I was doing some Monday Night Data Analysis (you know how it is) and I got to thinking about the microtransaction models in mobile games. When deciding on the values of Keys To The City in Fire & Dice, I just kind of stuck my finger in the air and let some math cushion my fall. Here’s what we ended up with:

7 Keys, $1, 14.3c/key,
50 Keys, $5, 10c/key,
250 Keys, $20, 8c/key,
1,000 Keys, $50, 5c/key.

That makes sense according to the Greater McNugget Law of Economics which has something to do with decreasing marginal utility and states that a 20-piece Chicken McNuggets should cost less than buying 5 4-piece Chicken McNuggets separately. Otherwise, McNugget arbitrage would throw commodity futures into chaos. Or something.

So we know that the cost per unit of MTX currency should go down (or stay steady) as the amount spent goes up. If I buy 1,000 Farmville Bux at a clip, it should cost me less than buying 100 Farmville Bux ten times. But how much should it go down per dollar? How much cheaper should it be?

A currency that provides no “bulk savings” would be just a flat line across at 1 because at any price point you would always be getting the same unit cost. The higher the curve goes up, the greater the “bulk discount” is for users. If there was an easy secondary MTX currency market, you would see all of these pressed flatter and flatter because arbitrageurs could just buy huge bundles of MTX currency and dole it out at cheaper than the supplier’s $1 level.

Here’s a zoom-in of the 1 to 2 range:

The sample of thirteen games available to me at the time that had easily divisible amounts provided quite a variety of suggestions.

• First, Danc is a saint because Triple Town‘s $5 currency bundle is either the most wonderful affordable currency bundle out right now or the $1, $2 and $3 bundles are vastly overpriced. The $5 bundle in Triple Town gives 25x the number of coins of the $1 bundle for 5x the cost. No one else does that. Why not? Are we afraid of over-saturating our whales? Give the people that buy the biggest bundle as much as they could possibly ever use. user.giveTokens(MAXINT);
• Every single game I looked at had a $5 bundle, but not every game had a $1 bundle.
• Someone at Ludia can’t do basic math because their $40 bundle on Family Feud & Friends provides more bang for buck than their $100 bundle.
• Who buys $100 bundles? Why aren’t they buying the $50 Fire & Dice bundle? Do we devs just put those out there to see if people will hit the button by accident like the I Am Rich app?
• Newtoy’s (er, Zynga with Friends’) games have the flattest curves. They really don’t offer much in the way of bulk savings.
• Ignore the weird curve thing going on with the Zynga Poker line from $3-$5 and the Triple Town line from $2 to $3. Google Doc’s curve smoothing wasn’t up to the task.
• While there seems to be similarity in the <$5 range (if you average the curves, you get about what we did for Fire & Dice!), once we crack $20 we get into crazy bux funtown. The curves diverge quite a bit. I think everyone can agree on 10%-50% bumps in the $1-$5 range, but the parabola gets so stupid when you get into $100 games that I guess you just pick a large number and throw it at the user.

*And lazy. I didn’t even out the space between x-axis points.

Education is boss and I dig what I do, but I’ve also missed actually making games. Luckily, there’s a neat little startup about fifteen miles down the road from me called Sky Parlor Studios that needed some help crafting a portfolio of mobile games. We are working on a number of things but the first to release is called Fire and Dice. It’s one of my favorite games I’ve designed in many years, so I do want to tell you a bit about it.

Fire and Dice has a number of inspirations, notably the board games Roll Through the Ages and Elder Sign where the player takes random resources and assign them in a Yahtzee meets Sim/RPG kind of way.

In Fire and Dice, you play as the fire chief of Sparksville, which is a town of sixteen blocks that seems to have trouble avoiding combusting. You roll your dice and choose to lock in water, movement, rescue or truck dice to drive around the town, put out the fires and rescue the citizens.

Small fires take five water to quench; large fires take ten. If two large fires are next to each other, they will spread. But having two trucks at a location will double your water efficiency (spend 5 instead of 10 to quench the large fires). Having three trucks at a location will triple it.

Rescuing a citizen and returning them to the fire station awards you a new die (up to seven), which is key to long-term survival.

Here’s my strategy, but I don’t have the score, so take it with a grain of salt: get to seven dice as soon as possible, then expand your truck fleet and make sure there are never two large fires next to each other. Easier said than done. Do you bunch your trucks together for the efficiency bonus or do you spread them out to cover a larger area? It’s a catchy game and I wouldn’t sell it so hard if I didn’t think it was a lot of fun.

The Ad-Supported Android version is on the marketplace now. The Paid Android ($2) as well. Paid iPhone, Free iPhone and iPad Universal apps are all forthcoming. There are more features and tweaks we are rushing to add, but we wanted to get this in front of folks as soon as possible.

