malvasia bianca

(Short Game disclaimer: There is a trial version of Galcon available in the app store, you’ll have a very good idea of what the game is like after playing it for less than five minutes.)

I got curious about Galcon when Randy Smith used it as an example in his GDC talk on “Designing to Grab and Retain Players” this year. My memory turns out to be faulty: I thought he’d talked about it as an affordance example, and I was going to quibble about that (given some surprises I had when trying to select multiple planets when first playing the game), but nope: in the “grab players” section, he rightly praised the game for the simple controls (you just tap on planets to send fleets from one to another), but he also said the affordances were weak, and that there were too many clicks before you got started. (I remember being confused by the tutorial.)

It actually turns out that Smith had more positive to say about the game in the “depth” section of his talk: the randomly generated levels, the consequences that the simple rules lead to, the different game modes for different play styles. And here too, I generally agree with Smith: I had to go through one major shift in strategy as I went up the difficulty chain in the main game mode, I’m pretty sure I would have had to make another strategic shift if I’d really wanted to make it all the way to the most advanced difficulty, and of the other game modes, one was too mellow for me, one was too frantic for me, one was too mysterious for me, one was arguably a slight improvement over the main mode, and they all brought something to the table.

All that aside, though, I think the reason why I must have bought the game is that it just looked like a neat idea. A very simple playing field with large circles and small triangles; you control the game just by touching the circles; and if there turns out to be actual depth there, what’s not to like? And I’m happy to have bought it, and it’s a good example of the sorts of design possibilities the iPhone opens up: I like the tactile feel of the game a lot more than I would have liked it if I were playing it with a mouse or trackpad, and I suspect also more than I would have liked it if I were playing with a stylus.

One aspect of my interaction with the game that I’m not sure what to make of: as you go up the difficulty levels, it doesn’t just give the enemy more ships, it also switches from showing you the count of enemy ships on planets to not showing you the count. Which rather annoyed me at the time; in retrospect, I’m not sure if I would prefer for the game to have its current design, for it to have show/hide ships to be an option that’s orthogonal to other difficulty changes, or for the game to have picked one mode or the other and stuck with it. I guess I would tentatively lead towards the latter (probably with hidden numbers, despite my general preference for visibility of that sort of thing): the game’s current design let me be actively disappointed about something that I wouldn’t have thought about at all otherwise, and in general I’m not a big option fan. (So, going back to the depth discussion from a few paragraphs up, I don’t see the multiple game modes as the most satisfying form of depth, either.)

Plants vs. Zombies is a thoroughly delightful game about which, for better or for worse, I have very little to say. Despite not being a tower defense fan, I enjoyed the main gameplay mode: while I had my favorite tactics, it threw enough changes at me to keep me interested but not overwhelmed. The minigames allowed the game to experiment further, exposing me to more options; and, as I made it part way through the second story mode a second time, it continued to throw new wrinkles at me.

But what sets the game apart is the charming touches that are everywhere: the title, the art, the help screen, the descriptions in the almanac, the music video. Miranda was fascinated as soon as she saw it, and both she and Liesl have spent quite a bit of time with the game as well.

So I really wish that I had something deeper to say about the game! The fact that I don’t, though, is in no sense a criticism of the game (though perhaps it is a criticism of me): I thoroughly enjoyed the time that I spent with it.

(Random fact, just to make you jealous: over lunch on Mondays and Fridays at work, I play board games in a group that Dave Rohrl, the model for Crazy Dave in this game, organizes. Steve Meretzky is another regular participant.)

Not a lot out there about the game in the blogs, but some links:

• Gerald Delaney plays the game as a pacifist.
• Greg Howley goes through some of the plants and the zombies.
• Bonnie Ruberg talks about it shortly after release.
• Carl Muckenhoupt compares it to other tower defense games.
• Gianfranco Berardi talks about prototyping and accessibility.
• Simon Carless pits Plants vs. Zombies against AAA games.

The Vintage Game Club has been going on for more than a year and a half now, and I’ve had a great time with it. But, as with any endeavour, its first appearance in the world leads to areas where the initial plan was, perhaps, not the best; so we’re experimenting with a new way to organize the participation.

I don’t want to speak for my fellow moderators, but I thought I’d explain some of the reasons why I thought these changes might be useful. Some of the issues I had:

• The moderators were busy enough that the between-game decision periods lasted rather longer than I was comfortable with.
• On several occassions, we selected games that people didn’t want to stick with, with even the game’s biggest proponents in the voting dropping off quickly.
• The voting process itself wasn’t very satisfactory: console gamers and PC gamers couldn’t agree on what to play, and the need to satisfy a large number of people and the rhythm of play meant that we couldn’t choose games that were too hard or to short or too long. (The Another World suitability discussion was the best example of this latter problem.)

Looking at all of these, I saw one theme: voting. It was directly causing problems (point three), it didn’t give particularly satisfactory results (point two), and it made the moderators a bottleneck (point one). Which raises the question: why are we voting?

I’m not sure we ever made that explicit, but the idea behind voting was that it would encourage a reasonably large number of people to play and discuss a game together, even if they wouldn’t necessarily play it otherwise. And we had some success with that, at least initially, but I don’t think we’ve really done a great job on that metric. In particular, the mental model implicit in that view is that people’s preferences in what to play are relatively flexible; but there are important ways in which that’s not the case, the biggest of which is that not everybody has access to every relevant game platform.

So we’re experimenting with stepping away with the model that we want as many people to play a given game as possible: instead, we’re switching to a model that we’ll work with people’s pre-existing desires to play a given game, and we’re trying to make as welcoming a space as possible for different groups of people to play older games together. This way, even a small group of people who want to find a home for discussing a game will be able to do it at the VGC.

The selection mechanism isn’t the only change: in particular, our change to requiring champions will also, I hope, help directly with all three of the pain points above.

Incidentally, I do hope that, even with these changes, we’ll still have occasional games that get a broad spectrum of participation—the BioShock playthrough was a reminder of how well that can work. I think that is a valuable model, but I no longer think that it should be our only model for a successful playthrough.

It turns out that yesterday’s attempt at setting up caching for the blog didn’t work: my feed was broken. (Or rather, one out of the three feed formats.) Sheer luck that I discovered it so quickly—I’d e-mailed the Akismet folks about a reader whose comments were regularly getting flagged as spam, and as part of their (delightfully quick) response they pointed me at ismyblogworking, which told me that, in fact, my blog wasn’t working.

So I’ve tured off hyper-cache, and am now trying W3 Total Cache. Hopefully things will work better this time…

I’ve turned on caching for the blog: it gets little enough traffic that 99.9% of the time I don’t need it, but I had one incident a month or so ago where traffic overnight overwhelmed the machine a couple of days in a row, requiring a reboot both times. So, since I want the blog to work and since I depend on the machine for other purposes, I figured I should turn on caching.

Please let me know if you see anything strange.

I’m using hyper-cache; another plugin I considered was w3-total-cache. Here’s a useful-sounding page on the topic.

Update: hyper-cache didn’t work so well.

There’s been lots of discussion recently about the fact that certain computing platforms are less open than some people would prefer, with many people being up in arms about this fact. Once, I would have been one of those people; these days, I’m not (though seeing the reduction in openness does make me sad), and I’m trying to tease out why.

The key concept here is that freedom to use software or hardware in ways that you choose isn’t just another feature that a piece of software or hardware may or may not have: it’s a separate and parallel class of good. And, for many people, it is a very strong class of good: there are a lot of people in my social circles who, given the presence of a free tool for a job, don’t seriously consider using a non-free tool at all. I never considered using non-free programming tools for years, for example, or using Windows instead of Linux.

That above example is for a particularly strong version of openness, namely freedom as used by the Free Software Foundation: the ability to not only use the software to produce whatever you want but to be able to modify it so you can expand its range of use. But openness is a continuum, and there are less extreme but still valuable positions along it: I remember when growing up reading about a compiler whose developer charged people for distributing software built by it, and this felt wrong to me at the time even though I never thought twice about the fact that I couldn’t get source code to the compiler. And I would also prefer to use a compression codec with a publicly available standard over one with a closed standard, even though the former might be just as expensive to use (e.g. because of patent licenses).

But I use non-free software a lot more than I used to; my use of non-free software got a big boost as my volume of video game playing increased, but I also use non-free software in many other areas as well. Video games give one example where free software loses so badly on the feature comparison as to not be worth considering, but that doesn’t apply to all the software I use: e.g. why do I use Tweetie as my Twitter client and Things as my list manager in the presence of many open source alternatives?

I think what’s going on for me is this: yes, features and freedom are both separate and important goods to me. But, where you have two dimensions for evaluation, you have the possibility of more than two dimensions, and a third dimension has started to come to the fore for me. I’m not sure exactly what to call it: at first I was thinking I’d use the term ‘beauty’, but that’s a bit stronger than what I mean. ‘Aesthetics’ isn’t a bad term, so maybe I’ll end up going with that, but for now, I’m leaning towards the term ‘habitability’. (Inspired by Richard Gabriel’s term ‘habitable code’, though he uses that to refer to the source code itself rather than the software or hardware involved; while I’m borrowing the adjective, I don’t claim that I am (or am not) using it in an analogous way.)

Basically, there is software that I feel happy to be sitting down and using, and there’s software that grates at me (sometimes only barely, sometimes quite violently) when I have to interact with it. I might be happy about the software because it does a particularly good job of meeting and even anticipating my needs; I might be happy about using the software because of a strong, well-thought-out vision that motivates it (even though that vision may entail removing features that, in the abstract, I’d want); I might be happy using the software because it’s a pleasure to look at. But, in all instances, the thought of using the software makes me happy; whereas there’s a bunch of software out there that I shy away from using, that runs the gamut from actively pissing me off to just not feeling right. I’m using the word ‘software’ here, but everything in this paragraph applies equally well to hardware. (And, in many prominent recent instances, to a mixture of software and hardware working well together.)

