In a state-of-the-art, painfully trendy office space in downtown Stockholm, my daughter Vera, aged seven, is a kid in a digital sweet shop. She’s playing her favourite Toca Boca game on the CEO’s iPad.
We don’t have an iPad at home and she has only played these games on an iPhone before. She is amusing herself with Toca Mini, a game where you create weird and cute characters: she is making what looks like a sloth out of a white ET-style prototype.
The sloth has piggy black eyes. This makes her laugh. I have no idea why she finds it so entertaining. You don’t really do anything and nothing much happens. I complain about this. “That’s Toca Boca for you,” laughs CEO and co-founder Bjrn Jeffery. “She gets it.” And, the inference is that I don’t.
Toca Boca calls itself “the world’s leading digital toy app creator for iOS and Android”. The apps have been downloaded more than 50 million times. In January the company won two awards from Beste Kinder Apps a popular German review site: Toca Tailor and Toca HairSalon Me, were selected in the best innovative apps and games for kids categories.
My two youngest children, Vera and Jack, three, are captivated by the games. In a world where everyone is worried about shoot ‘em up games andstranger danger, these cartoon cakes, robot nurses and smiley butterflies seem innocuous. Is there something I’m not getting? The company headquarters in Sweden should have the answer. And Vera isthe guinea pig.
Jeffery explains that it is just supposed to be fun. Nothing more, nothing less. Toca Boca divides children’s activities into five categories: active play (sport), make-believe, manipulative play (building stuff), creative play (drawing) and learning play (books and games). “Most children like all five types of play. But then you look at the app store and think: ‘How is it addressing these types of play?’ Everything in the app store is in the last category games and books. But that’s how adults play. It’s Candy Crush, basically.”
Vera pipes up: “Candy Crush is fun!” Me: “When have you ever playedCandy Crush?” (I have never played it and don’t have it on my phone.) “On Auntie Trudy’s phone.” (That’s my sister.) She turns back to thesloth.
It’s difficult to know as a parent what’s helpful and what’s harmful. Toca Boca’s colourful, psychedelic graphics are not a million miles away from the design of Talking Angela, the app that fell victim to a Facebook hoax in February that paedophiles were scripting the creature’s questions. Talking Angela is a relative of Talking Tom, the animated cat who is another favourite in our house. Tom and Angela are harmless. There is no predator on the other side of the cat’s face.
Still, I can understand why you might worry about these things. I monitor screentime with my three children (Jack, Vera and Will, 10) where possible. We have been through the Club Penguin phase, the Moshi Monsters phase, and we are in the midst of the Minecraft phase. I have reservations about all these sites but not enough to ban them. The one app brand Ican’t find anything wrong with is alsothe one I understand the least: Toca Boca.
The company was founded in autumn 2010 and released its first two apps in early 2011. In the past three years it has built a significant market share, going up against much bigger hitters such as Angry Birds and Disney. In late 2013, Toca Boca reached 50 million downloads at Apple’s App Store. The apps are on sale in 160 countries.
Their biggest market? The US (18.3 million of those 50 million), followed by the UK (3.7 million). The growth has been impressive: only 20 months earlier it was on five million downloads. The firm has now launched 24 apps, including , TocaPet Doctor, where you can choose one of 15 animals and lavish love and care upon it (with no Tamagotchi-style consequences).
Toca Boca’s office is in central Stockholm, just across the courtyard from the imposing headquarters of the country’s most successful men’s underwear retailer, Bjrn Borg. (Yes, that Bjrn Borg. Now he makes pants.) The office space for the team of 25 was masterminded by a theatre designer: it’s full of child-sized cut-outs of Toca Boca characters, abandoned merchandising prototypes (“We’ve saidno to 99 per cent of the merchandising deals we’ve been offered”) and retro toys (including a vintage Operation board game). There is Lego everywhere and cartoon drawings are pinned to the walls. Later, Jeffrey tells me they had wanted the intros to their apps to have the same jokey, fun feeling of the opening to The Simpsons where Bart is drawing on a blackboard. The Lego is no accident either: they never say it, but I feel like they’re trying to create a digital version of Lego. This is a long-term brand they’re building. And they’re thinkingbig.
The age range Toca Boca is focusing on three to eight years is interesting. Jeffery has a theory that after the age of nine children react differently to games and take on the mindset we’re familiar with as adults. What are you supposed to do in the game? What are the rules? How do you win? How do you get to the next level?
Children of eight and under who interact with these games don’t care about these things. They just play. They make it up as they go along. It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. And it reminds me of the thing many psychologists consider crucial in theories of success and fulfilment: developing a “learning mindset” where you’re immersed in what you’re doing and learning; you’re not judging what’s right and wrong, whether you’ve “succeeded” or “failed”. There is none of that result-oriented stuff in Toca Boca and if you try to interact with their games as an adult, I guarantee that it will show you just how depressingly goal-focused and play-phobic you have become.
