We are focused less on education, although education does come in to some of our games.
To give you a couple of examples of properties we're currently working on, our first series is called School 26, and it's built for what we saw was the largest gap in the market in terms of quality products for girls between the ages of 10 and 16 years old. School 26 is the story of a young character named Kate, who has unfortunately been to 25 high schools in total already in her young career, and in her last year of high school has made a deal with her parents for them to please stay put long enough for her to graduate. The deal is if she can get to know the kids in her school and make herself part of the community, then she can stay there and graduate. It's a tough school, though, and these kids have issues, so she's challenged to help them a bit.
Is it an educational game? Not necessarily. What we did was spend a lot of time looking at what young girls spend their time doing, and we're in each other's business, because we're social engineers. This is the stuff that drives us: “Did you hear about so and so? Did you know this is going on? I can't believe she doesn't have this. How can we help with that?”
These are great skills. When I went to do my MBA and they talked about emotional intelligence, I almost laughed. Really, this is a thing you teach? Girls have been doing this in high school forever, right? We do emotional intelligence nonstop. How do you build that into a video game so that girls are learning those skills and figuring out how to use them positively? The primary mechanic in that game is empathy. It's a little bit different.
In the second version of that game, which is called School 26: Summer of Secrets, the tool in that game.... In most games, if you're gathering something—for example, gathering coins—you might level up and buy a better sword. In our game you're gathering secrets, and you can use them for good or for evil, so it really teaches you the power of information and how to be a good friend.