year-old boy are their target market. That's their call as a business, like Abercrombie and Fitch wanting to drive fat people out of their stores.   As a woman who derived so much joy from the fine product EA is now tossing out like old athletic shoes, I want to shout at them:

"There is so much more to human beings than the mere struggle for survival. Where are the games that stimulate other parts of your brain? That urge you to explore beauty and wonder and empathy? That let you express the odd mixture of love and frustration and play and exhaustion and loss and recovery that humans undergo every day, everywhere? Games that enhance our lives and increase our enjoyment of the world around us? Games that can appeal to people of any age, that transcend language? Games that don't need sex and violence and 3-D graphics to give enjoyment?"

Pet Society is one of the rare games that could be played with satisfaction by anyone, child or grandparent, sophisticate or rube, with people whose language you could not speak. I know I'm shouting into the wind here, but I don't care. I shout for those who have no language, no voice; for those who found refuge and hope in a simple game while recovering from illness. I shout for the small children who aren't really supposed to be on Facebook but who play with their relatives and are training to be the computer whizzes of the future. It's been a grand part of our lives, and we will stand by our pets as long as we are able.

Saving Gaming for the Rest of Us

"Anyone who can't make money off Sports Night doesn't deserve to be in the business of making money." —Aaron Sorkin, Sports Night

The game companies of the world are gathering this week in Los Angeles for E3 2013, a major conference in the world of game development. Electronic Arts will hold a press conference at 1:00 on Monday.

I am looking at the E3 site, and other sites about gaming, like AppData, which tracks numbers of users for all apps on Facebook.

I am trying to make sense of the larger world where it makes economic sense for a corporation to spend over $300 million buying a successful company and to throw that investment away less than four years later, as Electronic Arts is doing with Playfish and its products.

Pet Society is still up there on AppData, as EA's third most popular game, with over 100,000 individual players each day, and over 1 million players a month. Some companies should be very happy to have those numbers. Pet Society is still ranked 157 overall, in AppData's odd way of lumping online games in with Yahoo, Yahoo toolbar, Bing, and Pinterest as apps. This is technically correct, but in terms of how real people use computers, lumping apples with oranges.

And I'm thinking, EA, do you actually enjoy being named Worst Company in America for two years in a row by Consumerist? Are you going for three?

And what about you, game companies, and game analysts? I'm looking at the categories for games on the E3 site. Here's are the genres discussed on their forum:

Action

Adventure

Driving

Fighting

First Person Shooter

Puzzle

Strategy, Real-Time Strategy

Role-Playing

Rhythm and Music

Simulation

Survival Horror 

Third-Person Shooter

Wrestling

I am not decrying other games. I merely note, there is almost no slot, no pigeonhole here for the sort of game that Pet Society is: a focusing, open-ended, noncompetitive experience where you can apply your natural creative impulse. Imagination. That what-if, let's-pretend capacity that's innate to small children, and gradually crushed out of us through rote schooling and formalized jobs. Creativity. Call it what you will. We value it at its highest flowering in art and literature, but don't know how to encourage the creativity that lies in everyone.

My husband loves comic books. Always had. Tried drawing his own. Not very well. In Pet Society he found a place where the brilliantly designed elements fell into place for him. He found an inner child in his pet Scoop, and created a brilliant little world for his pet. All the pet friends and their players could come and play with Scoop's toys, and wander through his house. 

What genre is there for the gentle games that soothe us, delight us, and awaken a sense of wonder? Can computers hone creativity as well as reaction times? Can we light up other areas of the brain besides puzzle solving or heroic rescue or quest retrieval? 

The players of Pet Society are making a stand. We want to be noticed. It's more than just losing our personal pet. Real life pets get old and die, we grieve, and go on. 

We protest the willful destruction of a beautiful, unique environment that encouraged creativity. That could be played with joy by people of any age, or any language. Where every pet and every room in every players house was as unique as a fingerprint. Standard-issue goods were combined in wonderful ways. 

Pet Society was a brilliant achievement in programming and in visual and sound design. Since it defied categories, and looked on the surface like Second Life for 3-year-olds, it may never have received the acclaim it deserved. It's been a marvelous experience that's held my attention for the past four years. One flick of the switch, and that world will be dark forever on Friday.

How someone can not make money off this intellectual property, with its devoted following of over a million fans? As Forbes wisely observed, social games should have a plan for the life of the game, including how it winds down. Can other companies make what they consider good money housing Facebook games? Is a subscription model possible? Mark Zuckerberg, don't you want happy customers  too? Does anyone at G3 see that there's an audience out there that is not being served? 

This sudden closure has won EA a new round of antagonists. Pet Society players are already boycotting EA products. Unless Monsanto somehow gets on the radar of Consumerist voters, that third year title could be already cinched.