Deep Water

Once upon a time, I was a Cloudmaker. Eventually, though, that giddy dream came to an end, and I wrote a somewhat embarrassing essay about it that has since traveled far and wide.

That essay has been on my mind lately, in no small part because I was startled to see it quoted in "Rules of Play" when I skipped ahead to the ARG section. It's a difficult piece for me to re-read, because it's very emotional; but it's easy to forget how intense the Cloudmakers experience was. Were we really that absorbed, did it really seem so pregnant with significance?

...well, yes.

Now that I'm on the other side of the curtain, though, it's interesting to find that some of the sentiment in that essay has very much informed my personal design philosophy. Most notably, I very much want to make games that don't require the same kind of fervent dedication hat rushed out of us as Cloudmakers. I really, really want my audience to be able to pass their classes with high marks or play with their kids every night or just cook dinner instead of ordering in.

It looks at first like a trade-off, of course; do you provide a shallow but pleasant experience or do you provide an all-encompassing one? My hope is to structure games where that's a false dichotomy. Games where a player can spend ten minutes a week, or every waking hour, and in either case come away with an enjoyable experience. Multiple levels of content available to suit your lifestyle.

Word on the street is that other designers are starting to feel this way, too. It just makes sense to make experiences that don't turn away participants who have time constraints. Why unnecessarily limit your audience?

If only the MMOs would figure this one out...

Comments

[Irwando]

I think that's totally reasonable. I could never do all that agian. A weekend? Sure, but months? No. In my "old age" here I've kinda regressed a bit in that most games I play are the quicker smaller things. Steal 5-10 minutes here or there, then go back to what I'm doing. It's not often I get to sit down and hack away for hours on something.

[Brooke]

While after the Beast, you were compelled to write that essay, I would say that it was born out of your own experience and the players that you were most familiar with and not out of a consideration for all players of the experience. There were those of us that participated in the game only a few minutes a day or an hour here and there. Certainly, I did not get everything out of the game that you did, but I was immersed in the story and inspired enough to stick around going on five years now. My grades and job were never in jeopardy as all assignments for both work and school were turned in on time, my social life was active and never ignored (though the time a friend answered one of the ingame calls while we were having a bbq required quite a bit of explaining dropping my status as a non-geek dramatically), and my kitchen was used just as often as it had been before I discovered that Evan Chan was murdered.

Could their game design have been better suited for multiple levels of game play? Of course. And, had they not been designing so much on the fly, I'm sure that it would have. Since then, knowing how dedicated that the audience becomes and the time commitment that being a hard-core player involves, I think that the vast majority of designers have considered multiple levels of game play. I know that we tried several methods to work with varying schedules and time commitments during Lockjaw... all the way back in 2002. While many of them failed, primarily because we were so green, we did have players that participated only a limited amount and able to find the experience enjoyable. If you look at the larger commercial examples of I Love Bees and Last Call Poker, you can see obvious design decisions at encouraging players at various levels of participation and, it appears, that they were successful in doing so. Are there still more levels to consider? A lower barrier to entry? Absolutely. But don't think that designers are just now starting to realize this.

Even so, no matter what considerations you make or how many levels of gameplay you provide, there will be a hardcore audience that wants to play at every level or the highest level. They will be highly visible because they will put the time and energy into the game and the game community. Perhaps, when the game is over, they will find themselves writing an essay similar to yours.

[Greg Gibson]

Hi, I'm Greg, a relative newcomer to your blog. Your latest entry really struck a chord with me. The issue you brought up is actually something that's been considered by some online game developers for years. I know for sure that at least one ARG team made it a priority, because I worked on the project.

About 40 dog-years ago, I was one of the first (and, eventually, one of the last) developers of EA's ambitious commercial failure, Majestic. I loved working on Majestic, and I'm really proud of a lot of the stuff we did. We accomplished some cool creative and technical feats. But in the end, we were unable to create the experience we originally intended. I hope some present or future games can learn something from what we did and didn't do right.

Before Majestic was released, most of the press coverage focused on our blend of technologies, our introduction of episodic content into an online game, and our attempt to usher in a new gaming genre with the first big-budget, high-profile ARG. (Of course, The Beast would ultimately beat us to the punch, both in timing and popularity. But neither the press nor we knew that would happen until it did!)

The funny thing is, none of those was our primary goal in creating the game. They were a means to the end you mentioned in this paragraph:

"It looks at first like a trade-off, of course; do you provide a shallow but pleasant experience or do you provide an all-encompassing one? My hope is to structure games where that's a false dichotomy. Games where a player can spend ten minutes a week, or every waking hour, and in either case come away with an enjoyable experience. Multiple levels of content available to suit your lifestyle."

That's exactly what we wanted to do. In fact, that paragraph could have been taken from one of our early design documents. When we first started development, that was the point of the whole project.

Our goal was, simply, this: create an online, story-driven game to satisfy the most casual of gamers--people who could only play in short bursts every now and then. At the same time, try to keep the hardcore gamers satisfied. After considering different game genre options and combinations--before I was hired, I think Majestic was originally going to be some kind of first-person shooter hybrid--EA and Neil Young (the head of the project) decided that an ARG was the right format for achieving that goal.

