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!

Hot Brunettes at SXSW

It should come as no surprise to any of you that gender in gaming is something a spend a lot of time and thought on. And in fact it's the topic of my proposed talk at SXSW this year: ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette.

Let's cut and paste my description, shall we?

ARGs are often trotted out as a shining example of woman-friendly games. They boast unusually high rates of female developers and players, and a slew of kick-ass female leads. But if you dig a little deeper, are they just the post-Buffy version of Princess Peach, always needing to be saved?

If that sounds like something you'd be interested in hearing, then please, go to the SXSW panel picker and give me a big ol' thumbs up.  

 

I'm by no means the only interesting panel submitted, of course. My friends at Six to Start have some proposals in, and Brooke Thompson has a fantastic and selfless write-up of several panels beyond her own submissions.

It's going to be a great conference this year, any way you slice it. Hope to see you there!

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!

Movies vs. Video Games

In part 3 of my series on ARGs and the Economy, I had a throwaway comment about finding the differences between movies and video games, and what that means for ARGs. I actually wrote quite a bit of this at the time, but cut it out so I could focus on the main point (it’s the money, honey). And so here’s my take on why video games are growing like gangbusters and movies aren’t. 

For starters, there's a basic difference in the value proposition you get from buying, say, Left 4 Dead, and going to see The Dark Knight. It's easy to speculate that it comes down to dollars per hour of entertainment. We could generously say TDK at $8 a ticket and a 3-hour run time is $2.60 per hour for one person, and conservatively Left 4 Dead at $60 for a 30-hour player experience is about $2.00 per hour for as many people frequent your living room. (TDK isn't quite as long as all that, though, and the play time for Left 4 Dead is theoretically much higher.)

But that's not how people decide how to have fun in the real world. The more important differences have to do with the qualitative nature of the experience being delivered. 

Video games are active. This is the difference most people get stuck on; they think people want an active experience and not a passive one. I'm actually not so certain this is true; from time to time, I loves me a good passive experience. Read any good books lately? I think it comes down to personal preference, and even the same person doesn't always prefer the same kind of experience. Still, consumers are getting more and more accustomed to having some control over their leisure experiences, and it would be ridiculous to ignore that. Even TV has bent to this, the result being American Idol-style shows where viewers vote for a winner at the shallow end, all the way to the Heroes and Lost extended immersive experiences at the other end of that scale. 

Video games are social. Whether it's rocking out with the whole family in Rock Band, running a high-level raid with your best guild buds in World of Warcraft, or making fun of your sister who can't get the bomb to the right spot in Super Mario Galaxy, games are at their best when you're playing with somebody else. Whispered comments aside, we're strictly socialized not to socialize at the movies. When people are hanging out with their friends, they don’t just want to interact with the experience; they want to interact with each other, too. 

Video games are convenient. This point doesn't get nearly as much airplay as it deserves. When you go to a movie, you're stuck with the movies they're showing, the times they're showing them, and whatever seat you can find. If you get a text message mid-film telling you a flaming meteor just destroyed downtown and you hurry to see the spectacle with your own eyes, you're not going to be able to complete your cinematic experience without laying out another eight smackeroos and starting over from the beginning. A video game is there when you want to play it. You don't need to go out in inclement weather, you don't need to worry about being late and not getting a seat, you won't be sitting through twenty minutes of previews and commercials, and you can pause the game if you need to go look at the meteor-devastated downtown. Or, you know, have to go to the bathroom. 

So there are some basic and very instructional differences between what the movie offers and what a game does. I've said before that ARGs are active, social, and convenient by nature; but that's not entirely true. Actually, ARGs fall down quite a bit on the "convenience" metric, for several reasons. Which I will address in... a future post!

ARGs and the Economy: Part 3 of 3

Movies haven't been doing so well in recent years, but it's not because people are opting to stay at home watching their grass grow. Instead, it looks like a lot of that discretionary spending has shifted to the thriving video game market:

It's also a given that no matter how you look at it, the global games market has been absolutely booming the last several years. Between 2000 and 2001, the U.S. games industry grew from $6.6 billion to $9.4 billion. In 2007, that figure was up to a record-shattering $17.94 billion (and it doesn't even include PC game sales or online revenue).

The economy may be tanking, but you sure couldn't tell by looking at video games. It's important to recognize that games aren't just seeing success around AAA console titles. It's been a great year for indie gaming, too. There's ample evidence that even a small team of designers can put together an incredibly popular experience.

In Part 1 of this series we figured out that ARGs don't want be more like movies in order to be successful. In Part 2 we established that it's going to be lean times for the marketing ARGs, as budgets shrink and clients flee for more measurable measures. But this third cousin of ours, the video game? I do believe we've found ourselves a good role model. 

So if the ARG community wants to hit its own boomtown days, we have a couple of questions we need to answer, namely: What do video games have that movies don't, and what does that mean for ARGs? My answer is that video games are active, social, and convenient -- more on that in the next post. In short, though, these are traits already inherent to the ARG. We're much more like video games than we are like movies already.

But none of this directly tells us how the hapless ARG designer should plan to weather the bad economy. The problem is that video games already have a clear and well-trodden path to revenue, and ARGs don't, not yet. 

There have been a lot of different experiments in monetizing ARG-style immersive gameplay directly, without first pitching to a client and creating an experience tailored to that one brand's preferences (and subject to its creative veto, too). And here is our path to survival. We have to go out and do more of that, boys and girls. First we build a rich, engaging experience that people love. Preferably a lot of people. If you do that, then you're free to make money in several ways.

• Offer subscriptions or added content for money.
• Sell material goods for money. (Books, shirts, artwork, maps, keys, posters, plush dolls...) 
• Tap into those marketing dollars from the other side: Get your eyeballs first, and then sell them via product placements, sponsorships, partnerships, affiliate relationships, or good old-fashioned Google AdSense. It's definitely worked before. (And now we've arrived at Brian Clark's prediction of pushing risk to the content creator, though by a different route: The content creator is taking on the risk of creating a user experience that just might flop, and if it does, it's all out of pocket for the dev team, since no sponsor has come on board.)

At the end of the day we need to recognize that our art lives in an attention economy, and the things we need to do revolve around gaining and keeping that attention. Once you have that, the ways to eke out a living are varied and plentiful. Frankly, if you have enough eyeballs looking your way, money will be banging on your door and describing exactly how to let it in. It's cheesy to say "If you build it, they will come," but it's accurate. Not the players, you have to work your tail off for that -- but attention-seekers with money.

We do need to get out of the pernicious mindset that making money at all is a grubby thing to do. We're not betraying the trust of our audience if we use the gift of their attention to line our own wallets (or pay our own mortgages, as the case may be.) Why don't more grassroots games try to monetize? Why is sell-out a dirty word? The audience is sophisticated enough to recognize that we can't all build the things they love purely out of the goodness of our own hearts. You're going to want to do it in a respectful way -- for heaven's sake, don't go selling the phone numbers and email addresses you've collected to any and all comers -- but that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't profit at all.

And as for me, the freelance ARG designer? I'll be keeping my hat in the ring, of course -- I'm certainly not one to turn down marketing dollars. Less risk and less uncertainty is still a fat checkmark in the plus column as far as I'm concerned. But if it comes down to it, I've also got my eye on just laying it all on the line and making cool stuff (and ultimately hoping other people like it, too.) Making cool stuff is the whole reason I'm in this game at all. 

And hey, the United States is officially in a recession, job losses are mounting higher every day, and venture capitalists are putting their wallets away. People are going to need cool stuff to help take their minds off it all.

This is the third part of a three-part series. Part 1. Part 2.

ARGs and the Economy: Part 1 of 3

The United States is officially in a recession, job losses are mounting higher every day, and venture capitalists are putting their wallets away. These are scary, uncertain times. And as somebody with a career in freelancing, I'm biting my nails wondering where the next contract will come from -- or whether there are going to be any other contracts at all. After all, the high-profile Lost Dharma Initiative was axed recently, apparently the victim of budget cuts. So are ARGs recession-proof? Well, actually... they might be (or may at least be more robust than you'd been thinking.)

Commercial ARGs are varied and it's difficult to make a solid prediction based on the historic record of any one other industry. We have ties and similarities to movies, advertising, and video games, but we're not quite the same as any of these. Still, looking at how these businesses have done -- and are projected to do -- is helpful in trying to read our own tea leaves.

From a purely rational point of view, one might think that in hard times, movies and games would do poorly as consumers hoard their discretionary dollars for more important considerations. On the other hand, one might expect advertising budgets to increase, as companies fight a little harder to get their piece of a shrinking pie. As it turns out, though, consumers are anything but rational, and neither are businesses.

Movies famously did well during the Great Depression and so are considered recession-proof. But that turns out to be nearly an urban legend:

Although the movie industry considered itself Depression- proof, Hollywood was no more immune from the Depression's effects than any other industry. To finance the purchase of movie theaters and the conversion to sound, the studios had tripled their debts during the mid- and late-'20s to $410 million. As a result, the industry's very viability seemed in question. By 1933, movie attendance and industry revenues had fallen by forty percent.

And there are some important differences between the environment of the Great Depression and of today. Most notably, in the 1930s, the much cheaper alternative, television, hadn't yet saturated American households. But how are movies actually doing? Well, there's some good news and bad news. Actual attendance is down about 3.6% from 2007. But apparently box office receipts hit 2007's tally in mid-November, before the traditional holiday movie season got started. This isn't cause for wild cheering, though, because total box office receipts for four of the last five years have been down, anyway. 

Movies are a doubly interesting metric for ARGs, because our fortunes are so often tied to theirs. Since so much of our work is promotional, rather than box office revenues, we should perhaps look at marketing budgets. Historically, marketing is where a movie budget's big bucks get spent. One could assume that these marketing budgets are hence prone to fall under the axe as times get leaner, as with Dharma Initiative. 

But perversely, one developer I spoke with indicated that he's seeing, if anything, increased interest from potential marketing clients. That's because a shrinking marketing budget means a more judicious eye watching where each dollar goes, and ARGs carry fairly modest budgets compared to traditional media buys.

Still, movies haven't been doing so well in years and years, even in good times, and even as the ARG has seen its star rising in the sky. So let's look at another cousin to see if we can find a more illuminating precedent. Next up in Part 2: Advertising.

This is the first part of a three-part series. Part 2. Part 3.