Finding our Rhythm

In the last chapter we tried to identify the soul of games as a service and we postulated that the player lifecycle helps us to differentiate this approach to games design. The next question is to find a practical application of this thinking and to see how this can help us provide a framework to improve our designs.

The problem is that we can only really understand the specific details of the player lifecycle for our game if we stand back and look historically (and dispassionately) across the collective behavior of our players. That’s not particularly useful as long as the game remains actively played and, worse still, the very act of analyzing requires us to change our attention from the detail that makes up the player experience, instead looking to the higher level patterns of flow through the game.

Focus on What Matters

A more practical approach is to look for the transitional phases such as the move from discovering to learning that is found in the data from access to our page on the app store to the initial download and in the first moments of play. Then we can look at the transition from learning to engaging, where we see how the player goes from playing the precarious first time (perhaps even the first few times) to the point where they are playing regularly and ideally multiple times per day (depending on the device they are using to play). As part of this stage we can look at the process by which players convert from playing to paying. I’ll come back to that in the last few chapters of the book. Finally, I want to consider the end-game, where the play moves from engaging to churning. How they leave the game as positively as possible matters if we want to sustain our brand and be able to re-engage that player for different games.

The Player’s Journey

In these places we find patterns of behavior that help those players move more easily onto their next stage. When we look through the player’s journey, particularly the first-time user experience, it seems to me that these have a rhythm that we can build on. There seems to be a series of cycles that repeat and layer upon each other to create a composite experience, ideally one that reinforces habitual play and deeper enjoyment of the game. I like to call these habit-forming patterns the “rhythm of play.”

The rhythm has to start quickly if the player is going to get a chance to become entranced by your game. There is a tentative delicate moment that begins at the first point the player encounters the game. The name of your game has to quickly define their expectations about the game that, combined with the icon you use, has to be instantly identifiable. These two simple things have to be compelling and memorable, not just to download the game, but to ensure that it will be clicked a second and third time once it has been downloaded. This isn’t an easy task when there you have only 11 characters and a 57 × 57 pixel icon (114 × 114 on HD devices), especially given that there are over 900,000 existing variations. We have to think of reasons for players to want to press that icon the first time; of course much of the reason they will press it time and again will come down to the game itself.

First Impressions

The first time the player launches the game is a kind of exploration where everything is new. Every click, every splash screen image, every inconsistency compared to their expectations will jar and risk them going off and playing something else instead. Unlike a premium game, players have not spent any money yet. They have no investment or “utility to maximize” in the game at this point, just the effort they have so far taken and the anticipation they have for our game. Any undue effort they have to go through undermines even that limited utility and you risk them getting so frustrated that they don’t give your game a fair shot.

This is the equivalent of the first date. You can’t expect them to make a commitment at this point. Don’t ask them to change their Facebook status or otherwise register until you have at least taken them out to dinner … I mean, until you have made sure that they enjoy the game.

There is no clear evidence over how long is too long. Personally I like to say that we have about six seconds to grab a player’s attention or we lose them. This isn’t particularly scientific, however, it does reflects the kind of design guidelines used when you create direct mail or newspaper headlines. Headline writers know the importance of catching attention and drawing people in and we have to learn to do similar thing with the way we create our user interfaces. Ideally players should not be faced with choices they don’t yet understand or which present dilemmas, like having to play with other real people before they understand the rules of the game. We need the transition from launching the app to starting to play as quickly and as comfortably as possible if we want to build up retention rapidly.

Measuring Your Heartbeat

Getting players started is just the opening bars of our rhythm of play, but allows us to introduce them to the principle underlying beat. The first play needs to introduce them to the core repeatable mechanic of play, the heartbeat of play if you like. We start with an objective, act upon it, and gain a reward; this is a pattern we then repeat throughout the game. There are alternative methods than just loops, for example the hand-crafted one-time-only puzzles used in classical adventure games. However, the loop is particularly effective for freemium as its repetitive nature helps create positive reinforcement in terms of play.

