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Tim Rogers should get a Pulitzer Prize. (There are multiple pages, don’t miss out.)
So apparently Mark Zuckerberg talked about my Mario post at F8 today. Here’s a screencap:
Zuckerberg:
“I cried when I saw this. … I appreciate that whoever made this realized that all modern games should be social, but I also empathize with it because it really is one of the worst experiences on our platform that when you are just in the middle of some app doing something and then all of a sudden it just pops something up and asks you to share… So today we want to make it so that you no longer have to do this.”
For the record, I’m jazzed that I can have some small impact on the world, but the “whoever made this” (He would probably know who made this if his people didn’t scrub my watermark from the image) does not believe that all modern games should be social. Unless he means something different than my conception of what they think social means.
Ute is an entrant in the IGF Student Showcase from a German group of students. In it, you play a woman who is told by her grandmother to be as promiscuous as possible before marriage. You walk around an abstract environment, pulling various men (including Che’ Guavara) into corners to fornicate in a variety of NSFW quick time events. If you are spotted by another man during said quick-time event, both men know your secret and their hearts break. Once only one man is left in the eligible pool, you marry him and the game is over.
It is a very cynical take on relationships and I wonder if part of that is due to the differing cultural mores between here in America and there. Although Lea’s previous game Ultisa Dimitrova is far more cynical, it is also playable in only one way. Ute can be played as if its subject matter was completely abstract or rethemed in any number of permutations. In fact, the cultural payload would change greatly if you rethemed the game to a man seeking out women. Would it then be a game about power struggles and gender roles? These thematic assignments are done wholly on the framing of the game and not the mechanics of the game. What do the mechanics themselves say about the game’s theme?
I’ve been awfully busy of late, but you will see news from me on two fronts very soon. In the meanwhile, Tyler from Betable contacted me about a comment I made on one of their blogs. This turned into an interview where I found out he was also a CMU alum and where he found out that I drone on and on about things.
Dan Cook’s statement (and I paraphrase) that designers also have to be businessmen is never more appropriate than it is today. The new wave is Free to Play and I think it is a great leap forward. Too long has the conversation been framed as business vs. ideals as if it were two sides of a balance. The truth is that in this environment business has to trust design and design has to consider business. That’s not a fence-sitting cop-out–it’s my assessment of industry trends.
Anyway, here’s the interview, which is also cross-posted on their site.
When Betable published the blog post “Advertising in mobile games is broken”, we got a lot of great responses and feedback from our readers, but one in particular struck me as insightful. It was from Zack Hiwiller, a game industry veteran with a fantastic blog that covers game design and the industry as a whole. Our discussion prompted an interview for you to read below, which has some great insights for game developers for game monetization, especially in-game advertising.
Tyler: Hey Zack, great to talk to you today. Let’s begin with an open question: why do game developers consider in-game advertising?
Zack: When we talk about making money in games, the conversation tends to only lead to two conclusions: either sell the game at retail and get all your money up front or give the game away (or sell it for a trivial price) and jam ads in there. The problem with the former is that it is an immense barrier to entry for untrusted game types or developers. The problems with the latter are legion, including reduced screen real estate and wrecking immersion.
Tyler: How do other forms of entertainment do in-media advertising?
Zack: Television, movies and other static entertainment have to face this choice. Sell at the front or load with sponsorship? HBO, Showtime, and others chose the former and has been able to produce high quality dramas that draw viewers into other worlds. The networks chose the latter and sell expensive spots in the middle of piecemeal sitcoms and sporting events and make hand-over-fist money as well.
There’s an additional prong of revenue that came about in the last few decades that games are starting to incorporate: the paid product placement. Look at the Coke placement in American Idol and compare it to the Old Spice Swagger Rating in Madden for an example. Old Spice paid Electronic Arts to rebrand a player statistic–something with no tangible value–just to get a new kind of ad impression.
Tyler: Do you see this as an effective way for games to incorporate these brands?
