Apologies...

Apologies...  It appears we've missed the entire month of May!  It's obvious that we need some help, so here is our Call for Editors notice again in case you were interested in the responsibilities.

Call for Editors

GDAM wants to strengthen its team of editors and would like to hear from individuals who would be interested in joining us. Routine tasks of GDAM Editors include:

• Developing or taking care of incoming topic suggestions
• Acting as contact points for writers and assisting them during article submissions
• Editing and preparing articles for publication
• Participating in the production and publication of GDAM podcasts
• Promoting GDAM via various communication platforms

A certain level of commitment is expected.

Also, we'd like to implement a change to Game Design Aspect of the Month that hopefully will make the site change for the better rather than the worse.  We've heard that sometimes the month goes by and an article doesn't get written up in time.  But, the topic is still interesting to some people.  So, rather than let our old topics lay to waste, we will start accepting articles from previous months' topics.  However, the priority will always be on the current topic of the month!

What do you think?  Let us know.

Where’s the Fun?

In this article, Steele Filipek and Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment explain why the opening hook is so important to video games and how game designers can create opening hooks that deliver gamers into game worlds of long-lasting fun.

One of Shigeru Miyamoto’s more famous quips is, “Find the fun.” That is, first find what is fun about a game and then build around that. It can be narrative, gameplay, action, mystery, whatever. Find the fun, the essence of what makes your game uniquely enjoyable and what will keep a gamer coming back for more. In that briefest of statements, the creator of Mario, Link, and a host of other iconic characters has captured the essence of creating a game: make the player WANT to play the game.

This desire is what separates a fling from a passionate affair. All games are a narrative about choice, after all: develop your pawns or move a knight, buy Boardwalk or save your money, hit on sixteen or pray for a dealer bust. The ones that people never put down are the ones that are gratifying on more than just a superficial level, the ones that give back for a long time to come.

Video games are a natural extrapolation of that, but at an average of fifty to sixty dollars for console or PC title, gamers need to be sure that their investment is worth three times as much as a DVD, five times as much as a film, or six times as much as a novel. The most important choice for a gamer is an abstract one: whether to play at all. And that means that the most vital moment of any game lies in the opening – the hook – where the gamer decides whether to continue playing or move on to other pursuits.

If one will allow a comparison, should this hook be…

…a long, drawn-out, unskippable cinematic with poor voice-acting, overblown graphics, and a story that seems to go everywhere at once, followed by a tedious training mission in which the game leads the gamer by the hand?

Or…

…a quick showcase of the story, including (if any) the protagonist, the goal, the obstacles in the middle, and an element of mystery that launches almost immediately into the first level of gameplay? There, the player is rewarded for his/her time with a gratifying experience of wonder and achievement.

That comparison might seem too simple but far too many games fail right out of the box because they place too much emphasis on the cinematic rather than the game itself. Games aren’t films. They have a language all their own, one that is based around a person controlling the events in a simulated environment. Short and awesome will always trump long and expository, so demand more from your writers by asking for less. Putting emphasis on the narrative right off the bat is understandable and sometimes necessary (particularly for sprawling, JRPG-style titles), but why would a gamer want to WATCH an event when they can take part in it?

Certainly, an emotional connection needs to be established from the get-go. In a narrative-oriented game, for example, the player needs to take a gut punch from the villain, experiencing something directly or indirectly that subverts everything he symbolizes and stands for. We see this in the greatest video games and that’s no accident. And it can be done with shocking brevity. Both Mass Effect 2 and Half-Life 2 thrust the protagonist into a world of mystery, adventure, and terror, where the villains seem insurmountable and victory hopeless. But they – and many other, successful games that rely heavily on narrative – accomplish this with very limited cut-scenes that lead directly into gameplay that cleverly masks learning with a sense of tone and accomplishment. Within thirty minutes, one has taken down a platoon of Combine Overwatch Soldiers (Half-Life) or a swarm of renegade androids (Mass Effect) and suddenly, even with hours of gameplay ahead, the gamer has become a willing participant in a world quite different from reality.

