Casual gaming – Interactive Digital Narratives

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood was released in 2014 to much fanfare, where it shot to #1 on the Apple App Store chart and grabbed #4 for top-grossing apps. The game developer, Glu Mobile, reported that it raked in $1.6 million in its first five days on the market.

The Kardashians are a brand and a lifestyle that is largely consumed in a passive way — we watch Kim on TV and in photoshoots and on red carpets. Our pursuit of her content across Instagram and Snapchat could be construed as slightly more active consumption. But the basis of Kim’s fame is visual: we want to see what her life is like. This is likely why on Twitter she has 48 million followers but on Instagram 85 million.

So how does the Kardashian experience translate into a game? In Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, players customize their avatars in either gender. The avatar works at a clothing boutique and immediately has a chance-encounter with Kim herself! You are destined for fame. Kim invites you to a party, gets you a modeling gig, and is a guiding hand through your ascent from the D-list to the A-list celebrity totem pole. This is the core goal of the game: attain fame, as much as you possibly can.

Megan Garber at the Atlantic described the landscape of KK: Hollywood as “ambient commercialism“: the more modeling jobs and event appearances you do, the more money, energy, and K-stars you get. Money can be used to buy new clothing, hair, accessories, make-up, pets, mansions, Range Rovers and more that get unlocked with each level up. Energy allows you do to more jobs but also extract more money out of each job (and better impress your fans). K-stars are the rarest and most valuable currency within the game — they translate to charm, as in, if you have enough K-stars you can literally charm your way through doors and climb that social ladder double time. Every action and reaction within the game is geared toward selling yourself so you can buy more things for yourself so that you can then better sell yourself, ad infinitum. (actually only until level 45).

The story-line of the game mimics Kim’s own early rise to fame; in-game, So Chic clothing boutique is a dupe for DASH, the clothing boutique operated by Kim and her sisters. In-game, you start with small modeling gigs, reminiscent of some of the shockingly small (and bad) modeling gigs Kris Jenner was booking Kim for on the first season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Miami becomes an unlocked destination where you can make club appearances to earn more K-stars, which is exactly what Kim did in her spin-off reality show set in Miami.

In “How to do Things With Video Games,” Ian Bogot dedicates a chapter to branding. Modern iconography in games adds a layer of “contemporary social values” in games. He gives the example of a re-skinned Monopoly game where the player tokens are updated to represent 21st century brands: a Toyota Prius, Mcdonald’s french fries, New Balance sneakers, and Starbucks coffee. (53). In Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, players experience a re-skinning of Kim’s own ascent to fame, layered with the “contemporary social values” the game points to: fame, materialism, social climbing, looks, travel…If the game lacked the contemporary context the Kardashian presence affords it, I don’t think it would have been nearly as popular.

I’m only on level 10 so it remains to be seen whether I’ll make it to that mythical A-list or not.

In my last game log, I analyzed how the designers of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U reward longtime, dedicated gamers by packing their game full of intertextual references to so many different kinds of games for the 50+ characters in Smash. Super Smash Bros. seemed designed to be intertextual, bringing many characters (Nintendo and non-Nintendo) under a fighting competition. In this light, Super Smash Bros. sounds like a typical fighting game for dedicated, “hardcore” gamers. The fact that there is a community of professional (paid) and extremely dedicated Smash players seems to support Super Smash Bros’s hardcore-ness (a topic for another game log). However, Super Smash Bros. doesn’t fit neatly into the binary of casual v. hardcore games. In fact, the game is extremely popular, as the Wii U iteration 4.9 million copies so in its lifespan (and the 3DS version of the game sold 8.23 million copies as well) (Nintendo Sales). Super Smash Bros. caters to all kinds of people and balances between casual and hardcore gaming effectively.

In his book A Casual Revolution, Jesper Juul outlines five components that make up his definition of a casual game: a positively-charged fiction, accessible usability, interruptibility, a tiered difficulty and lenient punishment, juiciness, which is “excessive positive feedback for every successful action the player performs” (Juul 50). Does Smash fit in this casual framework? Not really, but there are some casual components that Smash is built on. First, most Smash characters—save Solid Snake, Samus Aran, Ganondorf, and a few others—come from positive game worlds like the Mushroom Kingdom, Kirby’s Dreamworld, or Pikmin, even if these positive fictions mask a lot of cartoon violence. Second, Smash is very much a game of controlled short bursts of playing with the multiplayer mode being designed as a series of short matches that can have time limits. Turning off Smash only means leaving a single match that can easily be re-created later (unless you’re in single player mode, which, again, is a series of matches that are easily reproducible). There’s no story or large time investment Smash requires up front (unless you’re playing the Subspace Emissary in Super Smash Bros. Brawl). The units of play are quick morsels of action, not a full course RPG meal. Third, Smash has a tiered difficulty system in terms of its overall controls, where players can learn more and more advanced moves (wave-dashing and such) if they wish, or keep spamming down+B with Pikachu. However, these controls aren’t necessarily “easy to learn, hard to master” (Juul 41). With a GameCube controller, there are about 7 buttons along with the move stick that controls a player’s actions, as well as directional variants for each button; for a Wii remote held horizontally, there are 3 (4, if you like taunting) and a directional pad, which simplifies the control schemes a bit. However, Smash’s controls aren’t easy to pick up and play right away. In order for someone to learn Smash, it takes a lot of lectures from other players and playing the game over and over again. Then, after someone learns the basics, competitive mastery (wave dashing, timing tilts, etc.) is lightyears away. I do mean that in terms of time commitment and physical impossibility (for me, at least). The game further contradicts casual standards by not rewarding players for every single action (juiciness). Smash doesn’t hold the player’s hand nor reward every action. So, Smash scores a 2.5 (somewhat positive fiction, interruptibility, tiered difficulty) out of 5 on Juul’s Casual scale.

Smash is an interesting example of how blurry the distinction between casual and hardcore games really is. Smash appeals to many and doesn’t exclude based on its cartoonish atmosphere; however, Smash can offer dedicated gamers an arena of competitive mastery and genuine challenge. In this way, Smash toes the line between casual and hardcore to large financial and critical success.

Works Cited:

Juul, Jesper. “Ch.2: What is Casual?” A Casual Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Web PDF.

“Top Selling Software Sales Units.” Nintendo: IR Information. Nintendo, 30 June 2016. Web. Date accessed: 3 Oct 2016. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/software/3ds.html

Category: Casual gaming

Ambient Kommercialism & Kardashian Kontext in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood

A Hardcore Casual