Archive for January, 2010

Women, Myths & Video Games

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Women, especially mothers, are gatekeepers and budget masters; they own the keys to the marvellous world of consumption, proudly sat on the throne of purchasing power. Traditionally when women are mentioned in the same sentence as video games, people will automatically think it is something to do with controlling their children’s gaming habits. However, believe it or not, women do buy video-games for themselves, as part of their own personal entertainment and are now fast becoming equal in the gaming world. So next time you come across a pretty and well-equipped female Blood Elf in World of Warcraft, she is probably a real girl and not a guy pretending to be one!!

• Why have we never talked about girl gamers before?

In the USA, 40% of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (34%) than boys age 17 or younger (18%).

The reason why women didn’t get into gaming sooner, is probably down to the repelling image of female characters in video games. Very often in a secondary role, female characters have mainly been sexualised and stereotyped, which represents a real obstacle to any identification process and therefore interest in the game.

According to Helen W. Kennedy “The console games market has traditionally been very explicit in their exclusive address to a male audience. In the late 80s and early 90s both Nintendo and Sega made it very clear that to attempt to market games for girls would threaten their real market – boys and young men. Sony’s Playstation, by addressing youth culture in general, broke with this tradition”

Fortunately, this trend has changed, moving towards a set of powerful, fit, fast and precise female characters.

The Female Blood Elf - Probably Controlled by a Real Girl!!!!

• Is there a video game type for women?

Women don’t have as much time to dedicate towards video gaming as men do. Their lifestyle, children, and household care take up a lot of time on the top of their work! They are more likely to hook up with a game where they can, jumping in and out without being blocked in long-term objectives or achievements to reach.

The importance of the pace occurs with any genre of game. For example Grand Thief Auto, even though rated as one of the most violent and offensive games, does procure instant fun and entertainment, and therefore, generally, women enjoy it.

Something that EA understood very well with The Sims, is that women like to personalize their characters and create something they can identify with. The desire to escape reality in cyberspace tends to be a common element across genders; however, women do place greater importance on the customization of characters and gaming environments.

• So what’s the secret recipe for the perfect video game for girl?

Women who are into gaming, whether for work or pleasure, gather in associations to lobby for the access of video gaming careers to women, by subsidizing loans or giving career advices to young girls. Women want to see “more women making games, and thus, to make more games that women want to play.”

In reality, the number of women working in the industry is already rising: for example 60% of the developers behind The Sims are women. However, this may not be the miracle that women are waiting for. Sherry Floyd , a game designer at SOE’s Seattle studios, comments “I honestly don’t think it’s a gender issue,” she continues. “I think it’s a marketing issue.”

In the popular subconscious, women playing video games are abnormal: games are for guys. Unless they are accompanying their male partner, females are not seen as legitimate in video gaming temples (cyber cafes, game shops etc..). For example, women are more likely to under-report the number of hours the play then men, as if being a video gamer does not fit with being a women.

In statistics, female players are shown as two major clusters: casual gamers brought in by a partner or sibling, and hardcore gamers. But in reality, girl gamers are much more immersed in gaming than the stats like to show, and it’s this ability to adapt their gaming time that the industry should focus on to attract the female segment.

Playstation saw sense and avoided the 'Shrink It & Pink It' approach

• The girl gamers are crying out loud: give us a real segmentation!

As the figures show, women are now a real sub-group of the market: why not consider them as such?

Fortunately, women can salute the corporate effort to integrate female developers, as it helped the gaming industry to avoid the catastrophe of a full “shrink it and pink it” strategy. However, there is still a gap between the current offer (both products and marketing strategy) and the real landscape of female consumers.

Sources:
Entertainment Software Association
http://gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy/#top
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/02/28/women.gamers/index.html

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Unilever Global CMI Conference – Windsor

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

After years of enjoying being briefed by clients on their insight & innovation needs we at Face finally got to turn the tables yesterday and set a room full of senior client insight people one BIG challenge. At 3.30pm Face interrupted a Unilever Global CMI conference and sent delegates scurrying out into the streets of Windsor and crawling the web to get some hands on insights in the world of Oral Care. It was all just for fun, but it was great to see a group of senior people from Unilever not only interviewing each other & getting out on the street but also fully engaging with YouTube, Twitter, a variety of blogs and engaging with content produced by our own Mind-bubble women. There were a few cheeky calls to dentists, some great mother & child interviews on the streets and the shelves of local Boots and Tesco Express were stripped of toothpaste. All that was missing in the room was having consumers there in the room to work with us and get directly and actively involved in the process, but as we had plenty of mums and dads in the room, there was plenty of home truths available!

