Moshi Monsters is an online social community aimed at children which also integrates many forms of old media to make the premise attractive for the younger generation. When they sign up, children have to choose which ‘Moshi’ represents them in game and once they have done this they can roam the streets of Moshtro City using Rox (in game currency) to purchase food and items to keep their creature happy. Other features of the website include the Daily Challenge, a series of educational questions that users can tackle once a day, and missions which enhance the story of the game and challenge children with point and click puzzles.
This website is a great example of how old and new medias interact to create a better experience for its users, whilst also bringing its intriguing concept to life.
Moshi Monsters trading cards are sold in stores along with stickers also baring the branding. In almost every pack of cards and stickers there is a serial number which can be entered on the website to unlock new features including Moshlings (pets), food, items and Rox - all of which can be used to improve your Moshi’s room. This gives users an incentive to buy the trading cards and sticker collections and also to complete them as the more packs you buy the more chance you have of unlocking something on the website. This premise is also applied to other forms of Moshi Monsters merchandising. Plush toys of the characters can be collected and each of these also comes with unique serial numbers. Moshi Monsters uses old medias to encourage participation in new medias, the website being the prime example of this.
Another example of old and new forms of media working together comes in the form of a CD available which is full of Moshi Monsters music created by the characters on the website. This adds a sense of reality to the experience for the child users as they can listen to their favourite creatures sing and, thanks to the website, they can understand references made to certain parts of the city and other characters. This album is also available to download as a MP3 on iTunes and Amazon, an example of how even new medias work together to enhance experiences.
Both the Apple and Android app stores have Moshi Monsters games available to download. This is an example of how the new media (applications) works well once integrated with the old media (mobile phone). This also adds portability to the new media branch of the brand; running the website on an iPhone is impossible as it needs flash player to run it and running it on an Android is impractical as it would take up a large chunk of data usage. Users of ‘Buster’s Lost Moshlings’ will have to locate the Moshlings within a series of touch screen games. This serves as an extension to the main Moshi missions on the website making the overall experience deeper as a result of expansion.
The site itself is a glorified social network for children that also aids educational development. Friends are encouraged to add each other on the website so that they can interact on each other’s message boards and visit their rooms. Friends can also send one another in game gifts that they have unlocked and either do not require or do not want. This encourages the children to help each other complete their online collection of Moshlings and improve the quality of their Moshi’s happiness. They can also go head to head for the highest scores in the Puzzle Palace.
As a social network, Moshi Monsters allows open communication between friends that anyone can view if they have an account. This gives the users an internet presence and thus, a sense of online identity where having a pretty room on the site or the most Moshlings could lead to people becoming increasingly more popular among the community based on their achievements in this online world. In their journal ‘Friend Networking Sites and Their Relationship to Adolescents’ Well-Being and Social Self-Esteem’, Valkenburg, Peter and Schouten found that the social network their participants were signed up to did have an indirect effect on the users’ well-being and self-esteem. Positive feedback enhanced their well-being and self-esteem whereas negative opinions damaged it. This model can be easily related to Moshi Monsters as if you tell an eight year old that their online room is great they will believe it and if you tell them that it is horrible they are likely to be upset by it. The same study also discovered that the frequency that users received feedback had effects on both their well-being and self-esteem, leading to assumptions that the more feedback a user receives leads to an increase in their sense of belonging in the online community.
Technological determinists would say that the aforementioned features aid the view point that technology determines the direction of society and aids its developments. The integration of old medias such as puzzles and letters into the new media of a flash website is an example of technological convergence and also shows how we have used technology to enhance the way we interact with old media. We no longer have to sit in the same room as each other to play games and complete puzzles, we can now access it via the internet and play with people from all over the world. In his book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins argues that: “old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies.”
Moshi Monsters is a good example of this point.
Jenkins also argues that media convergence isn’t just a shift in technology, but that it also changes the relationships between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences.
This is very true for Moshi Monsters as it is a service that uses convergence to bring existing technologies and markets together; using trading cards to increase participation with their subscription based website brings two markets and technologies together and encourages children to pay money for both aspects, keeping them ahead of their competitors.
Moshi Monsters does have other competitors in the trading card industry. Arguably, their main competitor is the long-running Pokemon franchise which has a history of exploiting new technologies to increase the size of the brand. Pokemon started off life as a Gameboy game but later branched off in different directions, the most popular of which was the Manga cartoon series. Such was the popularity of the show, trading cards were released encouraging you to ‘collect them all’ as opposed to ‘catch them all’ as the series stated. Moshi Monsters chose a similar approach, starting life as a website before expanding into the trading card industry, among others. However, the way that Moshi Monsters uses convergence allows it to stand out from Pokemon as it’s own entity, not just another rip off of the same formula. This is due to the way new medias and old medias work together in the way I explained earlier, something that the Pokemon franchise has yet to move on to.
This leaves the market forces argument open that the creators have invested time in researching and developing technologies to allow for a greater profit and to get ahead of the competition, and that they may also have invested time in researching and developing new technologies that enable them to do this. The main example is the use of unique serial numbers in each pack of trading cards and how they can be used to unlock more features on the website. This technology was clearly researched and developed to keep users going back to the website and paying more subscription fees so that they can unlock their rewards.
Another major competitor for the brand is the much renowned Top Trumps franchise. They do not exploit new medias in the same way as Moshi Monsters, instead they rely on their traditional approach of conventional advertising on the television, in shops and in magazines. Top Trumps expand their market by not limiting themselves to the area that their business model constricts them too. Unlike Moshi Monsters, the brand’s interaction with new medias is directly linked with the cards they sell. They do not just sell cards with cute monsters on and hope they sell, they also cover other areas such as music, cars and TV shows.
To conclude, Moshi Monsters does use a high amount of convergence to increase the income of the business and also to entice more users to their website through conventional and popular old medias. By using old medias such as trading cards and books to offer new features, Moshlings and items on the website, Moshi Monsters demonstrates the worth of convergence between old and new medias and how, as a business model, it can be used to optimise revenue and increase popularity.
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