Finding the Fun

In the last chapter we started to move our focus away from the structure of a game and towards the behavior and needs of the player. “Identifying and satisfying consumer needs” was described to me as the definition of marketing and I have since found that it equally applies to product development and design. Commercial game design is no different; we use the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination to create engaging experiences.¹ That means it is important to us to satisfy our audiences as well as to understand what attributes those players will value.

The simplest way to express the desire of players comes down to “fun,” an attribute we tried to define in Chapter 2. We talked about fun being an emotional response to play and that play was a free activity with no care for material profit, with commonly agreed rules as well as some level of uncertainty. This isn’t a new thought. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi² proposed that happiness comes when people are in a state of “flow,” a state of concentration that completely occupies the mind between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. Looking at games as a service means that we have to be interested in the whole lifecycle of the player. When they start to play, they essentially have no “skill” (or at least have yet to learn how to use that skill appropriately for the game) and we have to illuminate them and bring them to the point they can leverage their potential ability to maximize and sustain that flow state. It takes time to reach the point where a player can slip into that state of flow and an essential aspect of freemium game design is to help them through that process. The good news is that players don’t come to our game in isolation. Games build upon familiar patterns and concepts.

Familiarity Breeds Trust

We need to use playing mechanics that are familiar enough so they can quickly make sense to the player with as little explanation as possible. This doesn’t just make it easier to get started, it actually engenders trust and confidence. Familiarity is important to shortcut communication about the values of our offering in order to attract an audience in the first place as this makes it easier for gamers to decide to download our game. However, as we looked at when considering the rhythm of play, we know players can quickly become bored if they pattern is too familiar. Players need our game to bring something special, even unique, in order to attract their attention or satisfy their craving for something more.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Familiarity is a compelling concept. The trust this engenders can motivate people to download games that share concepts with games they already love. However, the fatal flaw with clones is that in reality we don’t “just” want to play the same game with a new skin. Any duplicate will always fail by comparison if they fail to take the concept forward as the very act of playing the original has already altered our perceptions from the original game. Instead we want to recapture the feelings we had when we first discovered the great games that inspired those clones. Indeed you could argue that often players are seeking to recreate the emotions that first triggered their appreciation of interactive entertainment, something that is essentially impossible to achieve as we are no longer that original naive player. If we rely too heavily on the familiarity of game design this will feel shallow and inevitably fail to meet gamers’ needs.

Figure 6.1 The Triangle of Weirdness.

A Little Disruption Goes a Long Way

Disruption only comes when we are brave enough to challenge existing preconceptions. But be careful not to try to remove all familiarity. Scott Rogers talks about the Triangle of Weirdness³ where you could change the nature of any of the three elements of “character,” “world” or “activities” around a familiar concept; but not all three. If you change every element then it upsets the frame of reference for the player and becomes problematic to sustain their attention.

This model seems to work, look at the some of the most disruptive games we have seen from Angry Birds to Walking Dead, Portal to Candy Crush Saga; all of these took a previous concept into new territory by radically challenging specific areas of gameplay without breaking an overall sense of familiarity. Games that balance the new and familiar like this often manage to obtain a large passionate fan base who become advocates for the wider mass market audience that can catapult the game into success, often without the developer having to spend too much money on marketing. We will talk more in Chapter 10 about the importance of building brands and leveraging your community.

So Little Time

Familiarity as we have said helps us to communicate ideas to players. This is critical to help us communicate ideas about our game to prospective players even before they have any idea what our game is like. Assuming that a player finds our game we have a tiny window of opportunity to get their interest and we can’t waste it on lengthy explanations. Think about the space available on the app store or Google Play, where we essentially have just the thumbnail and name of the game to grab the players’ attention. This gets worse on the device itself because after the game is downloaded we only have a 12-character app name and the 96×96 pixels of the icon.⁴ We have to think extremely carefully about how we can best hint at why our game will be the one that will best satisfy the entertainment needs and aspirations of potential players. We can only do that with a high level of attention to detail to communicate ideas about our game that will resonate with other games that went before it, but at the same time we must still find a way to stand out from the crowd.

Great Artists Don’t Copy, They Steal

It’s important that we don’t rely too heavily on the experiences of previous games, even if our own is deliberately intended to stir up feelings of nostalgia, such as with the modern-classic 8-bit game art style.