It all just showed how much can be achieved by a focused group of people in a short space of time, and how much resource there is avaible all of the time for us as research community to tap into. We can’t reveal too much about any of the outcomes, but it generated a lot of energy, enthusiasm and a huge amount of competitiveness. The final output from each team was a 2 minute film capturing their insights and the journey they went on to get there. By the time you read this the winning team will have already been announced and with Oscar season upon us soon, the likes of Cameron, Clooney & Eastwood might be starting to feel a bit anxious about their chances this year.

For those of you who were at the session and took part in making the films, you can go and watch them all by clicking on the following link <http://www.facegroup.co.uk/global-cmi-conference>. You will need the password you have been sent by email!

Thanks to all who took part for their commitment and making it such a fun session.

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Community Manager = Diplomat

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Balance is something that is essential when looking after a community of any kind. You have to get it right, you have to know your members and not stray too far from their expectations. Always make sure that you aren’t visibly favouring one member over another, and remain neutral at all times, whatever the situation.

It’s a discipline that you perfect over time, a way of dealing with things that provides you with the power to diffuse any situation and restore the balance within the community.

The Spark

Research and insight communities are based around one thing, opinions. Now opinions are brilliant, they are what Headbox and Mindbubble are built on. It is amazing comparing how peoples thought processes work and reading how people interpret information. The only problem with opinions is that they have the ability to cause serious confrontation.

All it takes is a small comment or an adverse remark and the whole community can blow up into a mini war. Sometimes users take sides and there is a full on battle, and other times it can be the whole community vs. one user, either way the community manager has to spring into action.

Identify & React

The first thing you have to do is understand exactly what the situation is… usually, if the issue is only just developing you can leave it a while, let it unfold and hope the problems resolve themselves organically. However, if you feel the situation has the potential to erupt you must be active. Unless something really serious has happened, do not automatically shut the conversation down, this can make incidents seem worse than they are and it affects everyone, rather than just those involved. Contact the participants away from the epicentre to understand what has caused the incident and find out what their intentions were – sometimes innocent actions can be misconstrued.

The majority of the time with a little force of hand and behind the scenes movement the situation can be resolved and the community moves on without any bitter taste.

Protect Opinions

This is not always the case though and opinions can cause much more serious problems in a community. It is usually very easy to see why someone or something has caused conflict; an abusive, offensive or different opinion has been said and rightly or wrongly users have reacted. It is these situations that are the most difficult to manage. Whether you agree or disagree with what has been said, as a community manager, you have to remain neutral and try and get things back on track. Obviously some comments and opinions are not tolerated and users are ejected from the community, but it is important to not just eject your way back to clarity, it affects the balance.

Variety of opinion is integral to communities and it is crucial to understand how different people decipher information. Just because someone has said something that lots of people disagree with, even including you, does not mean that they are not entitled to that opinion, no matter how ridiculous it may be. That one opinion could reflect the thoughts and feelings of a large proportion of the population and it is an opinion that should be relayed back to the client.

After the comment/opinion has been said the main task is to try and build the offender back into the community as quickly as possible. First it is crucial to gain control of the situation. Warn the users who are just there to stir the drama (they will always be there) and explain to everyone the purpose of the community, it is all about opinions. It is not about everybody just agreeing with everyone else, there will be disagreements and it is important that this event does not stain the rest of the project.

Restoring the Balance

It can sometimes be useful to invite the main players of the situation into a chat group or message thread to let them resolve it away from the rest of the community. The most important thing you can do here is reinforce the fact that the situation is over. Any extension of the event will not be tolerated and it is essential that there is no fallout further down the line. Then close the case, continue to monitor the users and if they repeat their actions, work out whether you think it is important for the rest of the community to eject them.

A community manager is not a community dictator; you cannot decide what does and what doesn’t happen in the community. You are there to motivate, watch, prompt, help, react and feedback. So, when a situation does erupt do not say who is right and who is wrong, it is not your place, take both opinions into consideration and diffuse it. Do not give participants more fire by openly stating your views, save that for when you feedback to your team or clients. In the community you are a peacemaker, a negotiator and, ultimately, a diplomat.

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Interesting Things

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Here at Face we firmly believe that to be interesting you have to do interesting stuff – it’s a basic input – output type of thing.

And so to that end, we have launched a new initiative this week…

Winter Wanders!

(or Spring Strolls or Summer Saunters, depending on the season)

It involves the Face Team finding something that is either free, or very cheap, that will take no more than 90 minutes to do over a Friday lunchtime.