This Isn’t About Addiction

We mentioned the idea of Skinner Boxes and operant conditioning in Chapter 3, which looks at the idea of creating schedules of reinforcement of behavior. This type of thinking while hugely useful is also quite controversial and makes some people think that Free2Play design can become manipulative. I largely disagree not least as there is firstly an assumption that “entertainment” has the same compulsive effect as addictive factors such as food, sex, money, and drugs—all of which affect the lower level “need states.”¹ There is the suggestion that higher need states like entertainment don’t (by and large) have a limit by which we can satisfy our appetite, unlike our consumption of food for example. However, as we also discussed in that chapter, the form of entertainment we are offering through pattern-matching does indeed tire over time. If we know how to solve the pattern so well we can do it subconsciously then we stop getting the same enjoyment. Because of this I disagree that we are attempting to create some kind of a Pavlovian response² in the same way that ringing a bell starts a dog salivating. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to recognize the way humans react to conditions that encourage the player to want to make our game a regular hobby.

The First Minute

The early pattern of play for games as a service is often most successful when featuring short repeated plays through the mechanic itself. This lets the player quickly get feedback on their performance and allows them to learn and get the positive payoff from their initial success. That doesn’t mean we can’t have longer loops of play that may themselves repeat several times in order to resolve a larger section of the game narrative. For example, I may have to battle many waves of enemies or plant and harvest several items before I complete the objective needed to move to the next stage of play. However, if we are going to respond to the needs of the “learning” user then we need to appreciate the benefits of having an immediate sense of meaningful reward, directly attributed to their actions, within the first minute or so of playing. This ability to complete actions within short periods is particularly important with mobile device games. We commonly use our phones in circumstances where we are at risk of being interrupted. If we can’t have satisfying bursts of entertainment, or if our expectations are that the playing cycle will take too long to get into, this will limit the audience accessing our game. Although it might seem less relevant for tablet devices, which are less prone to interruption, or consoles, where we deliberately set aside hours to indulge, these short loop cycles are still valid as they provide a limit to the duration of intense focus needed to compete each puzzle or obstacle before moving on to the next. Otherwise it can get to be a bit much for some players. We all need save-points or moments when we can relax a little in the game.

Building on Success

Once we have succeeded in giving the player a positive sense of success with their first play through our game loop, we have to build on that to progress. We need to move on to the second or third cycle of play, building on that initial engagement and foreshadowing the delights that the player can enjoy if they continue to play.

Although these loops are easy to repeat in principle, if we don’t adjust them over time they can quickly become boring if we can consistently solve them. We need these puzzles or loops to evolve as the player becomes more familiar with the style of play. This typically means we introduce a sense of escalating challenge that builds on each subsequent loop, adding either greater difficulty or some other sense of progression. This can include the use of stronger opponents, new level designs, greater complexity, or new characters to encounter.

Making Progress

However, we should not just focus on the increase in the resistance of the mechanic to the player’s increase in understanding; we also need to present a sense of advancement or progression to the player. This often takes the form of introducing new tactical options, the use of new weapons or moves that allow them to solve different puzzles, or perhaps just introduces choices that add dilemma to the outcome. This is particularly effective if the progression of the player introduces ambiguity into the strategy for play, such as choosing where to spend any experience points you gain.

Don’t Be Greedy

The important thing is that we don’t have to rush into making money out of our players. Indeed it could be counterproductive to try to monetize the wrong things too early. We need to build up confidence in the game and a desire to continue playing as a lifestyle choice, a hobby. This kind of habitual behavior only comes from players returning to the game repeatedly and feeling that they can both trust the service and see that value of spending money in that service. We can’t afford to be discordant or otherwise disrupt the rhythm of play. Instead we have to foreshadow reasons why buying goods in the future would be a good investment in the game the players are enjoying.

Playing the core loop several times in the first playing session is important in order to ensure that the player fully understands how to play the game and so we know that they find it suitably enjoyable. However, if we want to build a sustainable game as a service, this is just the first step forward. The next challenge is to find a way to keep players coming back to the app time and again. This is not a task to be underestimated. This is why we need a rhythm of play to create cycles that effectively demand the player restart our app again and again. Just having a “nice” game isn’t enough. Looking at the behavior on mobile platforms as well as on PC with stream, even if a game is downloaded, there is no guarantee that it will be played. Even if it is played there is no guarantee that it will be used twice. Very few games are ever played multiple times. Think about what that means. Unless you charge upfront, something that always impacts the proportion of people who download your game, you are dependent on repeat use in order to be commercially successful. If only a tiny proportion of games are every reused at all, you need your app to be one of them. That means we have to stop being squeamish about encouraging repeat play.

The “CrackBerry” Effect

So what can we do to create reasons for the player to return after their initial playing session? A compelling narrative or context can help, as can the desire to complete the next puzzle or to progress your character through different levels. These are important ideas, but they are hard to make truly compulsive, especially with all the noise out there from other games, media, and, of course, real-life pressures.

