We are back, and here is part two of our interview with Garth Chouteau (guy on the left), PR Director of Popcap Games. If you missed part one of this epic 3 (maybe 4) part interview, shame on you! Okay, not really, but you can catch up here . 

Steve Spohn: Something we have found in our antidotal research is that people that have disabilities tend to see video games as an equalizer.  There's no need to run and jump to do acrobatics, it is just something you can do with your mind.  You don't need to do it, necessarily, rapid read, so it makes you feel good to be able to use your mind on an equal level of everyone else.  I'm not sure you're aware of this, but we actually published an article on an IDGA study where they discovered up to 9% of the American population is disabled and 1 in five suffer from some form of disability...

Michelle Hinn:... and that includes low vision, hearing loss, that type of stuff...

Steve: ...and disabilities, they run the gamut, there is no one particular disability that can be singled out for a game, and we're aware of that but I would say is from the way you talk it sounds like your study is continuing to involve, would you say was ongoing.  And if you do say it's ongoing, where do you think the information is going to take you, to making different games or adapting the games that you have.

Garth: first and foremost, we will continue down this path, we will continue to research in this area, we will continue to explore in general the effects that our games have on the audience overall, but certainly important and in sizable subgroups within the overall casual games audience.  So there's no question my mind that we will continue studies and surveys that touch on this, either directly or indirectly in a lot of cases.  As far as where that takes us as a company from a development standpoint is very much TBD.  Again, even more so than be the case, if you went to another casual game developer or even a hard-core developer.  We have a very different philosophy when it comes to developing games, we have no timetables for games, and there are no spec docs that lay out what the game is going to look like.  It is literally like Ernest and Julio Gallo wine, we don't ship until it's ready, we don't mess with it, we'll go back there and say, "guys, you've got to step on those grapes faster, because we had to get that game out by the end of the quarter!" No it doesn't work that way, when the game is ready.  The guys in the studio say, "okay, it's ready", and all of us have been playing it for nine months 12 months 18 months,  going, "it was ready year ago, what are you talking about" and then we see the next build and we go, "Ohhh , okay now I see what you mean by ready" so it really is a different approach to building games in the first place, that is absolutely grounded in the idea in, "Is this game is fun as it can be?" and if not shelve that sucker and ignore it until you come up with another idea that will make it even more fun.  And that's what happens with Peggles for example, it was shelled for multiple, multiple times, there were many many times when everyone in the company said, "that's it. That's an interesting idea but there is no way to make that as fun as it needs to be to be a Popcap Game." So, when you can think about how we might set out to modify an existing game or building new game with a particular goal in mind, it's like going to, you know, Bob Dylan, and saying, "Bob, we need a rap song."  The point being, you're asking these artisans to change their approach.  So, I would say it's very unlikely that we would set out to build a game for any particular audience, if we did, to be perfectly frank; they would probably not be disabled gamers, because, again, they are 20% of the audience, while women are 80% of the audience. But will never make a game for women.  So given that, I would say it's almost inconceivable that we would make a game with a primary objective of addressing a particular disability or something like that.  Now, when you start talking about modifying a game, that's a little bit more in our comfort zone, I would sayeven then, the issue for us is then just resources.  Being a small company and it's so easy to start going down these different paths, and every week we get just a few proposals, submissions, queries, whatever that we all over the map, "hey, come take a look at our technology and build it into your games, so that people in a moment we'll know what their blood pressure is  while they're playing..."I mean, it's just all over the map, and I do my best to try to filter these things and nurture some of them.  And somehow push them into our radar, and it's incredibly difficult and doesn't usually succeed.  And when it does succeed it's more at a level of "okay.  There's a company out there that wants to take casual games and map them to dance pads so that kids in K-12 can be playing Astro Pop or Bejeweled or Bookworm with their feet" so, on one hand, they are getting cardiovascular workout and, on the other hand, the teacher, who may be an English teacher at math teacher, is not having to play PE teacher, and we have done that.  We were able to provide the source code to one or two games.  For that project for that organization, who then hired a developer to take that source code and reengineer it to work with these dance pads.  And it works, I'm not sure how well it will work or ultimately, or how well it will be received, but it does do what they set out to do.  And that was one that we managed to kind of push through, but it was tough.  It was not easy to get that done.  And there are people within the organization that were pretty adamant that we not let our source code out the door and other people who are adamant that we not distract the engineers, and on and on down the list.  It is very possible, as we proceed in this direction, that there will be, we will identify, in partnership with organizations like yours, specific opportunities where we pretty safely say, "Yes, if we take this game and do this relatively modest amount of work.  We can change it so that it suddenly becomes accessible to the other audience." I think that's possible...

 

Michelle:... right, making games from the get-go, like color schemes for the colorblind, one in 10 men have colorblindness so would be, "hey, if possible don't use these color schemes," is that what you talking about?  Something you knew about it ahead of time, you might put it in as a design suggestion?

Garth: that's a very good example because we've done that.  That's relatively simple and probably if you think about it, and I'm not a software coder by any stretch, but if you think about, what would be required for that a lot of it is at the art level.  It's not the engineers, not the guys writing the codes that have too much about that, so to the extent that it would be other examples that somehow fit into that category, I think it is possible.  But if we said, "you know, if we did this one thing to this game now in his early stage.  If we just thought about this other audience, we could make sure that this particular game worked for them" and I think that to some extent.  Or perhaps the best example of that is, and I will claim a high degree of ignorance on this, but this whole idea of one click games.  That makes perfect sense to me, that should click, somebody should take a day of coding to figure that out.  So okay, you would not use the same input device, the mouse. I think that's an interesting path, in large part because what you're doing there is, rather than saying, "There is an audience that cannot get to this game unless you do this."  The way I would turn it around, I would go to a Jason Kapalka or a Sukhbir Sidhu; one of our studio chiefs and say, this isn't about opening the door to another 10%, this is about everyone who plays the game have another option for how they play at and how they control the game.  If that's the argument were making here than I think is a much easier sell. So you could argue, the vast majority of casual games should be one click games for their own good, not for anybody's good, but for their own good. If you're trying to make games as fun as possible, to appeal to the broadest audience as possible, if you can't do that in one click in your game is too complex.

 ---END PART 2---

Now part 3 is all about Garth yelling at me for not playing Peggles in Full Screen. So you will want to catch that.