SOE: leading developer/publisher of MMOs
– EQ has been out for 11 years and is about to launch 17th expansion
– 700 employees at 5 studios
– Expanding product line to incl PS3 and FB

Community staff of 16. Why so many? We have a lot of games. 12 current titles, 4 upcoming. Some staff pull double duty with smaller ones.

SOE social media
love/hate relationship
– FB is great for keeping up with friends and family
– Hate the spam even when I generate it
– Everyone knows we should be doing SM for our business, say the ‘gurus’ in marketing and PR
– It looks confusing as hell and is very time consuming

SOE are not SM gurus
– Just ordinary hardworking community folks who experimented and survived. Trial and error. wanted to establish a solid platform for future SM efforts.

Why be in the game? To increase reach with players.
– Current, former, friends of both, their friends etc etc.

– Not all of our player base uses forums or check owe website regularly
– Depending on the game, 9 (free realsm, which is restricted to 13 so kids can’t post) to 60% (SWG) use the forums regularly
– reputation mgmt through friendly, direct contact
– seize additional CS opportunities
– increase our knowledge of the player community at large

Definitely ‘bush league’ to start
– Limitations set realistic expectations
– Lack of man hours: community was already swamped and we’d just had layoffs
– Lack of expertise: never applied social media professionally
– Budgets: really really mall
– Timeframe from maybe to GOGOGO: 2 weeks!
– Lack of company understanding and buy in: marketing, PR and community all supported the rough plan to organise, consolidate and polish our SM efforts. convincing everyone else took time.

Products and audiences
– One size does not fit all: tone, content must be different and tailored
– SOE games have diverse and divergent audiences; they don’t speak the same language

Who owns the assets?
– Most SOE products had sow sort of SM presence, fan pages
– tracking down who owned teem was painful: wanted to consolidate them all under one admin team. trouble with squatters.

SM is a team sport
– General manager, VP of marketing, was committed and supportive. we could get decisions made quickly
– Coach: Linda, cynical but determined
– QB: he liked SM, used it heavily and was willing to do additional research
– Running back: she can get behind everything and leads by example, becoming a rallying point
– Wide receiver: artist, very handy for the 11 iterations of layouts and ability to change key art on the fly, good at last minute requests
– Offensive line: dev teams. They were not interested, were slow to respond and took a lot of convincing. However, once they bought in, their momentum and support helped us push a lot of promos and content
– Defensive line: brand: ensured quality and cosistency/ PR helped develop messaging / marketing helped developed the voice / legal kept us safe and in compliance
– Free agents: low-cost, project oriented contacts. Provide expertise and man hours, allows us to experiment without long term commitment on the part of community

Biggest problem with SM was within the community team: they were overworked and not interested. So, initial resistance existed and early participation was made mandatory. And this worked: within one week the CMs were active and having fun.

We had to demystify it: rules, strategies, long term goals. established a cpsistent, colid but flexible communication plan working closely with other departments.

Use of real names vs corporate names
– nicknames?
– FB insists on real names, so corps can be outed at any time and you lose consistency. We do ask staff to use their handles in any official posts so players can see who they’re talking to
– Overlap between persona and business personas: fine for many but loathed by some. Right now we let staff choose. Overflowing friends lists can interfere with personal communications with friends and fancily. Additional unwanted spam from ‘friends’ . Reduction of privacy, no place to hide. affects what staff can post on their own behalf
– What happens when people leave? Burning bridges and stealing fans is a real concern. Trying to work this out with legal, how to manage corp vs private

Remember your realistic goals
– Track metrics for all initiatives
– Find ut where your audience is already present and bring the game to the
– Look for economy of effort: auto-crossposting from FB to twitter saves time
– Try everything once
– If it doesn’t work, dump it
– Don’t spread yourself too thin: SM requires constant follow-up
– Expand options when time/money allow

SOE’s top venues: FB, YT, Ustream, flickr and twitter. twitter seems to be personality rather than product driven — unless you have a great personality you might not get your money’s worth there.

Metrics are vital: FB offers metrics for all oases with over 10k likes — a good reason to push participation to that level
– Paid services often offer more professional reporting options: Neilson Media’s Incite (BuzzMetrics) — free staff training
– Free metrics services are available, one will offer the reporting etc that you need

Promotions build audience
– Offer claim codes for games that support them to encourage revisits
– SOE’s early ConnectDING! promo for EQ, EQ2 and Free Realms over 30 days
— Required support from dev (prizes), platform (distribution), busDev and legal
— Three tiers of awards offered to all current accounts in good standing for the games
– Quadrupled our FB numbers over the promo in EQ2 and FR — didn’t work for EQ bc we didn’t offer the right carrot. They wanted xp potions, and when we offered this in a later promo they went for it even beyond what was expected

Establish best practices — and practice them
– Repost all articles, blogs, videos and notifications from site to relevant media channels
– Have staff put their handle in posts
– Make use of auto-crosslinks where possible
– Link to third party articles, videos, podcasts etc, from media fan fansites
– Post only relevant and useful info
– Choose and use a voice and tone: avoid marketing-speak and consider allowing gamerspeak and silliness sometimes, it connects well
– Avoid spamming at all costs: we stick to two posts a day (more on twitter for live events an FB for unexpected downtime)
– Encourage discussion and join in on threads (both positive and negative)
– Seek pops to create magic moments in public
– Never leave it unattended

SM = less moderation
– On FB, most ppl use real names and are more concerned with reputation
– However an increasing number are using aliases
– We apply our standard forum guidelines to all SM
– Weach out to early offenders in PM; social media often encourages reasonable dialogue
– Don’t be afraid to block trolls

Professionalism ftw!
– Do not, under any circumstances, post negatively to other product arenas under any handle
– Be friends with legal; get one on retainer if you need to. ask them to review all initiatives for compliance, esp contest rules. rating guidelines must be followed; legal can keep you abreast of changes
– Take no chances with rules! SM is constantly evolving and ignorance isn’t an excuse
– Beg, borrow or steal contacts within social media arenas and treat them well.

