The 2009 Christmas party has come and gone, though sadly our hangovers haven’t!
This year the Mind Candies jetted off to London Bridge for a party with an 80s retro theme to indulge in plenty of responsible drinking, tasteful dancing and subdued singing.
Here are a few snaps from the evening for your enjoyment.
The season of giving is now in full swing so we’ve embraced it at Moshi Monsters with the launch of ‘Gift Island’. Here you can send some very cute gifts and messages to your friends to say anything from ‘Congratulations’ to ‘Look After Your Monster!’.
Gift Island is a huge new feature on the site which has taken lots of development so the great response from the players in the first week is something that everyone at Mind Candy is really proud of!
To help celebrate the launch we wanted to bring Gift Island to life for all of the folks at Moshi HQ, so last week the office was filled with purple gift boxes. The boxes were filled with Moshi goodies including our new products from Zazzle and some amazing poppet cupcakes (sadly not made by any of us, but by the lovely Catherine at buycake.co.uk).
After this, and a few glasses of bubbly, a fun evening was had by all at Gilgamesh in Camden where the whole team had a chance to celebrate our latest Moshi achievement. Now it’s time for us to get working on the next one!
Playing games on your own is fun, playing against a friend in two player mode is even better, but the most fun of all is had when you can connect with hundreds, thousands or even millions of other players from around the world. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) have grown into a major sector of the $40B games industry over the last decade and produced a number of hits, most notably World of Warcraft.
The first wave of MMOs were focused on fantasy themes but there’s a new category of online game that has been quietly gaining momentum over the past couple of years. Social games are a relatively new phenomenon that don’t usually don’t require any annoying download, detailed instructions, or even money to play (at least for their non-premium elements). They focus on content that’s more appealing to mainstream consumers than Sword and Sorcery themes: sports, racing, fashion, dancing, virtual pets and so on. The social aspects of the games are as important to the users as the actual gameplay.
Many of these games are played within Facebook (Mafia Wars, Farmville, Pet Society) but many live outside where the developers have created their own social networks and vibrant communities from scratch (Moshi Monsters, Kart Rider, Stardoll, Dark Orbit, Puzzle Pirates)
These games are not only racking up new players at extraordinary rates, they are also monetising their audiences incredibly effectively. Many of the games are highly profitable and are one of the few sectors that seem to be prospering in the current recession.
As Vic Keegan in the Guardian put it last week, Facebook and Twitter are making all the noise, online games and virtual worlds are making all the money.
At dinner parties I’ve been to recently, people still laugh at the notion of consumers spending real cash on digital items such as food for their virtual pet, or birthday cakes for their friends (this might be a sign that I’m going to the wrong sort of dinner parties). The truth, as anyone in the online gaming business knows, is that people are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these items and will continue to do so in greatly increasing numbers over the next few years.
What’s frustrating to me is the lack of attention this booming sector seems to be getting from mainstream media. Europe is home to several of the pioneers of the Social Gaming space (Playfish, Bigpoint, Gameforge, Jolt, Mind Candy etc) yet despite tremendous growth, revenues and profits, the sector seems to have been all but ignored. The impact of the internet on Music, Film and TV has been picked apart by the mainstream press in micro detail, yet Games seem to get scant attention.
I want to do something about this. Fortunately Andy Moseby, and the forward thinking team at Kemp Little, were thinking along the same lines so we’ve decided to put an event on. We’re inviting several of the leading lights from the Online Gaming world to speak about their games to an audience of journalists, investors, execs from big media, gaming entrepreneurs, and other folks interested in learning more about this exciting space. There will also be plenty of time for questioning the panel, networking, and drinks
We’re calling the event GAMES GONE WILD! and it’ll be taking place in London on the evening of Wednesday September 9th.
We’d love to invite everyone, but due to venue constraints we’ve had to make the event invite only. If you’re keen to come along then you can apply on the Kemp Little site
Hopefully see you there
Learning through gaming is a topic that I am very passionate about and I am proud to say that Moshi Monsters is definitely turning out to be head of the class.
We have been contacted by many teachers asking us about Moshi as it has become more widely used in schools as a contextual tool to engage children in the classroom.
We have been bowled over by the support we have received from Derek Robertson and the teachers involved in Learning & Teaching Scotland. Margaret Young at Port of Menteith Primary School is an exceptional example of how teachers are embracing the use of games in the classroom. Here they have been using Moshi to bridge the gap between fiction and reality. The children have been creating their own shops and thinking about how they would run them, designing brochures for the Monstro City tourist office and thinking about how they could sell the Monstro City properties. They have created their own puzzle palace and filled it with puzzles they love playing. They have been motivated to write, draw and read around the subject. These brilliant teachers are putting learning back in the hands of the children by using a medium that they understand and connect with.
Pete Wells from the Sunderland City Learning Centre sent us some blog entries created by three children Adam, Anika and Shanice who were encouraged to adopt monsters, create their own personalities and show them off, another great example of how Moshi and other games can be used in teaching children about Information and Communication Technology.
Moshi is even being used on the other side of the world to teach children, “Moshi Monsters utilises educational content, through vocabulary and arithmetic to logic and spatial skills. Moshi Monsters has been designed to be a ‘fun, safe and educational’ website for all age groups”.
We would love to hear from you (teachers and kids) if you have been using Moshi Monsters and/or Tutpup in your classroom to aid learning in new and exciting ways, drop us a line and let us know what you have been up to.