Game Prototyping

How do you know if your game concept has hit potential? Here is a great talk from Casual Connect 2013 on this subject on “Finding the needle in the haystack”.

There are lots of talks about the process of prototyping, but no hints on how to evaluate them to make the decisions. In this talk Antti Hattara, Head of Studio at Wooga, will tell how to evaluate prototypes and recognize the ones with great potential from the rest Antti will talk about the mobile developer’s creative and agile approach to finding those needles in a haystack and how good projects are put to rest and great ones given that all-important green light.

Video: http://www.wooga.com/2013/08/ccsf13/
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/wooga/2013-0724-casualconnectneedleinhaystackslideshare-25024393?smtNoRedir=1

Is Your Game Sticky?

My students recently mentioned an article about a man who played the same game of civilization for 10 years. Talk about addicting gameplay! This brings me to the question, what makes a game sticky? The answer seems to vary depending upon the genre.

For Social Games, stickiness is vital since the revenue model depends upon users returning frequently. Simply put, whenever a user goes back and plays, the more involved they are. This increases the opportunities to monetize, since a user who plays every day is much more likely to get to this point where they open their wallet, compared with those who visit once or twice a month never comes back. The key stickiness factor for social games, aside from being a great game, is the game's ability access to their friends via Social Media. Yet with such a reliance upon social media, the challenge for social games going forward remains how to deal with the constant changes in services of social media as has been seen in the myriad of Facebook updates to user terms and services.

For MMOs, stickiness boils down to community. The initial draw to a game largely revolves around the excitement and buzz of something new. Yet after the novelty of the game wears off, the user is no longer playing the game so much because they still find it fun, but simply because the user is more interested being a part of their circle of friends more than completing quests.

Of course, all sticky games have one thing in common: they are great games. According to Raph Koster, the mark of a truly good game is one that teaches us everything it possibly can before we grow tired of playing. This suggests that after 10 years of trying to bring peace to the world in the face of opposition from war-minded AI opponents, the game still had something to teach. So when designing for your game, remember that regardless of the platform, the first key to success begins with having something compelling to share with your audience.

Crunching Candy Crush Saga

Every day, millions of people are playing Candy Crush, the latest mobile gaming craze that has garnered media attention and is even advertising on TV. I think there are several important lessons that can be learned from this game that can have an overall positive impact on the qulaity of mobile games being created today. How has this game captured so many players so quickly? A deconstruction of the game reveals that it has rcok solid underpinnings in three key areas: Core Mechanics, User Experience and Social Mechanics.


Core Game Mechanics

First, the game play mechanics have to be solid. No matter how beautifully polished and inviting a game, the core elements have to be engaging.

• The core mechanic of swapping candies to match 3 in a row is staggeringly simple. And while this mechanic is not new, the addition of more complex variations (such as 4 in a row, 5 in a row, and other formations to create special exploding candies that help the player) that affords the player a greater range of abilities  to change the outcome of the puzzles. Without a range of options, the game would quickly become stale. 
• Some candies obstruct and therefore represent antagonists. As the game progresses, more enemy candies are introduced that obstruct the player that creates a greater range of challenges. The spatial arrangement of the game board supports the effectiveness of these enemy candies and allows for challenges in which the enemy candies are either very strong, or even relatively weak, which bolsters player confidence.
• The difficulty of the game is very well done. Difficulty ramps up toward the end of stages and lowers at the beginning of stages. This gives players a sense of accomplishment in the early part of the stage and encourages players to remain engaged in completing stages.
• The game does an excellent job of allowing the player to prepare for challenges, by offering simple, clear instructions and opportunities to select paid power ups that will improve the odds of beating a level. The levels are puzzles to be solved. Successfully connecting patterns of three candies without consideration of the resulting formation will ensure failure. The ability to change the outcome of game play through thoughtful planning is a key to successful game design.
• The cost of failure is not so great as to push players away from the game. While lives can be lost to the point where further progression is prohibited, these lives regenerate over time and are constantly awarded for social interaction. There is therefore a low barrier to re-enter the game and keep players engaged.