Evolution
– We’ve established a broad range of SM arenas that our existing staff can maintain and nurture
– Central brand page at SOE.com, plan to support it and its social media arenas as our ‘central clearing house’
– More free agents for targeted project initiatives: contractor to dev a professional, centralised blog site; hired PR rep to conduct high level SM promotions and strategies (vlogs); will continue to parter with Nielson to improve metrics tracking
– Community will continue to work at grassroots level

Q: Can you foresee abandoning forums?
A: Not right now, but we’ve talked about the need for forums for some games. Forums are still the best place for in-depth and two way discussions that generate a lot of feedback. Might see a melding of the two in the future. We want a karma system and we’ll test it to death to minimise abuse.

Q: Dangers of using freelancers?
A: Community handles all day to day communications, so bc we control this the ppl we hire are more involved in strategy and initiatives; more idea providers than hands-on in the arenas.

Q: What about an out of control programmer posting secret stuff?
A: So many ppl will see it that his boss will find out about it really quick. We rarely have an issue, and when we do, PR cleans up the mess.

Q: How to maintain a balance btw marketing speak and grassroots communication?
A: We’ve found that other internal teams (marketing/PR) can provide good quality and appropriate messaging that strikes a good balance.

Q: What about devs adding players as friends?
A: After events like Fan Faire, we’ll notice that devs are accepting friend requests from fans so we hope that they’ll post intelligently. So far we haven’t had any problems.

Q: Time consuming?
A: Found that 15-20% of CM time was spent in moderating forums. Looked into time spent in SM and it was really only 5% or something; some people do it on their lunch hour. Not a massive time investment; most is spent in crafting careful messaging.

Battle.net backstory: launched in 96 with diablo
– world’s first integrated matchmaking svc
– evolved over the years: Starcraft, D2, Warcraft 3
– at launch, whole worldwide service ran on a single box

Classic popularity: (half the audience is in KO as of last year?)
BN: 12M players
WoW; 11.5M players

Times have changed…
– evolution of the online game svc
– digital distribution goes mainstream
– SN revolution
– and at Blizzard, WoW launched in 04 and now has 12M users

our vision: create the world;s premier online game svc that powers all blix titles and connects the community

our goal: enhance the fun factor of bliz games and extend franchise longevity by facilitating kick-ass online gaming experiences

Execution plan:
– staffed the team — very difficult
– built new svc from the ground up; orphaned the classic svc
– laucnhed the net BN and SCII on July 27 (after 7 yrs of dev); integrated with WoW at about the same time. Learned lots of lessons!

Post-mortem topic #1: the deeply integrated approach
– the vision: seamless integration btw game and game svcs
– leveraged back-end game svcs
– enables custom game-specific features that other svcs can’t provide (real-time ladders in SCII)

–the reality: it was a sprint all the way, pretty stressful
– we learned that it’s really expensive — a full client rewrite every time; real tradeoff btwn generic vs specialised svcs
– working with the game teams was rewarding, but challenging.creating parity btw vision of game (team) and vision of service (BN)
– getting the integrated UI and UX right requires a lot of work, a lot of iteration: particularly true of SCII: in-game experience and service experience appears as one integrated offering (social network for gaming) ex. achievement pop-ups, battle.net buttons in-game, etc.
– get started early and partner 50/50 with game dev teams as much as possible to share vision and workload

BN has been in dev for 3 years
– 07 version: gamer card and IRC chat
– 08 version: IRC chat still there but moving to browser metaphor
– late 08: war3 style, social bar at the bottom
– 09: closer to the ship version – gamer card, main nav at left. began to deeply integrate with the game
– jan 10: diff button style, less colour
– SCII beta: more polish, button definition, removed abstracts, rebalanced colours

Topic #2: identity and real ID
–the vision: unify the Bliz community via create of a common sN around all our games
– intro concept of a singel unified ID across all games
– address issues with anonymity and accountability faced on classic BN service. very hard problem to solve through technology

–the reality: Community was more receptive to Real ID concept than initially expected. first announced at blizzcon 2009
– Real ID was successful in some ways (in-client social [easy to find your rl friends], FB, cross-game chat) and less so in others (forums)

What we learned
– anonymity is important to gamers
– the tiered ID approach was the right call, but took more work
– loss aversion is a powerful thing (adding features is one thing; taking them away is another)
– take a measured and incremental approach to these types of ideas, and provide options.
– ‘i want to hide my profile, but see others’ (Armoury)
– suspension of reality is also important; we’d thought of taking an aggressive stance on real ID but customers helped us understand how important it is to escape from reality in the games. we’ve shipped a set of privacy settings for users to control friends-of-friends, real ID settings etc.

Topic #3: WoW integration
–the vision: unify our new SN with the most successful MMO of all time
– intro cool new features to WoW community at the same time (cross-realm chat)

the reality: we pulled it off, barely
– required tons of coordination and many months to get it right

what did we learn?
– integrating a community of 12M users and not screwing it up is a huge challenge
– 5 years is an eternity when you are talking tech about game svc integration
– understand your customer: don’t assume that your social features are right for every user and situation. a blanket approach to SNs isn’t really useful — need to know what gamers find relevant in their SN experience, how it is similar/different to their game experience, what do they want and not want. lots of sensitivity around SN integration; perception vs reality; sense of suspension of reality
– integrating game svc and MMOs can be challenging in other ways: logistics, compatibility, deployment etc.

topic #4: launch complexity
– the vision: launch SCII and new BN side by side, simultaneously
– sim launch around the world and support a multitude of payment methods and business models, very highly tailored plans for each region

–the reality
– we launched on 5 continents and in 13 languages
– we had a smooth launch nd lived up to ‘think globally’ (players have existing expectations — biggest challenge was for SE asia; wanted servers closer to players for a better experience, but most of them play in NA so the svc is spread across multiple regions)
–’tying all these pieces together was like landing a 747 on an aircraft carrier; if we’d missed any maintenance windows we wouldn’t have been able to ship on time

side note: bliz shipped boxed products with a non-recurring rev stream for 12+ years; since 2003 it’s been MMOs, more complex, and this has been an adjustment for us (esp in collaborative culture of Blizzard)