If you had a BlackBerry when they were at their peak of popularity you might already be familiar with the kind of experience that truly compels the user to return to an experience. This device was the first to actively use the buzz feature to alert you whenever a new email, meeting, or event was happening. The term “CrackBerry” became commonly used to compare the behavior of BlackBerry users, unable to resist any incoming message, with users of crack cocaine. Not an entirely flattering idea, however, it does reflect the very human response to partial knowledge and the importance of resolving patterns as well as information. When that little device buzzed it might be a spam email or a summons from my boss at the time. The only way to tell was to pull out the phone and check. Doing this while out on a date with my wife never went down well and I quickly learned to turn off the notifications that weren’t important. However, despite the negative description, having this tool was an amazingly positive thing and vastly improved my ability to keep up-to-date with what was important to me. It just happened to also mean that I couldn’t be without that device.

Am I Missing Out?

We need something about our game that taps away in the player’s subconscious like that old song we hear on the radio and find ourselves humming all day long. Something that at the same time reminds us of the fun we are missing out on. The feeling that there is something going on inside the game world helps encourage us to return, knowing that otherwise we might be missing out. This is of course a fine line (as with all of these concepts) because if I feel I have missed out too much then I won’t return, and if I feel that the game is nagging me to return at its convenience not mine, I will simply turn off the notifications or, worse still, delete the game.

Building Compulsion into Play

There are many different approaches to how this can work. It can start in the core mechanic, be part of the context of the game or even part of the metagame. The most common way technique we have seen in social games so far is the use of energy. What if the player has a limit to the number of actions they can perform in a given period of time or for some reason (as suitable for the game) they have to wait before a tool they are using will recharge.

Either method creates a time delay or “friction” to the way the players progresses. The influences the player’s decision-making process in the game and creates a playing mechanism in its own right around which action is best. All good. However, it also happens to create a moment that stops their ability to play further, at least until that energy replenishes either by paying or waiting. This also happens to cover up when the developer doesn’t have enough content to satisfy the lifetime of the player (but that’s not something I’d recommend).

The Friction Factor

Friction is a normal factor with a game design. It allows us to managed the pace and flow of a game and where this is “player-directed”³ it can be a powerful tool to enhance the game, but there is a very fine line between friction and frustration. Knowing that the energy will recharge over time means that in order to maximize my utility (existing investment) in the game so I need to return just as soon as the recharge has completed. Missing this timeframe has an opportunity cost but usually doesn’t actually cause me to lose any gameplay asset. However, it has become overused and many players can become cynical and lose trust with the developer when they see it in a game.

An alternative to energy, and one famously used in social freemium games on Facebook, is the “harvesting” mechanic. In this case the player decides which crop (it could easily be a car repair or tower defense building) to plant in their farm (or garage, or defense base) and knows that this will take a predictable period of time to complete, making it available to harvest or use. As we talked in Chapter 3, FarmVille included a “withering” concept where, if the object has not been collected in a specific time-frame, this becomes useless or requires me to pay or get intervention from a friend. If you want to use this technique, you need to think carefully about how to communicate this to your user base and find a way to make sure this is seen as a part of the tactics of play rather than just a frustrating experience that punishes the player, encouraging them to lose interest and churn early. It is a natural for designers to look to monetize energy or friction, but it’s a pretty transparent technique that players have come to deeply resent.

Are We Running Out of Energy?

Despite how unpopular it has become to use energy and friction to monetize your game, I argue these techniques still have real value to create the sense of activity in the game which the player is missing out on, something I believe is more valuable than the money they can earn. There remains a debate over whether you should stop your players playing or not. This might seem obvious, but stopping your players playing when they want to is generally a bad thing. However, managing their access to engaging with the game can intensify the experience and create a compelling driver to repeat play, particularly if these restrictions are highly targeted.

Take for example a Monkey Island-style classical adventure. What if clue objects could only be used three times every ten minutes?⁴ This would transform the way that you try to solve puzzles in a point-and-click adventure and encourage a more thoughtful response to the puzzle rather than having players depend on the brute force solution of repeated clicking on every aspect of the screen.

Alternatively, take Real Racing 3 from EA. It takes time to service your car and, although you can pay to speed this up, it’s often easier to simply switch to another car while you are waiting. That encourages me to vary the style of play and the nature of the experience I have while playing. It does more than leave me aware that my car might be fixed when I stop playing, it also reminds me of the other races and playing values of the game.