Zack: Well, these are still ads, just placed in a non-obtrusive and seemingly more subliminal manner. Microsoft bought in-game advertising specialist Massive in 2006 for something like $400 million dollars. Yet Microsoft shut down Massive in 2010. If in-game advertising was the boon for interactive media that it was for static media, then surely they could have made that arrangement work?
Tyler: Ouch, that’s a tough loss to swallow. What does the failure of Massive say about consumers?
Zack: Unfortunately, consumers aren’t nearly as static as the media they consume. With DVRs, even technophobe parents and grandmothers are getting used to “skipping the commercials”. It is understood now to show up to a movie 15-20 minutes late to pass on the trite TV-style advertisements just to get to the real trailers which are themselves advertisements. And the least said about newspapers the better, but I don’t need to describe how the dynamics of the Internet destroyed any ad-related models they could throw at consumers.
Tyler: Fair enough. That said, what advice can you give game developers looking to better monetize their games?
Zack: The key to the future is to realize that consumers are dynamic. If you make it hard to pay for a TV show online, viewers will just pirate it. Producers don’t get to dictate to consumers as easily as they once could.
For games, the old retail model was to buy up front once and play forever. As media speeds exploded in the late 90s and BBS sharing made way for peer-to-peer and BitTorrent, piracy became the status quo. Companies had to change from “Pay me if you want to play” to “Will you please pay me if you play?”
Tyler: Piracy is such as interesting competitor, because you essentially need to provide a compelling reason for players to pay for your game. What’s a game company to do?
Zack: Unfortunately, this is the new normal. The “Free to Play” (F2P) genre is the business model du jour and it is easy to see why: games are impossible to pirate and revenues per player do not have a cap. Whereas a player buying a game in 2006 would likely pay $60 whether he played for an hour or a thousand hours, F2P gamers pay only when they feel they are comfortable paying and want access to exclusive content. Players can spend unlimited money in many cases.
In Farmville, players pay for extra energy to get more actions per day. In League of Legends, players pay for new characters that differ from the characters the free players can unlock. In Battlefield Heroes, players can buy new weapons or ammo. In most F2P games, players can buy “XP boosts” that make their characters better without having to spend the time pounding away at early levels. Developers have literally tapped into a way to get people to pay money to not play their game.
Tyler: Love the concepts you’ve mentioned, but while virtual currency has proven to be a great revenue engine for free-to-play games, many of them still rely on advertising for either their primary or secondary revenue stream. Do you have any tips for game developers looking to integrate advertising into their games effectively?
Zack: For in-game advertising to be effective in getting a tangential message across, it must necessarily take away from the game’s experience. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively on the topic of “flow”. Flow, to not sound too new-age about it, is the concept of feeling “in the moment”. Imagine playing a racing game and not even thinking as you swerve in between cars. Or playing a rhythm game where your hands move on their own and the game seems to play itself. Games, due to their nature of scaled antagonism are natural flow-state delivery mechanisms.
Zack: For in-game advertising to be effective in getting a tangential message across, it must necessarily take away from the game’s experience. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively on the topic of “flow”. Flow, to not sound too new-age about it, is the concept of feeling “in the moment”. Imagine playing a racing game and not even thinking as you swerve in between cars. Or playing a rhythm game where your hands move on their own and the game seems to play itself. Games, due to their nature of scaled antagonism are natural flow-state delivery mechanisms.
What in-game advertising must do is avoid breaking the flow state, because the user will then think of advertised brand as intruding on their experience. The best in-game advertising exists in a way that the user notices but does not break the flow state. This most often occurs in games that don’t elicit a flow state at all: fantasy football is one place where in-game advertising cannot hurt much if a flow state is never achieved.
Tyler: Given the difficulties of incorporating in-game advertising and the commoditization of virtual goods, do you think free-to-play games need more monetization options?
Zack: The problem with framing the question this way is that it implies that there are standard monetization options that just drop in to whatever game you are creating as if it were an advertisement where it doesn’t matter if it is for Coke or Calvin Klein or Steak-Ums. But monetization is tricky because it necessarily changes a game’s dynamic systems. Every monetization system needs to be custom made to make sense with the game it is working within.
