My Little PlayStation: Why cute games will save the industry

Posted June 16, 2011 by Kevin Pabst.

I love cute things. For my whole life, I always felt that liking cute things, even normal cute things like puppies and kittens, was weird. That is, until the children’s cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic came under my radar from an unexpected source: adults.

The popularity of this fantastic, colorful, adorable, heartwarming bit of animation is something you should try, even more so if you’re a 20-something guy who grew up with G.I. Joes and boring brown toys. Of course, this site isn’t about ponies or cartoons, it’s about videogames!

Is the system white? Then shovelware is alright (also: black Wii)

Between the App Store on iOS devices and the Wii’s popularity, Apple and Nintendo have captured the elusive audience of those who don’t typically play games. Broadly, people who don’t play games lack the experience to judge quality based on a game’s cover or details page, and here is the problem of the day.

There is a massive audience of people who own these devices but can’t tell if what they’re buying is gold or garbage, which developers and publishers know. Just take a look at your local store’s Wii section and you’ll see what attracts the uninformed. You’re going to see a lot of animals, parties, talking animals, parties with talking animals, and lots of colour. For all its faults, Carnival Game’s colour palette dwarfs the three-colour focus of your modern first-person shooter.

Because the audience might not have the resources to judge based on a developer’s previous titles, every Z-list studio is pushing out crap as fast as they can with as many clashing colours as they can. On the Apple front, just looking at the best-selling games shows how successful you can be as long as you have birds and physics puzzles. Alternatively, your app can have a dog through a fish-eye lens which, mathematically, guarantees success. On both platforms, ignorant consumers are being exploited.

What does cute stuff have to do with anything?

Well, a great deal, actually. As a trained cuteness expert, I’ve noticed a trend in recent years: cute stuff is no longer the exclusive domain of embarrassing mothers and little sisters. Games today are slowly being contaminated by the sweet, sweet poison of cute. Don’t believe me? Check out this list of undeniably successful games that all involve elements of adorability.

1. The Custodian AI from Halo ODST and his scowl cannot be not cute.
2. Angry Birds is so successful it was on The Daily Show.
3. Cut The Rope is painfully adorable.
4. Tiny Wings is a pastel rainbow.
5. Robot Unicorn Attack combines things that are typically cute (unicorns) with things that are typically badass (robots, attacks).
6. Chocobo Chick in FF13. A minor entity, but greatly adorable when he (she? Do chocobos have genders?) appears.
7. Dog from Dragon Age 1 and 2. It’s hard not to ‘dawwww’ at him, even covered in blood after ripping out a throat.
8. Prinnys from Disgaea, dood.
9. Servbots who seem to end up in anything Capcom from Dead Rising to Marvel vs Capcom 3. They’re like tiny, always happy lego men.
10. LittleBigPlanet’s Sackboy/Sackgirl. What sort of feelingless robot doesn’t get all warm and fuzzy when seeing sackboy emote?
11. Peggle. All of it.

I’m not saying that cute things in games are a new thing, but it does look like the cuteness infection is spreading faster than seven out of ten zombie infections.

Who cares? Why does cute stuff permeating games matter?

If the general populace is ignorant because they only buy things that are cute, and the number of high-quality games that are either cute or have cute elements is increasing, then it could lead to consumers slowly become more savvy. If my grandmother buys Carnival Games on Wii and hates it but then buys Okami because it’s got a cute wolf (Amaterasu, obviously) on the cover and enjoys it, is she not better for now understanding that not all games are mini-game collections? Of course she is, though I’d be surprised if she put the disk in the right way.

And here’s where it all ties together…

On Youtube, the first episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has, as of writing, almost 750k views. Looking at the demographic details it is most popular with girls ages 13-17 and adult men ages 18-35. If this group can accept a show as cute as My Little Pony, then they can be accepting of cute video games as well.

Of course, also being the demographic that is usually pointed at as the primary target of games, they will have the ability to separate bad games that happen to be cute from products of actual quality. This group is going to be having kids soon, if they haven’t already. They’ll raise their children on what’s good and cute.

The next generation will grow up with a strong ability to judge games, leaving shovelware on the shelves. Some things are generational and develop further with each new set of people that grew up with it. My parents grew up with landlines, and my 15 year-old brother grew up with a phone he could carry anywhere. You and I grew up with videogames in some capacity, and the chances are our kids will grow up with them even more.

As the medium grows, even more parents will raise their kids around games, and the awareness for the next generation go up even more. Thanks to the likes of My Little Pony we may never suffer another videogame industry crash again.