What we learned
– think through stuff early
– really understand what is important to your customers in each market region
– build in the tracking mechanisms to avaluate success and failure
– understand regional challenges: latency, grey market, governmental issues — this is the key to success
– don’t underestimate the work (and get really good billing guys)

topic #5: building and growing the BN team
– vision: create the living game svc and evolve it with each game
– tightly integrate with each Bliz game and dev team
– build and scale a BN team to pull it off

– the reality:
– we’v grown 4x in the past 18 months: 12 more open heads incl. art, design, production and engineering
– online game experience is a rare commodity out there

what we learned:
– the bar has gone way up from 10 years ago, customer expectations are much higher, and launching service is just the beginning…
– managing multiple projects and customers is challenging
– key talent is the difference between success and failure
– listening to our customers has been critical to our success; we take betas very seriously, read forums every day (don’t cater for the vocal minority, we look for trends)
– few ppl understand the complexity and how hard it is to design and build this stuff! design iteration is as important here as it is with game titles

we have 10 years worth of features that we’d like to add, a v ambitious roadmap

Grind: what is it? Why do we use it so much if players hate it? If we’re going to use grind we should at least be self-aware about it.

Def of grind: When you make the player do something he doesn’t want to do, in order to get to something he does want to do. This definition applies about 95% of the time.

Grind is not levelling, but levelling systems can be grinds: example: master poisoner in UO. Why should I have to reach level 18 in Mafia Wars before i can go to Las Vegas? Why do I have to complete single player mode before getting multiplayer in a racing game? Why do i have to buy loads of booster packs in order to have a competitive card deck?

In many cases there are good reasons for introducing the grind, but this doesn’t mean players will be sympathetic to your reasoning.

Psychology and Theory — how do they apply to grind?
If you perform an action, you get a reward. Basic operant conditioning. Skinner Box: push button, get pellet, feel good. But are the rats having any fun, or is it all conditioning? Is the Skinner Box the original grind?

Extrinsic/intrinsic motivations

Intrinsic: Rewards from doing: joy, delight, fn, sense of accomplishment, mastery and purpose, novelty (looking cool in your new armour). These are more powerful and rewarding, but unsustainable

Extrinsic: Artificial rewards such as level, experience, achievements (raises, bonuses etc) (getting any old reward). More sustainable, less meaningful and tend to make future rewards less meaningful over time

Raph Koster argues that pattern matching and pattern-breaking are the fun to be found, at least in games (Theory of Fun). Arguably the grind arises when players are asked to beat a pattern that no longer challenges them, or don’t find interesting enough to learn

Bartles Four: 4 player types found in social spaces (Killers, Achievers, Socialisers, Explorers): players are normally a hybrid. Grind mostly occurs in Achiever play

Well-Centred Game (own theory): world / game / community. A good game wants to live smack between all these things, and adding grind pushes it into the gamey corner, which is ok if you add things to balance it out in terms of world and community.

Why the grind is hard to avoid
– players like significant rewards
– players like well defined paths to reach these rewards
– every time you do this, you risk creating a grind

Players hate the grind, but like the payoff they get from it.

Players also like direction: a sense of where to go and what to do next. Clearly defined goals give players a good starting point. Even find-your-own-fun players often need help to figure out the ‘possibility space’

Erik Bethke: For GoPets, adding a couple grindy elements made it stickier immediately (the game is primarily for Socialisers, but ppl need direction)

Perception of playstyles
– grind is a matter of perception– to those who want to raid or run high-end arenas in WoW, levelling is grind
– to millions of casuals who never target the endgame, the journey, levelling, is the reward. the level game is THE game

Resource disparity
– can dramatically change perception
– one man’s tense MMO fight is grind fodder for someone more skilled
– a player who has plenty of time to surf FB might find social games there not grindy at all

Replay factor (mosty MMO factor)
– the more you’ve ‘been there, done that’, the more it feels like grind to do it again. novelty wears off and alt development feels grindy
– in SWTOR each class has its own class story, and in terms of replay every class has a certain amount of novelty levelling up, so there’s freshness in replay

Cheap, robust content
– it’s not that we’re lazy! the grind is cheap and robust
– kill ten rats ‘never fucking breaks!!’ grindy content is easier to build, but also easier to design, to QA, to repair and support. It’s safe. We rely on it a lot, perhaps too much, for this reason. What we’re doing in MMOs is creating scale critical mass, and in MMOs players need a reason to be there, they need goals. in FB, they need a reason to revisit (come back and click). In both types of game, players can devour through handcrafted content faster than designers can create it.

But make no mistake… grindy content is usually seen as inferior by most of your players, and that’s because it is.

Managing the Grind
– sometimes it serves the design’s needs, and that’s OK. But always ask if it’s really necessary.

Introduce Novelty
– a little novelty goes a long way.
– mentally memorable interactions, humour, unique POIs, new game mechanics can break up the monotony
– understand that randomly generated content does NOT necessarily introduce novelty. Players are great pattern matchers and if they see that your RGCs aren’t interesting they won’t see it as different content, just as you being lazy. The content has to be interesting and compelling for players.

Milestone Grinds
Time to level per level in WoW used to have dips (lvl 39 just before mount; before cap at endgame), so were rewarding; getting your last name in EQ was perceived as a rewarding grind

Low Investment Play
– Players can only track so much gold-quality content at once; throw too many stories at them and they care less about each of them; things get too jumbled. To solve this sort of thing for SW we cut the bad quests, and spaced out the NPCs, added bonus quests to add more goals in the direction you’re already going — little tiny grinds.
– Simpler content can be a way to ensure that the gold-quality content has room to breathe

Boiling the Frog
You will intrinsically have fewer rewards (extrinsic and intrinsic) and less novelty the further you get in the game (turn up the heat slowly). Manage the pacing; avoid ‘hell levels’ and betraying your established cadence. Kills to kill per level is kinked — feels like you’re running through molasses. is your reason for doing this good enough?

Avoid Sticker shock
– don’t ask ppl to kill 5000 of something. Nothing makes the grind more tangible than an utterly absurd goal.
– reward the players doing new things…
– … but don’t make them do something they don’t want to do.

Encourage diversity of activity
–repetition is the devil

Proving devotion
– Long grind rewards (like the pirate hat in WoW) should be put well off the beaten path. Let players prove their devotion, these are often the pillars of the community and we want to give them this opportunity, but not spread it too broadly

Subverting the grind: how can we be evil? how can we make ppl feel good about grind?