We put a lot of love into the game, so we would appreciate if you purchased one of these for the mobile device of your choice and supported original indie development. We’ve got a bunch of good ideas in the pipeline and want to be able to afford to come out with something fun every month or so. Use the comments if you have questions or suggestions and I’ll get to them as soon as I can. I’ll keep this post updated with news and screenshots.

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?

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.

I have some serious heavy-duty gripes about LA Noire but it does a bunch of things right.

My favorite feature of all is that you can hold down Y (or Triangle) near your car to get your partner to instantly drive you to the next location instead of lumbering around town like a drunk teenager wrecking into every stop light in a ten block radius. If any dialogue was to happen during the drive, it happens before the fade-to-black. It fixes the primary problem of many open world games: that getting from point A to point B is really not all that fun. And when point-A-to-point-B is the majority of the time spent in the game, that discourages players from completing the bits that you spent millions of dollars on: the missions and set-pieces. Less than eight percent of players finished Red Dead Redemption. In movies or TV when your protagonist needs to go somewhere, we don’t see him or her get into a car, navigate the freeways, signal legally and pull into a valid parking spot. Because it is boring and unnecessary. We spend all of this time investing in raising the emotional stakes of our characters and then let that tension slack so that we can navigate a “real world”. A game that I found incredibly interesting and innovative, Far Cry 2, I never finished because I was tired of driving through jungles and savannas getting randomly assaulted.

The primary frustration I have with the game is the linearity of conversation. (This may seem ironic to some, since I just advocated what some may call linearizing travel, but I would argue that it is already linear since there are no meaningful changes that happen between point A and B – it is false freedom.) While melodramatic and a bit silly, the Ace Attorney games provided pretty interesting mechanics for searching crime scenes and interacting with witnesses/suspects. Often the dialogue would take the shape of a hub. You can take a line of questioning and if things go sour, you can loop back to where you started and take another line of questioning. Sometimes this would lead to repeating dialogue, but there was a sense from a metagame perspective that if you could suss out orders and prerequisites, that you could complete the designed interaction.

LA Noire takes a wholly linear approach to questioning. You get one shot at each prompt to answer Truth-Doubt-Lie. Only one of the pieces of evidence works for each lie even though evidence may lead to similar trains of thought. And when you “doubt”, you can not later go back and accuse the witness of lying. It makes little sense. You get one opportunity and that’s that. If you have suspicions, you better use the right evidence or forever hold your peace. Is it meant to be replayed? Is that the point?

Dialogue Shape: Ace Attorney vs. LA Noire

I’m also fully convinced that whatever genre Rockstar tries in the future, they will still use the same minimap.

I’m in the closed beta for Parking Wars 2 and it’s all the Parking Wars you know and love plus some bits. I thought the original was one of the most dynamically interesting social games ever created (and three years later, it still is). The new one has this item called, simply enough, the Brick:

Using the brick allows you to zero out the value of any car anywhere, parked legally or no.

But I’m kind of at odds to the purpose of the dynamic behind the brick. You can use it to hurt a friend, but why would you? It doesn’t move the car, it doesn’t give you anything and it doesn’t help you in any way. As far as I know, you don’t get the accrued money when you brick a car. The only way you would want to use a brick is if you were in a money race with someone. But in that case, since you can brick anyone anywhere, as long as you have mutual friends where you park, there’s no way to defend against the brick.

The Green Car is Bricked

When I was designing a Facebook game last year (unreleased), we had a similar mechanic where you could “steal” a neglected resource from a friend. But I added a bluff feature where you could tag a resource as bait and if a friend tried to steal it, they would get caught. That manages the friend dynamic in an insightful way, as would some sort of brick defense. There is currently no risk to using the brick and no reward besides schadenfruede.

For a game that’s largely about social engineering where success depends on being lucky and insightful (knowing when a friend won’t be on to move their cars or something), it seems like a cruel bludgeon.

Ideas for the Brick:

• It would be interesting if the Brick could only be used to “ticket” illegally parked cars on streets that aren’t your own.
• Or if there was a “Security System” you could buy for your cars that prevents against bricking and punishes brick-hurlers. In that case, there would have to be some reward for being a brick-hurler, perhaps that you collect the lost value.
• I’ll stop here because I could easily come up with about 200 ideas for mechanics for PW2.

I’ve played most of the Pokemon games. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, but they are part of the gaming cultural front and I like to dip my toes into every pool, occasionally jumping waist-deep into ones that I probably shouldn’t. Pokemon: Black is one of those pools.

The main gameplay loop isn’t interesting. The story is dreadful. The dialogue is worse than dreadful. At least in Black, they attempt some sort of allegory but mostly fail miserably because at its heart Pokemon is a series about dogfighting. Aside: If anyone makes a ROM hack of Pokemon to replace all the Pokemon with dog breeds, I’d vote for them in whatever contest they entered.