Many games, however, require little to no narrative of this nature. Tetris, Snood, Boom Blox…even a title like Super Mario Bros. There are no intros, no cinematics; just an opening level that establishes the world, the rules of the universe, and the mechanics. Or, in the case of a sports title like Madden, an pulse-pounding collage of battle and victory that quickly segues a gamer (heart-pounding) into an arena where he or she controls the action. With good design, players instantly feel at ease in a game that they didn’t even know the rules of just a few minutes before.

When a hook is done correctly, gamers won’t even know they’re being taught how to play. Jump on that first goomba in Super Mario Bros. and you automatically know how to defeat almost every enemy in the game. The learning not only CAN be the fun part, it SHOULD be the fun part. Like Robert McKee wrote, “Make your exposition ammunition.” Tell players what they need, when they need it on the fly, using story and environmental elements to show rather than tell, and then give them a sense of triumph that gratifies their actions. It doesn’t matter if they don’t understand the draw of the game beyond a primal urge of completion or accomplishment. When a good game is engaging from the opening, nobody wants to put it down.

It doesn’t need to be long, then, but it does need to be good. Bad controls? Glitchy graphics? Unlikable protagonist? Why would someone stick around when a title is only going to offer more of the same for entire rest of the game? The first minutes should be some of the most highly crafted, highly detailed, and most minutely controlled minutes of any title. Play through the director’s commentary of the first level of Portal and you’ll understand what this means. This isn’t to say that the next twenty hours of a title are inconsequential, but that the hook functions as both a preview and a contract for the gamer from the creators. Here is the game that we’ve created, and here is why you’re going to fall in love with it.

Miyamoto understood this. It’s why his games stand the test of time, even though some are as simple as “climb a ladder, jump the barrels, then save the girl from an angry ape”. It is about the willingness of a gamer to be drawn into a gaming world, and the eagerness of a game developer to create a game of lasting value. And by value, I mean fun.

Always find the fun.

Steele Filipek is Editorial Coordinator at Starlight Runner Entertainment, a New York-based transmedia production company.

Jeff Gomez is CEO of Starlight Runner, and is one of the foremost transmedia producers in the entertainment industry. His clients include 20th Century Fox (Avatar), The Walt Disney Company (Tron Legacy), and Microsoft (Halo). You can follow him on Twitter @Jeff_Gomez or on Facebook at Starlight Runner Entertainment.

In Medium Ludum

In this article, programmer Nels Anderson argues that "in medium ludum," or starting in the middle of a game, be it mechanically or narratively, may lead to better beginnings.

Jason Rohrer's Sleep is Death was released recently, providing unique digital gaming experiences that harken more toward improv theatre than anything else. Given the similarity, theatre professor and games critic Michael Abbott wrote a great post recently about how the methodologies of improv can be applied to Sleep is Death (and life in general). Given the inherently extemporaneous nature of that game, improv techniques are quite directly applicable. But, as I alluded to elsewhere, while I was reading Truth in Comedy, I was struck by how relevant their observations were to digital games in general, especially when it comes to how games begin.

Michael writes, "A Player needs 3 things: 1) A character who wants something. 2) A clearly defined situation, ideally with an inherent obstacle or conflict. 3) Strategies for getting what you want."

When digital games go off the rails, typically one of these three things is absent or vague. The player's goal is unclear ("I don't know where to go now"), the obstacles read poorly ("Is this room a dead end or did I miss a door somewhere?") or it's not clear how to start achieving the goals ("I can't see any way to open that door"). When I'm banging on about readability, this is what I'm talking about.

Note, this does not mean everything should be painfully obvious. The problem is when the player is at a dead end and feels like they have no means of discovering what to do or how to do it. Having to explore and puzzle things out is good, having absolutely no idea what to do and being reduced to trying things completely at random is not (e.g what happens when you're stuck in basically every old-school adventure game).

The other interesting lesson from improv I wanted to call out is "Start in the middle." Rather than starting at the beginning of some action or narrative, which tends toward unexciting exposition, the scene starts in the middle of some event. This technique is called "in media res" or literally, "into the middle of affairs." It's more common in film and television (e.g The Usual Suspects or Reservoir Dogs) than in games.

Despite my increasing intolerance for their staid mechanics and overwrought narratives, a number of JRPGs including several Final Fantasy incarnations have used this technique to good effect. So did Uncharted 2, both Max Payne games and the recent Tales of Monkey Island, for example. And of course, Planescape: Torment's "You wake up on a slab in The Mortuary" may be the best in medias res opening of all.