So this notion of habitable software is very important to me right now, equally so to functional software and open software. And, unfortunately, right now I’m having a particularly hard time right now finding instances where all three of these meet; this makes me sad.

Is this a new feeling for me? At first, I thought it was, but now I’m not so sure. I first started seriously programming doing non-application software from, say, 1987 to 1994. And, in that time period, open software was actually pretty awesome in terms of habitability: Unix was a great platform to be programming on, Emacs was a great editor, the GNU toolchain was very solid, Unix’s networkability was so much better than anything available for normal desktop use as to be beyond compare, and even X Windows was just fine, given the other alternatives. So you really could get all three of that trio at once; I’m no historian, but I think you could probably make a pretty good case that openness (and even freeness in the FSF sense) contributed actively to functionality and habitability in that case.

It’s a couple of decades later now, though; unfortunately, a lot of that world has stagnated in the interim. Unix is still a good foundation to build on (my favorite general-purpose computing platforms are all Unix-based), and its networking has flourished in ways that would have been hard to imagine at the time; Emacs and GCC and X Windows have all improved, but not nearly as much as I would have liked, however. If I were doing certain kinds of server development, I would find it acceptable (though still grating at times); otherwise, not so much. (Though I’m pretty sure I’ll always have a soft spot for Emacs!)

So the needs for a computing ecosystem has changed; I’ve changed too, though. Certainly playing video games has had a lot to do with my shift in viewpoint, both because they give examples where open alternatives aren’t at all competitive and because they give aesthetics a more central role. And not being on a student income means that it’s a lot easier for me to buy software and hardware than it once was.

But agile has played at least an important role in my shift as those factors. One reason is its emphasis on the ease and pleasure of working with the code itself (so I guess that habitable code analogy isn’t too far off): I value that in my programming, shouldn’t I value that in my programming environment more broadly? Also, the programming techniques that it suggests have also pulled me out of my old Emacs / C habitat: I want to use different programming languages (many of which Emacs supports badly), I want automated refactoring (good luck doing that in Emacs). (Though I should point out that much of what I want here is supported by open tools; they’re just different ones, and ones that come with their own set of habitability problems.) And, finally, agile insists on putting business and external design considerations at an equally important level to technical considerations when developing software; it’s no accident that the golden age I mentioned above was a golden age exactly for a community where the same people could judge both of those considerations well.

I could go further afield, too. I seem to be unable to go more than four or five blog posts in a row these days without mentioning Christopher Alexander; he’s convinced me that, to build spaces that you feel good living in, you need to take account of your environment as a whole, instead of using freedom as an excuse to do whatever the hell you want. And then there’s global warming: while I think that my house will remain habitable for the next several decades, untrammeled freedoms are putting habitability at risk in a very literal way.

So, at least in the computing arena, I’ll propose functionality, openness, and habitability as a trio of goods, the absence of any of which leaves me with a system that doesn’t feel right. I suspect I could get that trio to help me analyze other contexts, too.

I’d hoped that writing this would lead to my feeling more at ease. And, to some extent, it has: I’m happy enough with choices that I’ve made that involve selecting two out of those three criteria, in the absence of solutions that fit all three. But, having said that, I’m still not thrilled: it still doesn’t feel right for me to say that solutions that aren’t open are fine. What I would really like is for people working on open solutions, on free solutions (in computing arenas or more broadly) to have habitability front and center in their vision of the world they’re trying to build.

Freedom is great, but how we use that freedom is a choice: let’s choose to build something beautiful.

If any of you love the music in Studio Ghibli movies and would like to play said music on the piano, allow me to recommend スタジオジブリ作品集 to you. It’s got music from all of their movies, including ones that haven’t been released in the United States (incidentally, I recommend おもひでぽろぽろ, and the English subtitles on that edition are fine though you will need an all-region DVD player to watch it), and it’s a joy to play. I knew I would enjoy playing some of it, e.g. bits from Totoro and Pom Poko, but I hadn’t realized just how much some of that music had sunk into me: e.g. playing the music from Castle in the Air just felt right, and I’d forgotten how beautiful the song from Spirited Away is.

It’s possible that other people might prefer different editions of this music: for example, it’s probably not the right edition for somebody new to the instrument, and certainly there were areas that I had to pick my way through somewhat gingerly. But the selection of pieces in the volume is really top-notch. If you’re interested but don’t feel like figuring out how to deal with a web site in Japanese, you can also find it here or here. (I haven’t used either of those sites, though.) Though if you do decide to order from Amazon Japan, I recommend filling up your cart with Nikoli volumes (here’s one to get you started)—Amazon’s initial shipping charges are enough to give one pause (though the good news is that items arrive quite quickly), but charges for additional items are pretty reasonable, and Nikoli volumes themselves are a great value for the price.

• What core gamers should know about social games.
• Ian Bogost’s GDC 2010 microtalk.
• Roger Travis’s latest teaching experiment.
• This is not a spiral.
• A cool platformer twist. (Via @SimonParkin.)

• Jane McGonigal’s 2010 TED talk.

  A useful counterpoint to the discussion that Jesse Schell’s talk led to.

• The FarmVille diaries. (Via @SimonParkin.)
• Functional programming, OO programming, constructors, partial application. (Via @KentBeck.)
• Ponyo bread. (Via @SimonParkin.)
• Infect yourself with hookworms to cure allergies and asthma!
• I’m sure I must have seen this proof that the area of the circle is πr² before, but I didn’t remember it. (Via Ben Abraham.)
• Conway’s Life as a shoot-em-up. (Via @JoeOsborn.)

At some point this winter, an urge to reread Madeline L’Engle‘s A Wrinkle in Time came over me. I had read it many times when I was younger, along with the next two volumes in that series, so it’s not surprising that I had that urge; I like to revisit old friends periodically.

In general I’m a sucker for series; poking around a bit, I realized that L’Engle had written two other related series. I’m not sure how many of the volumes in those series I’d read when I was growing up, but I have only the dimmest of memories of them, so I imagine the number is small. Which is out-of-character for me; I decided to remedy that lack on this go around.

The three series are quite a body of work, it turns out. I’d remembered the three aforementioned books fairly accurately: among other things, they can be considered a science fiction trilogy, but a very odd one indeed. I was and am a big science fiction fan, but the science in those books doesn’t make any sense; part of what replaces it is mysticism, which I’m also a fan of, but it’s not particularly convincing mysticism, either. A Wrinkle in Time is still a special book, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet pushes some of my buttons, but their odd relationship to genres I liked probably explains why I didn’t read L’Engle more widely. (Especially given that her other books mostly aren’t in those genres at all, being instead straight fiction.)

This time, though, the books in all three series worked for me. I won’t say that I loved every book that I read, but I at least liked all of them; probably my favorite one was Meet the Austins, which had me crying on one or two occasions. I doubt I would have enjoyed them nearly as much when I was younger—in particular, family is a big theme across all of them, and family is a lot more important to me as a parent than it’s ever been to me as a child—but there’s a lot of special stuff in them.

I also really appreciated her unabashedly including important themes. Family, as mentioned above, appears in every book, but it’s not the only repeated theme: they’re pervaded with goodness, with love, with friends, with growing up and finding your way, with science, with music, with art in general. And with religion, something I have an odd relationship with: in particular, I’m an atheist, but one who feels unhappy disliking Christianity and Christians. The last few decades have been hard on that score—there have been a lot of people in the press doing evil in the name of Christianity—so I’m glad to read about people whom I like very much and for whom Christianity is a quiet but strong underpinning to their lives.

I ended up going through thirteen of her books over the course of a month and a half; that wouldn’t have been a particularly fast pace for me over much of my life, but I have enough competing for my attention that it’s pretty unusual for me these days. Now that I’ve finished those books, I’m slowing down my pace of L’Engle reading, but not stopping entirely; in particular, I want to read through her autobiography, because I’m curious where all these repeated elements in her work grew out of.

(See conflict of interest disclaimer.)

Many Facebook games (e.g. most or all entrants in the farm genre) could be considered sandbox games; and one of my most eye-opening experiences in spending time on Facebook is just how different those sandbox games can be from console sandbox games. Console sandbox games constantly give you very direct suggestions as to how to spend your time: yes, you can simply drive around San Andreas enjoying yourself, but there are always missions trying to force you to do something quite specific. Or you can drive around Paradise City just seeing where roads lead you, taking jumps, crashing into your friends; but there are at least ten more concrete ways that the game suggests you spend your time. And, in either case, there’s a distinct lack of sand with which to build castles: you can wander around the environment fairly freely, but your ability to actually shape that environment is quite limited.

In contrast, consider Social City, which I’ll use as an example both because it’s the Facebook sandbox game that I’ve played the most (though I wasn’t involved in any of the design discussions or anything) and because I think it’s a particularly good example of the genre. Sure, there are ways that the game suggests that you spend your time: you might want to build contracts in your factories in order to make you money, you might want to have people move into your city so that you can build more factories. And, when you dip into the store, you’ll discover that there are also leisure buildings that you can buy, in order to increase your citizens’ happiness, in order to allow more people to move in, in order to let you build more factories to make more money.

But that’s not really the point of the game: that’s a very bare-bones set of goals and mechanisms that the game presents you with, certainly not enough to hold the interest of somebody used to games with any real complexity to their mechanics. So, when leafing around in the store, you’ll inevitably start to think about considerations other than how much a building will help increase your populace: you start to think about whether that’s a type of building that you want to have in your city, which part of the city it belongs in, what other buildings you want to place near it.

