You match the Nicole Kidman card with the Nicole Kidman card, the Julia Roberts card with the Julia Roberts card, the J.Lo card with the J.Lo card. Simple enough. The game is called Ditto, and it's on the Web site of Ladies' Home Journal, and Karen Heal is, at this very moment, too preoccupied playing the game to talk about it.
"This is fun," Karen says minutes later on the phone. She passes along the tip -- LHJ.com has games now! -- to her three sisters, all working moms hooked on online games. She's genuinely excited about this. "You can read the makeup tips on that site and play Ditto at the same time. That works, huh?"
That the venerable Ladies' Home Journal, founded in 1883 as a supplement to a magazine called the Tribune and Farmer, is the new hotbed of online games comes as a shock. Then reality kicks in.
When it comes to online games, women over 40 play the most often and spend the greatest number of hours doing so, even beating out teenage boys, according to a study conducted by Digital Marketing Services. The study is called the Casual Gaming Report. But there's nothing casual about a 45-year-old mother of two who, day in and day out, logs on to her favorite site -- Yahoo! Games, MSN Zone, Pogo.com, to name a few -- a couple of hours before she goes to bed and a few minutes after she gets out of bed.
In February Meredith Corp., the publisher of some of the biggest names in women's magazines, launched a "games channel" that features diversions such as Ditto and Jigsaw Puzzle on its three most popular Web sites: Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ.com), Better Homes and Gardens (BHG.com) and American Baby (AmericanBaby.com).
Then in March, it teamed up with RealNetworks, a digital entertainment company, to also provide RealArcade games such as WordJong, Saints & Sinners Bingo, and Bejeweled 2 Deluxe.
In total, the three sites reach more than 8 million unique visitors a month, most of them women, says Dave Kurns, editor in chief of Meredith Interactive. It's too soon to figure out how many users are playing these free games, Kurns adds.
On LHJ.com, under the Beauty & Fashion banner, is a link to De-Stress With Games, which is followed by links to My Weight-Loss Planner, Recipe Center and Try-a-Hairstyle. Jigsaw Puzzle isn't only a way to get a working mom to stay on LHJ.com a few minutes longer, Kurns says, but also a way to get more advertising dollars. Think product placement. In the future, a TV show -- "Desperate Housewives," say -- could pay Meredith to use the kitchen of Bree Van De Kamp, the Martha Stewart-ish character on the show, as the actual image that you're supposed to be putting together, Kurns explains.
"We've been looking at the online gaming trend for the past years, and we realized that having these online games would lengthen the amount of time someone spends on our sites," says Kurns. "When the kids are asleep, when the husband is asleep, we know that women find time for themselves at night, to go online."
Curiously, the women who play these games don't necessarily think of themselves as "hard-core gamers."
None of Heal's sisters -- from Donna, the eldest at 44, to Sharon, the baby at 35 -- would even dare call herself a "gamer." They play, that's it, end of discussion. Kind of like the way they played with dolls on the back yard of their childhood home on Sycamore Street, just outside Chicago. They're regulars in what they call the "club," shorthand for ClubPogo.com, the gaming site that LHJ.com and BHG.com are consciously trying to catch up with. The $29.95-per-year subscription site has 800,000 members, more than 75 percent of them women. It's the sibling of Pogo.com, the "stickiest" site on the Internet -- the average Pogo.com user spent 621 minutes on that site in March, according to the Reston-based marketing research company ComScore. Pogo.com is free, but ClubPogo.com has more games.
Logging on to the "club" has been a way for the Ewing sisters to stay in contact on a regular basis.
They all work. They all have kids. They're all in different cities. Donna Marto, a mother of three, lives in San Diego; Susan Vargas, also a mother of three, lives in Palatine, Ill.; Sharon McCarthy, mom to 3-year-old Logan, lives in Racine, Wis. Karen Heal, the 36-year-old mother of two, signs on from Cortez, Colo.
Karen says they all usually log on to ClubPogo.com on Sunday afternoons, spending "hours and hours" chatting online while playing games, either by themselves or against each other. The sisters are card game fanatics. Donna is usually playing canasta. Karen is usually playing Jungle Gin. Sharon is usually playing some type of solitaire. On some weeknights, Susan in Palatine catches up with Sharon in Racine by playing canasta. On some mornings, Donna in San Diego plays a bit of Jungle Gin with Karen in Cortez. It's tough balancing the kids and the work and the sister time.
So it's a way for the women to keep track of one another.
"Karen gets home at about 8:30 p.m., turns on the computer, log on to ClubPogo. I'd already be there, we'd say a quick hello, she'd send me a message about her kids, I'd send her a message about Logan," says Sharon , who's studying criminal justice and works as a delivery driver.
They'd argue.
"She dates too much," Karen says of Sharon. "I'd message her while we're playing, asking her, what did you do last night? Then I'd think, forget it, I don't want to hear what you did last night."
Last night, like most nights, they were on ClubPogo.com.
