Artistic Sensibilities, Not Overt Teaching, Drives Award-winning Metamorphabet

AntlersShape-shifting, genre-bending Metamorphabet got plenty of industry attention in 2015. Between an Independent Games Festival award for visual art, a design award from Apple, and plenty of positive reviews, the game has built a relatively small but avid in-crowd of supporters. And for good reason: It’s beautiful, weird and intuitively interactive in a way kids seem to crave.

Though kids and parents celebrate the game’s educational properties, perhaps that’s what’s most interesting — Metamorphabet wasn’t necessarily designed with learning in mind. The vocabulary-building aspect of the game seemingly unfolded almost as a happy side effect of a creative project, though creator Patrick Smith of Vectorpark said he was well aware of the traditional audience for the alphabet book genre.

“I kind of like the idea of working in this strange, arbitrary structure and so for me it was an interesting thing I felt would hopefully be interesting to anyone, adults and kids,” Smith said. “I did know that obviously alphabet books are marketed toward kids, they’re generally made for kids and so it sort of dovetailed with this knowledge that kids were a big part of my audience, at least for mobile games.”

With that in mind, Smith avoided using anything that would overtly frighten kids. But that doesn’t mean his games aren’t a little creepy – in a good way. The game has a strange, surrealist vibe that’s totally intentional and part of what Vectorpark fans seem to love.

“I think kids can handle spooky and weird and even a little scary sometimes, as long as they’re not frightened,” Smith said. “So there was kind of a rubbing off of a few rough edges, you would say, but … kids can handle these kinds of interactive experiences, I think better than adults in some ways.”

On that note, Smith said he often receives emails from adults who don’t know what to do with his games. Kids, though, “just start stabbing around and finding out what happens,” Smith said, and that kind of spontaneous discovery is exactly how he intends his work to be experienced.

Smith knew to leverage the intersection between kid appeal and art going into his work with Metamorphabet. But before this game, Smith fell into the kids market almost by accident. He created a similarly surreal, interactive game experience in Windosill (released for mobile in 2011) and kids seemed to respond immediately.

“Once it was out on the iPad, I started getting a lot of feedback from parents, which I wasn’t really expecting. That game I didn’t really design with kids in mind – I didn’t really design it with anybody in mind, in particular,” Smith said. Quickly, though, he began receiving videos of very young children navigating his games with relative ease.

Though he’s learned to address the kid angle when it comes time to market his games, Smith doesn’t think much about sales during the creative process. He’s not an educator and he hasn’t done educational research, and he’s upfront about his background in fine art and design. He intentionally avoided the other alphabet apps out there, because he didn’t want to consciously avoid or knowingly imitate other apps on the market. “You know, alphabet books are all trying to solve the same problem in a way, especially some letters,” Smith said. “So I didn’t really want to know what was out there.”

ParadeSo if not based in learning, how did Smith choose the words he used in Metamorphabet?

He read the dictionary. Literally.

Smith said he bought a collegiate dictionary and combed through each letter, looking for words that had visual potential. Once he had the options narrowed down to about ten percent he manually sketched them, thinking about the ways those images could morph and interact. It was “almost a lot of grunt work,” Smith said – but it seems to have paid off.

Though it wasn’t necessarily made with learning in mind, kids and parents have responded to the product of Smith’s work – both for the satisfying gameplay experience and potential to help kids learn. Apple, in awarding the app one of its handful of Design Awards in 2015, noted, “outstanding creativity, convincing physics, smooth animations, and exploratory design that will have students coming back again and again.” The youngest users often refer to the game by their favorite word, Smith said, and anecdotally the game does help kids learn new vocabulary.

For all the game’s acclaim last year, Smith is careful to qualify the terms when talking about his success. For him, a job well done isn’t necessarily all about copies sold and the bottom line – though all of that certainly counts.

To be honest, I don’t know that it’s that successful given the time that I spent. It has a pretty high profile with kind of creative and tech types, there are game developers who seem to like it, and people who buy it seem to like it too. I’m happy with it, and it’s the kind of thing I wanted to make.
— Patrick Smith, Vectorpark

For that reason, Smith cautions developers against necessarily following his model if sales success is the only thing they are looking for: “I just think my process is not the most calculating for really hitting a sweet spot for selling millions of copies or something.”

What did work, Smith said, was – for the first time – employing a PR professional to help reach his audience. Between his PR outreach and the buzz surrounding the release itself, he said Metamorphabet ended up in front of most of the people who are inclined to be most interested in this kind of game.

And of course, the awards and recognition didn’t hurt. Metamorphabet seems to have the effect of making its supporters feel like they’re in on something special, both in Smith’s surrealist world and the world of online interactives.

“In general, I think it’s been selling, it’s been getting good word of mouth,” Smith said. “That’s kind of what I always want because that means I’m not solely dependent on it being highlighted by media or Apple. I’m just crossing my fingers that that kind of sustains itself.”

And if last year’s buzz is anything to count on, it seems likely that it will.

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Heather Jurva Heather Jurva is a contributing writer for gamesandlearning.org. She graduated from the School of Journalism at the University of Montana and is now pursuing master's degrees in nonfiction writing and English teaching at UM.