One of the most charming aspects of Social City is the animations that each building has: you don’t just see a house, you see a house whose inhabitant is lounging in a hammock, mowing the lawn, playing with a bow and arrow. (And there are people walking around town on the sidewalks, too.) This helps reinforce the fantasy that you’re playing with a real city with real inhabitants, where your choice of buildings and building locations helps shape the city that they’re living in. And this directly affected how I built out my city: I made sure that the factories weren’t right next to the residential areas (especially the standalone houses), but I also made sure that both were close to places where people could go to grab a bite to eat. I made a central town square with the most important municipal buildings, I created both an upscale shopping district and a less upscale shopping district, and I’m building a water park / zoo / exercise area on the outskirts of town. From the point of view of the in-game numbers, this is all irrelevant—this isn’t Sim City, you can put buildings where you want and the game will behave the same—but it matters to me.

Or rather, it matters to us. As far as I can tell, Social City has taken the lead in the list of games that Playdom employees play with their kids, and Miranda was fascinated by it as soon as she saw it. So we’ve developed a ritual where I will spend the week earning money in the game but not spending it, and then on the weekend we’ll talk about how to spend that money, how we want to next evolve our city. I also really enjoy looking at other people’s cities, seeing how others have made different design choices than Miranda and I have and how their design choices have changed as they’ve built up their cities.

The upshot is a game that feels a lot more like playing with Lego than any console sandbox game ever did. (Your choices are quite a bit more restrictive than when playing with Lego bricks, but there’s more than enough variation that the cities of all of my twenty-odd friends who are playing the game look quite different from each other.) In fact, I’m wondering how the term “sandbox game” ever got used for games like Grand Theft Auto, given how little that series feels like a sandbox to me: the closest console analogy isn’t sandbox games, it’s games like Animal Crossing, though even that game is a good deal more structured than Social City. Returning to Friday’s discussion of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, a game like Social City is so much farther on the intrinsic side of the intrinsic/extrinsic motivator split than games for core gamers are as to make them almost incommensurable in that regard.

And, while I do think that Social City does a particularly good job of nourishing intrinsic motivators that its players might have, it’s far from unique in that regard. Much of the discussion of FarmVille on core gamers’ web sites focuses on the externally visible extrinsic motivators of the game’s gifts and wall posts; but when looking at dedicated FarmVille players’ farms, I’m sure they feel the desire to sculpt a habitable environment just as strongly as I do.

Give these games a try, and look beyond the traditional game mechanisms and motivator chains that they contain. You’ll learn something, and you may be surprised at the unexpected pleasures you’ll find in them.

Jesse Schell gave a great talk at DICE earlier this year on “design outside the box”. There are pretty good writeups by Kris Graft and Kim Pallister, and his slides are available, but if you’re at all interested, I recommend just watching it: his presentation style is very entertaining and engaging.

The talk was all about how video games (and other sorts of games, too) are moving away from their traditional confines and are appearing in all sorts of surprising real-world settings. Given that I love games in general and video games in particular, one might expect me to find this super-exciting: I should see this as a way in which our culture could become even richer! (See, for example, this Jane McGonigal interview.) And the video game blogosphere might largely be expected to react the same way, too.

The talk did, indeed, get a huge amount of discussion in the blogosphere (I’ll include a bunch of links at the end of this post), but the tone of most of those articles wasn’t so positive: while people generally thought that it was a very good talk, they also thought that it was a very good talk about a potential dystopia. I suspect there are a few different reasons why the talk got that sort of reaction, but certainly one of the main reasons is the last part of Schell’s talk, in which he painted a world full of organizations trying to convince you to take actions based on receiving points. (And you don’t have to stretch to see this as a dystopia: in his GDC microtalk, Schell himself described that as being akin to Brave New World.)

Extrinsic Motivators

More broadly, much of the discussion focused on the problematic nature of external rewards. As a long time Alfie Kohn fan, I’m pretty dubious about external rewards (or “extrinsic motivators”), for many of the reasons that Jesper Juul gives.

Which leaves me conflicted: I love video games, I don’t like extrinsic motivators, but here we have a talk about video games penetrating broadly through society that is being read widely as linking the two! I don’t enjoy cognitive dissonance more than anybody else; what should I do to resolve this?

There are a few options here. Probably the most attractive is to say that games aren’t all about extrinsic motivators, that (for example) only bad games are. There’s probably some amount of truth to that, but less than I would have expected going in. Let’s set aside video games for the moment, and talk about my favorite game of any sort, namely go. This is a game that I think is an inexhaustible source of richness and depth, and even on a superficial level I think that the layout of stones on a go board in a good game has real beauty of its own. Yet, if I were given a go board and a set of go stones and told to make something beautiful, I wouldn’t be particularly likely to try to follow the rules of go to do so: I would only be likely to make go-like patterns on a go board if I wanted to win a go game. (Either a game I was playing right then, or a hypothetical game that I might play in the future that would be informed by my investigations on the go board now.)

So, while there’s a lot of intrinsic motivation in my desire to play go (love for beauty, love for problem solving, wonderment at the layers upon layers of higher-order concepts that emerge from such simple rules), there’s extrinsic motivation there, too: the winning conditions are one example, as is the fact that I play in tournaments and got excited when my AGA rating made it up to 1 dan and bummed when my rating slipped back to 1 kyu.

And, of course, this mix of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators within a single game isn’t exclusive to go. I’m growing increasingly tired of the combat in games where I’m primarily interested in the environmental or narrative hooks. So, I have an intrinsic motivation which certain aspects of the game satisfy (the stories, the cities), but the mechanics fulfilling that intrinsic motivation serve in turn as extrinsic motivators to get me through other aspects of the game (slogging through repetitive combat).

To make game designers’ jobs worse, the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators isn’t universal across their audience! If I’m playing a narrative FPS, I may feel that I’m slogging through the shooting because it’s the only way to progress the plot; an FPS fan, however, may be going to the kitchen to fetch something to eat during the cut scenes, waiting until he or she can get back to shooting stuff.

I’m not sure exactly what to make of all of this. I guess one lesson of the go example is that one level of extrinsic motivators is fine, even good: it can give you the structure to make something a game instead of an activity, and as long as accepting that structure opens up a range of experiences that satisfy your intrinsic motivation, great! But once you open up extrinsic motivators on top of extrinsic motivators, experiences get a good deal bleaker. My problem with most JRPGs isn’t just that I have to fight through battles to advance the plot, it’s also that I’m applying the same strategy over and over again in battles: so I’m only pressing the buttons out of the extrinsic motivation of getting through the battle, and I only want to get through the battle out the extrinsic motivation to advance the plot. (Which I am intrinsically motivated to do!) And of course it gets worse if games (as frequently is the case) add a third consecutive layer of extrinsic motivation: maybe I’m only going through battles to advance my level or to be able to buy new loot, which aren’t (for me) intrinsically rewarding. In fact, I’ll propose that as my definition of grind: three directly nested game mechanics that function as extrinsic motivators for me.

This desire to avoid consecutive extrinsic motivators almost sounds like my old friend Alternating Repetition, this time between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, though I guess the analogy breaks down somewhat because we’re changing levels of scale while going down the motivation chain. (Also, I don’t see anything inherently bad about having consecutive layers of intrinsic motivators, if that makes sense in a game context.) And the main tool to get layers of intrinsic motivation is, I suspect, my recent obsession of Strong Centers: going back to the RPG example, make the battles strong enough to stand on their own (which seems to be the secret behind the appeal of Demon’s Souls), strengthen the appeal of exploration itself (Etrian Odyssey), make the cut scenes good enough that even people who are there for the fighting will be happy to watch them, make both fighting and narrative elements strong enough to appeal to people who come to the game for one of those are happy to stay for the other (Mass Effect 2, see Christina Norman’s GDC talk).

Achievements

The above discussion of extrinsic motivators considers them inside core video game gameplay; but many of the followups to Schell’s talk discussed extrinsic motivators outside of the core gameplay, typically using Xbox Live achievements as an example. (Almost always a negative one.)

And, indeed, achievements seemed to me unambiguously like extrinsic motivators when I first encountered them; now, though, I’m not so sure. Many achievements do seem to me to be extrinsic motivators: taking Mass Effect 2‘s achievements as an example, “Power Gamer” acts as an extrinsic motivator (though not one that’s been effective enough to get me to earn it!), and I spent a while thinking about how I would react to “Paramour” and “No One Left Behind” in that light. (I ended up deciding that I wouldn’t go out of my way to earn either of them, but then Thane won my heart and I made the right choices on the final mission so got them both after all.)

Other achievements, however, didn’t act that way for me. The story progress achievements were simple checkpoints from my point of view: there was never any real question as to whether or not I was going to make it through the whole game, so they just served as a bit of punctuation. (And added a bit of fun looking at my friends’ profiles and seeing how much faster than me they were going.)

And then there’s the combat achievements: these did affect my gameplay, but in general not in ways that I think of as extrinsic motivators. The clearest example here is “Tactician”: my character didn’t have any biotic powers, and I wouldn’t have thought to experiment with combining biotic powers if the achievement hadn’t been there. But it was there, and it served to open up my eyes to some new tactical possibilities that I hadn’t considered before. (And then I closed my eyes after experimenting with it a few times.) So that achievement served to make me aware of an area of the gameplay space that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise; to use an education analogy, it’s like the difference between a professor telling me that I have to study something to pass an exam (extrinsic motivation) and a mentor suggesting that I look into an area that I hadn’t studied before because it fits in with my interests. I don’t think that the majority of achievements act this way, but Mass Effect 2 certainly isn’t unique in that regard—I could post to examples in The Beatles: Rock Band and Burnout Paradise as well.

