A time for play: Interstitial time,Invest/Express games,and feminine leisure style

Introduction

The rising popularity of what are often referred to as Social Networking Games (SNGs) have garnered a great deal of attention from both academics and industry professionals. These games have been lauded for their ability to capture new game audiences and connect players in compelling ways. The rise of popularity in SNGs such as Zynga’s FarmVille (and its successors), Clash of Clans (CoC), or even networking aspects of games such as Candy Crush Saga and Words with Friends have all gained attention in the academic community. These games have created a significant shift in how players integrate real world social and game world social factors to interesting effects. Similarly, the monetary rise of the companies that produce these popular games—companies such as Zynga, Glu, Storm 8, and Supercell—indicate that the shift in audience and play style has been a financially lucrative endeavor.

SNGs are described by researchers as games that are embedded as a part of a social networking website (usually Facebook), although an increasing number are stand-alone games that are played on smartphone or tablet iOS and Android mobile operating systems. For example, Zynga’s FarmVille was initially a Facebook-embedded game that required a computer and browser to play and is now a game that can be played entirely on a mobile device. It is up to the player as to whether or not they wish to link it back to their Facebook account. Other games function similarly, and increasingly while a game can be played using typical social media software, the stand-alone versions are equally, if not more, popular. In other words, the “social” aspect of SNGs has become increasingly negotiable and is no longer necessarily the defining component of these games.

Research on SNGs has helped to better illustrate the social network function of these games. Little research, however, has been done about the relationship between how the design of these games manages game world versus real world time. As such, it is worth considering that much of the video game industry refers to these games as “Invest/Express” games (as opposed to SNGs). I will break down the label of Invest/Express later in this essay, but for now it is worth noting the distinction between academic versus industry labels in terms of the industry’s overall perception of their value. Remapping the games as Invest/Express makes allowances for new ways to consider other aspects that make them powerful in their ability to capture both new and old gaming audiences. In essence, Invest/Express games have two major attributes that exemplify this power: the use of personalization (expressing) and the management of time (investing).

Time management in Invest/Express Games is particularly powerful and helps to contextualize the games and their values. As such, this essay will primarily focus on the significance of time management in the Invest/Express game, illustrating how the casual industry has expanded the older category of “Time Management Game” to transform it into the newer Invest/Express model. This growth, I argue, is an essentialization and explosion of both the realities and assumptions of what I label as feminine leisure styles, explaining the surplus of women gamers that play games in the Invest/Express category. While both men and women engage in feminine leisure styles, these games are built off of assumptions about how women construct their leisure experiences. To this point, the use of interstitial time as an important aspect of game play models the expectations of women’s leisure patterns. Yet, games such as CoC use higher risk gameplay and masculine style game themes (war and battle), as opposed to the feminine or gender neutral themes of FarmVille, Restaurant Story, or Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (KK:H) (using bucolic, culinary, and fashion/celebrity themes, respectively). CoC, then, helps to illustrate the larger industry impact of a feminine leisure style that has become prominent in recent years. In many ways, the significance of Invest/Express embodies a shift toward a feminization of popular video games.

SNGs and Invest/Express games

In recent years, research on SNGs has grown, unsurprisingly, along with the growth of SNGs themselves. While SNGs are not necessarily always the top downloaded games, many have made significant profits and rank in the millions of downloads. For example, Business Insider reported over US$28 million downloads of Glu’s KK:H by 2015. The game has brought the company a profit of over US$200 million (Weisman, 2015). Zynga—the creator of FarmVille and other ‘Ville games all of which are SNGs—had a 2015 revenue of US$764 million (Zynga, 2015). Storm8, a smaller but growing company which is producer of the popular Restaurant Story and Castle Story games, had over 400 million users in 2014 (Takahashi, 2014). King, the creator of Candy Crush Saga (which is not entirely an SNG but has social elements) brought in US$1.9 billion in 2014 (Kafka, 2014). And Supercell, the creator of CoC, made US$2.3 billion in 2015 (Takahashi, 2016). All of this is to say, the market for SNGs has expanded rapidly and is increasingly affecting the way we play games.

