School 26 Unique Game for Teen and Tween Girls Interview

School 26 Unique Game for Teen and Tween Girls Interview

Silicon Sisters Interactive, an independent video game studio that creates high-quality games for women, is announcing the launch of their debut title School 26. Designed for girls ages 12-16, School 26 is a unique casual game with a focus on the types of social activities and interactions that teen and tween girls take seriously and excel at. The game is available today for iPad, iPhone / iPod Touch, and Android.

In School 26, players join Kate on a quest to make friends at her new school. To do so, she must navigate the often-treacherous social hierarchy of high school by getting to know her classmates, helping to diffuse their conflicts, and strengthening her personal connections. Gameplay directly supports these goals with activities such as selecting appropriate emotional responses during conversations, matching cards in a mini-game with rules that reflect the students' current mindsets and situations, and taking quizzes that give valuable insight into friends' personalities. School 26's social elements carry over into the real world by enabling players to post their own personality quiz results to Facebook from within the game.

Silicon Sisters created School 26 not only to provide a fun gaming experience, but also to validate skills that girls may not realise give them a competitive advantage. "Most games provide challenges that help you develop mastery in the skill of playing that particular game. In School 26, players develop social mastery," says Silicon Sisters' COO Kirsten Forbes. "For example, the player uses empathy to 'level up' the other characters in the game, not herself. It's a twist on conventional game design that fits with the way girls structure their social hierarchies."

School 26 is available in Apple's App Store for $2.99 for iPhone / iPod Touch and $4.99 for iPad (HD version):
iPhone / iPod Touch: http://itunes.apple.com/app/school-26/id429336097?mt=8/
iPad: http://itunes.apple.com/app/school-26-hd/id431284898?mt=8
The $2.99 Android version can be purchased from the Android Market: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.expb.school26

To learn more about School 26 and view the game's trailer, visit the official website at www.school26.ca. Fans are also invited to join the game's growing Facebook community.

Silicon Sisters Interactive is the first female owned and run video game studio in Canada. Founded and staffed by industry veterans with decades of hands-on experience, the company is committed to developing high quality, inspirational games with a decidedly female focus-games made by women and girls, for women and girls. Silicon Sisters' development relies heavily on the analysis of data and studies that disseminate gender differences in video gaming, with the development team building innovative gameplay mechanics around themes and activities that research identifies as relevant to women. School 26, a social mastery game for tween and teen girls, is available now for iOS and Android, and coming soon to PC and Mac. A second project is also under development.

Interview with Kirsten Forbes, Silicon Sisters' COO and co-founder

Question: What is School 26?

Kirsten Forbes: School 26 is an innovative videogame for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Android phones that allows tween and teen girls to play around with the ideas of social engineering and social mastery. It's the story of a new girl at high school who has been shunted around to 25 different schools by her itinerant parents. Now, at School number 26, she strikes a deal with her family that if she can make close and longstanding friendships this time, everyone will agree to stay put permanently.

This character Kate (whom the player can name whatever they like) has two game mechanics at her disposal. The first is a series of facial expressions she can use to respond to her friends with. The more understanding and empathetic her responses are, the more her friends will realise she gets them and is hearing they're issues, and therefore the more bonded they will become.

Kate also has a tarot-style card game she can play to affect the emotions of her friends and help to give them a new perspective on their trials and tribulations.

By using her social skills in these ways, Kate levels up the crew of friends around her and thereby wins the game.


Question: What inspired the creation of School 26?

Kirsten Forbes: It may seem obvious that the time is right for women and girls to be embracing videogames since games are finally on the kinds of platforms and devices that we typically use. Whether as high schoolers, careerists or Moms, women tend to be a moving and mobile crowd so sophisticated smart phones are our 'desk' away from home or work. Similarly the advent of social gaming sites like facebook have given us a new opportunity to play games.

But just because girls and women are united on these kinds of platforms, does not mean that they're all looking for the same kinds of entertainment on them. As such, we started to tap into the best academic research worldwide and analyse the traits and preferences this audience is gravitating towards. One of the areas that fascinated us was social engineering - the idea that as girls enter puberty they begin to find power and notoriety in a new found set of skills - a skillset that involves organising their group of friends.

From pairing up couples, to determining who's in and who's out, to new lingo, what to wear, where to go - girls take the lead on the social front and start to develop the skills that will take them straight into the business world - communication, negotiation, gathering and managing information, collaborating, judging group dynamics, organisational behaviour - tons and tons of skills that make us who we are.