And, as with the earlier example of in-game extrinsic motivators, these aren’t clear objective categories: an achievement that serves as an extrinsic motivator for one person can serve as a neutrally-marked progress meter or mentoring for another person.

A great talk; I will repeat my exhortation to watch the video. The combination of extrinsic motivators and video games certainly gives a lot to think about; I hope I’ll be able to understand their interplay better in the future.

Other Writings

Some blog posts that other people have written about Schell’s talk:

• Sirlin on external rewards.
• Mitu Khandaker on the future of games.
• Annie Wright and Kirk Hamilton on too much for me to summarize in one sentence.
• Dan Lawrence on behaviourist game design.
• Jesper Juul on demotivation by external rewards.
• Jim Rossignol on taste.
• George Kokoris on achievements unlocked.
• Chris Breault on grinds.
• Ferguson of Interactive Illuminatus on rewards.
• Ian Bogost on persuasive games.
• Ralph Koster on gameifying everything.
• Bryan of The Pretentious Gamer on convergence.
• Jay Bachhuber on “ludic century nonsense”.

• More and more, I’m getting interested in programs because of their aesthetics. (Via Daring Fireball.)
• NPR’s 404 page. (Via @jpallas.)

• I should have spent more time in Mass Effect 2 with Tali and Garrus in my party.

  (Via @elenielstorm.)

• The whole world has linked to this one, but for good reason. There’s also a Wired article talking about some of what went into its making.)

• Two neat grass sculptures. (Via @marick.)
• Fun with chemistry. (Via @dws.)

• Time lapse video of the Milky Way over Hawaii.

  (Via @lisacrispin.)

• Best little girl’s dress ever. (Make sure you scroll down to the lower pictures; via @elenielstorm.)

So, now I’ve written about all the GDC panels I attended; for reference, the links are:

• Tuesday.
• Wednesday.
• Thursday.
• Friday, part one and part two.
• Saturday, part one and part two.

So, that’s the trees; what about the forest? Looking back at it, I see two themes coming out of the conference for me.

Know Your Audience

The first is that you should try to know your audience. Not just know them in terms of demographics, but know them in terms of what’s important to them, whether in games or in life in general.

This was a particularly important theme this year because of the rise of social games. Video games had been turning into an unfortunate monoculture through much of last decade: people who bought games knew what they wanted, people who developed games wanted much of the same things, the industry could succeed by mostly producing technical refinements of the same old stuff without re-examining where it was coming from. Nintendo (especially with the Wii, but we certainly shouldn’t forget DS games like Brain Age) showed the advantages of a broader gaze, but didn’t get as much industry follow-up as I would have expected; Facebook games have now turned into a second major salvo, showing just how broad the potential audience for video games is.

But nobody really knows how to make games that best fit the needs and desires of this less-narrow audience. (I certainly agree with Gareth Davis when he said that Facebook’s iconic games are ahead of us; his point that socialization with large groups is different from socialization with your friends is well-taken, too.) Of the talks on this theme, I particularly appreciated Laralyn McWilliams’ talk, both because of the positive characterizations she ended up with and because of frankness with which she discussed how easy it is to make mistakes in this area. And Mark Skaggs’ talk is emblematic of a major sea change: rather than throwing stuff out and hope that people will like it, you can measure how people feel (or at least how they react) and change your game accordingly.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: going through the sessions I attended, speaker after speaker touched on this theme. Timothy Fitz talked about the technical architecture necessary for such rapid response; Mike Goslin talked about the social space that their games provide; Jesse Schell had a rather moving talk about parents and kids playing together; Nicole Lazzaro focused on emotions; Sid Meier talked about how he was surprised by players’ reactions’ to game elements.

Strong Centers

The other theme wasn’t, perhaps, quite as deeply present throughout the conference, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of months. I’ve been using the term “focus” to describe it, but of course that’s the wrong term for me to use: I should be saying “Strong Centers” instead.

Stepping back to the previous theme for a moment, many of the speakers talked about how casual players don’t like tutorials: they don’t care about understanding all the game mechanics, they just want to go and do stuff. But Randy Smith made the best points here: you don’t want to take away the tutorial and just leave a void, you instead want the initial moments and minutes of playing the game to be a “game toy”, letting the game’s core ideas shine as brightly to new players as possible. Which forces you to think about just what those core ideas are; and then, to truly strengthen them, Randy insisted on subsequent depth awaiting players who find those centers appealing.

The other talk that did a particularly good job with Strong Centers was Christina Norman’s. She explained the lengths that they went to strengthen the center of RPG in Mass Effect 2, which required throwing off quite a lot of baggage both from its predecessor and from the RPG genre in general; the result is much cleaner and more powerful. I also want to mention Jason Rohrer’s talk in this context: he explained that the game that he’s currently working on is all about a simple idea, namely working through the implications of whether or not people know that somebody else knows that they know something.

Bringing It All Together

There are two other talks that I’d also like to mention here. The first is Sulka Haro’s talk on the Habbo Hotel economy. It fits into both of the themes above: it focuses on the economy as a strong center to the game; and, at every step of the story that he tells, the game team is responding to desires needs that their players are showing them, even when they have to stretch the possibilities of what’s possible within the game to do so!

The other is Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke’s. Which, I suppose, also hits at both of those themes, but at a much more personal level: it’s about what developers want (personally and professionally, but of course both are deeply intertwined), it’s about finding the centers within ourselves.

I’ve already talked about the two talks I went to on Saturday that were about Mass Effect 2; here are my notes on the rest of the day.

10:30 am: Motivating Casual Players: Non-Traditional Character Progression and Player Retention, by Laralyn McWilliams.

Another fabulous talk, marred only by the less-than-fabulously-legible quality of my handwritten notes. (The speaker plans to post slides soon, fortunately.) The talk was about Free Realms, a MMORPG for kids. It was designed by people who had been working on EverQuest, so they had a decade of experience with what an MMORPG should look like; they took that experience and designed a stripped-down, kid-friendly version.

Which was, in her words, a total fail. As they discovered, casual players approach games differently from core players: among other things, they

• Have other interests, only devoting a small amount of time for games.
• Don’t have a lot of experience with a broad spectrum of games, they’re not always expert with controls.
• Will stop playing at the first barrier.

(She gave more positive characterizations of casual players later.) Fortunately, they do have a play style which her team managed to alter the game to match; that play style turned out to be consistent across ages and genders, interestingly.

She then turned to a discussion of progression. First, some broad characteristics:

• Progression isn’t the same as accumulating XP; more generally, progression means something different for casual players than it does for core players.
• They should reward all playing styles fairly.
• They wanted to respect player’s time, effort, and money.
• Progression should be fun: there should be a reward for winning, there should be a sense of accomplishment even if you don’t win.
• Progression is tied to self-worth; players should develop skills and feel special and/or smart because of that.
• Progression is good for revenue: you want players to want to play again!

Next, she delved into three specific types of progression, namely character progression, player progression, and social progression.

Character progression involves accumulating experience points, using those to level up and gain skills and abilities, unlocking items as you level up, and it persists from one game session to the next. At launch, they had a class system; players could change classes as they wished, and leveled up separately. The reward for leveling up was “stars”; in combat jobs, you could spend these on your abilities. (I also have something in my notes here about “25% minigames, 75% quests, based on later notes, I guess that’s what sorts of actions were required to level up?) There were also quest rewards and loot drops. (Unlike traditional MMOs, though, everybody gets a loot drop.)

This didn’t work well: it turns out that casual players didn’t care about levels. Fewer than 10% of players were above level 10 in any job; what’s more, even when players accumulated stars, they didn’t spend them. Oops.

So they changed the system. They replaced the levels with progress bars. They got rid of spending stars entirely. They made level locks much clearer. And they rewarded people for having fun, not for doing extra work: you can pull up a map and click on whatever it is that you want to do, and you can get rewards for doing minigames.

The result was that players would level up without really knowing that they did so; as she put it, “if they don’t care, I don’t care”.

In the first incarnation, they had a lot of stats, covering everything; you could, for example, have stats that improved your ability at match 3 games. This turned out not to make a lot of sense to people; they got rid of non-combat stats, and significantly simplified what remained. The combat wearables had one number, a “power rating”; weapons had a power rating plus two abilities. (As she mentioned later, showing players that their abilities improved by a few percent each level didn’t help—it’s fine to have that behind the scenes, but if something isn’t making a big difference, then don’t bother telling players about it.)

As to rewards: before, players didn’t know about them. They changed that so each quest / game would show you the possible rewards in advance, and you’d spin a wheel after winning it.

Next, social progression. This can express itself in terms of hosting events, being in guilds, being in chats. Free Realms launched without a lot of this; and the Child Online Protection Act meant that free chat was impossible. But what few social spaces they had turned out to be quite popular; in fact, when they looked at the data, the realized that the few social spaces were more popular than all of the minigames combined!

So they formalized this by adding “party zones”, and looked for ways to help people show off. Before, people could customize themselves through their choice of weapons, through their job clothes, through just-for-fun clothes, and through toys and tricks; it turned out that, of these four, the most popular was the toys and tricks, then the fun clothes, with the more “pratical” gear running a distant third. (She used a banana suit as an example of a popular costume.)

Another issue where socialization came up was in terms of formal grouping, e.g. joining a party in order to do an activity together. It turns out that players wren’t doing this at all; their mental models seemed to be that, if somebody was on their friends list, then they should already be grouped, and if players were standing near each other, then they assumed they were grouped. The designers reacted to this by adding lobbies to games, and by handling all the grouping and un-grouping behind players’ backs.

Finally, player progression. Examples here are achievements (which she related to high scores in an arcade: those are your initials on the high-score list, not your in-game character’s initials), and a profile page showing all of your characters. They also had a way you could design a trading card out of one of your in-game characters, turn it into a physical object, and give it to a friend!

They discovered that people really wanted to express themselves as real people, not as the characters they played in the game; this is really important, much more so than character progression. In fact, it’s important to the extent that the two ended up merging: casual players overwhelmingly have their avatar be the same gender as themselves, with a similar skin tone and features. (In contrast, in EverQuest 2, only half of the players create a character with the same gender as themselves.) Basically, people are creating avatars, not characters.

After this, she took a slightly more theoretical turn, discussing the psychology of progression. They designed progession by thinking about characters needs, the interactions that they would have, and the rewards they would receive.

They could segment needs by market:

• Core players want personal skill and information.
• Casual players want wealth, social status, and individuality.
• Both want relationships, ownership, entertainment, and a sense of progress.

They didn’t segment interactions by market. But they did segment rewards:

• Core players want a leaderboard, knowledge, character leveling up, and useful items.
• Casual players want money, profile popularity, appearance, and socialization.
• Both want friendship and fun.

And then she went to mix and match them: e.g. somebody wants to improve their relationship, they trade with an NPC, and get rewarded by an improved appearance.

To sum:

Casual players don’t:

• Care about stats.
• Care about equipment. (I think, I might not be reading my handwriting correctly.)
• Make traditional comparisons (e.g. levels) with other players.
• Want to work hard for a single reward.

And casual players do:

• Value differences in appearance.
• Enjoy tasks that unlock new content.
• Want to feel special and unique.
• Like frequent smaller rewards.
• Understand large changes in effectiveness.

3:00pm: Metaphysics of Game Design, by Will “Phaedrus” Wright.

The identity of the speaker wasn’t published in advance; glad to hear that Will Wright is also a fan of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I won’t even attempt to summarize the talk here: basically, it was a microtalk given by a single speaker going at full blast for an hour straight.

And then the formal part of the conference was over. Michael Abbott and I plotted about the future of the Vintage Game Club at the Samovar Tea Lounge; many thanks to Jorge for introducing me to it! And I’m quite excited about the future of the VGC; I hope that we’ll have something to announce in a week or so. After which I had one last GDC dinner, with Michael, Ben, Nels, Wes, and Matthew. (I hope I’m not forgetting anybody; GDC is starting to blur…)

Honestly, the conference started out a bit subdued to me. But I went to some really excellent talks over the last couple of days, and had many pleasant conversations; I’m still starting to figure out what it all meant to me (and may do one last post putting it together), but it’s left me just wanting to sit down, think, write, and read, and that’s all to the good. To everybody whom I met, it was great seeing you; and I hope to see even more people next year!

On the Saturday of GDC this year, I went to two talks on Mass Effect 2 and two talks on other subjects; since I have a fair amount to say on both pairs of talks, I’ll split them up into two posts.

9:00 am: Where Did My Inventory Go? Refining Gameplay in Mass Effect 2, by Christina Norman.

(Slides here; I’m a bit afraid to embed them because having that page open is making my computer swap uncomfortably. Though y’all probably have rather more memory than I do, so I’m probably worrying excessively! It’s the first time I’ve seen Prezi used live; it certainly does a better job of bringing out Levels of Scale than the vast majority of Powerpoints that I’ve seen.)

I am enough of a Mass Effect 2 fanboy that I went to two talks on the game during my last day at GDC; it didn’t hurt, of course, that the Mass Effect 2 talk I went to last year ended up being my favorite talk of the conference. And this talk gave me no reason to doubt that policy; it was a fascinating discussion of how she and her team dealt with design problems that Mass Effect 1, despite being an excellent game, had: how they figured out where the problem areas were, how they honed in on solutions.

They started by analyzing player feedback, both qualitatively and quantitatively, mapped out design goals (more satisfying combat, better inventory, better balance, among other things), and then started planning fixes to these. Design documents were generated; none of the features in the design documents shipped, however. They tried prototyping using the Mass Effect 1 engine; that helped a little bit, but really all they could do there was make the guns a bit more accurate: they weren’t able to investigate possible solutions for most of the areas at all. Though a useful lesson did come out of that prototyping: they learned that they had to rebuild major components of the gameplay system.

Their first focus was on the shooter gameplay: it was an area where BioWare doesn’t have a lot of experience, and where they’d turned up a fair number of flaws. So, to make sure that the team didn’t let the RPG mechanics carry week shooter mechanisms, they turned off the RPG mechanics!

Here, I should go back a bit in her talk, and discuss the ways in which Mass Effect 1‘s shooter mechanics were flawed. Of which, to be honest, I had no memory; I’m not sure how much of that has to do with the time that had passed since I played it, how much had to do with my not being a shooter fan, and how much had to do with its being so much better in that regard than its predecessors. (In particular, than Knights of the Old Republic, which I played only a year and a half before playing Mass Effect 1.) But, like KotOR, there’s a lot of randomness in whether your shots hit in Mass Effect 1: the result is that the assault rifle, towards the start of the game, feels like it could barely hit the broad side of a barn. And you have to stop constantly to select which power to use or to wait for your weapons to cooldown; in addition, the cover system didn’t work very well.

Mass Effect 2 attacked all of these directly. Which, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, I didn’t notice: the truth of the matter is that I didn’t mind stopping frequently, to the extent that I never bothered to map the powers that I used the most to buttons on my controller! But I really enjoyed watching her examples of ME2 characters going smoothly through fights, mowing down enemies, popping in and out of cover and dodging as appropriate, combining powers with bullets all in a series of graceful moves; very impressive, I’m tempted to pick up the game again and try to play it that way.

Some of the improvements to the combat flow are obvious: you can do a lot more without pulling up a menu if you have five face buttons to map to powers than you can if you have only one. But some of them are a bit less obvious: for example, they switched from having per-power cooldowns to a global cooldown. I’d noticed that this improves the affordances of using powers (because your targeting reticule lets you know whether you can use your power), but it also means that it’s no longer an optimal strategy to constantly go through all your powers in sequence, so you can instead stick with your mapped powers much of the time.

They improved the affordances of enemy buffs, as well: once you learn a bit about the game, you can tell just by looking at the enemy’s health bar which powers will work on it and which won’t. They made the guns much more usable at low levels, but also made it easy to stick with your favorite gun over a long period of time, by switching the way weapon upgrades were handled. And they handled upgrades differently in general: you never upgrade your character or your weapons during a mission (other than picking up a new heavy weapon), instead you handle all of that on the ship once the mission is over. And they made lots of small improvements that really improve the fit and finish, e.g. preserving your aim point when you get out of cover.

The weapon upgrades bring us to another point. (One which Blizzard’s Rob Pardo had brought up earlier in the week, but not nearly as effectively.) To my mind, one of the great things that Mass Effect 2 got right is in its emphasizing of Strong Centers. On a broad scale, the last few paragraphs are all about strengthening the shooter gameplay as a center that can stand up to the RPG gameplay. But your improved interaction with weapons brings each individual weapon out an a center in its own right. The streamlined character upgrade system brings out your powers as centers. (The only exception being the “combat mastery” upgrade, which just sounds cool!)

They were prepared to cut classes if necessary to heighten them as centers; they eventually ended up with the same number of classes, but made them much more distinct. (I was very impressed with the two class-specific combat videos she showed; for the last few years I’ve had a policy to avoid game pre-release hype, but maybe I should have been paying attention to the Mass Effect 2 class introduction videos they produced!)

There’s a bit more in the talk, but I won’t go through it all here; watch her presentation if you’d like to see it. Suffice it to say that it was a great talk: a great story, with insights both specific and broad. And I’m very excited to see what Mass Effect 3 will bring: after last year’s GDC, it looked like the team had gotten their development process on a solid footing, and now it looks like they’ve got their gameplay engine on a solid footing, so they should be able to go at full blast when working on the third part of the series.

1:30 pm: Get Your Game out of my Movie! Interactive Storytelling in Mass Effect 2, by Armando Troisi.

This talk, unfortunately, wasn’t nearly as good as the other Mass Effect 2 talk that day. It started on a bad foot: the speaker and a technician spent a full fifteen minutes fiddling with the laptop’s video output before giving up and using a backup laptop. (Which they’d had ready all along, the speaker just didn’t think it would be powerful enough to show the videos well, but the videos turned out just fine.)

And the talk never really grabbed me once it got going, either. A lot of what he started with seemed vague or banal, unlike the concrete examples and story animating Christina Norman’s talk. He spent some time talking about how the Mass Effect series was supposed to be quite different from BioWare‘s other RPGs, because the others are “subjective” (so you, the player, are the center), while the Mass Effect series is “objective” (focusing on a story that you don’t really control). The thing is, though, that, in the grand picture, all of their RPGs are “objective” by that definition in comparison to, say, a tabletop RPG: your role playing choices are severely constrained by what’s present in the game.

He then dug into an example of what it means to be “objective” in more detail, namely the fact that, in Mass Effect, you don’t choose the exact dialogue in dialogue trees: instead, you choose more of an expression of the general direction you want the dialogue to go in. But that’s a false distinction: a more traditional dialog tree selector still only has a handful of options, options that are exceedingly unlikely to represent exactly what you would choose to say at that moment, and not even particularly likely to represent more than the general direction in which you want to take the conversation! So maybe there’s more to the subjective/objective distinction than I’m seeing, but I left unconvinced.