As the games have expanded, so has the research on these games. Research on SNGs often focuses on the most obvious aspect—the social. Wohn et al. (2011) discuss ways that the social factor is largely what gets many people involved in playing SNGs in the first place. Boudreau and Consalvo (2014) discuss the impact that SNGs have on families who play together, suggesting that families playing together increase the lifespan of an overall gameplay in order to foster a continued familial sense of the community. Some researchers have looked, to varying extents, at the role time plays in SNGs. Wohn and Lee (2013), for example, studied player motivations in Facebook games using Uses and Gratifications theory, finding that rather than using the games for social purposes, players were more likely to use the game as a means of passing time or relieving boredom (Wohn and Lee, 2013: 176).

This relevance of time is a key factor in pushing what we once understood as SNGs to a newer category of how industry now defines more recent versions of these games in this category: Invest/Express. Invest/Express is the industry label for more recent versions of what used to be categorized as SNGs. Games such as FarmVille, KK:H, Restaurant Story, and CoC once were known for their push toward social relationships but are now better suited to be understood in terms of the relationship between a player and time.

To break down the term Invest/Express, “invest” stands for the investment of time or money into the product—the player is expected to invest their time and/or money into the game world in order reap the rewards of play, which can be characterized by the “express” portion. In “express,” the label is referring to the ability to design or personalize a space according to various modes of personal styles, tastes, and gameplay needs. For example, a player coming to FarmVille is giving sparse land and resources within their bucolic space, and after spending time in the world is given more resources and space, which they can personalize toward efficiency, style, or some combination of the two.

It seems notable that while all of these games have a social networking capacity, social networking is no longer a focal feature. Invest/Express becomes an articulation of the industry focusing less on social gaming and more on temporal gaming aspects. Player management in Invest/Express is generally performed through the use of energy points. Within the Invest/Express model the player cannot play too much at once and is constantly asked to play a little bit and return and must return to the game world at a later time to complete certain tasks. In this sense, the Invest/Express model is best characterized by its push and pull of time—the player is expected to play for a short period of time over several points during a typical day, in order to play effectively.

Gender and the casual games market

Within all of this, it is important to consider the role of gender in understanding Invest/Express games, particularly in terms of how they fit into what is often referred to as the casual games market. “Casual games” is a moniker that came into heavy use in early 2000s as a positionality that sat in contrast to “hardcore” gaming. While hardcore games are often discussed as difficult to learn, using expensive console systems, and requiring large amounts of time, the casual games market is generally understood within the context of games that are easy to learn, cheap or free, and appealing to larger general audience (as opposed to the exclusive audience alluded to by the hardcore market). So, hardcore gaming would include games such as the Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid series, while casuals generally refer to games like Bejeweled or Diner Dash.

Jesper Juul (2010) breaks down the stereotypes of hardcore versus casual explaining that the stereotype of the hardcore player is a player “who has preference for science fiction, zombies, and fantasy fictions, has played a large number of video games, will invest large amounts of time and resources toward playing video games, and enjoys difficult games” (p. 8). Alternatively, the casual player is considered a gaming novice and “is the inverted image of the hardcore player” who likes “positive and pleasant fictions” (Juul, 2010: 8). This player, according to Juul, is often stereotyped as one who is unwilling to invest a great deal of time in game play. These stereotypes are not always accurate, as Juul notes. Similarly, Consalvo (2009) deftly illustrates the problematic nature of labeling games hardcore and casual, terminologies which are not always representative of actual play styles.

These stereotypes easily parse to gendered expectations of players. Many have written in great deal about shifts in the video game market that took place starting in the mid-1990s. Where, in the past, games were largely marketed toward men and boys, games slowly began to find audiences of women and girls (Cassell and Jenkins, 1998; Fron et al., 2007). In recent years, statistics show that roughly half of all game players are women (Frum, 2013). The casual market, in many ways, can be seen as an industry response to the emergence of female players, both perceived and real. While a variety of people play casual games (as well as hardcore games), in reality, a perception of femininity in the casual games market guides the design of casual games in many ways. One of these ways is a perception of women’s leisure time.

Because it is impossible to disentangle the emergence of Invest/Express games and other casuals, both of which exemplify a shift toward more gender diversity within the video game industry, it becomes reasonable, in many ways to correlate the two. Vanderhoef (2013) argues that the culture around the industry feminized the casual market. He explains that casual gaming became a perceived threat as the video game industry grew, and that threat seemed to be directed specifically at the perception of vulnerable masculine gaming culture. “This vulnerability manifests itself in an aversion to the feminine, to the queer, and to the non-masculine in general. Moreover, the discourses surrounding gender and video games also speak toward larger cultural discourses around gender, sexuality, and racial politics” (Vanderhoef, 2013: para. 42). Vanderhoef’s argument is essentially that the expansion of the video game industry itself led to the perception that casuals were specifically meant for women or feminine gamers.

