Ubisoft’s Imagine Series

This post was born when, while rummaging around in a bargain bin, I saw one of Ubisoft’s Imagine games. I’d heard of the games and knew they were big sellers, so I finally cracked and decided to see what they were all about. It only took a couple of hours to plow through, and when I finished, I was not really sure what to make of it. I picked up two more games in the series and had the same reaction. Playing games targeted towards women that are not designed with the assumption that the player is male is always a different experience. There are numerous interactive options and design aesthetics that I rarely ever see in other games. What I wanted to do with this post was to just catalogue the common design elements in three different Imagine games. There’s not much to debate about the game’s stereotyping, Ubisoft’s Vice-President of Marketing settles that issue when he explains the inspiration for the games was the high sales of the Pink DS (“Powering Ahead: Video Games”, CNBC.com, 23 Nov 2009). By making the initial titles focus on cooking, fashion, and childcare they tap into gender stereotypes of traditional forms of female play that Sara M. Grimes discusses on her blog. She writes, “Adults have long sought to contain children’s play, but girls’ play in particular, for more “useful” and productive ends. For girls, this most often meant channeling play towards activities that were thought to prepare them to be good wives and mothers” (“Imagine: [Insert Gender Stereotype Here]”, Gamine Expedition, 12 Dec 2009).

The most consistent game design element in all of the Imagine games is the ability to decorate things. That seems to be true across the series, Aileen Cole’s critique of Imagine: Detective notices the feature is even in an Imagine game when it barely makes any sense (“Review: Imagine Detective (Nintendo DS)”, Die Hard Game Fan, 23 Sep 2009). In all three of the games that I played, there was no scoring factor related to decoration. That was strange to me, particularly in Imagine: Movie Star, where gameplay alternates between a weird Guitar Hero style and designing clothes. When a magazine asked me to design a sharp outfit for fall, it didn’t matter what I was wearing. So long as you change your outfit on every level (type, color, and pattern for each section of dress), the game rewards you with a perfect score. What’s even more curious is that these games are all either rehashes of older Japanese titles or independently created from one another. The primary consensus about girl games from all of these different groups is that there must be a decorating element and that it should be totally up to the player what constitutes being attractive.

Another theme that was present in all of the titles is having minimal to no fail state. While the Movie Star game ranks your ability to catch notes as they dropped, you would have to blatantly miss notes to get below an A. The Baby Sitter game works by performing mini-games that fill a happy baby bar. Nothing seems to happen if you just stare at the kid except that they gurgle and cry. The Doctor game has no fail state. You either follow the on-screen action or nothing happens at all. This trait isn’t unique to the Imagine series, it’s something that you see when developers try to make “casual” oriented Wii games. By confusing being accessible with being easy, numerous games intended for younger or inexperienced audiences become dull because there is no way to lose them.

All of the games require you to be female. The Movie Star game lets you fully adjust your avatar in terms of ethnicity, height, and weight (although this only consists of thin to really thin). I’m not in a position to judge how well it handles skin color but it’s controlled on a blending slide bar rather than just picking a pre-determined color. The other two games require you to be a white female. The doctor game puts you in the role of a blonde doctor just starting her own clinic named Abby while the babysitting game lets you pick your name as you start your college career. You study child care and education while making money babysitting on the side. On a side note, both games are pretty diverse in terms of NPCs by having you work for people from a wide variety of cultures.

Sexuality remains mostly unmentionable in the games. The movie star game expects you to go on hot dates to boost your career, but because these dates (along with acting, auditioning, and going out on the town) consist of catching notes while fashion pictures flash, the game never indicates your feelings one way or the other about those experiences. Your devotion to childcare is creepily absolute in the babysitting game. The doctor game did present a love interest in the form of a movie star named Tony. I didn’t like him. He never asked my avatar anything and every scene was just him babbling about himself. By contrast, the boyfriend in the Nancy Drew games is always willing to listen to me talk about the case and offer advice for solving puzzles.

Generally speaking, none of the games were very fun to play. In addition to criticisms about the lack of a fail state, they are all short and grind heavy. The doctor game randomly generates patients that you must diagnose and hock prescription drugs to. Doing so increases your level and . . . some sort of heart currency, both of which let you buy more equipment for your clinic and not have to outsource patient care. Patients all have the same dozen or so ailments and you always perform the same series of activities that you can’t lose. The baby sitting game is the same way. Once you have played with one baby, you have played with them all. The Movie Star game changes the songs and difficulty, but it’s always the same “catch the note” sequence or test to see if you can dress yourself. In a weird way, it destroys any fantasy that a person might have about the fun and excitement of these lifestyles once it devolves into familiarity and monotony. Heroine Sheik writes about the babysitting game, “What’s interesting is to see the role played in a structured, game format with preset gameplay rewards. Rock the cradle well, gain points. Forget to feed your charges, lose them. Oddly enough, what we’re being reminded of here is that motherhood itself — like gender — is a role to be played, not an inherent state. For such a sexist game, it’s a strangely feminist message” (“Imagine Babyz: Playing Mother”, Heroine-Sheik.com, 10 Dec 2007).