Opening in this fashion is still quite uncommon though. I wonder if part of the reason why more games don't open in medias res is that the character's mechanical progress moves with the game's narrative progression. By opening in the middle of some action, it may seem harder to have the character mechanically progress from there (and if flashbacks occur, one might feel like abilities ought to be removed). Many games also open by introducing mechanics in a tutorial-ish fashion, which may be a bit harder to fit into a scene or story already in progress.

A few games also begin in the middle of the game mechanically, but at the beginning of the action narratively. Most notable would be the Metroid Prime series, where that player begins with powerful equipment only to lose it after a short opening scene (I think Super Metroid opened this way as well, but I can't remember for sure). These abilities are slowly recovered until the player eventually surpasses that initial state.

We might call this structure "in medium ludum" (thanks Roger!) if we wanted to be delightfully pretentious. And to be honest, I'm not sure how successful I feel it is. For me, it often gives the feeling that for at least the first half of the game, you're behind the curve and simply playing catch-up. The Metroid series is so well engineered, and this formula is fundamental to its gameplay, it works. But other games that have attempted this, most recently I remember Prototype doing so, don't work as well.

I generally like in medias res openings, partially because it dovetails well with another improv lesson: "Take the active choice toward forward action." Especially in improv, given the choice between discussing some possibilities and simply doing one of them, always opt for the latter. While Shakespeare can make Hamlet-esque indecision fascinating, neither improv nor games are particularly suited for this. If a game explicitly offers a choice, it ought to be between one type of action or another, not between action and non-action. And by "action," I simply mean something meaningful for the player to do, not "action" like shooting guys in the face.

A great many games have sleepy, unengaging beginnings, rife with text-laden tutorial billboards and mundane tasks. This is something no game can afford, especially for those of us in the digital download space, where demos and conversation rates are of vital importance. But even more fundamentally, opening in media res can help focus a game. Starting at the beginning makes it very easy to justify a bunch of dry exposition about characters and a world the player doesn't care for (yet, hopefully). Starting with action and conflict, something that will be engaging for nearly everyone, we can draw players in. Don't throw a bunch of narrative at the player right out of the gate; wait until questions have been posed before supplying answers.

At the end of the day, our currency is engagement. Structuring a game to start in media res is only one approach. The first five seconds to five minutes of a game are vital, however. All games would be well served by a careful consideration of this portion of the experience.

All that from a short book about improv, eh? Again, I highly recommend it.

Nels Anderson is a programmer at Hothead Games. He's probably the only game developer in Vancouver (and maybe all of Canada) that was born and raised in Wyoming. He writes about games and game design on his blog, Above 49. A version of this article appeared there.

History, Mystery, Story: The Cinematic as Game Opening

In this article, freelance games writer Leanne C. Taylor takes a look at cinematics in the context of game openings. She identifies three ways in which cinematics can be used to create a bond between the game and players: History, Mystery, and Story.

Games are like movies, or so some would have us believe. With their ever-increasing budgets and graphical realism, they're certainly heading down that path. In movies, there's something that's colloquially known as the 10 minute rule. The idea is that, after 10 minutes, the viewer will generally have a good idea of whether they'll enjoy the rest of the movie or not. In games, which are exponential in terms of cost and time-cost for the audience when compared to movies, where does the 10 minute rule lie?

In the same way that the Call to Adventure comes at around 10 minutes in movies, to convince viewers they want to keep watching, games need a hook to convince the player to actually start playing. This can come in the trailers, before the game is released. In earlier days, when advertising for video games was all but unknown, it had to come from within the game itself.

This was where cinematics came in – they told the player the story, linked the gameplay to something the player could relate to, understand, or wonder about. Far apart from the gameplay, they gave the player a reason to keep playing.

But the opening cinematic of a game must do much more than simply tell the player the story or provide a hook. It has to convince the player that they have spent their money wisely. And because games are so much more expensive for the player in terms of time and money than movies are, it has to do so quickly.

The best and most memorable games that I recall from the past 20 years have managed to do this: to hook the player with their opening cinematics. But what made them so compelling? Why did they succeed where so many others have failed?