Overlap your grinds: having multiple avenues for progress means the player is always close to progress somewhere. In Civ, the nav screen has a dozen little grinds that move fwd at the same time. This is very cool psychologically. In UO, players grind craft skills at the bank, which doesn’t feel as grindy because it contains social opportunities (distractions)

Offline grinds
– Players hate the grind enough that giving them some grind rewards for free is a great way to welcome them back into your social space, 1Bn blood in vampire wars! In EVE, players can advance skills while offline.

Bypassing the Grind
– Enough ppl hate grind that offering ways to cheese past it are rewarding: Civ ‘great people’, FB games microtransactions

Graduating Past grinds
– It makes sense that players that have been playing for a while wouldn’t want to be bothered by little things. Follows on from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: only worry about the stuff at the top once the bottom sections (more basic needs) are under control. When ppl embrace convenience items like the FV tractor, that speaks to the desire to reduce the complexity of little problems.

Complications: things to think about while designing the grind
– Players are really good at finding the best path to the cheese. They will then complain if it’s not any fun.
– Safe optimisations: death penalties that are too punitive can create grindy behaviour. Less severe punishment encourages players to take chances.

Indirection
– The more layers of indirection you have between what the player is doing and what he wants to do, the more frustrating the grind will be

Social grinds
– You must have a group to advance
– FB games take this to a high level; you have to get 15 friends to tolerate your game behaviour in order for you to progress. ‘pay money or go viral’

Recursive grinds
– Or the catch-22 grind:` i can’t PvP till i have PvP gear, which i can only get when i PvP
– Tanking is hard to learn, and harder if you’re not geared. most of the time the good tanking gear is inside the dungeons — this is not great

Competitive grinds
– Grinds that compare scores end up favouring early entry and those who invest more time and resources irl
– Can act as a barrier to entry for latecomers (Shadowbane: need a fully loaded city to compete, so older established cityholders stomped all over new ones)

Grinding for Upkeep
– Keep something from decaying by grinding — pay gold to keep stuff
– Upkeep costs on your house are a powerful motivator until you miss a payment, and then it is a powerful motivator to cancel your account
– We’ve mostly stopped doing this. Don’t take stuff away from players.

Strategies and Opportunities

– How much time and devotion does your bus model need from players? Are daily play sessions healthy? are the requirements ones that players are likely to be able to meet? Do you need to take as much time as you’re taking?
– Be inclusive: be sure grind doesn’t prevent people from getting to interesting content (Magic: multistrategy approach to helping players work around grinds: closed drafts, peasant leagues, powerful rare cards)

The Slutty Design
– Your competitors’ grinds are an opportunities for you
– You can give away the milk for free
– Scratch the gaming itch while noticeably getting rid of tedium: Sims online, grind to build houses, however players could retreat to the offline products
– The concept of the slutty design is why many games in many genres have gotten less hardcore over time — to the infuriation of the hardcore. Not to say that we have to abandon the hardcore, just balance it out.

Give feedback
– Life is full of real grinds (go to school to get a job, work hard to get a promotion, go on multiple dates to get.. married)
– One way game grinds are superior: the progress bar. You know where you are. In real life you may have no idea.

In conclusion;
– Players often perceive the grind as bad, and you have to start with that assumption and work with it.

Q: Once players have done the grind once on their main, how about shortcuts for higher level alts?
A: This can be a solution. for DAOC RvR was the secret sauce and they wanted to get ppl there as fast as possible; however if you want ppl to experience levelling up that might not be great, to rush them through. in general it’s better for players to play the game they want to play.

Q: Achievements in single player is a lot of fun, but in MMOs it leads to grind, esp with leaderboards. the metagame becomes so huge that it takes over.
A: Maybe, but I’ve found many SP achievements to be stupidly grindy too. A lot of games try to move hardcore gameplay to achievements in order to get the grindy stuff off the main critical path. A lot of players won’t log in unless they have something to do, and achievements allow designers to provide this pretty cheaply

Q: Balance rewards for grind behaviour with rewards for skills behaviour?
A: Yes, but it’s really hard. Problem is not usually balancing grind vs skill, it’s that usually those two things compound, so that usually the ppl who are really good play a lot so they get both sets of rewards and will crush players who only have one type of rewards. This is a problem designers have to solve

Q: What do you think about the relationship of friend feeds (FB) and grind?
A: It’s perceived as a grind for a lot of ppl cos they feel squicky about drawing their friends into the game experience for various reasons, and designers of those games are still trying to figure it out. I sees SGs as being where EQ was 20 years ago: you have to group to advance. They’ve dialled it back now and I think FB games are backing away from it now bc a lot of ppl are introverts and don’t want to share, they want to play FB games solo.

Q: Maybe don’t have cheap grindy things (find all the books) if you want to satisfy the hardcore
A: This might actually appeal to some hardcores, but most of these type of grinds reward dedication, not skill.

Q: What about grind that players impose on each other? Like WoW gear score
A: An interesting development but not sure what to think of it yet. Gear score filled a critical need, in that its hard to run a dungeon with a tank that’s undergeared, so ppl want to make sure this won’t happen. Players got v dogmatic about it, and will disband immediately if you’re not awesomely geared. Possibly it’s gone too far but not sure how to correct it.

Brief history of social games:
2008 — word/card games _ quiz apps + mafia: texty, not a lot of prod value
2009 — FV +flash games: polished, ”year of the flash app’, v mass market and widely played
2010 — FRV + ?? More sophisticated game design practices in social games, games getting more fun and more interesting to work on

SG before FV
– evolution in game mechanics
– influenced by web best practices: SG mostly figured out by web guys; methodologies tended to be web methods rather than trade game design

FRV basic facts
– launched June 10 2010, designed at zynga east (MD)
– studio founded by game and UI designers
– 33-35MIL MAU

FRV original goals
– experiment w game design in a social space
– ‘try another farming game’ — theme seemed to appeal to a wide demographic (‘little house on the prairie’ for the girls!!)
– topic w/mass market appeal; want to play with lots of real friends
– ways to make it “more social”
– use game design to weave together best practices
– didn’t want to make a radical departure, just wanted to meld everything that works with a cool new theme

Start with the idea of an ideal screenshot: what are you aspiring to make? what are players aspiring to do?