I still think they were correct. It was the right format. But with Majestic, we failed.

I don't just mean commercially. There are plenty of reasons the game didn't succeed in that way, and it's a related topic. But I mean that we failed to achieve that balance we needed to hook both the obsessive and the sporadic player. Majestic had problems achieving that balance in its gameplay, its pacing of content delivery, and its story.

As a gaming company, EA was most comfortable promoting the game to the regular gaming community, and not to the casual gamers that the company ultimately sought. If we wanted to build an audience with something so new and different, we would first have to win the approval of hardcore gamers.

We didn't.

For serious players, Majestic's gameplay was too easy. It could be fun if you just wanted to play a role in the story; it wasn't so good if you wanted to figure out puzzles. Except for an optional sidequest that some of us worked on late in the development cycle, the game offered few challenges for serious gamers. The puzzles were simple, and the game all but solved them for you if you took too long. A good deal of the infrequent gamers who tried Majestic actually liked its gameplay, but they had other issues with the game.

Soon after the game's launch, a few of us did work on an optional sidequest, Solitaire's Puzzle, that was much tougher and deeper than the mission critical parts of Majestic. But it was added too late, and those who played it often wound up enjoying the sidequest more than the main game itself. Maybe we should have used it as an ARG to promote our ARG! In retrospect, it gave us the idea of offering different gameplay paths for different types of players.

The majority of gameplay of Majestic fit more into "shallow but pleasant" category. In fact, this was enforced. Once you had accomplished a few goals, which took anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour per day, you often couldn't progress any further until the game contacted you or updated its content for you. You could wait longer than was necessary to engage the game again, but you couldn't speed things up.

Having to wait for someone to return an email or phone call may have added a layer of realism, but it took away the player's power (almost always a bad idea!) to choose how long to play each day. We could have--should have--allowed players to let the game progress at an accelerated pace if they wanted. Sure, each monthly episode might only take a player a couple days, but if it was a satisfying experience, the player would probably participate the next month, too.

In this sense, the hardcore gamer would be like someone who'd prefer to watch an entire DVD set of a show over a couple of days (if DVDs came out at the beginning of a season, instead of the end), while the casual player is content to watch that show at its appointed hour each week. Both might enjoy the show equally; they just approach it in different ways.

Our problems with balancing for different player types didn't end with the difficulty and pacing of gameplay. Our story was a culprit, too. I'm not talking about the artistic aspects: the quality of the story and writing. I'm talking about the craft: how we told that story.

Whereas Majestic's gameplay erred on the side of being too simple, our story was actually too demanding. We called Majestic episodic, but really, it was much more serialized. Though the episodes were designed with beginning and ending points, I don't think any one of them worked as a standalone story. With something as strictly serialized as Majestic--or, for a TV analogy, Twin Peaks--as soon as you miss an episode, you may be done for good. And if your only option is to start in the middle, you probably won't start at all. (Even though people could start Majestic from its pilot episode at any time, most people didn't want to spend weeks or months catching up to everyone else. I know that's how I might feel.)

Furthermore, to fully enjoy Majestic's story, which was dense, convoluted, and a puzzle in its own right, you had to be fully invested in it. While that's not too much to ask from someone who will spend hours combing the Web for minutiae and looking for clues and patterns in that information, it's not fair to the people who are happy with their 15 minutes of content per day. It's good to reward those who would go the extra mile, but you shouldn't punish those who do no more than they're required.

Because I think ARGs can have as much in common with TV as they do with videogaming, I still think the episodic method is a viable (sometimes preferable) way of delivering ARG content. But to maintain audience interest, each episode must be a complete and satisfying experience. Of course, within that framework, you'll probably want to add continuity and long-term story arcs. But for a casual audience, the story must be enjoyable in bite-size segments, and people should feel welcome to tune in at any time.

Think of X-Files or Buffy. While serious fans craved the plot advancement of the mythology episodes, both they and casual viewers could enjoy the standalones. The first season of Veronica Mars aced the balance between episodic and serialized content. Each episode worked on its own, but there were always well-integrated scenes that advanced the full-season arcs.

Majestic did do some things right. As flawed as it was, it wasn't all that far off from succeeding. And where we went wrong, we learned some lessons that would have helped us develop future projects that could succeed as a shallow/deep experience.

Unfortunately for those of us who worked on Majestic, there were no follow-ups, and we never got to apply these lessons to another ARG. Most of the staff returned to their previous lives in the film and videogame industries. A few of us, those who really bought into the potential of the ARG experience, tried for months to sell a new product to game and media studios. But, understandably, nobody wanted to risk losing money the way EA did on Majestic. One by one, we eventually took other jobs in different parts of the world.

I think it's great to see someone else who's presently in the industry taking up the cause you brought up in your blog entry. And if there's any way I can help--by evangelizing, or just by sharing some of the lessons I learned back on Majestic--I'd love to do so.