Perception, however, is not always reality. Eklund (2016) demonstrates that while there is a perception that the casual market is necessarily feminine, this is not how it always plays out in reality. Using survey samples, Eklund (2016) illustrates that both casual and traditional gaming has both male and female players “contrary to the dominating ideology which connect women with casual gaming and men with hardcore” (p. 26). Similarly, Good (2013) shows that the majority of large spending players in SNGs and other casuals are men.

Despite this disjuncture, I argue that in terms of game design, perception plays a more immediate role than reality. The assumption that women dominate the casual market—or, in the very least are a large part of that market—means that the play styles and preferences are going to be a large part of how casuals (and specifically the majority of Invest/Express games) are designed. One of those factors involves expectations about women and the use of their leisure time.

Gender, time, and play

As already noted, while both men and women play games that are often labeled either “casual” or “hardcore”—labels that have been critiqued as inaccurate of the actual realities of how and what people play—these games are often aligned with gendered stereotypes that set expectations of the player’s identity. In turn, many Invest/Express games, as a mode of casual play, are targeted explicitly toward women audiences. For example, in one interview, the Chief Creative Officer of Storm8 remarks that the game Restaurant Story 2 (RS2) was designed with the perceived audience of a woman named “Jennifer” a 30-something woman from Milwaukee (Sparks, 2015). Certainly, not all Invest/Express games are made for the perceived audience of “Jennifer,” but she becomes a useful way to understand industry perceptions about their expected players.

Research about women and leisure helps to illustrate specific constraints that many women have in organizing their free time. Women’s leisure time—particularly that which potentially overlaps with domestic spaces—is often problematic because women typically have more responsibilities at home in comparison to men (Aitchison, 2003; Green et al., 1990). In turn, work and leisure activities often become conflated for many women in and around the domestic sphere and often take on productive qualities (Green et al., 1990). Hochschild (1989, 2001) refers to this as a “leisure gap” wherein male leisure time is valued differently than female leisure time, resulting in women typically having less time for play than men.

In response to this complicated relationship, feminist leisure studies researchers have been exploring the limitations on women and the use of non-work time for several decades. This research largely finds that women tend to perform leisure activities that are cheap or free, easy to learn, and can be done in shorter or longer periods of time (Deem, 1986). This final point regarding longer or shorter periods of time for leisure is a relevant one: it helps to elaborate on the reality that many women have found that it is easier to fit leisure activities in-between activities and therefore seek leisure activities that can be done for a few moment or for longer periods of time, depending on the snippet of time allowed. Henderson (1996) warns that women’s leisure is not quite so pat—not quite so simple in reality, her work suggests, “one size doesn’t fit all” and that women’s actual leisure time varies depending on other cultural, social, and ideological constructs in the lived experiences of women. Obviously a single mother with a lower income level has significantly less time for leisure than a single woman without children. Similarly, other factors such as age, social class, ethnicity, and abled status map to different modes and interpretations of leisure time.

This research neatly can be applied to video game play as it relates to leisure time. Along these lines, Royse et al. (2007) suggest that many women simply feel that they “don’t have time” to play video games, which deliberately qualifies game play as a “waste of time.” Lally (2002) finds that in particular with domestic computing technologies, women tend to be reticent to use home computers deliberately for “play” activities. She explains, “Women do sometimes buy computers just because they want one to ‘play’ with, although they might not describe what they are doing by the use of that term” (Lally, 2002: 165). Yet, increasingly domestic technologies such as personal computers are no longer necessarily tethered to the domestic sphere, given the increase in mobile technologies. This disjuncture has likely helped the shift that has increased the number of women who play video games. That leisure and those games, however, are designed with very distinct characteristics with regard to expectations of the player’s free time.