Pitch things that made it into the final game (are these the things that with hindsight made FRV a hit?)
– click on anything, esp when visiting: highly interactive but v simple. wanted to make visiting more social, was most fun aesthetically to see what friends had done but not much to do when visiting in FV
– clearing and exploring: make wilderness my own, like unwrapping a gift
– building customisation: wanted lots of self-expression
– energy bar: successful in mafia wars; good way to ‘charge by the click’ — every click a player makes on content is being charged for in an indirect sense. Manages the problem of too many clicks (really clean play xp for 5 mins but then it grows and you get overwhelmed), session mgmt at 10-15 mins, easy to monetize. ppl can sneak in when they’re supposed to be doing something else (work, school)
– collections: each click can be a surprise. scarcity, completes. little projects to finish and get rewards
– weakest of original ideas: schoolhouse. didn’t launch with it cos it felt old, but added it later. could have been a step too far for launch.

These are all good enough ideas to put in the final game, but with JUST these features it’d be another FV, just another farm game. ‘You can’t conceive all the best fun on paper’ — it’s what you learn through tinkering with the game that makes it fun and great.

Stuff we found along the way — late-breaking solutions
– did lots of prototyping and playing
– put real players in front of the game
– took a lot of time to polish
– ‘jamming stuff in and ripping stuff out’: certified in JSI/RSO?

– ‘Doobers’ and bonus bar: lots of stuff flying out after click actions, for excitement, seems more dynamic and will generate click investment (optional) – safety valve on click fatigue
– Reputation: hard to get ppl to prioritise this, so Reynolds coded it himself. Social xp bar, measures altruistic progress. Want to encourage ppl to visit their friends’ frontiers bc it’s more fun to be social but also for viral reasons. Turned out to be fun and got good response from players. Social currency concurrent with traditional currency system
– Varmints: more like pinata than hazard; added as an afterthought cos there are wild animals on the frontier. Debate about how mean to make them. Cool for players to learn patterns: which varmints emerge under which conditions. Accidental bug made the snake spew loads of stuff, they saw it was cool and wanted to make more types of varmints and create contexts
– Frontier Jack: originally a hasty friendly face for the tutorial; he inspired funny voices in the office and he gradually became a character. All the other characters evolved from this.
– Family: not in original pitch, more of a ‘panic thing’ afterwards, popular idea in the green-light meeting. Knew they wanted players to make avatars; this let them hook into the social sparks of the way ppl interact and share on FB, which is where the ‘social gold’ is — i want to learn stuff about my friends, what they’ve over-shared about their family life, learn about ppl i’m not in touch with from day to day. the family feature lets ppl do this — creating spouses (does she look like the real spouse?) players say that creating spouse is the most fun they’ve had in the game. Lots of special social expression happening with this feature.
– Quests: never thought of this! ‘desperate attempt to make our tutorial not suck’. Really quick 5-click tutorial that teaches you to click on things, learn the things they wanted players to know. Try to make games so you can play them while you learn — learning is hard but jumping into the action is fun and the learning can happen there.
– Story and narrative: you can make ppl pay to find out the end of the story: they keep coming back and suddenly we have a game design feature!
– humor (esp in feeds): wanted to teach players how to move stuff with the lost sheep — cartoon in the feed prompt elicits interest

The stuff that turned out to be great about FRV was the stuff that we found along the way.

How can game designers come to the social space and succeed? Most of what we did was knowing about classic patterns in game design and adapting them in new and social ways. WoW hit the jackpot with quests. Pardo: ‘quest designers are the cruise directors of WoW’, we knew about that pattern and leveraged it in the tutorial — we adapted a classic game design pattern.

pattern: exploring and civilising. you don’t start with a hostile map, but it’s wild and untamed — you gradually come to own it and change the game board yourself so it reflects your taste

pattern: great interactivity. make stuff explode, make pretty things fly around etc. stuff to grab, dynamic, unpredictable — fun and players respond to it

pattern: episodic content: ‘we’re in the tv business’. players are coming back to see what’s next in the story. This indicates ways to do business too — wait for next episode or buy the DVD? Allow new players to buy conext so they can have the same experience as their friends?

pattern: pinata effect: Diablo 2 — enemies are pinatas, every click is a chance to win something

What game designers bring to social
– you know how to balance game systems — there’s a lot of balancing and fine tuning into makin a smooth experience
–write GOOD stories and text. cpmmuniate in appealing ways
– deep game design that plays easily
– know how to solve game problems.
– know difference between fun and spam
– adapt classic game design patterns in new social ways

importance of hiring game designers
– quality bar is going up — the more we figure out how to make cool games, the grader it is to settle for something old (concepts)
– story content is cheap to make compared to making new game engines, art assets, etc.
– mass market games need depth buried in simplicity — players want subtlety
– ‘fun’ monetizes well: a lot of ppl think god game design retains players, game designers are in the retention box. i’ve noticed that’s the parts of games designed by game designers that end up monetizing well — they can design better virtual goods that players want to buy
– the limits of A/B testing
– success in entertainment requires fresh content: audiences are going to tire of things. in tv you can’t put out one show for 57 series, there’s a limit and then it goes away. in tv you have to keep looking for new hits and it should be the same in games.

FRV lessons learned
– start with a mass market concept that has broad appeal across demographics (nuclear bomb of SG is that i can play with all of my friends on FB). really short play sessions ‘so i can play at work
– respect the lessons of prior social games: try to innovate from proven mechanics before launching off in some radical direction. FRV is the stepchild of FV and mafia wars (collections, energy-based progress)
– remember that what i really want to do on FB is learn about my friend: the game might be fun but i really want to share stff about me with my friends offer opportunities to giggle with friends, have meaningful interactions and social sparks
– get it running right away: all the great stuff came in the learning later.
– take the time to get it right: a good game will take longer than you think, and a bad launch will kill you. i found a lot of sneaky ways to get more time! how to not ship your game 101 is next year’s talk. the first people tat play your game are the most engaged social players, the most likely to spread virals and the most likely to pay if you blow oit with a bad launch you miss out forever on those users. better for the game to have limited features but you must ship whatever you do ship in excellent form — fun, pretty, amazing because you’ll never get another chance.
– adapt classic patterns in new social ways: mash up stuff and make new cool games. Civilization was a mashup of Empire and Civ board game tech tree, diplomacy stuff and maps from railroad tycoon. it ended up amazing
– high depth behind simple systems
– innovate! these things really are games, and ppl play them to be entertained. they want to see new and interesting stuff. even telling new stories, speaking in ways players haven’t heard before. social innovations are the best ones of all: new ways to socialise and share are the features that will be the most amazing.

Playdom: online, mobile — #1 on myspace, 50Mil MAUS, part of Disney interactive media group. autonomous but also supported by Disney

GS Agent — liaison btw community and game teams, connects w community through fan pages, blogs, forums, support, surveys/polls, other channels

Fan pages (FB) allow GS agents to update millions of fans with a single post
- app to user, one way
- 3 images max/time
- 320 k limit on post
- roadmap to various demos, multiple daily updates
- sound bites/blogs/forums
- GATEWAY to playdom evangelists

Blogs: for more engaged users, use them to get ppl to forums
– app to user, one way (forums for many to many)
– tips & tricks
– hot support topics, promotes power features in more depth
– TREASURE MAP, leaving breadcrumbs for power users to pick up
– example of shoplifters in Market Street game, post provided tips on how to stop them

Forums: where we gauge community mood, take comm pulse
– empower strong mods to provide player to player channel
– highly engaged users
– many to many channel
– brand evangelists (terrorists)
– vocal minority vs town speaker (latter represents greater good)
– relay bad news in the best way (player to player)
– mods take ownership of the game and feel responsible for players, empathise with them and can predict their reactions
– NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH, ‘good hell’s angels’
– anoraky CoW spreadsheet

UGC/User feedback: contests on fan pages, forums and blogs (monthly if possible)
– users make their own voices heard through multiple ways (youtube, fan sites, game tips, community)
– key = balance (bug fixes, roadmap and suggestions); balance new content with roadmap and user suggestions (careful of vocal minority)
– fans come up with the best ideas
– example: building design contest, ‘cheat the system’

Support, surveys and polls
– one to one with players
– give personal attention, learn hard but necessary truths
– find out context behind the words, understand players’ emotional motivations
– most expensive but you get the greatest ROI when done properly
– ‘we show players that we care’

GDC SF — 2009 rules of social gaming
1) start with a good game (good insight; many were barfing up games that didn’t make sense — run acid test internally)
2) you DO have a second chance to make a first impression; you can make a comeback after launching a game
3) we work in perpetual beta, things are always evolving and changing
4) find the balance — game performance vs new stuff. users want features fixed as well as getting new ones

GDC Austin 2010 rules?
1) good can be bad
2) bad can be good — the way you deal with mistakes gives you opportunities to create loyalty. how do you deal with customers in a crisis?
3) find and heed the lesson: why did you get the results you did? do you understand it?
4) does this make sense? does the community like what you’ve done?

2009 — year of spaghetti (throw ideas at the wall; see what sticks)
2010 — year of strategic bets (make educated guesses)

lessons from 2010, yin/yang
– recurring themes that change the way we look at users
– there are no mistakes unless you make them twice

BUGS
– frustrate players
– we want to use bug reporting to gauge interest in the game
– use bugs as a way of telling users that we care, demonstrate how we prioritise and fix things
– succeed and learn together with players

too expensive?
– mobsters 2 — we made mistakes (no shoes for the titanium armour set). CMs are the first to catch these
– show advantage and create buzz, be clear

Why not freemium?
– we do have to find the balance between paying/non users
– understand the player’s POV (even if they’re not paying), relay that to internal teams
– explain value to users/players

Legacy items previously paid for
– vocal minority of people who paid more will complain, however this is how the world works and it’s our responsibility to explain the situation
– no. of happy players has to outweigh no. of unhappy
– messaging is often the issue; relay community reactions to game teams
– select great items

Community activists — evangelists and bullies
– develop relationships based on mutual trust and respect, give and receive
– player to player vs playdom to player
– crisis is often the road to evangelism

Virals/pop-ups
– Tiki Farm : pop-ups performed but the experience for users was bad
– CoW virals (embassy pop-ups) are performing well, virals are reminders or thank-yous, these make sense and are a communication avenue for users
– design true social features rather than features that will cost you

Downtime
– Alert the community and explain why the game is down; manage the situation properly
– offer consolation items; the msg comes through that you’re sorry
– evangelist users came to playdom’s defence

Monetization errors / fraud
– mistakes do happen; you need a good way to prioritise and do damage control (brand terrorism can spread very quickly)
– many companies don’t have SLAs for monetization/fraud — make sure you prioritise these situations highly. if only 3% of your users pay, you have to keep them happy! this is true of any issues that erode trust — you must prioritise these
– the acquisition funnel is not endless; it’s easier to retain customers than to find new ones (it’s alarming that existing players aren’t nurtured more in general)

Sunsetting titles
– communicate to understand the player’s POV — they’ve invested and they won’t be happy
– this is a trust erosion/building opportunity
– wrong way: shut down all Acclaim games with no notice in a single announcement; this affected playdom’s rep, they failed to save, harness and move players
– right way: users get personal emails well in advance when games are closing, now they msg early — this is essentially marketing msging to promote other titles

Marketing vs servicing
– tug of war between these factions
– clear communication with internal teams smoothes the path
– relay the details, over-communicate on money issues
– update all comm channels for reference

A/B tests
– this is essential best practice
– arm CMs with knowledge that you’re testing in order to contain any negative spirals; internal communication is key

What will the 2011 lessons be?
– seen everything before

– CM support varies, 3-5 games per CM and one mod per game
– handpick evangelists from forum community

More active CM work at the time of a game launch, but have best practices that are followed throughout

CMs answer CS tickets, and this has been enlightening about customers (esp about what not to do). it doesn’t scale well; if you build team from the ground up, make this a critical step. make sure your staff are knowledgable evangelists

Program or Be Programmed,
originally uploaded by jpob.

A talk by Douglas Rushkoff on 12th March 2010

[This isn't a word-perfect record -- if I got anything jarringly wrong, please comment!]

Online, things get extreme very fast and change a lot in a short space of time. There’s an overwhelming sense that we’re trying to operate society on obsolete social code, on the basis of legacy systems we don’t even remember that aren’t appropriate for what we want to get done. If we don’t understand these old systems, we have no chance of recognising the new programs that are layered on top. Understanding of this places people into one of two camps: the programmers, and the programmed. Grokking programming bias is really important because it helps us manage ourselves in context – the most important thing is to recognise that programming bias exists in the first place.


How much of our outdated social code is the result of bias of the media, and how much is due to the bias of the programmers? How can we tell the difference? We won’t know until we understand how our technologies work, and how they work on us. Essentially, if you’re not a programmer, then you’re one of the programmed. A metaphor for this: a kid gets a videogame and plays it til he gets stuck, and then goes to get cheat codes – beginning to play outside the original context of the game. His role shifts from player to cheater. If he really likes the game he goes online and finds out how to mod it, becoming an author. If his mod becomes popular, he gets programming job offers and creates his own stuff. This process sees him move from being passive to increasingly more active – stages our civilisation has moved through in terms of media.

In a civilization of readers, we get a nation of readers and an elite class of writers. Now we have a nation of bloggers that are largely blind to, and don’t think about, the biases they’re operating within. Facebook is biased towards reducing humans to a consumer profile. Google is biased towards the extraction of value from content creators. At each stage when we get a new medium, civilization seems to be one iteration behind. Programming is bigger than the printing press – it’s as big as text. What does it give us? Automaticism? Conclusion: the Book as a medium is over, and biases of written culture are giving way to the biases of digital culture. To underline the biases for digital media, Rushkoff assigned commands for them.

1) TIME — Thou shalt not be always on. Asynchronous conversations (e.g. those on the Well) allow lots of time to think, like chess by mail. These conversations are therefore richer for being online than they would have been in real life. Once we turn an asynchronous medium into one that’s always on, we ‘fry our nervous systems’ and start exhibiting stress factors that arise from the always on-ness of tech – like phantom thigh vibration syndrome (physical sensation of ringing phone).

2) DISTANCE – Thou shalt not do from a distance that which would be better done in person. There’s a lack of understanding about short and long distance biases, and a fetishism that has us using long-distance tech in short-distance situations: students running a UN simulation in Second Life while sitting in a classroom! This is pretty common, and recognizing the biases will help us learn to use the most appropriate methods and tech for each situation.

3) SCALE – Exalt the particular. Not everything scales, should scale or needs to scale. The popular belief that the only way to make money online is to scale up aggregation of what other people are creating exacerbates Jack Welch-style hypercapitalism (the parts of your business that work are imperfect and should be sold off; the goal is to become more like a bank), and it doesn’t have to be this way.

4) DISCRETE – You may always choose none of the above. Everything is a choice, digitally. The real world is analogue, not digital, and analogue recordings of our world are physical artefacts of real events that have occurred; a digital copy is a symbolic representation of an event through metrics. Digital is symbolic as text is symbolic. The problem with digital metrics is that any metric we haven’t thought of is gone until someone realises it’s been left out. Online life occurs in a digital environment of forced choice: you start to believe that the options are pre-existing conditions of the universe, but they aren’t — they’re the choices given in the program that you’re involved in. You don’t want to live ‘snap-to-grid’, but that’s the only way to relate through the digital. “Withholding choice from the available options isn’t death, but life.”

5) COMPLEXITY – Thou shalt never be completely right. The net tends to prematurely reduce the complex; everything is one level deep. Wikipedia seems deep and complex to us now, but in the old days an encyclopedia was a joke! It’s hard to explain this without seeming anti-folksonomy, but that’s not necessarily the case – moving through pathways to get to the cherry is how we learn, and it’s not a worse approach, just different. Philip Rosedale has remarked that within 10 years Second Life will be indistiguishable from reality: if this were true, it would be because our perceptual apparatus will have devolved to the point where we can’t tell the difference! Our perceptual apparatuses are declining: kids raised on mp3 have 20% less ability to make auditory distinctions than previous generations because their brains have been trained differently. These are choices, and recognising this frees us to use digital simulations as models with chosen parameters.

6) OUT OF BODY – Thou shalt not be A/anonymous. The non-corporeal nature of the internet is great for some types of users (political dissenters, torrenters [ha ha]), but it’s bad for community and the social contract. We have to work against the tendency of the net to equalize us through anonymity, otherwise we become parts of polarised mobs with no sense of the consequences of our actions. Conditions of anonymity nerf us in important ways: they allow us to sidestep the prejudices that pervade our real lives, and they negate our ability to communicate non-verbally. Reportedly 80% of communication is non-verbal, so online we use 20% of the communication capability that we have – we focus on language, which is desocialising and solipsistic. We can see from blogs that allowing anonymous comments leads to worse remarks/content because of lack of accountability. Radical but powerful view: it’s liberating to adopt a strict sense of identity online, for everything.

7) CONTACT – Remember the humans. Content is not king in a communication environment –, contact is. ‘Social marketing’ is an oxymoron; it reduces multiplicity of connections down to one. There are humans responsible for the value you receive – it’s important to remember that we don’t have to give everything to the hive for free. There’s a difference between offering stuff we do for free to others and delivering it to Google, a corporation that’s happy to extract value from us. You’re allowed to do what you want, and it’s okay to not deliver everything for free (so that corporations can profit).

8) ABSTRACTION – As above, not so below. Everything doesn’t happen at different levels in the same way. Media abstracts: abstraction is what symbol systems do, but in this case it leads to a chaos systems assumption about the real world that can be modelled in computers but doesn’t exist in the real world. Spending time in abstracted space makes the games seem real when they’re not – don’t make equivalencies between abstractions and the real world – abstractions don’t work with real people.

9) OPENNESS – Thou shalt not steal. When there’s no social contract, openness can continue until there’s nobody left to give anything away. If Google succeeds in bringing the free tv model to everything there’ll be nothing left to advertise, and Google will eventually eat its tail! Getting something for free is not open source – having the world being open to Google is the same sort of thing as wanting the third world to be open to the world bank. Nothing is free.

10) END USERS – Program or be programmed. Everything in the digital realm is programmed. You’re either creating software or you ARE the software. We think ‘what can the tech do for us’ rather than ‘what can we make it do’. If we start living in a world where everything is a product we consume rather than something we use to create value, we’re doomed. Ignorance of programming is unhelpful. Kids are being taught to be users, not programmers. We accept black-boxness of devices (e,g, MS Wizard – mysterious processes, stay away!!) . User and coder move increasingly far apart under the false premise that the farther the distance, the easier things are.

We celebrate our new-found agency in the digital age but remain one step behind the programmer. This is an amazing moment where we can program money, society – but we have to understand 1) the programs and 2) the mean sets, codes, symbols and how we relate to them. We can’t understand how to work with them if we don’t understand the technology we’re using to express and codify them; but, if we don’t create a society that’s aware of programming and that devices are being programmed in certain ways, we’ll end up being just users and the used.

Q&A

Q: How do we implement these commands? A: We need to start sharing our ideas and info about how biases apply to what we use. Europe and Korea are teaching programming to school kids, ut the US isn’t. When we create a nation of dumb users, we end up not having anyone left to realise what’s happened and why it’s important.

Other parts of the world have a different perception of programmers. We think of it as grunt work to outsource, we distance ourselves from it; but the people who do this work are the new Masons.

Q: How does this differ from the old arguments about literacy and cold war concerns about the fitness of US youths when it comes to science and technology? A: The only way it’s different is in the definition of literacy. Literacy today means to program, but the old definition is ‘to be able to make an extended linear argument through an 18th century novel’, which is not an up to date literacy for a digital world.

Audience comment: When the web was young it was decentralised, but now it’s centralised (like Facebook). Geeks, when you’re thinking about making stuff, consider decentralisation. A: People adopt client side stuff because they think they’re going to get something. The future is perceived to be in digital/private currencies, and this will do to the central bank what Craigslist did to Hearst. It has to happen in a decentralised way.

Q: In terms of staying true to your real life identity, how do you see the future? A: Facebook is pushing for to be the verification agent of online identity, and verifiability is going to be something either we or they pay for. This verifiability will help with the adoption of digital currencies too.

END! Visit http://pbsdigitalnation.org for more fun discussions.

The schedule kicks into gear after lunch (a meal that I’m probably not going to be requiring after stuffing myself with bacon and wholegrain pancakes [in that order] at breakfast), and if my notes turn out to be coherent after a session I’ll pop them up. Tweeting now and then from @jen_bolton too. If you happen to see me around, come and say hi!

Somebody’s nicked Heroquest, we rarely have enough of us in for a decent game of Werewolf and my Rock Band expertise doesn’t extend far beyond songs by the Police (oh, the joy in their eyes as they’re forced to play ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ *again*!), so I bought some new stuff for game hour this week. I wasn’t around for the deboxings this morning though, since I’ve taken the day off to recuperate after juggling like a trained octopus all month.

Finished Mass Effect this morning, finally. Expected it to be good and it was, although the Paragon ending left me a bit cold and the romance stuff was eye-rollingly bad. At least [spoiler alert!] Kaidan didn’t pounce on Shepard at the end. Thinking about it… if ME’s supposed to be a trilogy, I wonder if we’ll be able to import our Shepards all the way through?

The session schedule was pretty packed and I couldn’t make it to everything I fancied due to things happening concurrently, but I managed to pick many awesome brains, eat 17 brownies and sun my translucent arms for the first time this year, so I wouldn’t dream of complaining.

The first talk I went to was about brainstorming game ideas. That attracted a lot of interest. It involved hashing out timed exercises on paper, and it wasn’t the sort of group exercise I expected but it got some lazy synapses firing ahead of the rest of the day, which was good.

A small, standup discussion on MMO guilds was next, led by a lovely gal who leads a kinship in LOTRO. There were only four of us, all experienced MMO gamers, so most of it was friendly eggsucking but towards the end it took a neat turn towards how to recruit for the kind of guild you want to develop (which reminds me to try to figure out exactly what’s going on with GamerDNA).

Dan and Katy joined me for a lovely lunch by the window, and then I wandered down to the Rock Band. There seemed to be a queue so I nested on the sofa, enjoying my raised blood sugar level while perusing RSS feeds. Back upstairs to join my guild master in ruminating about whether ARGs are FISHed. They might be. :) Two other interesting people contributed to that talk, and I found out later that one of them was Justin Hall – a person I’ve been told I should meet at some point. That would have been a good point. Whoops!

The last session I went to was a discussion about how to properly wrap up Virtual Magic Kingdom, so that the kids who spent time and money building presence there can maintain social ties with one another and take away nice mementos of their experiences. Knowing how the closing of a game can affect adults, as with Asheron’s Call 2 and one a bit closer to home, the little players of VMK plucked gently at my heartstrings all the way home. I think the discussion yielded some good ideas, and I hope they’ll help.

This GameCamp was made of win. I had a really fun, thought-provoking day. Already nursing a couple of ideas for stuff to talk about next time.

Last Friday, a couple of the guys were super-organized and brought in Mario Kart for the Wii. We’ve got a Wii in our games room, but unfortunately someone had borrowed its power cable for a couple of weeks (!) so we couldn’t actually play anything on it. Having only five players, which isn’t quite enough for Werewolf, we decided to fall back on an old classic: HeroQuest.

Although a suspicious number of our brothers had apparently played HeroQuest back in the day, none of us ever had so we spent the first half hour pawing at the game pieces and trying to figure out the rules. In defiance of typecasting, I picked the Dwarf character. (You can’t go too far wrong hacking at everything with an axe.) We each entered the the dungeon from a different place on the map, and sortof individually winged it through sections of the pre-made level one dungeon, fighting goblins, finding a bit of treasure and falling into traps.

The game was rushed and improvisational – not quite HeroQuest as intended, but a great experience. With five minutes left it descended into all-in PvP vs. the Elf, which I’m happy to say (since my Dwarf started it), the Elf lost. Next to a particularly spirited game of Rock, Paper, Scissors with my daughter, it was the most fun I had all week.