He spent a fair amount of time talking about the meanings of the locations on the dialogue wheel, including showing examples of how they were misused. That would probably be interesting to somebody new to the series, but I didn’t see anything there that I hadn’t seen before.

The one part that was new to me was his discussion of quick time events in the game: I hadn’t thought about that very much. For example, you never get both a renegade and a paragon option at the same time: they’d tried doing that, but people were unable to make that choice satisfactorily in real time. (Whereas choosing between one of those options and doing nothing was a choice that people were willing to make, while feeling a pleasant amount of tension in the process.) Also, one problem with QTEs is that, unlike the dialogue wheel, they didn’t have a good way to telegraph to the player more or less what action Shepard would take (other than the very broad stroke of paragon / renegade); they solved this by adding visual telegraphing before the QTE. The example that he showed us was a situation where, right before the QTE, Shepard cracked his knuckles; after that, it wasn’t too much of a surprise to see Shepard deck the person he was talking to when you selected the renegade QTE.

My favorite talk of the first four days of GDC was Sulka Haro’s talk on The Evolution of Habbo Hotel’s Virtual Economy. Habbo Hotel is a virtual world that’s been around for almost 10 years now; its economy has gone through a lot of phases, each of which came with its own set of surprises. I doubt I’ll be able to do it justice here (Sulka said he’d post the slides on his blog, I’ll add an update when that happens), but I’ll give it a shot.

The phases that the economy has gone through so far:

1. No in-game currency at all.
2. Emergent unofficial currencies.
3. A paid currency.
4. A tradable paid currency.
5. Dual official currencies.
6. An official secondary market.

The details:

No in-game currency at all.

When the game started, there was no in-game currency. If you wanted to buy an item, you paid for it right there with real money, by sending a certain text message.

This had some problems: for one thing, there were social engineering hacks (people convinced others to send plausible-looking text messages that ended up buying items for somebody else), but also there weren’t enough price points. There were only two prices; for the cheap one, the carriers took off a large chunk, while the expensive one was too expensive for most of the items in game.

Emergent unofficial currencies.

Perhaps in reaction to this second problem, players developed their own currency. From the beginning, players could trade items to each other after they purchased them; rather than trading desired items directly, they eventually settled on using a particular cheap chair as the standard currency. (So a player would sell you this thing for 7 chairs, that thing for 10 chairs, etc.) And, in fact, this unofficial currency system persists to this day, though the reference items have changed over time.

In 2001, they launched the game in the United Kingdom. Cell phone penetration wasn’t high enough there (especially among kids) to use it as the exclusive payment source, so they needed to do something else; but, again, they couldn’t afford to be bled try by transaction fees for the smaller amounts. So they need a way to split a 10-pound payment into smaller chunks, which led to:

A paid currency.

At this stage, they introduced credits, and switched item purchase to work in terms of credits. One credit cost about 15 cents; cheap items cost 1 credit, standard items cost 2–3 credits, premium items cost 4–15 credits.

Here is where the speaker started putting up increasingly complex diagrams explaining the economy; I’m not up for trying to recreate them myself, which is one of the main reasons why I’m hoping the slides will appear soon! But one of his main points was that their economy went from only having one pool (the pool of objects) to having two pools (adding the pool of credits, which drained into the pool of objects). This made it harder to predict revenue: people could either purchase items on the secondary market or purchase items from saved up credit without having to spend real money to purchase credit. (Also, as he pointed out here: all the goods in their economy at this stage were persistent, which makes them a great value proposition, especially in the presence of the ability to trade, but also led to item value inflation.)

So, to help with predictable revenue, they added the Habbo Club. This is a monthly subscription; it’s paid for in credits, so it added another sink from the credit pool. It lets people customize their avatars; that way, subscriptions and item purchases don’t cannibalize each other.

In 2005, they noted that the number of players who were trading but not paying increased faster than the number of players who were purchasing new items: basically, there was too big an item pool in circulation. They thought about banning trading, but it’s great content for the game, so trading drives sales. Also, people who trade the most monetize the most. (At which point he made a side note: expect a power law in distribution of, e.g. paying players: metrics based on averages can give you very misleading guidance.)

So they wanted to continue to allow trading, but rethought it a bit:

A tradable paid currency.

At this step, they started allowing people to trade credits, not just trade items. The point here is that the most liquid currency is the most desirable currency: so you want people to be trading your currency, instead of trading chairs or rubber ducks.

And this, indeed, led to more buying of credits. I have some notes here that I don’t quite understand: they say that before, “buyers = spenders” (because you couldn’t spend credits if you didn’t buy them yourself), and that, before, “traders > buyers” (most of the action happened in the item pool). Afterwards, it remained the case that “traders > buyers”, but now, “spenders > buyers” (because there were more ways to get credits to spend). With the effect (this is the part I don’t entirely get) that there were more buyers. (I guess because the buyers were feeding not only the trading pool but the new pool of non-buying spenders?)

There were, of course, unanticipated side effects. Before this change, the smallest unit of currency was a rubber duck, which people had decided was worth about .1 credit; after this change, a duck ended up worth 1 credit. So the cheapest items went up in value, and the total value of the item pool went up significantly.

He also showed a picture of a room full of gold bars that was a problem; I don’t quite understand either why this happened (why wouldn’t rich people store their assets in credits?) or why it was a problem.

At any rate, they had inflation. Which raised the question: is there any way to establish a sink for persistent goods after the fact?

The answer that they ended up with was the “ecotron”: you could put five items in, and it would give you a random higher-value object back. This turned out to be very successful: players liked it a lot, low value items started disappearing, which drove more demand for high-value items.

But, even with that, inflation was a problem. The credit sales were still unstable, and new players had a hard time entering the market: the very presence of items that people were selling for $200 discouraged them from participating. Also, inflation served to discourage people from buying credits: because of inflation, their value dropped as soon as you bought them.

A side note on inflation: you have to be careful as to how you measure it: as the user base grows, the size of your pools naturally grows, so there’s a moving target here. The metric they ended up using was the ratio of liquid cash to the number of people trading in the secondary market. (Another metric he mentioned was a “consumer price index”: the value of a standard basket of items.)

At here, he also mentioned something about having inflation arise from giving away the paid currency for free. If I’m remembering correctly, Habbo Hotel never did this, it was something that they considered and rejected. But they still wanted to have something they could give to users as a reward. So:

Dual official currencies.

They introduced a secondary currency, called pixels. It had a different role than credits, the paid currency. Specifically:

Credits

• Get by buying or trading.
• Use to buy persistent goods, expendables and services. (I think, I can’t read that last word in my notes.)
• Its purpose is monetization.

Pixels

• Get by performing in-game actions.
• Use to buy expendable items, and for discounts on the credit market.
• Its purposes are user retention and conversion (? I can’t read that last word in my notes), and to support the primary market.

I don’t entirely understand this—in particular, if my notes are correct and you can use pixels for discounts on the credit market, then doesn’t that lead to inflation concerns?

One question that people sometimes ask: we only have one currency in the real world, why does Habbo Hotel have two? His answer is to reject the premise: aside from different countries’ currencies, we also have frequent flyer points, stocks, stock options, mortgages, and in general no end of financial instruments that can play the role of currencies. (Also, by his count, World of Warcraft has 39 currencies!)

The two currencies and the two sorts of items ended up working well together: e.g. players could build a race track out of persistent items purchased with credits, but to drive on the race track, people would need to purchase expendable items with pixels.

Anyways, continuing along the line of reasoning that led them to make credits tradable, they asked the question: if removing credit frictions leads to increased sales, and if trading correlates to sales, then wouldn’t we expect that removing trading friction would also increase sales? It should: removing friction increases participants, and participants correlate to sales. So:

An official secondary market.

The introduced an official market for purchasing items. Before this, to buy an item, you had to run around looking for somebody who could and would sell it to you; this was a pain for the buyer, and it also negatively affected the experience of players who didn’t want to participate in the transaction. In contrast, the official marketplace was a lot easier to use, and players felt a lot safer; the result was that a lot more people participated.

There was also quite a lot there for traders to love. The official marketplace gave you lots of information about the average sales price of each item, both right now and historically; players would spend hours just browsing the sales catalog, gathering information and looking for (and finding!) arbitrage opportunities.

They also used this this as an opportunity to introduce a further sink into the economy. Listing items wasn’t free: you had to buy a ticket to list an item (they came in packs of 5 selling for 1 credit), which let you list an item for sale for 48 hours. And, if the item sold, the company took 1% of the sale as a commission; but the commission was a minimum of 1 credit, so in practice commissions were actually quite a bit higher than that.

And, the final takeaways:

• Economics helps you create a sustainable virtual economy, which is necessary for a sustainable virtual world.
• Think of economics in a broad sense: don’t just focus on prices, also focus on making the world a safer place for players to invest time and money.

Today’s talks:

9:00 am: GDC Microtalks 2010: Ten Speakers, 200 Slides, Limitless Ideas!

I really enjoyed the microtalks last year, so I had to go again this year. It had nine people speaking in a slightly modified pecha kucha format; nobody was boring, some were quite interesting, and it seems to be a much more reliable multi-user format than panel discussions.