Of course this kind of approach is not for every game or every player, but I’m sure as a designer you can see the potential benefits of using friction wisely from a pure gameplay perspective.

I’m Not in the Mood

At this point it’s probably worth discussing mode, mood, and pace. The flow of a game is rarely static and when we look at the playing experience we are trying to create in mechanical terms such as “loops” or “cogs,” it’s hard to remember the importance of the intensity and emotional experience we are trying to create. This isn’t strictly part of the anatomy of the game, it’s more about the rhythm, which is why I’m bringing it up here. Personally I happen to play lots of different games, almost at the same time.⁵ Mood often drives my choice of game as well as the “mode of use” I am currently in. Mode being the relationship between where I am, what devices I have access to, whether I am connected or not, as well as the impact my physical location has on my playing choices, e.g., in the living room with my family. Mode determines largely practical considerations while by contrast my mood reflects the emotional decision-making, which is largely drawn to less obvious conclusions. For example, subject to my mood, the cathartic gloom of a horror story might well be more rewarding than a high-octane rush or the sweet indulgence of a candy-colored world. Mood often makes us behave is a way different from our usual approach, making us appear to behave like a different user-segment (or cohort) than we would usually expect. For example sometimes I don’t want highly intense experiences, sometimes I am looking for trivial distraction. Much of the time I am not directly aware of my mood but this will still be reflected in my game choices as well as how I respond to the way the game delivers content. Curiously, although we often want a game to help us journey through a particular mood state, this is rarely a static proposition, and where the game takes us forward emotionally we often find ourselves lost in its story. I suspect this is part of why games are so powerful at engaging us.

Pace is directly connected with the rhythm of play and has a musical pattern to its design. Many equate the patterns of building tension, harmony, energy, or relaxation to concepts from music theory. Pace has a role in sustaining interest as well as punctuating the narrative or context, but it also acts like a mirror to the mood delivered by the game. More than that, it helps players push forward on their emotional journey.

Different games will have different patterns of play peculiar to the context of the experience but what matters is that this pace should adjust as the play continues. Players will become bored if the pace and mood of play don’t vary, just as much as it will alienate them if the pace and mood vary too greatly and clash with the context of the game.

Keeping Up the Pace

Pace relies on forces which direct the player’s attention. This might start with the stick of an enemy behind them or the carrot of a reward they can acquire just ahead. This is important as there is a great deal of difference between the way we make decisions while calm and logical, as opposed to when we are hot and under tension. Stimulating players’ emotions⁶ can impact the way that they act during play and this can make for deeper enjoyment and a greater opportunity to fail. A great example of this is the tongue-twister, as many of us know how infuriating these can be when we are rushing or under the influence of alcohol. Time can also play an important factor, just as a limitation in the number of moves (or indeed energy). On the other hand, pace can be reduced to enhance the relaxation derived from a game. Creating a sense of awe about the location where the play takes place or a building an impression of upcoming dread, perhaps of a known enemy just up ahead, can do wonders to slow down the pace of a game. Even the simple mechanics involved in different action mechanics can influence the pace and mood of a game. Even the smooth movements used when harvesting goods in HayDay contributes to the pace of the game that players experience and this technique affects the game for the better. I’m less interested in story exposition, which although can help slow the pace down, often does so at the expense of the game. I believe we should try to “experience not tell” in games.

Pace, like mood, needs to vary throughout play in order to sustain the interest of the players. This means we need to take note of the patterns of interaction, how consistently we repeat them and what patterns we can create that take the player on an emotional journey while they enjoy our game.

A great example of this for me is the way CounterStrike plays through the intensity of a counterterrorist action, with forces moving rapidly toward choke points in order to take out the enemy, followed by a few minutes of downtime between battles which allows them to chat and re-equip before kicking back into the intensity. There are musical parallels here for me with the Soft>Loud>Soft>Loud associated with grunge rock. Of course different games resonate with different musical forms. It’s too complex a subject for us to cover in enough detail here, but it’s worth checking out various articles and books on the subject.⁷

The Lure of Other People

Sometimes it’s not the game mechanics themselves that encourage us back into the game. The biggest compulsion can come simply from the knowledge that our friends (and other people like us) are coming back to play. Social play has been a big influence for many computer games. Games like Singstar encourage shared play in the same room, while games such as Quake or Counterstrike thrived on real-time connected servers.⁸ Social Facebook games like FarmVille and Zombie Lane encouraged asynchronous connections that had a simple low-level of interaction that benefited both sides. Even relatively simple web games like Tribal Wars from Innogames⁹ include a level of persistence where the actions of other players can have a direct effect on all the other users in due course. If you know your game might be affected your fellow players—whether they attack your village, water your plants, or tune the engine of your car—it creates a reason to return. Again we have to be careful about the type of consequences we want to build into our games, but the awareness of other players acting on the game world while we are not there can be quite compelling, especially if those people matter to us.