The solution is not that we need more monetization options, but that current monetization efforts should be created with thought to how these features affect the game’s systems as a whole. If new monetization options are created, they should think about how games can be built around them effectively.
At GenCon, I was talking with Kevin Wilson (Sid Meier’s Civilization: the Boardgame, Arkham Horror, Descent, a million others) about balance and playtesting. He said something which I politely balked at: that a simple game needs a lot of testing because it can be easily broken. A very large game needs a lot of balancing and playtesting as well because it is so interdependent. But medium-large games don’t need a lot of playtesting as long as they are complex enough that players can adapt strategies that self-balance the game – focusing on things that maximize their chances and ignoring slight imbalances as rounding error.
I disagreed at the time but was too polite to say so. Now the more I think about it, the more merit it may have. What if many of our games that we find to be paragons of balance are that way because of organic player behavior? I know from experience that balance is largely a guess and check endeavor. I’m playing League of Legends with folks from work lately and I am astounded that there aren’t obvious dominant strategies with such diverse character abilities. Is this because of rugged playtesting and post-launch tweaking and nerfing or because the system is complex enough to allow for self-balancing? What if games that seem needlessly complicated or fiddly (Arkham Horror is a good example) are that way to allow for player flexibility in the hopes that the player, rather than the designer, finds the balance?
It’s amazing to me that in the course of five years we can go from “consumables are the artifacts of greed” to “F2P is the strongest pillar of the industry”. When EA put consumables into Madden 2007 (I believe that was the year), there was an entire shitstorm of rage from the commentariat. Now, consumables are 68 percent of F2P spending and allowing entire distribution types that did not exist previously.
Gamasutra has a great article up by Simon Ludgate on the economics of that particular market that I find incredibly interesting. Designers and companies deserve to get paid for the products and services they provide. If this model helps breed innovation in game design and doesn’t just become a mechanism for extracting revenue from users (nee Zynga), then I welcome the sea change.
Coworkers have introduced me to League of Legends which is confounding in many, many ways, but I have to admit to finding how the business merges with the design to be fascinating. My one worry about these games are their ephemeralness–once Riot moves on, the game is done. There are no artifacts to leave behind. If that is the unfortunate dynamic of privacy prevention, then we all lose.
TwitShift is a service that will set up a parallel Twitter account that will post what you have posted or retweeted exactly one year to the moment that you tweet or retweet. Last year was a particularly difficult year for me. I had moved to New York City with which I almost immediately fell in hate. My job that moved me there turned out not at all to be what I expected. Watching “Past Zack” tweet for the past few months has been strangely unnerving as the growing angst and depression started to seep into my outward-facing persona.
In January, I was wide-eyed and hopeful. In just two weeks, I’d start to get disenfranchised:
January 19 - First day at new job. No one told me what time, so I’m going in for 9. Strangely nervous!
January 20 - The inspiration. I found it? This is what it felt like?
January 26 – I may finish the draft of this GDD by Wednesday after all… 5200 words in two days ain’t bad.
January 27 – Blarg. My 33 page doc is in the wrong format, needs to be totally reorganized. Here we go!
January 28 – Balls. My design proposal got vetoed.
February 17 – Just saw the most masturbatory design document I have ever seen in my life.
February 23 - I think my team just formed a new band called “Rage Against the Gantt Chart”
By March, I was starting to learn that I wasn’t being respected and it was getting to me:
March 2 – Grr. Breathe. Relax.
March 31 - Unbefuckinglievable.
April 1 - Why do I let myself get this stressed?
April 12 - I totally understand Alan Smithee
April 13 - You know it’s bad when delicious Polish food, getting a game from Germany in the mail and walking home with my love couldn’t cheer me up.
April 26 - No! My beautifully balanced system tumbled like a Jenga tower!
April 27 - Today crossed that line from frustrating to so ridiculous that you have to laugh. It’s a good place to be.
