hildren are armed with them in airports, waiting rooms, public transportation—just about anywhere that boredom might lurk. At the press of a few buttons, those kids are transported to worlds filled with action, familiar characters and places—and once they’re done playing, the young players can say with conviction that they learned something. No, it’s not that “hand-eye coordination” chestnut, either. These kids are learning about math, English and more.
“LeapFrog is a universe unto itself in the way that it’s always had education be the cornerstone of its gaming,” says LeapFrog’s Marni Taradash, executive producer of online development. “I haven’t worked with another company like it with regard to its passion and its mission around the marriage of education and technology.”
Since it was founded in 1995, LeapFrog has earned a reputation for creating compelling and entertaining educational games and toys for children, putting about 90 million of its interactive books and games into homes worldwide. The company’s popular Leapster handheld-gaming system was released in 2003, and the company recently launched a new game platform, Didj, aimed at a slightly older crowd. (LeapFrog also recently released an updated Leapster, Leapster2, which adds some PC interactivity through the Learning Path program. More on that later.)
The world of gaming is larger than what we core gamers oftentimes consider, which made us curious about LeapFrog and its place in the gaming space. Who develops these games? How do they balance education and entertainment? Most importantly (for us), are they fun to play? We talked with LeapFrog about these issues and much, much more. What we learned came as a surprise to us—and it might surprise you, too.
In its lifetime, Leapster has been the home to more than 55 games. If you’re not familiar with Leapster, it’s a chubby-looking green-and-purple handheld system with a 3” screen. Kids can play games by using familiar D-pad and A and B buttons or by using an attached stylus device on the touch-sensitive screen. Games are a little blocky looking, but kids in its 4- to 8-year-old target market don’t seem to mind. Leapster2 hardware is about $70, with its titles costing about $25.
LeapFrog’s latest system, the Didj, is a more sophisticated piece of hardware aimed at a more sophisticated crowd—6- to 10-year-olds. The system boasts a higher quality screen with roughly double the resolution as Leapster as well as a much beefier processor. The Didj system sells for about $90, with games priced at around $30.
“On paper, it’s between a DS and a PSP,” says Michael Kosaka, Leapster’s director of game design and innovation. “In execution, it’s probably more toward the DS. It’s a very capable machine actually, and when I first took it out to developers they were like, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool.’ Some of them had done some Leapster stuff before, and that’s 7-year-old technology. The Digj has actually got some chops behind it.”
Kosaka has a long history in the games industry, with more than 20 years of development experience. In his career—which included a 13-year stint at EA—he’s worked on such well-known titles as Crystal Castles, Skate or Die, John Madden Football and Rogue. He started at LeapFrog about a year and a half ago with a seemingly simple task: “We were brought over when the Didj started firing up,” he recalled. “The task was how do we actually make this gaming system fun for kids who think that Leapster is like a bad word? How do we create a platform that’s going to be compelling and interesting to kids who are playing DSs and PSPs and are on their iPods—there are so many distractions—how do we make it cool? That’s been a challenge, to be sure.”
One of the obvious ways to appeal to kids is to snag well-known properties and characters—as the company recently did with Star Wars and Indiana Jones—and build games around these licenses. “I think we’ve actually shown quite a bit of success with leveraging our own IP, but I think there’s no denying the fact that licenses have an enormous pull, and it just makes the Leapster that much more interesting for kids—and that’s true for all of our products,” says Chad Weiner, senior brand manager at LeapFrog.
While LeapFrog titles are first and foremost about education, that doesn’t mean that gameplay isn’t an increasingly important consideration. “The key hook is engagement,” says Taradash. “Educational advisors pretty much all agree that the higher the engagement value, the greater the likelihood that the children will be learning.” So that means that designers have to find the most appropriate places to insert the educational curricula—or as Taradash calls it, “the chocolate-covered broccoli.”
The ways that that content is incorporated into gameplay varies. In the Nicktoons: Android Invasion game, for example, players zip through a fairly traditional side-scrolling platformer, with powerups, pickups and plenty of enemies. Occasionally there are missing platforms to activate or other environmental elements which need special attention. That’s where the learning takes place. In this game, the focus is on mathematics, so the child will have to pick the correct answer among several choices to get past the obstacle. (Perhaps most interestingly, Android Invasion was developed by WayForward, the guys behind last year’s Contra 4 on the DS.)
WayForward says developing for the Didj was a challenge since Android Invasion was a launch title, but that the hardware was surprisingly capable—though it was significantly different than working within other development environments. “... The Didj development system ran under Linux, not Windows, meaning there was a bit of a learning curve at first to get everything up and running,” says WayForward’s Jonathan Hopkinson. “Copying code to the Didj unit for hardware testing was a easier because the Didj unit has a USB port and built in flash memory. It worked just like any other flash drive, you hook it up and copy, no dealing with carts.”
Add’s WayForward’s George Mathews, “[O]ne major difference is we used software emulation instead of hardware for debugging. The other major thing is the educational software that is built into the Didj, it was easy to use but not something our team had done before.”
While LeapFrog’s educational experts are in charge of providing the datasets and curricula to the developers, those developers have a fair amount of leeway in how best to design games around those ideas, says Kosaka. “With the racing game [I worked on], we put all of the education in one spot, which was the prerace,” he recalls. “We had the kid in the shop and they did all of their curricular stuff up front and they’re earning nitros—basically power boosts—which they can expend in the race. When I came over here, I didn’t like that the race would be interrupted by these educational moments—I wanted to race. It’s a different take, what if we put it all in the pit stop or the shop and earn your bonuses there, and then you go play for a bunch of sessions?
“There are no hard and fast [guidelines], like every 2.5 minutes you need to have a question asked or anything like that,” he adds.
Kosaka’s team has also taken a hard look at how developers approach LeapFrog projects. “One thing that I found coming in all of this is in all Leapster games there’s no fail state—they don’t allow the kids to die or lose a life,” says Kosaka. “That was something that we introduced with the Didj line that was new to LeapFrog, as a game-design feature, of having fail states. It was a bit of a fight—not a physical fight—but it was a bit of a thing. Some of the established guys here weren’t used to that, and then we came in as the gamers and said you’ve got to have a little friction going on here, or things get boring. That was an interesting thing to try to install in there. Even with Star Wars, having blasters was sort of far out, the same thing with Indiana Jones and having some of the action that’s involved there—comic-style action is still a bit of a new area for LeapFrog to go into, but simply because the audience is getting older we’ve been given the ability to go play in that area.”
“It’s tough,” Kosaka says. “I think it’s been the holy grail for game designers who have ever done educational games, going back to EA Kids and Lucas Learning—these were really talented designers and developers, and it’s really tough because you’re fighting with yourself as you’re doing the design, where you can escape from something to get into the zone of gaming, but at the same time you want to bring them back with a big collar and yank on their collar and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to do some educational stuff.’ It’s really, really difficult.” It’s not impossible, though, he added, citing historically successful products such as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail.