Deus Ex Machinatio

Deconstructing Farmville

I started playing Farmville a couple of months ago, as a part of my continuing education in games and game design. The surprise? I'm still playing it. And I even ponied up some of my own cash to keep Zynga running. (If you like a creative work, it behooves you to support the people who made it, right, kids?) 

It's not like me to play a game for more than a few weeks. Treasure Madness and Packrat? Ancient history. Kongregate keeps me coming back for twenty minutes a pop, but I hardly ever play the same game twice. Oh, sure, Clockwords, Chain Factor and Boomshine all kept me for a while, and I might still play from time to time, but it's nothing like the dedication with which I play Farmville. So what is it about Farmville? What makes it so special? The answer is that it absolutely nails all of the things I like best in a casual game.

1. Multiple goals. For those of you who don't already know, Farmville is at its heart a very light, easy resource management game. You have a limited amount of land and money, and it's up to you to work out how to use them to get what you want. Better, it's up to you to decide what you want. Farmville offers experience points and levels, achievements and ribbons to earn, and sets of objects to collect. You can play to make the coolest 8-bit image on your farm, play to master all crops, or change from one goal to another depending on your mood. The more things there are to do, the more likely it is any given player will find something that floats their boat and stick around.
2. No penalties. You might be able to lose Farmville, but you'd have to work really hard at it. The only limited factor is time -- you need to harvest crops before they wither. But you know how long that takes, and the time between ripening and withering varies from 2 hours to 4 days, depending on what you planted. And even if you neglect and lose all your crops, you're unlikely to have lost all your money. If you have managed to burn through it all, you can always visit neighboring farms to earn a little seed money for your next crop. I don't know about you, but I play games to relax. For me, keeping the stakes and pressure low works way better than ticking clocks and hordes of zombies shambling toward me. And I don't imagine I'm a special flower, unique in my gaming tastes.
3. Effort is always rewarded. In Farmville, you get out of it what you put into it. It's just like the grind in Warcraft, an invigorating contrast to the uncertainties of real life. In Farmville, as long as you keep trying, you'll keep moving up. This is the secret sauce that makes World of Warcraft the behemoth it is, and one of my foundation principles of game design.
4. Shiny new content. Farmville is very much not a finished product. Zynga's developers are constantly unrolling new features and virtual items, holding limited-time events, and refining the interface. The game hasn't been the same from one week to the next since at least Halloween, when I began playing. And a lot of this content has limited availability -- you can plant forget-me-nots and buy moose right now, but they'll be gone again in five days. (But something else will come along.) That keeps players coming back; there's less chance to become bored if there's always something fresh.
5. Collaboration, not competition. The only rivalries here are the ones you make yourself. But Farmville's social mechanics encourage you to not only play yourself, but to get your friends to play, and to play more often. There are objects you can only receive if a friend has sent it to you, and collections you can only complete by interacting with a friend's farm. The more friends you have in Farmville, the better you'll do. Peer pressure to play is a subtle but powerful thing.
6. Value for money. Farmville lets you buy FV money with real dollars, not to be confused with the lesser gold currency. FV money lets you buy some things that you might otherwise have to save up scads of gold for; but there are also animals, objects and other incentives you can only get with FV money. The game is very cleverly designed to show you the advantages of paying Zynga for play without being a spammy pest about it. They put the incentives for paying in front of you, but they aren't shoving your nose into it. Their method works.
7. Low time commitment. This is the kicker. I can play Farmville for ten minutes in the morning, for ten minutes every couple of days, or I can spend all day planting 2-hour raspberries, visiting my neighbors' farms, and rearranging my orchards and flocks. And if the phone rings, or my kid spills Goldfish all over the floor, or I remember it's time to make dinner, I can walk away and come back later. (See point 2, No penalties.) I wish more games were like that!

What about you? Are you a Farmville fan or foe? Are there reasons I've missed that you think make it so successful, or do you think I'm completely off base? Let me know what you think!

See You in Austin!

I am thrilled, boggled, amazed, and other combinations of excited-plus-surprised to say that I'm in the first batch of speakers for SXSW this year, announced today. My topic is ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette, and I find the more I think about this subject, the more I have to say about it. 

This will also be my first time at SXSW, so I feel like I need some mentoring. Anyone have any SXSW-related advice for me?

An Open Letter to the Person on IM Last Night

Launching a game is hard. I get it, trust me. Finding an audience of receptive players and approaching them in a novel way is lots of work. Keeping them interested is even more work. Sometimes you want to be blunt and just tell people where to look. 

And that's OK. More than OK, it's great! I am all about telling people that you have a game on.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but let me tell you what not to do: Don't randomly approach somebody on IM with a new/unfriended account and send only a URL. Because you know who does that? People who want to sell me ¢14l|$, that's who. If I get an unsolicited IM from an unfamiliar account and it's just a URL, do you know what I do? I block that account so it never bothers me again. 

You know what I absolutely don't do? Click on the link. That's because, given its dubious source, it's likely to be an eyeball-stabbing fiesta of horrific web design at the very best, and thoroughly infested with malware at worst. 

But there's another reason not to take a blanket approach to pinging people on IM that you should consider. Know your audience, dude. If you're taking the time to reach out to people one at a time -- or however many you can IM with at once -- then you have time to figure out who those people are, and whether they're receptive to what you have on offer. Let me give you a hint: if you are considering IMing me from an in-game account by way of introducing me to your game, I am not receptive to your advances.

If you are a friend or well-known colleague of mine, you will get a warm response from me if you approach me as yourself and say, "Hey, Andrea, I made this thing, take a look." I promise this is both cheap and effective.

If you don't actually know me, you probably need to rethink your approach to launching. I'm not a marketing vehicle, I'm a person. More, I'm a person who hasn't been an active or vocal player for any game in years, literally years, and who has already made my wishes regarding unsolicited trailheads very clear in the past. I've written about this exact problem with email before, and less than a year ago. (There must be something about September.)

But hey, if you want to be friends, then hop on in to the ARG SIG chat room and say hello. Once I get to know and like you, I'd probably be perfectly happy to help you launch your game.

Booyah: My Review

Have you seen the buzz around Booyah? I was intrigued by a particular Tweet from Jane McGonigal. A social reality game! Earn achievements for doing the stuff you want to do with your life! Awesome.

And then I downloaded the app to give it a whirl. Unfortunately, it's not the app I thought it would be, which means I still want the app I thought it was going to be. Booyah start with a cute little robot-looking avatar which you can customize with various colors and patterns. And then it pops you into a screen where you can browse categories of achievements to unlock, or the robot can give you ideas for "Booyah moments" to go after.

The problem, though, is that the process of recording those achievements wasn't what I had assumed. You don't just check a box saying "I did this today!" Instead, the social network component is all but forced on you. So if I want Booyah to help me record and celebrate that I went to the gym every day this week, or that I tried a new dish at dinner, or that I finished Chapter 5 of my novel-in-progress... I'm supposed to Tweet it, or put it on my Facebook status, and broadcast it to all of my friends. Why the heck should I spam my friends every time I go to the gym or hit my writing quota? Why can't I be quietly proud of myself, eh, Booyah?

I briefly flirted with the idea of setting up a separate Facebook account to keep private, for Booyah. And then I recovered my sanity.

Worse, half the achievements available in Booyah aren't even under your immediate power to achieve. If you get a certain number of Likes or comments on one of your Booyah updates, that can earn you even more achievements. This is irritating at best, and counterproductive at worst. If I'm going for a particular achievement -- say, getting five friends to comment on a fitness Booyah -- and I don't hit it, then I'm going to be disappointed. And maybe even discouraged. And then I just might give up. You just can't control other people, and it's ridiculous to make that a component of a validation system intended to make you feel good about yourself.

Now, the overall concept is still spectacular: Earn achievements for stuff you do in real life. I still want that app. Booyah, if you happen to read this, here's what you can do to turn me from a grouchy crank on the internet into an evangelist:

1. Don't give me a uniform set of achievements to go after. Let me pick and choose, so I don't have to even look at the ones I don't care about (like getting people to Like my gym workouts). 
2. Let me define my own achievements, and let me browse achievements defined by my friends or the Booyah community as a whole.
3. Let me keep my Booyah moments all to myself (unless I'm specifically in the mood for sharing.)
4. And let me choose a small group of friends to share Booyah with when I do feel like sharing; one cell who are my writing friends, another who are my gym buddies, and so on.

It really is a great concept; it's just that the implementation hasn't gone in the right direction for me. What I'm envisioning is probably a combination between 43 Things and earning Girl Scout or Boy Scout merit badges. For now, I'll keep waiting for the achievement app of my dreams. And who knows? Maybe when Booyah grows up a little more, it'll be exactly that. 

