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My opening remarks for “The New Frontier of Play”
Sandbox Summit at CES, January 8, 2008
Welcome to everyone, and thank you to Claire, Wendy and Robin for inviting me. What a massive and amazing event to pull off. I’m honored to be moderating this panel out here in Las Vegas. I told my kids I was going to Las Vegas and my 3-year-old said, with real concern, ‘Mommy, why is it lost? Are you going to get lost too?’
I hope not to get lost, but I’ll tell you, it can be a confusing – but so fascinating – time to be a parent. In case you hadn’t heard, when it comes to electronics and childhood, there’s a high-pitched debate going on out there. People have strong feelings about whether childhood is being squandered or set free by today’s tech-based toys. It’s often a debate that goes nowhere, pushing people to one of two sides without enough information. So it’s time to take a longer, more informed look. That’s the mission here. The new frontier of play. We’ve got a panel of people who are making the future, who are standing on a bluff, plotting out paths they hope today’s children will travel. From their vantage point, what does the future of playtime look like?
But first, let’s think about where we came from. In the colonial era, according to a new book on childhood by Howard Chudhacoff, a common toy was a knife – a penknife for whittling. For girls, there were dolls. For both sexes, cards. In the first half of the century, children lost themselves in comic books to the dismay of their parents. How about 30 years ago? I found a list of the top-selling toys of 1978, published by Hit Parade. Star Wars figures were first, followed by the game Simon, cars, trucks, dolls, Mattel’s Electronic Football, Hungry Hungry Hippos, a toy medical kit, UNO, and stuffed animals. Video games were just coming into existence, and virtual worlds like World of Warcraft, let alone Club Penguin or WebKinz, were not even on the radar screen.
Where are we today? The best-selling toys on Amazon.com last week were a mix of electronic and traditional. On top was the Eyeclops bionic eye (a microscope that plugs into a TV), followed by a Iillustory’s make-your-own story kit… then Webkinz reindeer, the Blokus board game and the Barbie Girls MP3 player. My guess is that the Wii might have been right up there too, had it been in stock. In the first half of last year, NPD tells us, the market for youth electronics grew by 17 percent. Today, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 24 percent of children age 4 to 6 play a video game several times a week, and the average older child plays videogames 49 minutes a day, with another hour on the computer (not doing schoolwork). TV time averages almost 4 hours a day. TV and movie characters appear regularly on toothbrushes and toddler toys, and while parents buy right into the marketing, they also lament it. Eighty percent of them, acc to this month’s Parents Mag, say they are fed up with media’s influence on their kids.
Once, last summer, I saw two children – probably around 8 years old – sitting on a park bench on a brilliant afternoon, facing monkey bars, swings, and a two-story fort. There was a huge green field behind them where their families were picnicking. The kids spent their time passing a handheld game back and forth – I wasn’t close enough to see exactly what -- and trying to find enough shade to see the screen.
Yet, on a blog not long ago, I read the words of a mother joyfully reporting:
I’m just happy that after Lego Star Wars the Complete Saga, when we play with Legos in real life, my boys are suddenly building walls on their own, and a house for Yoda to sleep in, and a Star Destroyers to go flying through the house. Before, they could only watch as I helped them build cars, planes, and houses. They were never so creative; they never really knew what worlds and stories they could build.
Are both these scenarios part of the new frontier of play? As we look out there, where’s the quicksand? Where’s the climbing tree? That’s our mission this morning. The debate goes nowhere if we don’t know what digital play, tech play, screen-based play looks like and will look like –among different ages and different products. How do they differ in how they make kids’ feel about themselves and the world? How do they differ in the role models they offer, the kinds of thoughts they spark, the kinds of playtime they enable?
We’re fortunate today to have a panel of people to give us insights from the industry perspective. They are, from my left to right:
Introduce each.
Jeff Bell, Microsoft Xbox
Alice Cahn, Cartoon Network
Ellen LaPointe, Hope Lab, which was the force behind ReMission, a game for cancer patients
Tim Hall, Digital Blue
Rosie O’Neill, Mattel, to tell us about Barbie Girls
I’m going to ask each panelist to spend a few minutes talking about how their companies think about these issues when it comes to designing toys and games for today’s kids. Then I’ll ask a few questions and take questions from the audience.
Jeff, let’s start with you. Take it away –
--- Lisa Guernsey