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Shikigami Games was created in 2009 to develop the PaperDoll series of games. The idea for PaperDoll grew out of a child-raising game the company founder had started designing a year earlier. And where did that idea come from?

It was always understood that Shikigami’s games would emphasize artificial intelligence. The company founder had studied artificial intelligence in graduate school and had spent several years teaching game AI in college.

If you had asked five years ago, few people would have predicted that Shikigami’s first game would be a fashion game. Before founding Shikigami Games, the company founder had worked on a “serious game” for the military. Granted, it was a game that taught foreign culture and language to help soldiers get along with people rather than shoot them, but it still seemed to a lot of people like a large leap from that to a cutesy fashion game. Prior to that, the company founder had made games of all sorts, from platformers and simulations to adventure and role playing games. The founder’s love of story was well known – he had written numerous short stories, several screenplays, one (not particularly good) novel and had made several (fairly bad) amateur movies that graced the local cable access channels. He had gone to college to be a writer and took computer classes only because the introductory computer science class involved building a video game and had allowed students to write their own plots. Given his fascination with story, it seemed odd that the company’s first game would be one with no plot, no dialog and no goals.

Part of the blame for that falls on “the girls”. Refusing to let daddy play games unless they got to sit on his lap, they made it abundantly clear that the “fun” way to play Half-Life was to throw grenades against the wall and watch the pretty explosions. In their mind, games were only fun when they were funny. Running around shooting people? Boring. Using guns to write your name in the side of a building? Cool. The Sims wasn’t about raising happy, healthy people, it was about ghost farming (ingredients: tombstone, swimming pool and a disappearing ladder). They saved up their money to buy Soul Calibur, beat-em-up fighting game, just so they could use the “make a character” feature to create the dumbest, ugliest, funniest characters they could think of. To them, the Nintendo Wii wasn’t a game console, it was a drawing program, allowing them to make Miis that looked like all their favorite people, from family to comic book characters.

While they aren’t in the majority, there are a few games that are explicitly designed to have fun come from exploration rather than trying to achieve the game’s goal. God’s Sandbox was one that was played a lot, but the one that had the most influence on PaperDoll was Hanako Games’ Cute Knight.

Another inspiration for was a tough job decision. In 2008, Shikigami’s founder was laboring hard on his PhD when he was offered a job at a pretty famous game company to work on the AI for an open world game. The game was set in a school where every character had a name, personality and memory of the things the player had done to them. It sounded fantastic but in the end, finishing the PhD was deemed more important. But the desire to work on a social game where everyone was an individual and reacted to what you did remained.

In 2008, the company founder started work on a child raising game where how you raised the child determined how the child’s life turned out. The idea was similar to Cute Knight, albeit with a complex personality and individual differences psychological model plugged in. Part of how you raised the child was how you dressed him – dress the child in a bunny suit and take him to the beach and you’ll likely traumatize him.

An unlikely source of inspiration was Susan Boyle. According to a morning radio DJ, her audition on Britain’s Got Talent was the most watched video on YouTube. A quick check on YouTube turned into love at first sight. Susan Boyle seemed an unlikely star. After she walked on the stage, the camera panned across the audience to reveal some of the meanest, ugliest faces that had ever been seen. As she sang, the cameras showed faces that moved from shock and surprise to utter elation. It was the best survey of emotion one could imagine. After watching it, the company founder knew he wanted to make a game that showed, and could invoke, all the strong emotions that had been seen in that video.

In the spring of 2009, the company founder moved to Los Angeles to work as an intern for the R&D arm of a “serious game” company, designing scalable pluggable-culture AI tools for cultural training games. At night, work continued on the child raising game, eventually becoming work on a “fashion reaction” game. In the summer of 2009, he returned to Minnesota and, at the encouragement of several friends, he decided to formally create a company to work on PaperDoll. Eventually. Originally, Shikigami’s founder, a practical man not known for his sense of optimism, believed there was no market for the game. Although he and his kids liked the game, their sense of humor was always a little off and he wasn’t convinced anyone else would be interested in a game where you dressed up a doll just to make it cry. Several students disagreed, which led to a meeting with Pete Eckert and Michael Gjere, both long time game producers. Much to his surprise both claimed that the game was a fantastic idea. It was not only a good game, they said, it would actually sell a few copies. Much arguing ensued but eventually Shikigami Games was born.

Which leads to today, the big bet – is an AI-heavy game about dressing up a doll the kind of thing people want to play and can Shikigami actually make that game? Come the end of the year, we’ll find out.