Social play is more than just a reason to return. It helps reinforce our expectations and values associated with playing a game, and it can in the end become a driver for deeper engagement in its own right.

Don’t Let Me Forget

Although there are many more techniques out there to build reasons to return, do not underestimate the value of the appropriate use of the notification system. Add to that the impact of regular predictable new content releases or functional updates to trigger a desire for players to re-�engage. We should use every technique suitable for our game and create an appointment mechanism to encourage players to regularly and predictably return to the game, as long as it remains meaningful to the players.

Stop Nagging

We have to create this as a benign process designed to encourage repeated play. We can’t afford to do this in a way that upsets or annoys players. The last thing we need is allegations that we are being manipulative. Long-term lifetime value depends on trust and if our objective is to get as much money as possible, rather than to make a better game, we will be found out and lose out.

If we get the balance right we will have succeeded in building the rhythm upon rhythm. This starts with the core mechanic, building with the minute of play, further building with the context loops. We have to keep our interconnected rhythms going and harmonious so we can help players fully realize their enjoyment of our game over an extended period of time.

Patience Will Pay Off

We need players to keep playing our game for days or weeks to realize the full benefits of their engagement. The biggest spenders in social mobile games seem to take between eight to twelve days before they start spending any money and if we get the model right they will continue to spend over many months.

Eight days of repeat play for a mobile game is a massively long time and we can’t just rely on escalating difficulty or simple appointment mechanisms to guarantee that players will sustain their interest in our game. To achieve this we need to build a rhythm and progression that provide ongoing purpose and drive for the player to continue their game over the longer term. This generally uses that part of the anatomy of the game I described as the “context” but the specific tools we use can vary widely.

Wheels within Wheels

The basic principle is to build up mechanics as cogs, feeding into the next tier of cog in line with the context of the game or the overarching metagame, giving players a sense of narrative or progression along the way. This typically means we find a reason to repeat the Core Mechanic as separate steps building up to another cyclical objective but at the context level. One example of a context loop might be found in an MMO quest where an non-player character (NPC) asks me to obtain an item for them. Each step to complete that quest involves me encountering a number of enemies who I have to dispatch until I finally reach the boss encounter and resolve that. This mission could easily be a series of connected puzzles or even a series of different layouts of a casual match-three game. Each stage is a separate use of the core loop mechanic with its own rewards, but if all the stages are complete I gain an extra reward from the context loop. This is potentially endlessly repeatable, but will often form parts of a finite ladder of progression or in the case of Candy Crush Saga from King,¹⁰ a lengthy fixed path of separate puzzle levels that show your friends’ progress and success at each stage. Importantly this path isn’t just static. At each stage a new variation to the mechanic is revealed, building on what has gone before and increasing not only the challenge level, but also the variation and uncertainty within the gameplay.

Another example would be where there is a puzzle or natural barrier that requires a player to repeat the core loop in order to gain the right equipment or skill level required to beat that barrier. For example, if you have to build a bridge to cross into a new area you might have to find all the raw materials and then practice your blacksmith skill until you were able to create that bridge. This feels like a natural process in the storytelling but requires ongoing repetition of the core game mechanic to complete that task and, once complete, opens up a new chapter in the story, which may itself have a further context loop.

One of the best lessons I learnt about creating natural barriers comes from the game Galaxy on Fire Alliances from Fishlabs. While playing the beta version of the game, I found that the experience was missing what I can only describe as the “Middle game.” This is a sense of purpose that we are trying to build with the context. However, rather than adding a new feature, the designers cleverly increased the difficulty to create some of the more valuable items in the game; in this case a Mark III Carrier. Having to invest much more effort to raise the rating of your HQ, Laboratory, and Starbase by spending your grind resources and waiting for the process to complete transformed the playing experience. As a player I had the tension of having to wait, with the potential risk of being attacked during the process, to build my most effective defense. There was no need to add new features or complications on top of an already complex game.

