XCOM and Joystiq, sometimes they just GET IT

We play games.  Games, GAMES.  These are meant to be entertaining and FUN.  Often I have sat in meetings and listened to big burly men discuss the merits of the brown fluffy bunnies vs. the pink fluffy bunnies. (Side note: one of my favorite industry friends is Scott Rhode, and I will NEVER forget hearing him tell how his game idea was rejected because two previous games that had sand in them had failed therefore a beach volleyball game would fail too)

So when I come along a review or comment that shows the writer is having FUN, I laugh and have to quote it.

…look like no aliens you’ve ever had to fight off before. Okay, maybe if you’re Spider-Man, you’ll find yourself on familiar ground. Everyone else is screwed.

This is from a review of the new XCOM trailer that looks very cool too.  But DO go read the entire review and watch the video on JOYSTIQ, and dig their new look.

Mac

P.S.  And if you’re wondering, I have NO idea why Hemingway’s picture comes up when Zemanta is looking for pictures based on this post, but that too cracked me up.

Facebook games are old Play-By-Mail games

I was sitting in a meeting discussing Facebook games when the person who called the meeting listed some of the important facets of a successful game.

Engagement
Retention
Free and paid optional actions
Economic balance
Player to player social interactivity

Those of you that know ANYTHING about Play-By-Mail (PBM), know that these are the exact same issues. The biggest company in PBM was Schubel & Son. I met Mr Shubel at a Star Trek convention in 1976. It was before he got into PBM and his son was a toddler.  He understood the basic principles  of engagement, retention, free vs. paid options, economics and social interaction between players. While PBM was never a huge industry, there is no question that Schubel & Sons was a leading company.

This encourages the player to keep going, to come back, to be involved. This engagement, results in retention. The player must always be able to do SOMETHING.  This leads to Free and Paid options.  The free options are always available, even if they are limited by “energy” that must be regenerated over time. The player must only leave the game because they have other priorities, not because they have run out of options.

Paid options are the difference between a handgun and a M16.  They both have devastating affects, but the M16 has greater range and can deliver more bullets faster. While there are many possible examples, this is the one I use as a test with every feature of a PBM game or now, a Facebook game.

There are plenty of examples of the non-player characters, in Shubel & Son games, attacking without reason, and of course ANY battle resulted in a fee to the players account.  But as a player, knowing that at any time you could be attacked, you stayed always defensive, but also risky.

Typically turns in PBM games are weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly.  The fees were $4.00 or up to $15 a turn and people played these games for YEARS.  Because the basic principles were met.

The economy in a game is as important as being true to the theme.  If you’re in a Sci-Fi game, you might get out of sorts if your character has to wield a colt 45.  For the economics, if that colt 45 is 50 game bucks, and the bullets are 500, there is just as much of a problem. While that is an obvious and dramatic problem,  most economic problems are much more subtle.

A game designer I admire very much is Sid Meir.  One of his basic principles has been adapted by many game designers, including myself.  That principle is that the game should be playable as early as possible in the development process.  Getting the economy “playable” at the beginning of the process is just as important.  You need to know why the players buy a certain weapon, why they buy a spell or seem to gravitate towards a special ability more than the others LONG before the game goes public.  To leave these into the players hands without testing, is foolish. 

Schubel & son realized very quickly that players wanted much more than to just fight with each other.  They wanted to learn from experienced players, they wanted to form alliances and wanted communication avenues that allowed for a meta-game to be created.  They wanted to be able to negotiate the terms of surrender on a 1-1 level.

Unlike today with instant communication, in 1980 we had only snail mail.  But players used the in game communication systems to their maximum, and then asked to connect directly. It was this direction connection that pushed the games to a higher level, and that’s what Facebook does best.

So you think Mafia Wrs is new?  You think Farmville was discovered as a great design in Facebook gaming?  You think virtual good is new?  Think again, think about PBM.  Companies like Schubel & Son, Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo, these people created this business and we can learn a lot from them.  And if we ignore them as no or low tech, we’ll suffer the fate of those companies and games that didn’t follow the principles that they created.

What PBM have you played lately?  Farmville?  That’s a good one.

Mac

Community Vision, have it? What is it?

I love the title of this post.  I have a hunch that after reading that your first thought was something like; “What’s that?” or “What does he mean by that?”. Good! All through time, or at least the last 29 years, I have read and it has been said ti me to: “Get the vision” or to “understand my vision”.  I have actually said that a big part of my job early on is to communicate the vision of the product.

I am a visual guy.  I am an awful speller in part because when I imagine things, I see shapes and colors and objects, not letters. It’s these shapes and objects that becomes games, or control interfaces, or blog posts. My job is to communicate that vision to people who look at things differently than I do.

Now that we’ve defined “vision”, let’s talk about community.

Back in the old days, the community was JUST those people who bought your game. The question was, how do we keep them involved. Side note here: companies that only care about getting the product purchased, and then ignore the customer, often go bankrupt or are just a flash in the pan.

Community is the made up of first, people who bought your game.  It then splits into factions.  There will be those who tell their friends about it, those that only play it on their lunch hour, those that only play it when their friend is over to play multi-player, those that use your in-game tools to create content, those that blog or create fan sites about it, and those that will follow yur around like puppies at game conventions.

That’s a lot of different needs that need to be met for “community”. Most companies fail to meet all of these factions needs. Actually, most just meet one or two, and hope that’s enough to encourage people to buy the downloadable content, DLC, or at least the sequel.

But let me through another wrench in the mix, Facebook and Twitter.  Facebook IS a community for your game all by itself.  Their needs are communication directly with YOU.  The twitter folks are a offshoot of Facebook and there is huge crossover between them. We’ve been known to call these groups Twitbookers or the Twitbook community.

Your vision of your community must include all of these factions and your priorities must be on the amount of impact these groups have on your sales.  Obviously the Twitbookers are about immediate communication.  Gone are the days where a product was a “fire and forget” proposition. I suggest also that the days of complete secret development are gone as well.  We want the consumers to know what we’re working on, we NEED them to know.  And furthermore, we HAVE to let them know so they’ll talk about it.

At board game conventions I always say, “Draw a crowd, because crowds breed crowds.  And crowds mean buzz, and buzz means sales”.  Your job as a developer or publisher is to create a community vision, which are your major groups and how will you meet their needs, BEFORE the product is launched and  suggest you do it as the game is being designed.

Feed the community by creating the vision.  The more you feed them, the more they’re talk about your game.

So let me ask you this, what is the vision of your community?

Mac

Microtransactions kid based? (link)

Today on IndustryGamers.com there was an interesting story about successful microtransaction companies.  They listed a bunch of sites and titles that have suceeed in making a game that works well with microtransactions.  This certainly is the norm in Asia, but really has not taken off here in the US.

Image via Wikipedia

The basic sticking point is that in Asia they want to buy things to make their avatar look cooler, but in teh US we want them to make us win!  But game designers here don’t want to fall into the trap of: “He who has the most money wins”.

But the thing that struck me about the sites and games listed… only 3 of them were for adults.  All of the others were aimed at kids. 

I think that’s making a clear point that gamers have not taken to microtransactions but kids who want their avatr to look cool have.

Care to disagree??

Mac

Joystiq does it again (link)

Image via Wikipedia

I’m sure its not easy to answer questions about a game with such high visibility, but really if you know the game well and the question is simple… it should easy to do this…

Apparently not!

I’m glad that the boys at Joystiq caught this, but frankly its very obvious that eiher there was a major distraction going on, or the guy thought he was answering a different question.

Mac