Game Jam Will Be a Catastrophe

By Cameron Hills

Source:  $18K to be awarded in first ever game jam for cats by Frank Cifaldi.  March 14, 2013.

Games for Cats.  What’s next, games for parakeets?   Squirrel sounds for dogs?  Will Siegfried & Roy come back to market a line of games for Tigers?  Developers will go after the money and this appears to be a lucrative new market.

Purina’s decision is based on the news last July (July 20, 2012) that developer Hiccup decided to market games for Cats and the challenges and successes they faced.  As a marketing gimmick, this is a great and relatively cheap decision.  With top prizes of $15,000, 3,000 and 2,000, the $20k is less than Purina pays out for a single TV campaign.

Given the success of Cat videos on Youtube. (at least 2,350,000 as of today,) there are certainly a large market of people who are interested in these things.   Pet owners are known for buying sweaters, houses, pet vehicles and other offbeat items for their pets.  As long as people are willing to shell out for these things we will see games, toys and other items marketed to this genre.

In many ways actually pursuing this line of development is a good exercise in user interface research and design.  It forces developers to put aside old ideas and research what is actually happening with the user.  This is great training for innovating new methods of interacting with a user, breaking the shackles of tradition.

Games for Cats.  Hopefully, this will be more than a flash in the pan and new techniques for interface and visual design will result.  That would be just purrfect.