It might be an exhibition, it might be a talk, it might be a pop up shop, it might be some sort of performance art, or it might be something else entirely.

But whatever it is, the idea is that it will stimulate and inspire us in different ways. Not to mention get us out of the office and into the fresh air for a bit to get rid of that slightly sickly grey pallor and have some fun team time.

First on the agenda for January is going to be the wonderfully titled Museum of Everything which we’re going to wander over to on Friday.

We’ll let you know what we think was interesting about it so stay tuned….

Check out The Museum of Everything here

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Tweeting From The Front Line

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

No one can have escaped the total devastation that has afflicted Haiti over the past week. It is a situation that is almost too hard for the majority of people around the world to comprehend. It has become readily apparent that people on the ground are in dire need of key resources, as well as exposure in order to help find the thousands of missing people in Port-au-Prince and beyond. With the majority of formal lines of communication down, social media has had a significant role to play in facilitating donations and giving a voice to people on the ground. CNN’s iReport platform is currently putting together a database to help connect people with loved ones in Haiti by calling upon people to post names and upload photos of people who may be missing. Similarly, the twitter hashtag #rescuemehaiti is being used to direct rescue efforts to where trapped survivors have been located. The Haiti Earthquake Support Center has also created a crowd sourcing app to “harness the power of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons with just a few minutes of your time”.

These are all powerful examples of how social media can be harnessed in ways that can have a positive effect and, potentially, save lives. The past year has been punctuated by similar examples where social media has had a role to play in giving people a voice and bringing about some form of action – from student protests in Iran, to the PCC investigating Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately in The Daily Mail. With all these examples in mind, it begs the question: is social media coming of age as a force for good?

A key criticism that has been levelled at social media is that, whilst it allows people to easily show their support for a variety of causes or social issues, this does not often lead to tangible action. What does pledging your support for a cause on Facebook really mean in actual terms? Is this a viable alternative to good old-fashioned physical collectives of people? Moreover, does this ultimately lead to people doing less than they would before, with digital support becoming a replacement for physical action? These have all been valid criticisms of the role of social media in political and social causes and crises.

However, are we now seeing the first signs of how social media content can translate into tangible positive action? The proliferation of tech startups focused on social innovation would indicate this is the case. A key example of this is Ushahidi, a simple website mashup using user generated reports and Google Maps to gather citizen-generated information. It has already proved invaluable in mapping reports of violence and peace efforts in Kenya, reporting activity in Gaza for Al Jazeera and monitoring the voting system in India. Ushahidi exemplifies the benefits that the real-time and flexible nature of social media can deliver in emergency and conflict situations.

For now, this is still probably a question of watch this space, but hopefully this heralds the dawn of the positive role that social media can play in such situations.

The Open 100

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

The guys over at http://www.openbusiness.cc are running a competition that allows you to nominate your top open companies/organizations/platforms in the world. The Open 100 celebrates the power of openness and mass collaboration. The competition was born out of the UK’s National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) search for the world’s top 100 open innovation organizations. Now it is being opened up to you to find who the world’s best open innovators really are. You can nominate those companies you think are the best deserving to appear on the list of the best and most interesting open businesses at http://www.openbusiness.cc/category/directory/.

You might wonder what we actually mean what we mean by open organizations? While there is no clear-cut definition of ‘openness’ there is undeniably a trend to democratize and de-centralize previously closed business processes as the lines between consumers and producers blur. Increasingly companies are opening up their innovation and production processes. Some are formed from the start around communities as with Face, while others are opening up their intellectual property to share with others. This promises better, faster and more efficient innovation.

Lego, hoping to be part of The Open 100

Roland Harwood of NESTA responded to the idea that open innovation is bandied around as a phrase too much, suggesting that the techniques will eventually just drop the word ‘open’ as it becomes more the norm. “It’s over-hyped and has been used and misused but the trends that underpin it are only going to increase. Open innovation is being prioritized at a senior level in organizations. Leaders like its promise of creating value quicker, cheaper, faster,” said Harwood to Businessweek. “But it’s the middle managers and heads of departments who have the responsibility for implementing this. They’re struggling for the right processes and business models and they don’t know where to start. That’s where the gap is. The strategic argument has been won; now it’s a pragmatic challenge.” The practice is always so much more difficult than the theory.

A month into the competition and there are a varied mixture of organizations and platforms nominated. Major telecommunications companies like BT, Nokia and Orange are nominated for their open innovation approach. Collaboratively made films like Faintheart,and El Cosmonauta as well as a Creative Commons based film production company are also nominated. Household name web startups like Firefox, Twitter, Flickr, Google, Ebay and Facebook have been put forward as well as the smaller but equally important web services that focus on the environment like Akvo and Pachube.