And so I should have quit after about an hour, which is usually the latitude I give for games that I know just aren’t any deeper than what I see in the first hour, but I trudge on for some reason. There’s another badge to get. Maybe I’ll see a Pokemon based off of an ice cream cone or a trash bag or the collected works of Borges that will make me smile (at least two of those are real). But in the back of my mind I realize I’ve paid $25 for what is essentially a non time-gated Mafia Wars.

So I’m a bit of a hypocrite, yes. I still wade into social games hoping that one will give me something more than the shallowest of decisions or a story beyond the thinnest veneer of narrative. But then I actually buy games that give me neither.

That’s okay for millions of players because that’s all they know or are satisfied with. Take this article being passed around the Intertron about why the status quo in games is okay. Here are smart guys making the same arguments. This particular article actually collates (by accident, it seems) almost all the anti-Bogostian themes on why social games are the bee’s knees:

1. “It’s all a matter of taste, man. Millions enjoy it.”

Millions paid to see Transformers. Is that the pinnacle of what we can achieve in filmmaking? Should we be satisfied and applaud that? Should we copy Transformers as the business model of the future as every single social game company copies Zynga’s methods? If Michael Bay literally scammed people to trick them to buy tickets, would we applaud his success?

2. “It’s okay that they are shallow, because most games are.”

Why aim for more? Sure some games have meaning and interesting choices, but that’s hard and I’m lazy. So let’s just be happy with what we got. Right? Bull squeeze.

3. “Actually, scratch that. All games are shallow because you just move around and press buttons. Fighters, shooters. All shallow.”

Well, no. The structure of the game world can create interesting decisions. If you think that no decision can be more interesting than where-do-I-place-my-cow, play Civilization V. Or Sleep is Death. Or Drop 7. Or maybe you believe that shallow gameplay cannot lead to deep discourse? Then try Cow Clicker or Passage.

4. “Jocks like console games now, so there’s no hope. I can’t like them.”

What the fuck? Are we in high school? Clique warfare? Really?

5. “You just feel threatened/resentful/jealous that Zynga is successful/that the industry is passing you by/that what you like isn’t popular.”

These arguments generally break down into ad hominem at some point. Even responding to this point makes me feel slimy. Before I took my teaching job, I applied all over the place. Some of these jobs were at places that make social games. Some of these jobs got to the interview stage. Some of these interviews were with Big Social Developers. In these interviews, we talked about process. In at least two of these interviews, a lead designer or creative director told me that they weren’t interested in making interesting or fun games, that they were just trying to pump up user numbers and ARPU because that’s all their boards/presidents/CEOs wanted. You could tell that even under the corporate facade they were contract-bound to keep, they were miserable. That they wanted to do more.

I don’t want that fate for us. That’s what I’m truly threatened by.

Of course, there are dozens of social developers that drink the Kool-Aid and think that their stuff is hotcakes. Good for them. Hopefully, they won’t just repeat the status quo like hundreds of console game makers do when they make Generic Shooter of Duty XVII. Bryan Reynolds thinks he is helping, bless his heart. And he is, just a tiny bit maybe.

You know who is generally a positive-seeming guy? Frank Lantz. I met him at GDC a few years back and had great discussions with him about games and the craft of making them. His company, area/code, made two of the social games that I think are actually worthwhile. One is Parking Wars. The other is Power Planets. He’s one of my favorite designers.

He sold his company to Zynga to become Zynga New York.

God help us.

If anybody will push the industry to do more, hopefully it will be Frank. He doesn’t seem content in the status quo and Xerox culture.

6. “People like Zack Hiwiller are just elitist snobs. Whatever you like is what you like. Millions like clicking on cows. Zynga swims in a Scrooge McDuck money vault every night before closing at 2am.”

That’s just the taste argument again. If you give up on making games interesting in favor of making games profitable, then I pity you. You are lazy and holding the form back. We may not always succeed – I haven’t. I’ve made some dreck. But I still hold out that something better can be made.

If we hold *ville on a pedestal we say: “this is the best we can do right now”. If that is true, then we’ve regressed to making themed Skinner Boxes and can define success by metrics. We should just stop at Saturday morning cartoons, Dancing with the C-list Celebrities and Stephanie Meyer because popular=nutritious. If that isn’t true, if we can do better, then why hold them on a pedestal at all? Why are they sacred cows?

You can attack me all you want and paint me as elitist and out-of-touch. Maybe I am. Or maybe I just want more.

7. “You just admitted to playing Pokemon, so what gives you the right to criticize Farmville? I like clicking cows, you like shooting space marines.”

Theme is irrelevant and is used to obfuscate mechanic discussions based on stereotypes about classes of players.

I love discussion and argument. Any day of the week I will gladly put up a game I play against Farmville. Even a game as vapid as Pokemon: Black.