Yet, while the reality of actual women’s leisure time might be distinct and complicated, there are unquestionable assumptions built into the perception of women’s leisure time within the consumer market. In particular, when it comes to game design women’s leisure is often treated with an understanding that it needs to be sold in a productive way that does not always parse as entirely a “leisure” activity. For example, elsewhere I illustrated that Nintendo advertising campaigns in the mid-to-late-2000s often sold their products as “productive” or as a means of filling all available free time (Chess, 2011). For example, one advertising campaign for the Nintendo Developers’ System (DS) instructed players to “Do something with [their] nothing” indicating that leisure time should not be constructed as a distinct activity but should be slipped into snippets of time between other productive activities. These features of leisure style have largely remained a part of the design of more recent games targeting women audiences—in particular notable in how Time Management Games morphed into Invest/Express games.

From time management games to invest/express

As women gamers entered the market in the early-to-mid-2000s, a new genre of gaming emerged: The Time Management Game. Time Management Games can be seen as an early articulation of perceptions of women and leisure time. The genre emerged and became popularized with the release of the 2005 computer game Diner Dash. Diner Dash (and its sequels) puts the player in the subject position of a waitress/restaurateur tasked with making customers happy by waiting on tables, clearing messes, and engaging in other work-like tasks (Chess, 2012). Subsequent Time Management Games did not always take place in restaurants but tend to be thematically focused on service-related tasks such as the management of salons or hotels. The genre became large enough that the casual game portal Big Fish Games has an entire searchable category for this style of game.

The ludic style of the Time Management Game relates back to processes and expectations of women’s leisure (Chess, 2012). While Time Management Games typically does not involve real world time management—the player does not connect game world time to real world time—it does neatly allude to expectations of women and time. The official moniker of “Time Management” itself references a deluge of products, all meant to actually manage time. According to Arlie Russell Hochschild (1989), time management products are typically marketed to women, in response to the complexities of what she refers to as the “Second Shift”—the reality where many women are tasked with two full-time jobs, one in an office and one managing the domestic sphere. I refer to the work performed in Diner Dash (and similar games) as a kind of “third shift” wherein even leisure time marks a move toward a kind of simulated productivity (Chess, 2012). While Time Management Games enjoyed a good deal of popularity, in many ways their replication of productivity was always somewhat limited. Time Management games, while bearing the same moniker as time management products, do not mark actual time in the real world. This changed, however, with the emergence of newer models of play—at the point that SNGs and Time Management Games became rearticulated as Invest/Express. As already described, Invest/Express captures that essence of early SNGs, but does so by balancing real world and game world time. Invest/Express use the frenetic style of Time Management movement and service, combining them with the temporal constraints of the real world.

The Invest/Express model of game play becomes the perfect articulation of the perception of women’s play and leisure time. As already noted, both men and women play casual games (regardless of whether they are labeled puzzle games, SNGs, or Invest/Express). However, the use of game time to inhabit interstitial time in the real world marks a mode of feminization of game play and leisure time. In the next section, I break down how interstitial time is used in Invest/Express games as a mode of feminine leisure style.

Interstitial time as feminine leisure style

As noted in the previous section, Invest/Express games are characterized by what could be referred to as a kind of “interstitial time.” With this label, I am referring to small spaces of time—gaps of time that are not used for anything else. All of our lives are characterized by interstitial time, time that is not used for other purposes. To some extent, our digital mobile devices have taken up much of this interstitial time. Where that time used to be spent reading, quietly thinking, or performing other small acts of leisure, many people now use mobile devices as a method of taking up these tiny excesses of time.

Yet, Invest/Express games thrive on interstitial time. The Invest/Express model does not allow for longer periods of game play time. All game play is generally done in less than 15 minutes; if a player wants to play for longer they generally need to spend real world money. This means that the game world necessarily monitors extra-game time in its very format. Yet, because most gameplay functions of Invest/Express cannot be achieved in one time period, the design itself also banks on the player returning for subsequent periods of interstitial time. It is constantly in the mode of pushing the player away (since the player cannot play for long) yet pulling them back (because the player needs to return to complete specific in-game tasks). The game itself seems to count on the interstitial moments that we carry throughout the day, arguing that the player should use those moments deliberately as a mode of leisure.