Bjrn Jeffery is an unlikely digital tycoon. With an English father and Swedish mother, Jeffery was born in London and moved to Sweden at the age of three. He speaks flawless English in a cut-glass accent, but his sensibility seems Scandinavian: he is relaxed and open about the company’s aims. He’s based between Stockholm and San Francisco and, no, he doesn’t have any kids.
Toca Boca is owned by Bonnier, aprivately held Swedish media company founded in 1804. (They’re very keen to mention this. This isn’t a flash-in-the-pan venture capital startup. It has long-term aims.) They operate a series of publishing ventures in 17 countries, including the UK’s Hot Key Books. Jeffery started out working in research and development for Bonnier only to make a painful discovery for apublishing house: “The future isn’t inbooks.”
In 2009 when everyone was talking pre-iPad about what Apple might launch next, Jeffery produced an online mock-up of magazines to read on a “big iPhone”. The similarity to iPad’s idea was coincidental. More importantly, the video of the experiment went viral.
“It gave the company some digital confidence. When the iPad came out we started looking at what people were actually doing with it. They were surfing the web, watching videos, playing games. And kids were starting to get access to the iPads. Parents weren’t necessarily buying them for their kids but there was a ‘family iPad’. That access changed everything. The children had a stake.”
The iPad’s touchscreen, and children’s easy familiarity with it, was a game-changer, says Jeffery, because it was so intuitive. He continues: “Kids aren’t small adults. So we went against the idea of games and went towards the idea of toys. We wanted no stress and especially no stressy music.” He is talking about the “pressure” music you get on games.
“We do what makes sense for the screen. So take the hair salon app, for example: there are no points, there is no score, it’s just play. It’s a very non-radical idea. But most apps are usually about winning, losing, getting high scores, getting to the next level. Instead we wanted a ‘digital toy’, not a game.”
The apps have other worthy aims, many of which then happen to have a commercial payoff. There is no language and no text, for example, which automatically makes the apps global. (There are sounds like monsters going “Wheee”.)
And, as Jeffery says: “All the apps are unisex. Which is rare. All the characters can wear dresses. It just didn’t feel very modern to us to do anything else. If you want to do a game with ‘hair salon’ or ‘tailor’ then it can easily go one way. When we took the idea on we decided we would not go with stereotypes. There is a new kind of parent who really looks for these things.”
My friend Carla is this kind of parent: she has two boys aged three and six. She backs up all Toca Boca’s claims without even knowing that it makes them. “It came up on a search engine for apps,” she says. “We didn’t know anyone else who was playing with them when we discovered them but then all of a sudden lots of people seemed to be into them. The kids just love them. The first one they had was the kitchen one where you feed this moose. Now they’ve got the car one, which is a bit more complicated.”
She explains the attraction: “It’s like the way that Lego just has this weird appeal and it shouldn’t be as successful as it is. Because it’s just coloured bricks. But they will play with those for ages.
Toca Boca is the same. It has no real purpose. You just play. It all looks beautiful too. And in a bizarre way, like Lego, it’s tactile, if an app can be tactile. The way the sausage sizzles or you can puree a lemon It’s quite realistic. And it’s kind of old-fashioned in a way. Like Play-Doh.”
It is supposed to be old-fashioned. A lot of the staff used to work in children’s television programming for SVT, Sweden’s equivalent to the BBC: they care about what children enjoy. They are not programmed to care about what’s cool and what makes money.
Game designer Chris Lindgren, originally from Malm, regularly takes her ideas to test on children in kindergartens and after-school clubs: the game has to work in real life before it can become an app. Toca Tea Party started as a game with cardboard cups and paper cakes. “Adults look at everything and think: ‘How do I win?’” Lindgren says. “Children play and learn about the world. Everything we do is everyday themes and activities: playing house, playing shops.”
There’s another responsible dimension here that keeps the parents coming back: “We have no in-app purchasing opportunities. Obviously,” says Jeffery. Last month the European commission announced it would be holding talks with Apple, Google and app writers about protecting consumers from “unexpected purchases” that can crop up through these in-app opportunities.
More than half of online games in the EU are advertised as “free” but carry hidden costs. There was a case in the UK where two parents were able to get a refund when their son spent 980 buying virtual doughnuts in a Simpsons game. In 2011 an eight-year-old girl ran up a bill of 4,000 playing My Horse and Smurfs’ Village. (Apple sent a refund to her father.)
Of Toca Boca 24 apps, four are free,the rest are priced at about 1.99. “You pay once and that’s it.” It’s a model that is working so far and Jeffreyis happy with it. “Friv, for example,” Jeffrey says, referencing Vera’s favourite website, “makes money from advertising. And a lot of the ads are not that appropriate.” I know what he means. Friv is not banned (yet) in our house but I monitor its use a lot more carefully since I found out that Vera was playingShopaholic: Paris. This was without spending any real money. Obviously. But with a “sensible budget” so she told me of 300.