My theory is this: for original IP, your hook must be some form of a history or a mystery, probably combined. For second forays into a world, you can start to rely on story. It's easy to discover what kind of hook a certain game has by asking which one of these three things the player will be wondering about by the end of the intro cinematic:

• What has happened? (History)
• What's happening now? (Mystery)
• What's going to happen? (Story)

To illustrate my point, let's look at games from the three Big Bs – Blizzard, Black Isle/BioWare and Bethesda.

Mystery is the largest category – for first-run IPs, this seems to be the preferred method of getting and keeping players. In this category, we have games such as WarCraft 1, StarCraft 1, Diablo 1, Baldur's Gate 1, Planescape: Torment, Morrowind and, oddly enough, WarCraft 3. Despite our lone contender at the end, you'll notice most of those games have a one after their names. Sequels generally being a sign of success, we can assume these games did well.

The reason WarCraft 3 fits into the Mystery category is simple: since there were 6 years between the last released WarCraft title and when WarCraft 3 came out, Blizzard figured they would be attempting to sell their product to a new and broader range of gamers, and treated the IP as original. They developed a mystery in line with their lore, and met the Mystery and Story categories in a single two-minute cinematic. The result is something short, compelling, and lucrative.

History, by comparison, is the smallest category. These games usually have also either a Mystery or a Story to back them up, as History by itself is not especially conducive to gameplay. In this category, we have games such as WarCraft 2 and Diablo 2. They tell of the events that came before, and are most effective when applied to the player's previous actions. In WarCraft 2, you're continuing your battle. In Diablo 2, you're discovering the path of the Wanderer – your own character from the first game. History is more compelling with a personal context for the player.

This leaves us with Story. In this category we have games such as WarCraft 3: Frozen Throne, StarCraft: Broodwar, Baldur's Gate 2 and Oblivion. The question in these introductions is not What has happened? or What's happening now?, as these things are usually explained. Prior knowledge is used to propel the player into discovery, to lend the unmistakable allure of history in the making.

This, I would argue, is the most difficult way of creating a hook, simply because it relies on previous worldbuilding and play experiences to generate interest. These games often throw in a motive, such as revenge (Baldur's Gate 2) or Mystery (Oblivion) to give the story more shape, but their underlying message is: Come and play a part in what's about to happen. Come and create the future.

If we look at these categories from another angle, we can see a different way of trying to decide what draws the player in – is it discovering the past, understanding the present, or shaping the future? What experience do you want your player to have? How can you make it more personal?

Know all this, and you will know what the first 10 minutes of your game should be. You will have your hook. Know that, and you will know your audience. Know your audience, and they will love you for it.

Leanne C. Taylor is a freelance games writer currently lecturing in Interactive Narrative at Qantm College, Brisbane. Her most recent achievement is writing a lecture on the narrative structure of Kick Ass using Sleep Is Death as a delivery medium.

April 2010: The Opening Hook

This month's topic was proposed by game designer Doug Hill.

Doug writes:

Much like the first chapter of a book or the first fifteen minutes of a movie, the opening hook of a game quickly confirms whether a player will continue playing or find something else to do. This hook can come in many forms: showing a non-interactive opening movie, thrusting the player directly into gameplay, or even playing an interactive narrative opening that also hides a gameplay tutorial.

In this month's topic, Game Design Aspect of the Month wants to explore the ins and outs of creating a strong opening hook for games. Here are some potential topics to explore:

• What elements make a good opening hook for a game? How does interactivity change the opening hook in media, or does it?
  
  
• How do we best introduce the player to both the gameplay and the narrative? How do we handle games that are heavy on narrative? Light on narrative?
  
  
  
• How do we balance the need to teach the player how to play our game while still creating engrossing gameplay right from the start?
  
  
  
• What are the fundamental flaws and issues that many games still have with the initial user experience today? What can we do to remedy these flaws and issues?
  
  
  
• What games have gotten it right, and how did they do it? Can those lessons be applied to all games or just specific types of games?

Doug Hill is a freelance game designer and writer who has worked on a variety of published video games over the past ten years. His current focus is on developing intellectual property for use in both interactive and non-interactive media.

The Near Future of Viral Game Design

In this article, lead social designer Aki Jarvinen argues that 'viral games' might be a better name for social games and postulates the future opportunities for viral games.

