Mind Candy

Moshi Monsters passed the 15 million registered Monster Owners mark on Saturday, March 6^th. In honor of our latest milestone (or is that mill-stone?), we’ll be celebrating in LARGE style at The London Aquarium this month. We’re giving away 100 Golden Tickets to 100 lucky Monster Owners, each of whom are allowed to bring one guest and one parent or guardian to Mind Candy’s monstrous event we’re calling The 15 Million Monster Party. If you can get yourself to London March 24^th, you are encouraged to enter the contest!

The event will be action-packed with face painting, candi floss, goodie bags, Toad soda, games, Moshi staff celebrities, and the world premiere of our “Hey Moshi!” Dance with a choreographer and group dance instructions. Who knows? Maybe Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s sons will enter. The Mirror quotes Sarah Brown on February 13^th stating that the boys play Moshi Monsters. Everybody wants a Golden Ticket, even Prime Minister’s sons. We’d love to see The Brown family learning the “Hey Moshi!” dance, that’s for sure.

Speaking of news articles and celebs, our own Mr Moshi, Michael Acton Smith, the CEO of Mind Candy and creator of Moshi Monsters, was featured in Wired Magazine recently.
The Monster Mash-Up article, talks to Wired about our plans to bring Moshi offline. We can’t reveal everything but we can encourage you to read the article.

And since we’re on a news role, we may as well talk about our very own community news written by Monsto City Editor-at-large Roary Scrawl. Roary is our resident content genius who translates all the happenings into English for us each day. He also comes up with brilliant contests. We had a record-breaking number of entries for Valentines Day this year, with well over 17,000 Secret Admirer Shout Outs. We knew even our most dedicated Monster Owners wouldn’t be able to read 17,000 shout outs so we chose the top 1,000 and posted them over a week or so.

On a different note, Moshi Monsters participated in Safer Internet Day this year, February 9^th. Monster Owners around the world learned about online safety by taking the Safer Internet Day Quiz. We take online safety seriously at Mind Candy. In fact, we’ve recently purchased Crispthinking.com’s NetModerator ™ software, which we plan to integrate in the next month or so. And we recently upgraded to Inversoft’s filtering system in our Forums. Rebecca Newton (@RebeccaNewton) is a featured speaker this month at the San Francisco GDC 2010 (Game Developer’s Conference). Michael Acton Smith (@acton) is also speaking at the GDC 2010 Summit. Many of the Mind Candy team are attending the event. We’ll report back next week on how it all went.

Rebecca Newton (aka ‘Miss Pinky’ in Monstro City)

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.