User Experience
Candy crush achieves a high level of user experience both from an artistic as well as psychological point of view.

• The choice of candy as a key element in the game is deeply embedding in our childhood memories and evokes strong psychological associates with pleasure, adventure and happiness. "Candy Crush" is a wonderful choice for a name, having both a satisfying alliteration that rolls off the tongue and evokes a satisfying sense of mischief. The double meaning of "crush" also works nicely.
• The missions to complete stages in Candy Crush are all centered around helping likeable characters in distress. An example of this is the challenges of completing all 15 levels in the Minty Meadows stage to help a unicorn regain her lost horn. At first she is in tears, but after beating all the levels, she is overjoyed at her new replacement horn made of candy. In Achieving good deeds provokes strong sense of achievement and emotional connection to the characters in the game.
• The game has achieved a high level of artistic quality that underscores and enhances the user experience. The choice of vintage circus visual elements evokes an age of better days. The two mascots, a young girl and a tall Willy Wonka-esque figure of a man suggests an age of innocence, fantasy and wonder. The background music, with it's bells, harps and sleepy Edwardian overtones, supports this narrative of a dreamlike, turn of the century age of wonder. All of the buttons in the game have subtle squash and stretch animations that evoke a jelly candy like quality. The game play pieces are (of course) all made of candy that are rendered with a beautiful glossy finish that gives them a tactile and inviting look. The visual effects of candy being crushed sparkle like magic. All of these elements work in concert to further support a magical, world-of-candy narrative.

Social Mechanics
The most vital component here is the mechanism that encourages exchanges of information between friends. There are several elements that contribute to this:

• Multiple synced platforms: At first glance the benefit of multiple platforms that sync progress seems to be that it removes a barrier to play.
  
• Asynchronous lives: The real genius is that the game offers additional lives when playing on different platforms. King could easily have synchronized this as well, but extra lives were intentionally allowed. Player immediately recognize the opportunity to "cheat the system" and this mechanic encourages additional log-ins, which raises retention.
• Reliance upon Friends: Candy crush doesn't just allow you to see your friends, it creates an economy that creates dependence upon your friends in order to progress.
• Competition with friends: You are at the same time dependent upon your friends and competing with them at the same time. This fact is constantly reinforced every time you glance at the level progression map where you can clearly see which friends are ahead of you and which ones are behind you. This is further reinforced every time you beat a level. Candy Crush informs you of any friends you have beaten.

Candy Crush has one final vital key to success which is perhaps the most vital lesson to be learned; the designers have worked diligently to ensure the game can be won through skill and persistence, as evidenced by the players currently on the last level, 70% of whom have paid nothing. This is not only a feat of good design, it is also a feat of overall attention to creating a game that creates an incentive to progress based on desire rather than pain. Many games makes this mistake, notably those that feature ads and frequent pop-ups as a mechanism to anger or frustrate users into purchasing a paid version of the game. But these mechanics undermine the appeal of the game and in the long run, will drive users toward seeking other games that are free of these annoyances.

I think the overall quality of mobile games could improve from learning this key lesson, which is at the heart of my crush on Candy Crush.

Ethics of Leveraging Psychology in Social Media

Psychology is an incredibly powerful and important part of game design and social media as underscored in a recent article, "Psychoanalyzing Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button". Jonathan Cook's comments , " Some psychologists say Facebook doesn’t create problems, but could bring out pre-existing ones." underscores what most industry experts seem to gravitate toward, that the idea of depression linked to social media bears a correlative, not causation relationship. I think the key thing I as a developer must grapple with is that knowing this, am I developing content that is pure in its entertainment value, or am I targeting this known behavior for reasons of profit? The latter strategy is what Zynga (makers of Farmville) focuses upon and for that reason is both one of the most profitable and unscrupulous of companies. In the end, I believe that chasing the quick profit will both harm the collective reputation of the video game industry and undermine the genre of asynchronous social game play. The companies that will emerge as the "winners" will be those focused on fun, high quality entertainment that improves the player's esteem and intellect.