I am telling myself it helps with maths. Last time I checked they were advertising women’s fashion brand Hoss Intropia on Friv but that’s just my cookies. What advertising has Vera seen on there? “By the side it tells you to ‘open your windows and tell everyone about friv.com’. And it says ‘Click here’ a lot. I don’t click on it.”
Being able to design things without thinking about traditional marketing considerations is one of the benefits of digital, says Jeffery: “Kids should play with whatever they want to play with. A lot of toys exclude children. You can see it just from looking on the shelves in Toys R Us. And if you’re a toy manufacturer and you don’t make a toy that comes in thecolour pink then there is no space on the shelf for you. Well, there is infinite space in the app store. I would like to think we could have done this in the physical world. But I don’t know.”
Toca Boca is not trying to claim it’s educational. But maybe even the claim that it broadens the imagination is hardto stand up. Mike van Duuren, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Winchester, who wrote his thesis on how children perceive artificially intelligent objects, says: “I just downloaded Toca Boca Doctor and Robot to my phone. The free versions seemed rather dull and claims of stimulating imagination would seem rather inflated to me.” (The thing is, they are not dull if you are three. Or seven.)
“I think there are some interesting apps around for children. Such as perhaps ones that are utility-based: for example, there are apps for young people with Asperger syndrome that provide information about social scripts (ie what is and what is not conventional in certain social situations). Other than that, I would prefer to take my five-year-old for a walk in the park or even atrip to the science museum.”
Fair enough. Richard Joiner from the University of Bath, who has conducted research into how children use tablets, is sceptical about the idea that the secret of Toca Boca’s success isthat below a certain age children aren’t interested in “winning”: “I think that children can, and do, play competitively before the age of eight. But I do think it is possible to create apps where children just play for the fun of it and not to win. There are certainly classic theories of play from Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner that talk about the importance of play. [Computer scientist and expert on artificial intelligence] Seymour Papertis another person who talked about how play develops children’s minds.
“What is interesting is that with apps you can give children toys to play with that are different to physical toys, which could help them develop skills that are hard to develop with just physical toys.”
As we get up to leave the Toca Boca office, bracing ourselves for a lavish display of Bjrn Borg’s Y-fronts, I struggle to tear Vera away from the screen: “You can make anything you want out of this,” she is muttering, “anything.” As we leave I turn to her: “You’re not getting an iPad after this.” She replies: “You don’t need an iPad. You just need a dad with an iPhone.” At least she realises I will still not be putting it on my phone.
Vera spells out the attraction of her favourite apps
Toca Store
Vera: “You choose what you want to get in the shop You could buy food. Like pasta, rice. Or dolls. And toys. And if you don’t have enough money, it gives you more money by giving you another purse. It goes 'ping' when you get another purse and then you’ve got more money. If you know how to add up really small numbers you can do that. It’s really fun. And you don’t have to be in real life.”
Viv: “Why is it better than real life?”
Vera: “You know it’s not that risky in case you get something wrong. It will always wait for you to finish what you’re doing.”
Toca Tea Party
Vera: “You choose your food and then you eat it and you can choose if you want to have some more and then youwash up. If you want to eat the food, you press on the screen and it goes ‘nom nom nom’ and the food disappears. Then you can get new food. Then you wash up. You soak it and when it comes out it’s allshiny.”
Viv: “This game sounds a bit repetitive.”
Vera: “What does that mean?”
Viv: “It’s when something is the same all the time.”
Viv: “Yes. You just keep on going and it’sthe same. I don’t mind that.”
Toca Mini
Vera: “You have this sort of doll-person who is all white and you have to paint him or her. And then you can add eyes and hair and other things. It has a really cool background. I don’t think you can change the background. Once I made a basketball player on Toca Mini. It was a boy and he had a number 5 on his T-shirt. You can add on eyes and the face. But not until you have chosen everything else. You can also add nose and mouth.”
Toca Tailor Fairy Tales
Vera: “This is when you go into there and you can choose what you want to have aboy or a girl and you can dress them and change the colours of them by clicking an arrow or a special box. You can change the design and how long or short you want their clothes to be.”
Viv: “How is that a fairy tale?”
Vera: “Because it’s about elves. You can get elves’ hats and shoes.”
Viv: “Is there a story?”
Vera: “No. If there was a story it would make it clearer how it was meant to be. But I don’t mind that there’s no story.”
Viv: “So you just make this a person, and then what happens?”
Vera: “You make another person. You keep on going.”
Viv: “And then what?”
Vera: “I don’t know. Maybe go off and play a different game?”