And our big message to girls around those kinds of skills is that YES, they are real live useful skills! They are valid and legitimate and deserve to be practiced. Gazing at yourself in the mirror for half an hour every day is not shameful - it will give you a great sense of self when you're on a stage one day addressing an audience of hundreds. Gossiping is not a bad word - it's learning to discern the useful and advantageous information from the tripe. Even manipulation is not a bad word - in evolutionary terms it is the strategic use of information to get what we want or need in a world where we can never successfully get it through brute force.

Soft skills are our competitive advantage in the work force and in raising our families, and the tween years are where we lay that foundation. School 26 is a game where you can rehearse and experiment with all kinds of responses to real world, relevant, life issues.


Question: Can you talk about the experience of creating a game for iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch, and Android?

Kirsten Forbes: Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch (CEO and co-founder) and I are both veteran game developers; we've been in the industry for a combined 20 years or thereabouts. And the team we assembled to make this game was likewise stacked in favour of console experience.

Making big console games for the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii is an enormously complex undertaking - those games often require a hundred or more people for upwards of two years and are very sophisticated software projects. So for us, the iOS and Android devices were like a miniature version of the platforms we were used to working on. And I don't mean miniature in a way that trivialises them, I mean that they're smaller, timelines are shorter, and fewer people are required, so it was like a microcosm of the projects we were used to.

So we used exactly the same approach we've always used on the big projects - the same design discipline and rigour, the same proven agile processes, the same multi-platform approach to our code base - and we were grateful for the years of experience behind us because the entire development cycle was reasonably smooth. (I say reasonably because no creative endeavor is ever completely smooth. If it is, it probably means you're not pushing the envelope hard enough : )

Then of course the icing on the cake is that Apple and Android are open platforms where we can self-publish our games for the most part. That was really a joy - to be able to work with those platforms and ship the game directly to the platform owner without any middlemen.


Question: How does the game education girls ages 12-16?

Kirsten Forbes: I think I answered most of this in the second question you asked above, but I'll say that we don't intend to 'educate' girls specifically, we intend to give them a fun place to practice and rehearse the stuff that they are already good at. It's more about having a safe place to experiment and practice, than it is about learning a new skill. And it's about realising that those things you love to do are talents that will stand you in good stead for your whole life.


Question: What is the ultimate goal of the School 26 game?

Kirsten Forbes: The ultimate goal is to level up your friends. And that is a very cool twist on most videogames where the goal is usually to level up your own self. In School 26 you level up your friends by solving their problems, which makes them better friends with you. Once you've friended all the characters in the game, you win. And then you can still go back to answer more personality quizzes and learn more about yourself.


Question: Can you talk about the process behind creating the School 26 game?

Kirsten Forbes: We always use a form of "Scrum" to make our games because this takes into account that making something innovative is not a manufacturing process, it's an invention process. Scrum is a process that includes regular review meetings and team check-ins, allowing us to quickly adapt to what's working and throw out what isn't working.

Even though that makes it sound like the process itself does all the work for you, of course it doesn't. And when you're making a game it's easy to get blinded by the details that keep you busy all day long and not step back to take a look at the whole picture. So that's something we consciously make ourselves do. And it helped a lot when it came time to design the card game.

Our designers locked themselves in a room for one whole week and brainstormed game after game after game to find the one that was both fun to play AND that fit the theme of solving problems AND that was flexible enough to have variations like the character cards and the shifting goals. Afterwards I remember the designers told me that at one point they both had their heads slumped against the wall in the corner of the room and they said to each other, boy, I sure hope Kirsten doesn't walk in right now :) Which I tell you to illustrate that whether you're making a big console game or a smaller iOS game, game design is very hard work that requires strong personal discipline and tenacity.

Game design might even be the hardest job in the studio because the designers are the ones who start the whole ball rolling, and they have to create everything in the game out of thin air. Which is a really cool thing about videogames in general - that we don't use any trees or water or gas to make games - we just use electricity and our brains. But the game designer is the one who has to go first, they're the creative leader, they're the first one to jump into the thin air


Question: What is Silicon Sisters Interactive?

Kirsten Forbes: Silicon Sisters Interactive is a game design studio that was formed to make games for the underserved female audience around the world. The number of girls who own the big consoles has never exceeded 17% or 20%. But the 20% who do own them are probably playing the types of games they want to play on those consoles. For everyone else, we figure there are lots of games yet that haven't been made and that will provide different kinds of fun than the world has seen before. And those are the games Silicon Sisters intends to make.


Interview by Brooke Hunter