There is a fine line between healthy borrowing from previous games and outright copying. I don’t just mean in the legal sense (although a breach of copyright is a serious consequence that I assume we all want to avoid). However, creating a game that is little more than a derivative version of an existing title without adding something is bound to end poorly. As I have already stated, most players who are familiar with the original will eventually feel cheated with your version if you don’t take the concept in a new direction.

So how do we deliver on the promise of the new without removing the familiar values of the experience that we are building on? I believe successful game development is very much like standing on the shoulders of giants. We try to understand the games that formed our thinking and look at how we can build higher still. This may sound lofty, but there is something in reminding us that that we aren’t (usually) creating from a blank sheet and that this is OK. When we want to build a game in the style of one of our own great influences we need to start not trying to copy, but instead trying to recreate the objectives of the game’s original creator. We need to consider what they originally wanted to deliver (or at least your own approximation of that) and understand what compromises drove them to build that experience. Then we need to consider how the resources, platforms and technology have changed and whether we can use these to get past those compromises. More than that, we want to consider how we can apply our own values and creativity to those objectives in order to make something completely new and unique to you as its creator. You need to take ownership of that idea for yourself.⁵

The Story of Arkanoid

One of the earliest examples of this principle is arguably Taito’s Arkanoid.⁶ On the surface this game looks like a simply copy of Atari’s Breakout.⁷ However, there are differences. First, the bricks have rounded corners. I know this seems trivial, but it does mean the art style is different, something that was vital in the accompanying court case. Second, Arkanoid had a story. The rectangle you used to bounce the balls was actually a space ship, the Vaus—that had escaped from the doomed mother ship, the eponymous Arkanoid—which you have to steer through all the levels until you defeat Doh.⁸ OK, the story, like Tetris, was fairly abstract, but it existed. Arkanoid also offered power-�ups, which it granted on completion of levels.

Don’t get me wrong, building on other games is a murky area fraught with problems. Look at FarmVille, which was accused of being a clone of MyFarm and Farm Town among others. I’m not going to enter the debate about whether those claims are right or wrong. Instead, in order to talk about how we can discuss how to build on familiar concepts, let’s look at the more useful comparison of Harvest Moon.⁹FarmVille and Harvest Moon are clearly not the same game, but both rely on relatively cute characters managing the resources of their respective farms. There are many unique aspects that Harvest Moon has to offer that never made it into Farmville,¹⁰ and I know that some designers who say that Zynga’s breakthrough title was missing any gameplay. I don’t agree, but I do accept that the game did very much simplify the playing process, which made it much more accessible to people who were not established game-players. The most important contribution this game introduced (compared to Harvest Moon) was asynchronous social play with Facebook friends into that design. Your friends could meaningfully interact with your farm.

Social Interaction is Playful

The idea of using the Facebook social graph was not new. Playfish, one of the first teams to successfully work with the early Facebook APIs, had started experimenting with this approach as early as 2007.¹¹ However, after its launch FarmVille quickly became dominant, and I suspect this was due to the combination of simplicity, schedules of reinforcement,¹² and social play. The thing that impresses me most is that—more than any other Facebook game of the time—FarmVille, through its social elements, managed to transform the appeal of game to a truly mass-market audience who had previously rejected computer games as too geeky for them.

Building on Expectations

I argue that disruptive creative change is most successful when the design builds our expectations, rather than simply confounding us. We can create startling new stories or playing mechanics provided we do so from a place of comfort. If we can foreshadow expectations of the changes that players are able to reveal, this will empower them to enjoy the game more. Better still we should try to make the most of how we reveal these elements by creating moments for the player to remember and share that makes the experience their own story.

The disruptive elements you introduce to your game have to make sense in line with all three tiers of what makes the game work: its mechanics, context, and metagame. The underlying flow of play in terms of usability, immersion and narrative are equally as important as whether the handling of the mechanic feels right. I believe that this is a critical issue for game designers to consider and it will come up again when we look into monetization in Chapter 13.

Too Much Disruption?