Some highlights:

• Kellee Santiago talking about the design of online multiplayer, and relating it to Stewart Brand’s New Games Movement. (Whose motto was “Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt”.) One of Kellee’s points is that online multiplayer isn’t just a technical feature: it needs to be part of your design plan, you need to work to craft it to get whatever sort of behavior you wish to promote. Simply blaming the players is just laziness.
• Chaim Gingold talked about the trickster mythos; unfortunately, I can’t read my own handwriting, else I’d give a list of qualities here.
• Jane Pinckard talked about designing for the limbic system. (Favorite quote: “I really don’t care about the Citizen Kane of games, I want the Pride and Prejudice of games.”) Basically, current video games are good at triggering the reptilian part of our brain (fight or flight) and the neo-cortex (puzzle solving), but not nearly as good at targeting the emotions in the limbic system. Too often, they present love as a discovery process, uncovering a pre-existing story instead of participating in creating it; they should let players express themselves more, should allow vulnerability, should give you the feeling that the object of your affection is unique.
• I’m really not sure what I have to say about Ian Bogost’s talk, other than that I’m very glad that he’s planning to post the slides on his blog, because I’m fairly sure that they deserve a good deal more time and thought than I could give them in the moment.
• Jesse Schell: his recent DICE talk wasn’t presenting the future as 1984, it was presenting the future as Brave New World.

10:30 am: The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong), by Sid Meier.

This was the keynote; after Kojima’s keynote last year, I wasn’t particularly optimistic, but I thought it was pretty good. Interesting examples of how players interpret what look like mathematical calculations: e.g. if they see numbers giving them a 2-1 advantage, they accept that they might lose occasionally, but once they get to 3-1 or 4-1, any loss just feels wrong. But they’re happy to win occasionally at a 3-1 disadvantage; also, if they have a 20-10 advantage, they feel they should always win, unlike the 2-1 situation.

(Incidentally, it’s not entirely clear to me that players are behaving irrationally in most of those examples: if people mentally map M-N to M people fighting N people, then probably losing in a 4-1 situation really is hugely rarer than in a 2-1 situation, and a 20-10 situation is different from a 2-1 situation. But rationality isn’t the point, anyways: the goal isn’t to blame players for behaving irrationally if they don’t like our game design, the point is to make a satisfying game design.)

Also, in general, players want a game that works well in a story for them. They don’t want moral uncertainty: if you’ve invested 10 hours into a game, you don’t really want to find out that you were inadvertently working for the bad guys all that time. Players and designers work together in a sort of delusional alliance: if the designer pretends that the player is good at the game (both in terms of skill and morality), then the player is willing to suspend disbelief in the world that the designer has created.

Of course, those aren’t universal game design rules: for example, I certainly wouldn’t blame game designers for wanting to create games with rather more moral uncertainty, and I’d like to pretend that I would enjoy such games. (So I guess it’s true for me on a meta level: I want to pretend good things about myself!) But I agree with Sid that you should know what you’re getting into if you work against such forces. (And should, presumably, have a strategy for dealing with reactions, which may include resigning yourself to your game’s not being popular…)

I was planning to sort of wander off by myself for lunch; but then completely by chance I wandered into the same place where Ben was buying food, so I ended up having a pleasant lunch with him, Charles Pratt, Nels Anderson, and Wes Erdelack.

1:30 pm: The Nuovo Sessions.

A bunch of relatively experimental games. All of which looked interesting; I’m rather curious what Hazard: The Journey of Life would be like to play (could be wonderful, could fall flat on its face), I really liked the cover art for A Slow Year (especially in the context of the grand tradition of Atari 2600 cover art), and I’m glad to see that somebody has apparently picked up The Unfinished Swan. (And that they’re keeping it a game about curiosity.)

3:00 pm: The Connected Future of Games.

I really should learn not to go to (non-microtalk) panels one of these years. It wasn’t bad or anything (though too much of the moderator asking questions of individual panel members instead of letting a discussion develop), but I just skimmed my notes again and I’m not seeing anything I feel like writing down here.

4:30 pm: The Evolution of Habbo Hotel’s Virtual Economy, by Sulka Haro.

The most interesting talk of the conference so far for me; I’ll split it off to a separate blog post.

After which was the second annual blogger’s dinner, where I talked to too many people to be able to link to them here; many thanks to Michael for doing almost all of the organizing legwork!

Today’s talks:

9:00 am: The 4 Most Important Emotions for Social Games, by Nicole Lazzaro.

Her slides:

First, she gave some preliminary talks about some of her other conceptual frameworks, and talked about about social tokens (using a mango that’s a shared joke with her sister as an example). This is an inside joke, a symbol that represents a shared experience and increases its value with use. (On which note, she thinks the term “social capital” should die: the scarcity model is completely inappropriate in the social area.)

Then, she moved into the emotions:

• Amusement – laughter

You feel closer when you’ve shared a joke with somebody. A social game example is the brown cow in FarmVille that gives chocolate milk.

• Amici – chumminess

Make things round and cute; examples are “likes” in Facebook, pets, orphan quests (including FarmVille lost cows). Make it easy to be friendly with one button. Also, the idea of stroking gestures on the iPhone is brilliant: you caress it every time you want to use it!

• Amidar – admiration

(She made that word up.) Epic armor in World of Warcraft (since the whole guild works to earn it, but only one person can get it), the horse stable in FarmVille (where you can buy the frame but need friends to help you build it). Players are willing to pay for this.

• Amiero – social bonding

(I think that one’s made up, too, but I’m not completely sure.) It follows naturally from the other three, but can be crafted directly. Make sure your mechanics link together, to create reciprocity. (E.g. items you find that you can’t use yourself, so they’re useless unless you give them.) Also, have players ask for help: the possibility of rejection makes acceptance that much more powerful.

In general, it seems like an interesting set of lenses to look at social games through.

10:30 am: Creating Successful Social Games: Understanding Player Behavior, by Mark Skaggs.

He’s a Zynga bigwig. If he were titling the talk today, he would have called it “developing a metric mindset”. And, indeed, it was a talk about metrics, most of which should be familiar to people who work in the web space; he went out of his way to try to talk to boxed game makers about how they could use that thinking in their development process, too. In general, try to make your expectations and desires precise, and then measure them; not only will you be more successful, but, in a nice side effect, a lot of arguments will go away, since there’s no point in getting worked up defending a position when you can just as easily run an experiment to get the answer!

You still have to think about how to interpret the metrics, of course. E.g. the early Mafia Wars tutorial led to a steep player dropoffs; they tried removing some steps, and the good news was that 25% more people made it through the tutorial, but the bad news is that the players who made it confused were pretty confused.

Also, he talked about fun. No, you can’t measure fun; but you can measure what people do, and try to correlate that with other ideas of fun. E.g. when testing Command and Conquer in a previous job, they measured how much time players spent on gathering, building, moving, and attacking at different points in a level. They got a feel for what patterns looked like players having fun and what patterns didn’t: e.g. a bunch of building followed by a bunch of moving followed by a bunch of attacking was typically a sign of players beating their head against an unsuccessful attempt to seize a location.

After that, I had a delightful lunch with Michael Abbott, Ben Abraham, Nels Anderson, Wes Erdelack, Manveer Heir, and Kirk “the burrito fairy” Hamilton. (I hope I’m not forgetting anybody?)

1:30 pm: Crushing The Overhead: Case Study of A Microstudio Start-Up, by Randy Smith.

Seemed like good business advice if I were planning to go indie. Which I’m not, for the forseeable future, however. Nice to see him succeeding by focusing on trusting and acting trustworthy.

3:00 pm: Making a Standard (and Trying to Stick to it!): Blizzard Design Philosophies, by Rob Pardo.

My first choice was full, the book with descriptions was badly organized, and I forgot my notes on what my second and third choices were. It’s a topic I care about, but that I also got my fill of last year. Some nice Blizzard-specific ideas: “make everything overpowered” and “concentrated coolness”.

4:30 pm: Are Women the New Hardcore Gamers?, by Shanna Tellerman, Wanda Meloni, Jessica Tams, Morgan Romine, and Amy Jo Kim.

Interesting enough, but I’m not sure what to write down from the discussion.

Today’s talks:

10:00 am: How to Manage an Exploratory Development Process, by Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke.

I heard Robin speak in the microtalks last year; she’s at thatgamecompany now. Good talk, and surprisingly moving: they started off by talking about how, at E3 2008, they debuted Flower, the press and their publisher loved it, yet the team’s morale was at an all-time low! Their development process was putting all sorts of stresses on them, which they needed to fix lest the company implode soon. (Which, I should emphasize, isn’t anything particularly negative about their company, just typical game development culture.)

Some of the key points for how to build a sustainable development process, so they can keep making the games they love indefinitely instead of burning out after a few years:

• They needed to distinguish between commitments and estimates.

Both are important; but, if you don’t hit an estimate, that may be a learning experience (or may not, variability is natural, especially in creative work), but certainly isn’t anything to beat yourself up over (or for others to beat you up over), whether consciously or subconsciously.

Also, in an exploratory phase in your process, who knows how long it will take to find the game’s real core mechanic. (Shades of Iwata’s keynote last year.) So estimates there have a particularly large margin of error. Be confident that you still have a vision for the game inside of you; it will come out eventually.

• Planning and feedback is important.

They have a big board sketching out milestones over the entire lifetime of the project; on a smaller level, they have two-week sprints, with standups three days a week. Their sprint goals aren’t as rigid as some teams do them, but it’s important to have the task cards up there, as a point for discussion.

Which leads to what I saw as their main takeaway:

• Have conversations; don’t shy away for them, especially if they’re difficult.

The point of having task cards is so that you can see and talk about them if they’re not moving as you expect: are they harder than expected, are they unpleasant, are they simply something that nobody cares about? Or, if your explorations suggest that expected mechanics won’t work or that you’ll need more exploration than expected, don’t hide, even though you’re really nervous: talk to your publishers, talk to your marketers. And don’t just give the bad news: talk about your vision, talk about why you think this will make the game better. More broadly: remember that conversations aren’t part of a zero-sum game: they’re all on the same team!