On April 29, my creative frustration must have boiled up and it led to my famous Mario + Tutorials post and everyone started telling me I’d get fired.
May 4 – Wholly depressed. Best time to try writing.
May 5 - Seriously, if I get fired for that I’ll probably kill myself since there will be no one with a sense of humor left in the world.
May 17 - wegyrgwuegroqrgtqwiergfylqwgeflqwergfqpw;re8tyq9rwehfrgbkhgwwuoewr830ywe97wte23gui34hkr32gifewkbfewaoywfeuo412h43hjv532vhj532h23589y532ghi90
May 21 - Quick! Shoulder me out of the way because if you don’t stand 1 inch from the subway door, you won’t be able to get out! i hate ny
June 1 - Some of my work got nuked, but I hid a backup in a place no one would ever think to look – the GDD.
By June, I’d given up and was a downright mess. Our project that had given me so much stress over the past half-year was cancelled for reasons way beyond my area of impact. Nothing looked like it would make sense and I had nowhere to turn.
June 16 – head kablooey
June 28 - Only saw three crimes on the subway this morning. #mondayinnyc
June 28 - Filling up documents with useless data. Thinking about adding some lorem ipsum to see if anyone reads it.
July 6 - It’s so hot out that the area of high pressure has reinflated my hopes and dreams.
July 8 - I’m gonna choke a bitch.
July 12 - The least annoying thing happening in the office right now is the drilling into metal sounds.
July 13 - If enough people believe that our project is uncancelled, then maybe it will be? @radmartigan get working on that.
July 19 - Fast, Good and Cheap. Pick all three.
July 19 - On the verge of totally flipping out. #keepsayingitsfriday
July 19 - When I feel like I am about to lose it, I read “focal feature” as “fecal feature” in a GDD and all is right for a moment.
July 21 - Watched world’s worst mother berate and abuse her child on the subway this morning. No civilized person can live here. I’ve had it.
July 28 - I can just tell this will end poorly.
July 29 - Cells in this s.sheet that are important are highlighted yellow. Cells of cut features are also yellow. Then we just made some more yellow.
By August, despite my internal attitude leaking out to Twitter, I was still creating prolifically and working hard. But when you push yourself to the bone and then you are essentially called worthless, there is little you are left to do.
August 10 - 25 pages of design doc in one day. Not bad.
August 13 - Left Gameloft today. Definition of a poor fit. Anyone know of any openings? RT if you can.
Damn do I feel bad for “Past Zack”. His tweets really do feel like they are coming from a different person. The Twitshift application is a lot different than just reading your old blog or diary. Since it happens in realtime alongside the tweets of real people, it really does feel like you are watching an external real person. Except you have this burden because you know how his story will go before he does. I want to message him and tell him to hang in there, that everything gets better really soon. But I can’t and it breaks my heart.
By October, Past Zack will have moved away from New York but will be really vague about where he is and what he is doing. He won’t want to tell people that he, a grown man, will have moved his things back to his parents house to save money while he looked for a new job. He won’t tweet about the crippling depression he is trying so hard to hide from everyone. In fact, he will try and stick mostly to retweets and quips about football. I think what is more disturbing to me is my knowledge of what is going on behind those tweets, why they get farther apart and why they become less relevant to the things that actually interest me.
By the way, things are completely great for me right now. What a difference a year makes!
Too long and wonderful to tweet:
Enough pronouncements and posturings about game design as problem-solving, of finding the most effective solution, or the most powerful trump card, and wielding it in the air like an autistic Achilles. Let’s make games. Let’s make good ones. Let’s try to figure out what that means for each of us. Let’s help our colleagues and our players and our critics understand it.
I’ve unfollowed so many of the so-called designers-to-follow out there because of their egotistical and unsubstantiated pronouncements on design that X is dead, long live Y; that because they consulted on some obscure title or read some obscure author that they have the true design principles, carved into stone by the hand of God. I’m no relativist, but I cannot believe that what passes for GDC lectures need be read by students and designers alike as gospel.