In this essay, I want to pose questions about a design aspect which is particularly topical to social game design. This aspect is something that has not been traditionally associated with game design, but rather with marketing and distribution: virality.

It has been suggested that 'viral games' characterizes game applications in Facebook better than the widely adopted 'social' prefix.[1] Yet population is a prerequisite for any viral phenomenon, and it is through social interaction that viral growth can take place. So, viral games are social, and social games are viral, to the extent that their developers and marketers push them to be.

In this context, Facebook and its communication channels become the viral substrate [2] that both constrains and affords viral spread. In practice, designing viral growth for a social game is leveraging whatever communication channels the network platform affords, and integrating this set of constraints and possibilities with gameplay. The platform, such as Facebook, functions here as the viral substrate that sets boundaries for viral growth.

In this kind of design activity, the difference with marketing as such stems from the organic nature to gameplay - unless the marketer understands the details of gameplay, the viral features are in danger of turning into tacked-on messages that only take advantage of the standard communication channels of the network. The marketer-designer needs to understand the inner workings of the product, unlike with many other product categories.

The opportunity in this, in terms of development, is that even if the communication channels change, the message does not change. On the other hand, the player does not necessarily feel very motivated to only function as a puppet marketeer for the game developer. Rather, if there is ever to be an incentive for an individual player to virally spread the word, it needs to be about a personal achievement or decision in the game, not the game as such.

Innovating with viral

The innovation in the viral design of social games is either nearly non-existent, or goes barely unnoticed, due to the formats - i.e. the communication types and channels - that Facebook forces the virality into. The policies Facebook puts in place function as deterrents to aggressively viral endeavours, thus protecting its population.

As the Facebook platform as a viral substrate has changed, the boundaries of viral growth have changed. The development has been one of narrowing the channels rather than liberating them. This means that, e.g., FarmVille's (and Zynga's) status of non-displacement, acquired in 'wild west' days of Facebook virality, is literally non-displaceable.

More substantial and disrupting innovation might come from the double viral loops that connect outside Facebook - paradoxically, through Facebook Connect and Facebook's OpenGraph API, launched later this year, that allows many of the standard page functionalities from Facebook to be embedded into any page in the web. As we speak, social game developers are persuading players to give permission to email them directly. At once, this opens up a direct marketing channel for social games, and expands the viral substrate to an inherently viral medium - the substrate behind the success story of Hotmail, after all.

Nevertheless, I believe there is room for incremental innovation, both in terms of structure and content - even with the channels in place at present. This could constitute the near future of viral design, at least in the context of a social network like Facebook and the communication channels it affords.

Epidemic social gestures unlock viral breadth

If there is a near future of viral game design, my argument is that it is in modeling the viral feeds more strongly towards general social gestures.

This postulation is based on a starting hypothesis, according to which competitive gameplay reduces viral reach and its design possibilities. If we take a highly competitive social game and analyze the Facebook stream stories it persuades players to post, what is there beyond bragging, taunting, and the standard quantitative game data (levels, points, etc.) that can be communicated?

When the gameplay and theme are inherently competitive, the possibilities to adapt general social gestures to viral design become more narrow or at least their social reach stays within more or less fixed boundaries of taste and social proof. Viral messages about game events remain meaningful only to those already playing the game, or someone playing a very similar game.

This might give the virality some density within a closely knit group, but it does not automatically provide absolute breadth, especially if it is bordered with lack of social proof. It refers to general tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it. Social proof is something that differentiates viral in the epidemiological sense from viral in the marketing sense of the word.

Jesse Farmer approaches the same issue from the perspectives of network theory and epidemiology, and identifies two mechanisms of behavior adoption in social networks: The Threshold Model where people do something if enough of their friends are doing it, and the Cascade Model i.e. that people have a chance of doing something if one of their friends is doing it.[3]

Whichever the model, the persuasive means to follow other's actions are crucial. Besides effective copywriting, it is the social meaning of the viral gesture that is important. Majority of your friends might not care less if you got to level 32 at game X, but what if that leveling up stream story would guide you to dedicate it to a friend of yours who is about to turn 32? Even if your friend would not convert into a player instantly, the social gesture of congratulating more likely gives your game a positive tilt in terms of brand value and recognition - your game stands out from the spam in the mind of the yet-to-be player who is your friend. Embedding game events into social gestures presents a chance for a viral loop of social goodwill, but it has to sprout organically from your game's theme and mechanics, and their emotional potential.

