More than 100 million people have downloaded Dots or its sequels, Two Dots and Dots & Co. Ask them about it, and they'll probably say they aren't gamers. "For a lot of people who play our games, it’s the only game on their phone," says Ondriona Monty, who just joined the company as chief marketing officer. "And they don’t consider it a game."
Dots is, of course, a game. But the sentiment makes sense. The minimalist, Bauhaus-meets-ball-pit aesthetic is unique in the App Store, and the connect-the-dots mechanic is easy to learn and lends itself to repeat play. Of the handful of games I've downloaded over the years, Dots is the only one to survive storage shortages and phone upgrades. There's a simple reason for this: Good design.
Although the game is three years old, it remains popular and has of late appeared in everything from magazines to promotional videos to fashion shows. That's because *Dots, *the game and the eponymously named studio that created it, has from the start embraced a design ethos that lends itself to the artistically inclined.
"Playing Dots is like being in the cool lobby bar at the right boutique hotel, while playing Candy Crush is decidedly not like that,” says Ian Bogost, game designer and author of Play Anything. The company is capitalizing on that perception with strategic marketing to establish its reputation as a "game for non-gamers," and make more games like that.