Soul Food for Business

I am hardly surprised at the findings of an MIT study that found that IBM employees that maintained online social relationships brought additional revenue to the company's bottom line. Any business involved in building relationships between the company and 3rd parties stands to gain from employees that regularly exercise their social circles. Malcolm Gladwell drives this point home in his book "The Tipping Point", in which he treats social and business circles as environments in which information is compared to a spreading virus and people are categorized into three distinct roles in spreading that virus. The thing that impressed me most about IBM's decision was their underlying philosophy of how to deal with the phenomena of Social Networking. Rather than to assume that it was a nuisance that interfered with the mechanisms of productivity, they decided that since Social Networking was not going to vanish, they might as well try to understand it. In the end, through regulation and guidelines to set expectations, IBM turned a "problem" into a competitive edge. Bravo.

The Tech Wave

Yesterday, one of my students asked if consoles would continue to be defined as ancillary devices hooked up to a TV, or if the word would evolve to refer to a new generation of devices that serve as portable multimedia players.

Historically, the record is mixed. In some regards, everybody still casually refers to broadcast monitors as TeleVisions, (TVs) regardless whether the technology is using a cathode ray tube (CRT), a plasma screen or an liquid crystal display (LCD). The same is not true of audio devices. You can identify the geriatric technophiles in the room by whether they listen to LPs, cassettes, CDs or their iPod. I'm pretty sure nobody says, " Check out the new tune on my MP3 player". And even if some folks did, it would fall out of fashion soon enough. After all, MP3 as a format will one day be supplanted by something either superior or with better compression.

By it's very technological nature, the video games industry must undergo change. Technology never remains static, but rather flows, like a wave, barreling in an unstoppable fashion toward new shores. Companies like Nintendo have always been able to adapt. Indeed, the ability to adapt to changes in technological waves has less to do with expertise, and more with innovation and core philosophies.

Can anything Virtual be Monumental?

Today I read that video games are now legally eligible for National Endowment ofr the Arts funding effectively granting them legal recognition as a work of art. Blogger John funk said it best: 

The "games as art" debate will likely continue raging for years before videogames reach complete cultural acceptance, but at least one important organization now officially considers games art: The US Federal Government. Or, rather, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) considers games art - which technically amounts to the exact same thing.

The whole purpose of NEA funding is to create a means by which an artist can create a work of art that would enhance the public good. The logic is fairly sound - beautification fosters civic pride and paves the way for economic prosperity.

This made me wonder:  It's easy to see how a physical work would add value to civilization and serve as a lightning rod for business and creativity. But what if the work you are creating is virtual? How do you associate the creators and the location in which the works were made with the works themselves? I think that film serves as the best model of what we can expect. As a resident of LA, it is easy to see the utter lack of monuments that actually represent the film industry. The real places of inspiration should be the massive sound stages at Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, Sony, etc., but for lack of anything tangible, people are instead drawn to the Hollywood Walk of Fame or Mann Grauman's Chinese Theater. Yet despite the fragmentation of the film industry, Hollywood remains at least for now, the de facto capital of the film world. This is largely due to the legacy of Hollywood but really has little to do with the reality of any global monopoly on film making. But we can certainly see the cultural benefit the United States has enjoyed from the Hollywood legacy.

What is important to remember is the financial mechanisms, tax structures, investors, talent pools, etc. that were put into place that created the environment for Hollywood to exist in the first place. I think that the availability of NEA funding for video games is a step in the right direction. The reality is that the video games industry is very much still in its infancy. There is little reason to expect that without further state and federal economic incentives that video games will remain an iconic jewel of American culture and instead come to be known as an industry ruled by the China, Japan, Germany or France. If you don't believe me, go ask anyone if they still think France is the King of the movies.