Is social proof viral proof?

On the other hand, the forms of social proof are changing in online, networked contexts, discounting some. A common comment from any fan page of a Facebook game application goes: 'Add me please level 19 play daily'. In a social network that is supposed to work according to a reciprocical friendship principle, the benefits of game-related friends are over-riding traditional common nominators of friendship. It is not that games are creating social ties, games are becoming social ties. Such viral befriending is not constitutive of the behavior of the majority of population, but it is still common enough to warrant a reality check on

The broader spectrum of social gestures reaches beyond the competitive dimension. At the same time, expands the array of social emotions the virality can tap into, thus also affecting the gist of viral phenomena, i.e. behavioral adoption. Doing favors and reminiscing are examples of social gestures that, when originated from a game, function as a viral address between two or more people.

It is telling that the types of games (e.g., Friends for Sale) often disregarded as 'real' games by video game developers show signs of the approach. They also marry their gameplay with the social gestures rather than routinely stylize fantastic, or perhaps more appropriately 'farmtastic' actions into game mechanics.

In conclusion, the near future of viral design holds opportunities for experimentation, perhaps even creativity, that question the existing, formulaic means to create viral growth. The balance between density and breadth can be explored with a repertoire of viral channels, but also with social gestures unleashed within them, originating from a social game and injecting the player's friends with a meaning outside the game, and thus beyond spam.

This might open the floor for the first truly mainstream meme from a social game that goes beyond stream stories and parodies. Once that happens, we have arrived at the future of viral game design.

Aki Jarvinen, Ph.D, is the Lead Social Designer at Digital Chocolate, with a decade of experience from creating casual game experience through mobile, gambling, and online games. He is writing a book about social games - you can follow the progress here.

References

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TadhgKelly/20091218/3665/Zynga_and_the_End_of_the_Beginning.php

[2] http://20bits.com/articles/three-myths-of-viral-growth/

[3] http://20bits.com/articles/behavior-adoption-on-social-networks/

Why We Need to Pay Attention to Social Games

In this article, graduate student Nick LaLone points out that many video game designers view social games with disrespect and worries that if industry professionals do not take social games seriously, they may be doomed to repeat mistakes of the past.

What are Social Games?

Social games are a structured activity which has contextual rules through which users can engage with one another. Social games must be multiplayer and have one or more of the following features: turn-based, are based on social platforms for providing users with an identity and are casual[1].

A secondary feature of social games is that they tend to be on social networking sites like facebook, myspace, orkut, twitter, or any of the other services out there. The basic social game is linked to a database of friends who take turns doing things in a game through which they are linked (loosely) together in friendship and application.

What do game designers think of social games?

This is best summed up in two parts. First, you have the famous Jesse Schell talk in which he talks about the horror of social games, or the creation of a monetary or credit reward system for doing the right thing permeating the whole of society. Second, there is this sentiment that social media groups are designing games around the idea of making money.[2] And while Zynga has made a gigantic amount of money, there have not been a lot of other success stories.[3] Yet, because of this success, there is an ever-growing glut of imitators.

In a Google search of “zynga is,” the very first link is to an article through which comes this quote:

“Zynga makes mediocre games. What Zynga discovered is that Facebook had left an opening for spam. They acquired a lot of audience from a security loophole that Facebook has since closed. And they aren’t social. Their only social game is Poker — it’s the only one that you can chat in. All subsequent games are turn based and spread over days.”

The audience’s response? A round of clapping.[4]

However, in looking at the popularity of Zynga’s games / social experiments, you can state the following:

But a study done by research form Next Up for pre-IPO trading service SharesPost says Zynga is worth three billion dollars, putting it in the same league as Facebook’s estimated $5B valuation.