We should also be aware of the risks that bringing disruption into a game can cause. The flow of the game needs to carefully balance the mechanics and context, as well as the monetization. Adding new features to existing concepts can accidently cause us to breach the delicate boundaries between the reason to play and the objectives of the game. This topic is the subject of a wider industry discussion known as “Ludo-narrative dissonance.” The term was introduced in 2007 by Clint Hocking in his critique of Bioshock.¹³ He used it to describe the �conflicted demands of the gameplay against the demands of the narrative. He argued that the needs for character progression worked against the narrative structure to prevent the player from connecting with either, leaving players unsatisfied with both. As designers, we have to pay attention not just to good gameplay and good story, but also to ensuring that the underlying player objectives pushing forward the gameplay are aligned with the objectives that support the narrative (or at least context) we are creating for the game. This seems on the surface to be a fairly obvious thing, but in practice it’s more difficult to avoid than you might think. To help find these problems, it’s essential to test out all of the potential game strategies, not just the most instinctive ones. Perhaps there are dominant strategies or hidden consequences that lurk below the surface creating a dissonance that destroys the intended harmony between game and story.¹⁴

Lucre-Ludo-Narrative Dissonance

This idea of the conflicts between conceptual elements in a game isn’t restricted to the narrative and the mechanic. Within freemium monetization we have to also consider the impact of virtual goods sales and advertising as a factor in this balancing act. When this goes wrong it creates a similar imbalance in gameplay focus as Hocking described. A Lucre-Ludo-narrative dissonance if you like. OK, it’s a bit of a joke term, but we do have to consider the impact of commercial elements in a game with the narrative.

There is a relationship between the decision to sell a consumable virtual good or place an advertisement and the way that the game plays. This might affect the flow of the game, our ability to suspend disbelief, but the more interesting effects come when they impact the tactics or strategy of play. Think about a resource management game where we spend in-game currency to build up our farm, city, or units. We can earn that currency by harvesting things or perhaps playing some kind of minigame. How we use spend that currency might affect the rate at which we earn additional currency and that in turn affects our strategy of play. But if we can purchase additional in-game currency then this removes the resource restrictions that made the game challenging, it fundamentally changes the game. It’s not my intention to go too deep into monetization at this point, something you will hopefully notice is a trend in the way this book is written. We will come to that topic in time at the end of the book in Chapter 13.

Understanding Reward Behaviors

Understanding the motivations for playing or paying for games content, indeed why particular games have been successful is something that returns us to thinking about the needs of the player. As we mentioned when talking about the phenomenal rise of Facebook games from 2007 to 2011, games now have for the first time a truly a mass-market audience. This means that we can’t just assume that all the players are like us anymore. Indeed I would argue that we never could and that this has always held back our potential as designers. We can look at demographics and other traditional marketing theory about consumer segments, however, in games I believe that there are more relevant techniques based on the concepts of “mood” and “mode” as we discussed in Chapter 5. Here we look at the behavior of the player to provide us with insight on the segments.

Richard Bartle’s¹⁵ work on player types very much reflects this kind of thinking, each type responds to the different objectives of each segment that arose in the MUD virtual world and each represents a different reward behavior. While we can’t assume that these types will exactly match the player needs we will discover and satisfy in our games, they remain a useful tool to allow us to consider who is playing our game and what they will want from the game.

Mass-Marketing Means Targeting Everyone

Trained marketing people like me will usually tell you to identify your target audience and then work out how to satisfy them. The trouble with selling a mass-market product is that everyone is your target player, and you don’t want to ignore potential players. This makes things more complicated as we can’t target everyone. That’s why we have to identify different segments and look to see how we can satisfy their player needs differently. If you complete a puzzle to release a magical sword that automatically kills all the monsters in your path, this won’t be particularly satisfying for an “achiever” player. In fact you will probably be undermining the very thing they thrive on, their ability to beat opponents despite the odds. However, an “explorer” might find this a tremendous benefit as it frees them from the trouble of perfecting their fighting techniques, something they might not be as good at or enjoy. Instead, unlocking this sword allows them to spend more time working on puzzles and finding new secrets.

Players Aren’t Static Types

Of course looking at player types isn’t enough. As we have discussed, players are rarely one “type”; although they will usually exhibit a dominant one. Mode, mood and of course player lifecycle all affect their attitudes and behaviors within and between different games over time.

This was my experience playing CSR Racing from Boss Alien/Natural Motion. Around the third tier of the game, I found that the core drag-race mechanic transformed for me from being the whole point of the game to simply a minigame that allowed me to earn money and gold faster. Instead I discovered a new game. The “real” game for me became selecting the right upgrades and races that would get me the most income fastest and with the optimal use of fuel. Of course I could buy more in-game money, fuel, gold or indeed better cars but that would defeat the purpose I had found in playing the game and my personal narrative as I attempted to rise up the ranks to defeat the other racers.