International megabrands such as Lego, Virgin Atlantic, Tesco, IBM and Dell are also in the running with open innovation and openhardware communitites like Harkopen and Openp2pdesign.org. There are also 3 nominations for the band Nine Inch Nails for their pioneering transparent and co-created approach (nomination 1, 2, 3).

Nine Inch Nails released their album, The Slip, online last year as a free download

In 2009 Nine Inch Nails released their album, The Slip, as a free download

Nominated companies for ‘The Open 100’ can fall into the following categories:

Open Innovation│ Crowdsourcing │ Co-creation │ Open Source Software │Open Hardware│ Open Business (includes web 2.0)

And they will need to do some of the following…

∟ innovate products or services through communities

∟ share information for free using alternative ‘open copyright models’

∟ give substantial parts of a product or service away for free

∟ operate organizationally like open source software production, but translate the model to services

∟ lowering the costs of market entry by providing tools or services, that ‘open’ up traditional business boundaries

Public nomination will close on the 12th of February and the panel of judges will then choose the winner from each category. The panel of judges includes: Vic Keegan (technology correspondent Guardian), Marc Surman (director Mozilla Foundation), Roland Harwood (director Open Innovation at NESTA), David Simoes-Brown (head of Corporate Open Innovation at NESTA) and Andrew Gaule (found of the H-I Network and leader of the Network for Innovation and Strategic Growth). The winners will be announced on the 24^th of February at the ‘Open 4 Business’ conference at NESTA and at http://www.openbusiness.cc/. The winners will have the privilege of being published through NESTA and The Guardian Open Platform in the ultimate collection of open organizations; ‘The Open100’. Help celebrate the benefits of openness by nominating your favourite organizations or platforms at:

http://www.openbusiness.cc/category/directory/

Follow The Open 100 on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/TheOpen100

Check out Face’s entry to The Open 100:

http://www.openbusiness.cc/2010/01/21/face/

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Fun Inc. Why Games Are The 21st Century’s Most Serious Business

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Last week 6 of the Face team headed down to the RSA to listen to Tom Chatfield talk about his new book, Fun Inc. Why Games Are The 21^st Century’s Most Serious Business. Chatfield, a literature critic for Prospect Magazine and massive gaming enthusiast, talked about the fact that, in today’s society, computer games have worked their way into every part of life. He split video games influence into three sections, 1) Play Instinct, 2) Games as Technology and 3) The Power of Virtuality.

Although the adolescent male market is still big business for video game world, gaming has spread its wings wide and now covers a whole load of new audiences/purposes. From kids playing games to learn the fundamentals of life all the way to Soldiers using war simulators to learn how to kill; computer games are now an intrinsic part of life that are not going to go away.

Nick Getting Stuck into Fun Inc.

So how do we, as a society, manage the world’s fastest growing industry? Where do we pigeon hole computer games? And who is responsible for how the industry is governed and monitored?

Well if it was up to Shadow Culture Secretary Ed Vaizey, who shared the stage with Chatfield, there would be a governing body that looks after, protects and projects the UK gaming industry; potentially giving it the same level of security that the film and music industries have. Vaizey, who freely admits he is not a gamer, was clearly a bit out of his depth when speaking about games, but just his mere presence shows how far the gaming industry has come.

Chatfield’s book, which is available here, looks at all elements of the commercial gaming world, its progression and its future potential. In the words of The Guardian, Fun Inc. ‘is a compelling defence of the much maligned but fantastically successful computer game [industry]’, and it would be hard not to disagree. Video games, much like music and film, have their fair share of negative attention but now as the first real video gaming generation find themselves in positions of authority, it surely is just a matter of time until games are not only accepted but celebrated as a form of entertainment and culture.

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‘We’re Still Not Taking Consumers Seriously Enough’

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

It is always nice to see someone from the advertising world stepping out and talking about involving consumers in their processes. It is even nicer when they work in the same building as us! Owen Lee, Founder & Creative Chairman of Farm (our office mates), had a letter published in the latest edition of Campaign Magazine titled ‘We’re Still Not Taking Consumers Seriously Enough’.

Owen stresses the point that agencies & brands need to listen to, and collaborate with their audience as today’s empowered consumers ‘have the power to make or break brands in an instance’. He goes on to say that in today’s 24/7 online world there is a need to make big changes and ‘move away from campaign bursts’ exchanging them for ‘a continuous engagement model’.

You can read Owen’s letter in full below… Click on the image to enlarge!