Another interesting monetary fact:

A surprising fact came up at last week’s 2010 Media Summit in New York. An eBay spokesman said that Zynga was PayPal’s second-largest merchant in 2009… it’s interesting to consider how Zynga became so big on PayPal, so quickly. Some of its most successful games were launched in 2008, and their quick growth helped prove to the world that virtual goods and virtual currency are a viable market… The caveat is that neither reached their full potential until part of 2009 was past — Zynga started 2009 with fewer than 15 million players. Then there are the many games that Zynga launched in the second half of 2009. Its two largest games today, FarmVille and Café World, were launched in July and September of 2009, respectively. FishVille was even later, showing up in November…Those games alone represent over half of Zynga’s current 240 million monthly active players, but they were barely present for most of the period that PayPal was measuring.[5]

With 3-5 games, Zynga has gained nearly half of the entire worth of EA [6]:

Market Cap (intraday)5: 6.02B
Enterprise Value (19-Mar-10)3: 4.27B

This has happened before

This sudden and amazing gain comes on the heels of another sore spot in the video game industry, the Nintendo Wii. Looking at the Google searches for “Nintendo Wii,” we find:

Ex-DICE boss and hardcore game designer Fredrik Liliegrin has labelled the Nintendo Wii a "virus" and says that it is "not a video games machine".[7]

However, the Wii has outsold the Xbox and the PS3 nearly 2 to 1 worldwide.[8] Consumers have answered with their spending power yet the game industry seems less than keen on the idea.

The question that sits at the crux of this article is thus: If video games are to be taken seriously, then why not study what hole these “toys” and “distractions” social games are filling for consumers in such tremendous numbers?

Conclusion

Video games as currently dominant video game makers define them have not had the respect of the general populace since the early 1980s. While video games regained some confidence after Atari thanks to powerful marketing and redefinition of what a video game is by Nintendo, they became a product from Japan meant for kids. “Derrogatory nerd culture” has long been the realm of American game makers. While this is changing with the success of the Xbox 360, the general populace is still indifferent to video games as a whole and has remained so until Nintendo and Zynga began to find new ways to get them interested in video games. This tremendous movement is polarizing with gamers and game makers thinking opposite of the general populace and social game makers. To demonstrate this, think of respect for video games (respect being likelihood to spend money or pay attention to the game) on a continuum from low to high. It would look something like this for a “Gamer”:




The gap between the people who play and make video games (white males between the ages of 18-35) and the rest of the world has been thrown into open debate. As Jesse Schell notes, game design decisions outside the dominant console are being made by whoever is there at the time. Professional game makers, because of their derogatory statements about these moneymaking machines, are being ignored. Even if those game makers do not appreciate the design decisions made by social game makers, the fact that a majority of non-gamers are playing these “new” types of games should say something to the “gaming industry.” At the same time, social game makers have just as much need to look at the history of game design. Even if current game design is stifling, gamer target marketing stale, and public ideas about video games (addiction, violence and all) are wrong, there is a lot to learn in that history.

I propose that both sides do a little more research on the other. If game makers want their products to be taken seriously while making enough money to maintain a routine product release schedule, then they should pay attention to this tremendously large gap their so-called “enemies” have brought to light. It wouldn’t take very much (research) to capitalize on the Wii’s success while keeping your games hardcore enough to attract the “core” gamers. On the opposite side, the social game makers must realize the potential to flood their own market in a similar series of events that killed off American console manufacturing at the video game industry’s creation. Both sides must realize; however, that maintaining the sudden and tremendous monetary gain is nothing more than a trend is the very thing the American public did when they labeled gaming a fad when Atari closed its doors and was sold off.[9] American game makers are just now recovering from that error their predecessors let happen.

References:

[1] http://www.socialtimes.com/2008/07/social-games/

[2] http://blog.pixel-lab.co.uk/?p=1846

[3] http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=2129705

[4] http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/10/hi5-cto-zynga-is-mediocre-it-isnt-social-it-just-discovered-an-opening-for-spam/

[5] http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2010/03/18/zynga-was-paypals-second-largest-merchant-in-2009/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+InsideSocialGames+(Inside+Social+Games)&utm_content=Google+Reader

[6] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=ERTS

[7] http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/the-nintendo-wii-is-a-virus-says-ex-dice-boss-673627

[8] http://www.nexgenwars.com/

[9] http://bit.ly/cK38q0

Nick LaLone is a graduate student working on an MA at Texas State University-San Marcos. When the video games are turned off, Nick can be found writing about modernization theory, gender, and social media. His work on these subjects with regard to video (and board) games can be found at www.beforegamedesign.com.