Mind Candy

Mind Candy is a great place to work (and play).  We have every imaginable toy and game scattered around the London office. We have an entire section of the office for gaming, with couches and bean bag chairs and a big TV. It’s not unusual to find a group of Mind Candies playing Guitar Hero during their lunch break. And, we have “Game Night” now and then, where we order take-out and play games after work.

Last month the Mind Candy team took a ‘Field Trip’ to the Victoria & Albert Museum to view a digital art show.  20 something Mind Candies took the Bus and Underground to South Kensington. It was a spectacle for Londoners and a great exercise in camaraderie for the Mind Candies. The exhibit was interesting but the journey and purpose of our group activity made an impression on me. I spent time talking to one of our newer employees and had time to get to know him outside the office environment. It was a great exercise, all in all.

Recently, two of the Mind Candy Community Team members took the term “work ethic” to the next level by visiting a tattoo parlour to show their dedication to moshlings, the cute little pets that belong to Monstro City monsters (because we all know that pets need and love pets of their own). Here’s how Amanda, one of our Assistant Community Managers, describes their adventure in ink:

“Because our love of Moshlings has grown to astronomic proportions, Tiffany (Community Assistant) and I were carried off by a giant Furi and Katsuma and taken to a tattoo parlour in our home state in the US. We visited a toy-tattoo collecting artist, Jesse, and had the Moshlings Shi Shi and Lady Meowford permanently added to our body art collections.”

I don’t think we’ll see a trend among the Mind Candies such as the LOTR  (Lord of the Rings) cast who (not so) secretly “branded” themselves to show solidarity.  But one never knows. When you work together AND play together, you become a family of sorts. The monsters and moshlings are an extension of our collective efforts at Mind Candy. We think of the monsters and moshlings as more than 2 dimensional characters. We think of their personalities and how they interact with Monster Owners in the game. Every team member is encouraged to provide input when we create new characters, need character names, and every team member is welcome to provide input in pretty much all of the creative  processes.  The atmosphere is quite democratic and open. Michael (our CEO) is a great communicator, open with information and inclusive. His approach makes all the difference in what you do 8 hours (or more) a day. Some of us spend more time at our jobs these days than we do with our families. So, we need to be sure we’re in an open, creative, accepting and healthy environment. Trust and respect start at the top of Mind Candy, with Michael and the Senior Management team. Creativity is always rampant. I had a conversation with our Community Manager just yesterday where she said “I just gotta give out those thousands of Mississippi Mud pies first… (I love that I get to say that -  my job rules).”  I have to agree.

At Mind Candy, creativity rules, as well. We’re thrilled to see two of our team members’ affection for their favorite moshlings (mine is Lady Cleo but I’m too chicken to get a tattoo). The Community Management team is coming to London this week for the 15 Million Monster Party at the London Aquarium. So, if you’re in London and you see an American with fun little moshlings tattooed on her arm, feel free to stop her and ask her for the moshling code ;)

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, candy 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 roll, 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.

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