Don’t Make Your Currency the Performance Metric

A common mistake made by designers is to fail to recognize what players choose as their performance metric. Grind currency can be an incredibly powerful way to gate content access, provide friction, and importantly demonstrate a level of progress in the game. However, if this is the only or best way to measure our success, then we are creating a problem for later. Why would I spend in-game currency if it’s the only way I can measure my ongoing success? If I want players to progress in my game and to become repeated payers then I need them to be able to feel free about spending that in-game money, and not create a disincentive to spend it.

If we are aware of this effect we can look for other ways to motivate the players and find ways to ensure that the both the friction mechanics and monetization approach works in line with the flow of the game, rather than against it. Friction and monetization methods are design tools, they are not compromises we have to throw in to frustrate players. There is no need to create a “lucre dissonance” in our games when with care we can use these elements to simply make a better game.

Monetization as a Design Tool

One of my favorite examples of how this might work came during a panel session at Game Monetization Europe conference. The panel was moderated by Nicholas Lovell and included myself and Patrick O’Luanaigh of NDreams. We were attempting to show how one could turn any game into a Free2Play model. One of the suggestions was the classic point and click adventure, Secrets of Monkey Island. After a series of discussions including turning the world into a sandbox and the introduction of repeatable minigames to complement the mission system, we asked the audience for their ideas. One of them suggested that you could restrict the number of times per day you could use puzzle objects. That might sound like sacrilege to the purist, but if we think about it as a disruptive technique it could have a genuinely beneficial impact on how we play the game. Rather than clicking everywhere on the screen, having a limited number of tries per day makes us more cautious about how we control Guybrush to find the solutions to puzzles. How might this affect the way we locate a file from inside the piece of carrot cake from Otis? Would this add to the emotional intensity of the research we might so in order to find out that the file is in fact intended to shave the rhinoceros toenails and open the idol’s case? This might cause some frustration of course, but it contributes to the game, rather than taking an approach like selling “hints” where spending money simply defeats the purpose of playing the game. Not to mention that there are probably all the answers we might want freely available on the internet. Thinking with this approach to monetization means we can create game mechanics with real-world consequences associated with each attempt to solve a puzzle. In reality, the risk is that this particular mechanic would be too heavy-handed for some players and of course its introduction makes for a different game experience. The point is, however, that we can use virtual goods in many different ways to create new strategies and consequences that can positively contribute to the experience. The limitation is only in how we approach the design. The presence of virtual goods can and should be entirely beneficial to the gameplay, as long as we think about the consequences and use them as part of our palette of design tools.

Notes

1 The expression and application of human creative skill and imagination is the very definition of art, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/art. However, we are making more than “just” art, we are creating experiences for paying players.

2 Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has been described as the world’s leading researcher on positive psychology. His seminal work is Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi.

3 Check out http://mrbossdesign.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/triangle-of-weirdness.html for more details on Scott Roger’s Triangle of Weirdness.

4 The app name is actually based on a maximum length rather than the number of characters on iOS, 12 (including a space) will often work, but sometimes 11 characters is safer. Android uses character length of 12 and the pixel limitation described above refers to the higher resolution screens for Android; in practice you have to be able to create your icon using 36×36 dp for the lowest resolution. On iOS this resolution is (at the time of writing) 114×114.

5 Pablo Picasso is often quoted as saying “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” The argument being that inspiration may come from external sources, but it requires the artist to take ownership of the idea; to make it their own.

6 Arkanoid was Taito’s response to Breakout and was very similar, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkanoid.

7 Breakout was originally conceived as a successor single-player mode version of Pong, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game).

8 I was personally never patient enough to play through the entirety of the game.

9 Harvest Moon or Farm Story was originally produced by Victor Interactive Software; later purchased by Marvellous Entertainment and first released on Nintendo’s SNES in 1996, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Moon_(series).

10 Farmville was introduced in 2009 by Zynga and as well as winning the GDC “Best Social/Online Game” in 2010 was also described as one of the “50 worst inventions” by Time magazine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FarmVille.

11 I was lucky enough to be one of the first 100 people sent an invite to the Playfish game Who has the Biggest Brain? in 2007, which was one of the first games to reach millions of daily active users.

12 We talked briefly about schedules of reinforcement and the Skinner Box in Chapter 3.

13 http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html.

14 I strongly recommend that you try paper prototyping techniques to stress out the practical details of your design before asking a coder to commit to writing the game software. It’s much quicker and cheaper to iterate a design with your imagination, some paper designs and physical playing pieces to represent what the game will do and you almost always learn something about the properties of the gameplay.

15 We mentioned Richard Bartle, his work as co-creator of MUD, and the analysis he did on different player types in Chapter 2.