Creating Special Events

There are other methods that are less integrated with the underlying concept of the game. For example we might introduce a series of daily rewards or challenges that are only available if the player returns to the game each day (perhaps even more frequently) as well as less predictable “special events,” which subtly subvert the rules of play in a way that adds an interesting challenge, such as a boss opponent who is invulnerable to “water” effects. The original Plants vs. Zombies and JetPack Joyride both include these kinds of disruption to the normal play. To gain certain achievements in Plants vs. Zombies the player has to change their approach to specific levels, such as not using any “mushrooms” in a night scene or not using any catapult plants on a “rooftop” level. Similarly, JetPack Joyride challenges the player to deliberately die at a specific distance—something that is trickier to achieve than you might at first think.

These kind of challenges need not only be about avoiding using certain items, indeed there is no problem having some of them benefiting from the player using temporary boosts, additional energy, score-multipliers, etc., provided that these can reasonably be obtained without paying. Otherwise it might be seen as a cheap trick to obtain money from the player.

The rhythm of play continues beyond the context level and can also reside up in the metagame level. Metagame loops can include a range of behaviors that interact with the game, but are not necessarily tied directly into the game mechanics. The most obvious of these is the playful involvement with others. Socializing games mean more than just connecting people through a social graph such as Facebook or Twitter. They require that we create both reasons to share and meaningful interactions. We should not underestimate the personal effort and risk involved for players who don’t know what their friends’ reactions might be. It takes energy to maintain active relationships whether that is in person, over a real-time game connection, or even through playing asynchronously via social games. The latter of course requires much less effort on the part of the player but still provides emotional engagement and shared experience. If designed well, social interactions within a game can become a conduit to help maintain relationships we might otherwise lose.

Making Metagames

Metagames can involve almost unlimited options, and this is an area I believe the potential is only just being considered. Think about what patterns we can create by leveraging the real-world location of each of the respective players. What about the physical space around the device we are playing with, from augmented reality to shared-screen multiplayer experiences? How might we use each player’s connected devices to generate new patterns of play, which might deepen our relationships with the game and its other players?

Fundamentally, any game is enjoyed for the rhythm of how it is played, from challenge to defeat to ultimate success, whatever that might look like. Designing a game as a service means that we can’t take these patterns of behavior for granted. We have to pay very close attention to them and find ways to enhance the delight that these can bring so that our players engage more deeply and build utility into the game itself.

Notes

1 It’s worth investigating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to understand the different levels of engagement, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow’s_hierarchy_of_needs.

2 Pavlov famously rang a bell in his experiments on classical conditioning before giving his dogs food and discovered that the ringing of the bell itself could elicit salivation, even without the presence of the food. However, there are those who question whether this response was conditioning at all, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning.

3 By player-directed I mean that the player makes the decision to select how they use their allocation of actions, any mistakes or limitations are by association their choice—provided the player considers that they had a fair allocation in the first place.

4 This was an idea suggested by someone in the audience during a panel session at Game Monetization Europe 2013 in London.

5 In case it’s not obvious, playing lots of games is an absolute must for a game designer. This shouldn’t be limited to computer games. There are lots of amazing mechanics out there from card, board, dice, and RPG games, and I once arranged for bridge lessons for all of my team at BT. Personally I also enjoy LARP and pub games like Shove-Ha’Penny, although pool and billiards don’t do it for me. Even mechanisms such as old-school Play-By-Mail influences my design thinking. All that being said, probably my biggest influence is a business learning tool called the Balloon Game.

6 This form of cognitive bias is based on the hot–cold empathy gap and we will discuss this further in later chapters, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_gap.

7 There is a great Gamasutra article looking at pace in games at www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132415/examining_game_pace_how_.php?print=1.

8 In 1998/1999 I worked for Wireplay from British Telecom and we operated numerous online games including first person shooters like Quake and Counterstrike, which were played over dial-up modems—hard to imagine now in our permanently connected wireless broadband world.

9 This is a city-building and conquest game that requires a certain aggressive mindset to play and which can be quite brutal and unforgiving.

10 King’s Candy Crush Saga reached over 70 million users in April 2013, http://www.tuaw.com/2013/05/16/king-claims-70-million-daily-active-players-pet-rescue-saga-com. This game features a lengthy path showing all the levels and each players progress so far. At Level 35 it introduces a barrier where you have to introduce friends or pay in order to progress further. Since then they have also introduced “Quests” that allow you to continue provided you come every day and complete a special level over three days. Although fiendishly difficult at the higher levels, it is possible to play endlessly if you are prepared to go back to the earliest levels again.