Women’s leisure, as already discussed earlier in this essay, is often characterized by its necessary operation in smaller snippets of time. In this, there is an inclination to sneak away smaller portions of time for other purposes. In this way, we can see the intersection of the interstitiality necessitated by Invest/Express games and the perception of women’s leisure activities. Where Time Management Games used a title that effectively characterized the expectations of women’s leisure time, Invest/Express games enact it fully. Where Diner Dash simulated work processes within game play in ways that conflated work and leisure, FarmVille and other Invest/Express games function in such a way that the player’s leisure activities are all necessarily productively functioning within interstitial moments. This new outgrowth can be thought of as a kind of feminine leisure style.

Work in the field of rhetoric often refers to “feminine style” to consider specific modes of speech that traditionally women used in an audience persuasion style but ultimately is used by and for both men and women. The phrase was coined by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1989) as a speaking style which is “personal in tone,” “structured inductively,” inviting “audience participation” creating a kind of identification between the speaker and the audience (p. 13). This style was what helped normalize women into the public sphere of speech and avoided typical taboos in historical times and places when women were not permitted public speech. These early tropes in women’s public speech patterns helped to stabilize women in a place where she had not been accepted previously.

To a similar effect, we can see the interstitial time as a mode of everyday play practices as being a form of what could be characterized as feminine leisure style. If the video game industry and its accompanying products had been, in the past, intended for masculine audiences, then certain markers would be necessary to help normalize and indicate that women may have a growing role in this market. In this way, while women’s leisure might be varied and complex, as noted by Henderson (1996), one might more successfully characterize the patterns already discussed regarding women’s leisure as “feminine leisure style.” Feminine leisure style need not necessarily be only for women—men can just as easily engage in the patterns of feminine leisure style. However, the placement of feminine leisure styles functions as an indicator that the space is open to a growing woman audience. In this way, the previous aspects of women’s leisure that I have listed help to construct a list of what “feminine leisure style” might look like. In short, (1) it can be done in interstitial moments, (2) it is cheap or free, (3) that it is easy to learn, and (4) it is often conflated with work. Finally, while not explicit, the previous things suggest that the games are (5) low risk. By “low risk” in this I mean a variety of things: the game will not constitutively disrupt the player’s life (hence the snippets of time and low cost entry points). Additionally, “low risk” is meant to imply in-game aspects: the game is more likely to make the player feel empowered as opposed to disempowered. Disempowerment, I would argue, can come through not being able to attain paths to game play success (implied by difficulty to learn) as well as thematic elements that might suggest disempowerment. This lack of disempowerment inherent in feminine leisure style aligns with Juul’s assessment of casuals as “positive and pleasant fictions.”

Feminine leisure style offers easy entry points that allow the player to enter game worlds and enjoy leisure, but with lower stakes in terms of time, money, and themes than hardcore gaming does. In many ways, the free-to-play (F2P) structure of these games provides a partial articulation of the feminine leisure style: it gives a zero cost entry point that permits players to dabble in several kinds of games, finding the exact in-game style that gives them the most comfort and easiest fit into one’s non-gaming life. While Invest/Express games always equate time with money (i.e. paying allows you to skip certain time-intensive projects), the F2P inevitably encourages a more novice audience, permitting them to only pay at the point that they have decided to commit to the game. In this way, F2P elements offer a harbinger of feminine leisure style within a game. The subsequent sections use specific Invest/Express games to characterize feminine leisure style as a mode of nascent play.

Playing it out

Invest/Express games, more than any other category, characterize feminine leisure style by prioritizing interstitial time as a fundamental aspect of low-risk game play. Other casual games also often use interstitial time as an element of play but do not tie the game world and real world time together in the neat and coherent ways that Invest/Express games do. For example, in games such as Candy Crush Saga, a player earns one energy point every 20 minutes (one energy point equals one round of play), which maxes out at five rounds. This means that unlike older casual games such as Tetris, a player cannot play Candy Crush Saga indefinitely—there are limitations built into the game space that forces the player to stop playing. In Candy Crush Saga, however, the use of interstitial time does not necessarily pull the player back in via a quest structure or narrative. Invest/Express games, however, are dependent on this interstitial time in order to build an intimate and ongoing relationship with the player, pushing and pulling them in and out of the game world as time allows.

