Joan Cusack, an animated red bird and two little girls watching over my shoulder want me to make the colour orange, and I figure it's best to go along.
The computer's browser window shows three large paint tubes - red, blue and yellow - sitting on the ground, their open tops facing a fence, and when I mouse-click on the red one, a duck named Quack, who looks like a walking eggplant, makes a funny sound and hops onto the tube. Red paint splats toward the fence, followed, after another click and jump, by yellow; Cusack, the narrator, congratulates me for the orange result.
The girls, ages 3 and 5, are not impressed, however, until I click on the nearby hose to wash everything off; Quack yells "Hose!" and the wide-eyed red bird gets drenched - to giggles all around, every time.
This is science according to Peep and the Big Wide World. You may recognize it from TV, where it airs on PBS, Discovery Kids and TVOntario, but this week I caught up to Peep and friends in 10 online games. They open up in Internet browser windows on all types of computers - old, new, PCs and Macs - and work almost entirely through mouse movements and clicks.
The Peep activities, which teach kids everything from how sound travels to common animal habitats, are part of a vast array of free online diversions that are often called Flash or Java games, referring to the multimedia tools used to create and run them. Increasingly, these games are serving as introductions not just to interactive entertainment but to digital literacy: This month, I watched as family members separated by seven decades figured out computing basics while playing them.
The girls, my nieces, have been set up with their own user accounts on the family computer. This limits their Web access to sites such as TVOkids.com and CBC.ca/kids, which have large collections of Flash games for various age groups. These range from simple tie-ins to television content, such as hide-and-seek tasks featuring popular characters, to the more educational fare found in Peep's big wide world.
Regardless of the content of the games, playing them still imparts skills: mechanical things like how the mouse works, but also how windows open and close and other operating-system mysteries. The nieces are now moving on to opening and running more advanced educational software, mostly the popular Reader Rabbit series from The Learning Company, as they learn to read.
The other family member was a tougher nut to crack: The girls' grandfather has kept computers at a safe distance since they first started entering the home in the early eighties. And by safe distance, I mean never touching them. This finally changed when a billiards Flash game was found on Miniclip.com. The site boasts 43 million unique visits per month - enough to earn it bragging rights as "the largest privately held entertainment portal" - and its roughly 300 free games are supported by advertising. The pool game is representative: limited in terms of what you can do, but it has accurate physics for the movement of the balls and, most important in this case, point-and-click controls that can be picked up in a minute or two.
It has been an instant success and the no-touch policy has been put aside, for now.
N IS FOR NEW
In addition to reaching out to new players, such games allow would-be creators to learn the ins and outs of interactive software. They are inexpensive to produce compared to 3-D commercial games, and they can be distributed in small files to potentially huge audiences.
Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns, who met while taking computer science courses at the University of Toronto, started working on a Flash game called N five years ago. It features a stick figure "ninja" who runs and jumps past obstacles and enemies. They formed a company called Metanet and released N online, for free, in 2004; it quickly became a hit in indie gaming circles.
On Wednesday, a repackaged version of the game, N+, was released on the Xbox 360's Live Arcade. It can be downloaded for about $10 and has plenty of new features, including an editor so other budding game-makers can design their own levels and an innovative leaderboard that lets you watch the replays of the game's best players - and its worst - setting their high scores. (The original Flash game is also being translated for the Nintendo DS and the Sony PlayStation Portable; both should be out this spring.)
The day before its Xbox Live coming-out party, Sheppard gave a postmortem on N+ as part of the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco, which kicked off the larger Game Developers Conference there. She told the audience having a working prototype was key and allowed a small team to produce the Live Arcade version for a relatively small sum in game-design terms, about $214,000 (U.S.).
As the GDC warmed up later in the week, it became clear that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are keen to see more Metanets and more Peep-style games move to their respective consoles. Nintendo announced that its WiiWare service will bring smaller-scale games to the Wii in May; and Microsoft used the conference's keynote speech to trumpet an open distribution program that will allow anyone to "play and rate community-created games."
John Schappert, a Microsoft vice-president, said in the keynote that the company is going to use those games "to break down the barrier between the creators and consumers." There was talk of recreating the excitement of YouTube and peer-reviewed music, but don't write obituaries for the $60 commercial epic yet. The speech ended with the surprise announcement of a game the nieces and their grandpa will probably not be playing any time soon: Gears of War 2, out in November.