Updated to add: A friend has rightly pointed out that some of my criticism is unjust -- it's possible to keep your posts private, just in your Booyah journal, and share only some things with Twitter or with Facebook. Still, the whole philosophic focus of the game is around that sharing concept, and fully 2/3 of the available achievements are getting your updates Liked or commented upon. As a gamer, I'm a completist; but as a social person, I hate spamming my friends with stuff I don't think they'll find very interesting (like when I've gone to the gym). So the combination of achievements based on the reactions of my friends plus my drive to earn all available achievements makes Booyah particularly ill-suited to me. And probably others like me.

GDAM: Single Play Sessions

I've submitted the topic for this month's, well, Game Design Aspect of the Month. Allow me to quote myself from the GDAM blog:

Games are designed with the understanding that each player needs to meet some requirements to get the best play experience. Hardware specifications and age or maturity level, for example, are even listed on the box. But game design also makes implicit assumptions about a less obvious requirement – the time commitment we ask from our players each time they sit down to play.

This is an interesting topic, I think, from both a traditional game design point of view and from a pervasive/transmedia point of view. Like the sand of time, the social contract between a player and a designer is always shifting. 

GDAM is now actively soliciting contributions talking about this topic, and I'd really love to hear what all of you smart people have to say. If you have an opinion or theory on the matter, why don't you write it down and submit it?

Come Out & Play 2009

Are you going to Come Out & Play this year? It's this weekend, Friday through Sunday, in New York City.

Sadly, due to a ridiculously overbooked schedule, I'll only be making it in for the festivities Saturday afternoon and evening... but that means I'd like to make the most of that time and catch up with as many people as I can.

Even if you won't be there at the same time as me, though, you should definitely go -- there are some fantastic games to be played this year, and great company to be had. It's sure to be a great time!

Routes: DNA Heroes

The Routes Week 5 Challenge is up: DNA Heroes. I'm fantastic at DDR but miserable at DNA Heroes, how do you stack up?

While you're there, be sure to register to win tickets to a comedy gig starring the divine Canadian funny girl Katherine Ryan. If you're already registered on the site, sign in and go to your profile to tick the box that says you're interested in going. It's sure to be a good time!

And speaking of Routes, our man on the scene Fluffy has been keeping us updated on what's been happening with Rachel in her search to find out what happened to her uncle. Take a look at the latest, why dontcha:

Routes: The Plot Thickens

Have you seen the Week 3 game up at RoutesGame.com? It's called ExperiMental, and it's a social media/photohunt challenge. You try to capture a photo of the most awesomest science experiment at home and upload it, and then go through and vote on the ones other players have uploaded that you like the best.

But that's not all that's going on over there. (and if you're a curtain purist, so to speak, you may want to avert your eyes right about... now.)

My heavens, it looks like there's some sort of cross-media interactive experiential cool thing going on! Not that I'd know anything about... OK, OK, who am I kidding?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is where I walk the talk. There's a game going on! Don't worry, I'm not going to start spouting off about design goals and overarching priorities at this point. But I DO think the time is right to say "Hey, looky here, I has a game, and if you generally like my work, this is what you need to look at." You see? It didn't hurt a bit.

So right, if you want to go digging up treasure, you need a map. Allow me. Right now, courtesy of Fluffy Bickles, we have a video summary of Week 1:

Annnnd hot off the presses, Week 2:

It's a great point to jump in, and we'd love to have you. If you're interested in playing along, there are of course a few more links you might like to see. I'd love to hear what you think, but I'm afraid I'm not going to enter into much of a dialog about Routes until the show is over, so to speak, so I apologize in advance if I'm uncharactersitically silent.

Have fun!

Ah-CHOO!

The next game at Routes is up: Sneeze!

I can't claim much of any credit for this one, so it's not bragging to say it's a fun little chain-reaction game covered with a gooey layer of snot. I've made it all the way to level 10, but not yet cleared it, how about you?

Introducing Routes

For the last several months, I've been working with Oil Productions on a project for Channel 4 education in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust. That project is Routes, and I'm thrilled to tell you that we've officially launched!

   

Routes is a very ambitious project, incorporating elements like casual gaming, television, competition for prizes... and more. (See my Breeder up there? Oh, the pride!) I'll naturally have a lot more to say about Routes when the run is over; it wouldn't do to play out my hand now, would it? 

Meanwhile, sign up, explore, invite your friends. It's going to be a great ride. Promise!