Because there is not a singular formula for how Invest/Express games construct a relationship to time within game content, in what follows I break down four popular Invest/Express games elaborating specifically about the push-and-pull of time with reference to the player’s relationship to the game world. Each of these games—FarmVille 2: Country Escape (FV2:CE), Restaurant Story 2 (RS2), Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (KK:H), and Clash of Clans (CoC)—are primarily played on android or iOS mobile devices. While they all have social elements built into game play, those elements are necessarily eclipsed by how the game deals with the player’s time. In this way, it becomes clear that the Invest/Express model focuses increasingly on time management in gameplay and less on social networking. In these examples, we can see the emergence of the feminine leisure style as a primary mode of mobile play. Additionally, in what follows, I highlight how low-risk elements of the games help to reinforce the feminine leisure style.

FV2:CE

The FarmVille games—like all of the other Zynga branded ‘Villes—first emerged on Facebook. The original ‘Ville game, YoVille, was purchased by Zynga in 2008, and they maintained the branding to include games such as CityVille, CastleVille, ChefVille, FrontierVille, and its most famous game, FarmVille. In addition to other games (such as Words with Friends and Texas Hold ‘Em) the ‘Ville series launched Zynga to a point of infamy, in particular with FarmVille winning the “Best New Game” award at the Game Developers Conference in 2010 and subsequently being heavily critiqued by others in the video game industry (Terdiman, 2010). Yet, as of 2015, Zynga’s revenue is US$764 million. All of this to say that the “Ville series has been wildly popular and, by many accounts, and has invented a new style of game play.”

As already noted, initially FarmVille could only be played through Facebook, using the already built social network structure of the platform to create this browser-only game. But as smartphone technologies continued to develop, versions of FarmVille became available as iOS and Android apps, both for smartphones and for tablets. This transition meant that many of the social media aspects remained, but the game itself was now separated from its initial central point of extending social networking. While more recent versions of the game, such as FV2:CE, suggest that users connect with friends or strangers to tend to fields or borrow items, these functions are no longer necessary to the game play. Instead, the design focus is now more reliant on the interstitial moments that occur throughout one’s day, parsed through an interface (smartphones) that many are already attached to for more practical, non-gaming functions.

FV2:CE (Figure 1) relies entirely on interstitial play to guide the player within the game world. When the game first begins, the player has a small plot of land and the ability to farm wheat. That wheat can be combined with other items (water, milk, and apples) which are acquired from other portions of the farm (wells, cows, and trees), which can then be developed into other products that the player can “sell” to anonymous non-player characters for in-game money. Within this bucolic setup, however, each of these items takes time to grow, cook, or repopulate. Thus, the player begins processes in one game visit and then returns for subsequent play sessions to continue what they have begun. For example, crops take varying amounts of time—anywhere from 1 minute to 24 hours. Recipes and other modes of crafting take varying amounts of time as well, anywhere from 2 minutes to several hours. In effect, play sessions are begun in intervals and then completed in subsequent intervals—and in those subsequent intervals even more new play is instigated. The players are constantly being brought back to the game to finish what they have begun.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Screenshot of FV2:CE.

These crafting patterns, of course, are not entirely unique to Invest/Express games. In many ways, they bear similarity to the larger Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game worlds, such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft. Crafting is certainly part of MMO game play, but it is far less central than it is in Invest/Express games. While in MMOs it is tangential to questing, in Invest/Express it is central and integral to the very point of game play. The process where players start something and must return to complete that task creates a rhythm of play that taps into feminine leisure styles, where there is an expectation that the player will never have more than a few minutes to finish any one thing. More than any other defining characteristic, recent versions of FV2:CE are defined by an expectation that the player will be playing for short bits of time between other tasks. The game, additionally, can be understood as low risk both thematically and monetarily. The F2P game does not require that the player pay upfront. The content is thematically empowering for the player through “pleasant fictions” wherein it gives nothing but positive affirmations in this bucolic utopia. The game does not punish players for not playing over longer periods of time, if they decide to leave and pick it up later—the game world remains stable from the last time the player had been there.

RS2

The conceptual designs of Invest/Express that Zynga constructed with the ‘Ville series were perfected by Storm8. Storm8, a company founded by former Zynga employees in 2009, not surprisingly has similarly gameplay functionality in many of their games to the Zynga ‘Ville Style mentioned above. Many Storm8 games are clones of Zynga Games. For example, Storm8’s Farm Story is essentially a clone of FarmVille and Castle Story is essentially a clone of CastleVille. However, other games in the Storm8 catalogue are relatively unique: in particular, both Restaurant Story and Bakery Story encompass a different mode of Invest/Express game than the ‘Ville games.