One other amusing bit from the talk: we call a task easy in one of three cases: 1) we really want it to happen; 2) we have no idea what it entails; or 3) we don’t have to do it ourselves!

And, finally, the summary:

• Be honest.
• Wandering is okay.
• On every project.
• Until you die.

11:15 am: Kids and Parents Playing Together Online: the Next Frontier of Casual Gaming, by Jesse Schell.

Lots of good points here, starting from the basic point that you have to decide to design for this, not just (for example) build a kids’ game and hope that the parents will like it. Looking through my notes, I don’t see any huge insights that I’ll be able to provide beyond what you’d get from his slides, so I’ll just embed them here.

11:45 am: Lessons Learned building Moshi Monsters to 15m Users, by Michael Acton Smith.

Moshi Monsters was done by a company that had just burned through most of their venture funding, on a real-world cross-media game PerplexCity that sounded fascinating but wasn’t profitable. So they didn’t have much margin of error. Failure was still okay, but they needed to fail fast: which they started off doing, by trying a Webkinz model of physical goods linking to an online world. They stopped doing that, and immediately got a lot more signups, which they eventually managed to monetize quite successfully.

They monetized using a subscription model; he said that a good subscription model is sliced (so free players get to see parts of it), and visual (so free players can see what subscribing players have). The price points matter: they had 1 month, 6 months, and 12 month plans, and initially set them up so the longer plans were a modest savings over shorter ones. That led to most people signing up for 1 months; so they switched to putting a much narrower gap between the 6 and 12 month plans (5 / 24 / 30 pounds, respectively), and all of a sudden almost everybody signed up for 12 months! Another anecdote along those lines: when the Economist had an online-only subscription for $59 and a print and online for $125, then 68% of people chose the online-only version; but when they added a print-only option to their price list, also priced at $125, then it switched to 84% of people choosing the print and online option!

1:45 pm: The Convergence of Flash Games and Social Games, by Daniel Cook.

I went to this talk because I love Lost Garden and because slides from talks he’s posted there before looked good. But it was mostly focused on how to use ideas from social games to be successful on Flash portals; not so interesting for somebody who has been reading Dan’s ideas on his blog for years, who is already in the social game space, and who doesn’t want to be successful on Flash portals.

3:00 pm: Seriously, Make YOUR Game!, by Paolo Pedercini and Jason Rohrer.

Paolo’s bit was amusing theater. Jason’s went into the details more: it turns out that his upcoming African diamonds DS game didn’t have its origin as a social statement, but rather from thinking of what multiplayer strategy video games can do that board games can’t, deciding that hidden knowledge (e.g. spying on the other player’s position) is one possibility, and coming up with a game mechanic where hidden knowledge about knowledge would work. (Having agents in the field buying diamonds, who can possibly be bribed.)

Also, when playtesting the basic purchasing mechanics with a physical game, he found that they weren’t much fun; going into it a bit more, he discovered that they’d stumbled on Nash equilibrium behavior. He broke that in two ways: by introducing a nontransitive relationship (basically, a hidden rock-paper-scissors mechanic, to avoid a dominant strategy) and by having bids where both the winner and loser pay (to avoid having the bid price settle at the item’s value).

4:15 pm: Indie Gamemaker Rant!.

No super standouts, though certainly better than yesterday’s AI rant. I guess the part that clicked the most with me was Robin Hunicke talking about the many ways in which having a male-dominated industry is a problem. Certainly her and Kellee’s talk earlier this morning struck me as a good example of how bringing a broader set of perspectives is likely to have a positive effect on your game’s development.

So that was today’s talks; my first time going to the Summits part of the conference, it’s mellower than the main conference. Very nice dinner, too, and I was glad to finally get to meet Jorge Albor!

When showing up at GDC, I leafed through the booklet to see if there was anything I’d missed. And, indeed, there was: it seems that the online schedule builder had left off most or all of the keynotes for the summits! (Or at least did when I looked at it last week, I guess that’s fixed now?) Oops. So I decided to go to two of those today instead of what I’d previously planned, for the Social and Online Games summit and for the Independent Games summit. (At 10am and 4pm respectively; I guess they don’t trust indie game makers to be awake at 10am?)

The other thing I discovered today: if you want to zoom when taking pictures on your iPhone, you have to buy a third-party application. It’s only digital zoom, of course, but it’s still convenient to be able to do that right on the phone so you can read pictures of the slides easily right there.

Today’s notes:

10:00 am: How Friends Change Everything, by Gareth Davis.

He’s Facebook’s platform manager; mostly Facebook boosterism and stuff that’s not too surprising to those in the social games business, but pleasant enough. As he notes, Facebook is interesting because it puts front and center the possibility of game interaction with people who aren’t essentially anonymous / pseudonymous (as is the place when playing strangers on XBLA); the idea of games being social in that sense goes back thousands of years, so in that light maybe Facebook games should be considered normal, while video games’ relatively brief history is the exception?

To that end, he thinks that the iconic Facebook game is still ahead of us, and that we should expect to have multiple games with over 100 million players; both of which I quite agree with (there’s certainly no reason to think that FarmVille isn’t going to be surpassed multiple times over. And, of course, he thinks that Facebook will be at the center of social gaming; hard to argue with him, for the time being.

11:15 am: The State of Social Gaming: Industry Overview and Update, by Justin Smith.

He’s from Inside Network, which publishes web sites like Inside Social Games and Inside Facebook. The talk was what the title suggests; so, for better or for worse, nothing here that I noticed that I wasn’t already basically familiar with.

11:45 am: Open Source Secrets: The Software Architecture Behind a Successful Virtual Goods Business, by Timothy Fitz.

He’s the technical lead at IMVU, and I found this talk hugely refreshing: an ode to continuous deployment and the testing and refactoring that makes this possible. They have a thick client that they push new versions of once or twice a day, and they update their website 35-50 times a day (though only pushing changes out to ten percent of users); so their cycle is “commit, go green, push, repeat”.

They learned this lesson the hard way; they once worked on a release for two and a half months. Fortunately, they did A/B testing when they did finally release it, which revealed a serious problem in chat functionality; it took them an additional 6 weeks to figure out what went wrong, because two or three minor changes interacted in unexpected ways to produce a bad effect. Oops. So they don’t want to have to go through that again.

Their heavy emphasis on automated testing doesn’t mean that they don’t like manual QA: instead, they want the QA people to use their brains, instead of acting as robots. So QA people think about how to test features (which engineers then automate), and they work to understand the impact of planned changes in interfaces; automated tests work to catch unplanned interface changes.

The title comes from the way they build their client: they realized that they have a lot of good UI experience on the web, so they build on that by embedding Firefox in their client, with custom C++ code only in one narrowly defined area. They have significant amounts of code in each of C++, Python, and JavaScript, and they find this works better for them than a single-language strategy.

1:45 pm: Why Are Gaming Veterans Flocking to Social Gaming?

This was a panel discussion between Steve Meretzky, Brenda Brathwaite, Brian Reynolds, and Noah Falstein. Quite pleasant to listen to; two themes that repeated themselves were: 1) they all missed times when games could be developed quickly by small teams, and see social games as recapturing some of that, and 2) if you’ve been in the industry for more than two decades, you’ve gone through a lot of changes, and this is another one of those; so having veterans around is valuable for that reason alone.

They didn’t have any crystal balls or anything, just a pleasant chat. One of the more amusing lines: Brenda Brathwaite saying that, now, with the emergence of metrics, game design has finally become a game for game designers!

3:00 pm: What Social Games Can Learn From Virtual Worlds, by Mike Goslin.

He’s the VP of product development at Hangout, and also has Disney theme park experience. His first claim is that retention is key: it increases lifetime value in obvious ways (lifetime increases) and slightly less obvious ways (people get drawn to status items and subscriptions), and decreases cost of acquisition (virality works better over time, better to invite fewer people over a longer time than to spam everybody you know at once). He thinks that concurrency leading to a sense of community is important; it certainly seems to be something that Hangout is betting on, and something that Facebook games so far have generally stayed away of. (Wild Ones being an exception here.) They actually use Unity instead of Flash, another exception, and they have games that are gateways to a chat / community area.

As to the title: social games have the advantage that player registration is very easy (because Facebook handles that), but getting players to monetize is harder than in virtual worlds. To that end, he made a push for subscriptions: not as requirements for players (the way World of Warcraft does it), but as an additional layer on top of virtual goods to increase core players’ commitment and to give them a way to get VIP accessories. (Hangout has a fashion show theme, so the latter probably works well there.)

4:15 pm: Increasing Our Reach: Designing To Grab and Retain Players, by Randy Smith.

I really enjoyed the talk he gave last year on “helping your players feel smart”, so I figured I’d see what he had to say this year. And it was my favorite talk of the day, though I certainly won’t be able to do it justice here: basically, making the point that games have to work at immediacy (make the first 10 minutes awesome to draw players in) as well as depth (to keep players satisfied over time). And he went through a bunch of games (which I want to play now) showing how they did well or badly on one or both of these.

For immediacy: provide a “game-toy” as a player’s initial experience. This should package up the game’s core ideas in a way that’s as fun to play as possible: have simple, intuitive controls; have strong, juicy affordances; and make it hard to fail, lowering the pressure. For depth: provide it on demand, so players can go into games as deeply as they wish but don’t have it forced on them; provide hints to players for depth that they might not otherwise notice (e.g. completion stats on a level, achievements suggesting things to try out); and have both low-level tactical gameplay loops and mid-level strategic loops.

He talks fast. I hope he’ll put his slides up somewhere?

5:15 pm: AI Developers Rant!

Insufficiently ranty; a bit of completely gratuitous guy culture, and a Bourdieu reference that might lead to something interesting. I napped through parts of it.