RS2 functions as a cross between Diner Dash and a Real Time Strategy game (such as Civilization), albeit with less functionality than the latter. Additionally, while “story” is in the title of these games, there are no narrative elements to contend with—we get neither a name nor a backstory for our protagonist. Instead, we are given pure work with an endless desire for expansion.

In this Invest/Express game, the player is given a small restaurant space and the ability to sparsely decorate when the game begins (Figure 2). The player has access to one grocery store to pick up ingredients, some of which are immediately available and some of which unlock later. As the player has access to more ingredients, they are able to unlock more recipes. Each ingredient takes specific amounts of in-game time or in-game money to unlock. For each recipe to cook, it takes various amounts of time to complete. For instance, French Toast takes 1.5 minutes to complete, tomato soup takes 1 hour, and a French Dip sandwich takes 6 hours. In addition to time, each recipe costs a certain number of ingredients and a certain amount of in-game monetary investment to cook. The more the player unlocks recipes, the more customers they can serve, but quickly, the restaurant runs out of space and expansion is necessary. Additionally, along with expansion comes decoration—the express part of Invest/Express.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Screenshot of Restaurant Story 2.

As always with the Invest/Express model, time equals money. The longer it takes for something to cook and the more in-game money it costs the player, and the more servings the item creates in the RS2 algorithm. When the player serves an item, a more expensive item might provide hundreds or thousands of servings, while a cheaper and less consuming item may only be a couple of servings. When the player serves those items, it does not a personalize service, as one would with Diner Dash. Instead, customers automatically enter the restaurant and if there is food to be served they will sit down at a table (if there are open tables). The game automates the service and payment as customers wander in and out of the restaurant. This continues until all of the servings have been completed.

The more time a player invests in the RS2, the better they do. While the player can allow non-player characters to wander on and off of the screen without interacting with them, there are bonuses for collecting tips, and “special” non-player characters such as workmen, who if clicked on will offer the player important building items (such as nails, blueprints, and wood boards) for building expansions to the game world. The game, in this way, requires consistent touching and rewards the player for always being aware of what is happening within the game world. To play RS2 well, the player must always be prepared to play it just a little—investing small amounts of time at regular intervals. The game, in its design, rewards the feminine leisure style. At the same time, the game (like FV2:CE) uses thematic “pleasant fictions” to reinforce a low-risk atmosphere. There is no risk to the player deciding not to play for days, months, or years—the game picks up where they left off.

KK:H

The feminine leisure styles produced by both Zynga and Storm8 allow for players to constantly dabble with their leisure practices but never get fully invested. The investment of time in these games is primarily to encourage the player to return to the game world, which increases their opportunities for creative expression. In the Glu Interactive game KK:H, the player becomes bound not only by the processes of time investment and return but also by a sleek narrative wherein the player is thrown into the highs and lows of celebrity lifestyle (or a gameplay approximation of those things) (Figure 3). Within this narrative space, the player is almost immediately introduced to the celebrity KK who (unsurprisingly) takes a liking to them and helps them by finding them an agent and a variety of show business gigs: modeling, acting, and appearances.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Screenshot of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (with my in-game baby, “Pickles”).

Gigs take time in KK:H. Each gig takes an interval of anywhere from 1 to 8 hours, marked by real time. In other words, the player must succeed at the gig (by achieving a five-star rating) in the allotted time given. For example, a player may have a modeling gig that is given 3 hours of real time; once the gig has begun, the clock begins ticking. Simultaneously, the player is only given a specific number of energy points, depending on their current level. There are almost never enough energy points to complete the gig at hand, regardless of the player’s level in the game. New energy points repopulate—once every 5 minutes and have a cap depending on the player’s current level. Thus, the game uses interstitial pockets of play to pull the player back in, every short period of time in order to use up energy points and complete a task. At the same time, this mode of Invest/Express means that a player is dissuaded from ever playing for too long. The game is constantly pulling in the player to finish old gigs and then pushing them back out again to earn more energy points and time. The result is that the player is bound up in the flow of interstitial play and feminine leisure style.

The game, however, is also somewhat more thematically complex than FV2:CE and RS2. The narrative involves more operatic movements toward and away from fame, wherein the player’s character is always invested in “drama.” The risk factors of KK:H are variable, choices often have slightly different ramifications, and there are several possible paths to “success.” Not playing for longer periods of time could cause a player to lose fans, but can also potentially help her gain them (these elements appear to be randomized). In short, with KK:H the ideals of “low risk” and “pleasant fictions” are far more of a question of personal taste, according to the player. In other words, whether the game is “pleasant” largely depends on the player’s personal love of “drama.”

CoC

The previous three games—FV2:CE, RS2, and KK:H—all bear themes that are either popular with women audiences or gender neutral. The use of bucolic, culinary, and fashion themes help to establish that the Invest/Express style of gaming is one that can easily match feminine leisure styles with themes that are commonly popular with feminine audiences. CoC, however, illustrates a shift. In Supercell’s CoC, the player guides a warring clan of soldiers attacking other warring clans, infinitely. The theme is not terribly unusual for a video game—although as an Invest/Express game, CoC stands out because of its thematic reliance on more traditional video game expectations—fighting and war. Additionally, the game has higher risk elements embedded in its structure.

Just as with the other Invest/Express games, CoC tasks player with crafting and building—processes which take intervals of time and force the player in and out of the game world (Figure 4). Instead of focusing on themes of nourishment and creation (such as FV2:CE or RS2) or work (such as KK:H), CoC focuses player activity on destruction. Some of that destruction is toward fictional non-player characters, while other portions of the game nod at the SNG aspects—players are able to raid the camps of other players. While the results of these raids are never devastating, they do create a more high-risk gaming scenario where departure from the game world puts the player’s game world in a more precarious situation.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Screenshot of Clash of Clans.

CoC engages with feminine leisure styles through the interstitial pockets of time, in which it enforces play. A regular player of CoC, just as with the other games, can never play it all at once but must return to the game over the course of regular daily activities. The play can never be performed in excess and is always modulated by the constraints of real world time, which are built into the game. At the same time, it creates higher risk scenarios wherein the player is potentially disempowered, albeit briefly, and punished for not playing regularly. CoC puts players at risk only when they are not playing, creating a sense of anxiety that if one is not playing, their materials and land may have been demolished. This extra stress on time—the inability to control how and what will occur in the game world in a player’s absence—combines feminine leisure styles with a different level of urgency toward play. In these things, CoC neatly combines masculine and feminine leisure styles in such a way that the boundaries become blurred. This is not to suggest that the game, itself, was necessarily created for a target audience of women. Instead, it suggests a slippage, wherein the feminine leisure style has become a primary mode of digital play for a broader spectrum of audiences.

Conclusion

Where Time Management Games simulated feminine leisure style—a form a leisure that is necessarily productive and reliant on interstitial pockets of time—the Invest/Express style of the game has exploded this simulation, wherein those interstitial pockets now guide real world time. Additionally, they help to continue to produce low-risk, positive play styles, considered typical of casual games. By thinking of this as a mode of feminine leisure style, it is useful to consider ways that the influx of women gamers has clearly influenced the output of the video game industry since 2005. Yet, it is important to remember that feminine leisure style is not only meant for women; like the rhetorical feminine style, it is a practice begun by women by that has seeped into the larger cultural milieu.

Certainly, it would be easy to question the “play” aspects of the feminine leisure style. When so engaged with work, one must ask how and when the pleasures of leisure are able to seep onto the screen. In short, I would argue that the pleasures of interstitial play, in particular, returns to the notion of “empowerment”—by empowering oneself over all available time (both inside and outside of the game worlds) a player is able to feel empowered in their everyday lives. In this way, the empowerment of properly and efficiently waiting on tables and creating happiness is equal to the empowerment of successfully navigating a modeling gig, on the way to the A-List. CoC, of course, complicates this more, although battle-centric games are empowering in different ways.

By focusing on Invest/Express games and examining their relationship to the feminine leisure style, we can learn more about the emerging games and how there are changing audience expectations about adult play time. The four games discussed specifically in this essay—FV2:CE, RS2, KK:H, and CoC—each deal with the interplay between the player’s real world time and in-game time in unique ways. Regardless of the theme, these games force a kind of push and pull with the player that constantly brings them back to the game world but never allows them to stay for a significant period of time. These processes emulate many of the real world perceptions of women’s time and a mode of feminine leisure style that is counterpart to this flow of time.