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Why You Shouldn't Design Games Through Analytics
An anonymous reader writes "Game designer Tadhg Kelly writes at TechCrunch about a trend many gamers have noticed over the past decade: designers increasingly relying on statistics — and only statistics — to inform their design decisions. You know the type; the ones who'll change the background color if they think it'll eke out a few more players, or the ones who'll scrap interesting game mechanics in favor of making the game more easily understandable to a broader market. Naturally, this leads to homogenization and boring games. Kelly says, 'Obsessed with measuring everything and therefore defining all of their problems in numerical terms, social game makers have come to believe that those numbers are all there is, and this is why they cannot permit themselves to invent. Like TV people, they are effectively in search of that one number that will explain fun to them. There must, they reason, be some combination of LTV and ARPU and DAU and so on that captures fun, like hunting for the Higgs boson. It must be out there somewhere. ... Unlike every other major game revolution (arcade, console, PC, casual, MMO, etc.), social game developers have proved consistently unable to understand that fun is dynamic in this way. ... They are hunting for the fun boson, but it does not exist.'"
Didn't they actually just find the Higgs ? Kinda blows the analogy,
Can I light a sig ?
The goal is money: get more people to buy the game and get more people to buy in-game purchase items.
Admittedly, I don't play any of Zynga's games, but I play a lot of games, and I talk to a lot of gamers, and I've never heard of anyone designing games exclusively through analytics or statistics. I am not convinced that this is a real thing...
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MVP and F2P eventually passed into regular industry jargon along with a boat load of other terms. Most every company involved in the space now talks about DAU, LTV, ARPU, ARPPU, ARPDAU and even ARPPDAU. They talk about performing cohort analyses. Some of them ask whether they are working on an MVP or an MDP? Most don’t really bother discussing viral K-factors any more, and instead obsess about the CPA of players. These are significant changes for an industry that used to worry more about Metacritic ratings.
Jesus, some executive just had a seizure on that guy's keyboard.
I would be interested to see if Notch has any interest in Analytics at all.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Social games aren't supposed to be *fun*. The objective is to keep people playing. Fun is one way to do that, but there are other methods that can be just as capable or even more so. Social games depend on a few effective psychological hooks:
- Time sinks. Once you have gotten the player to invest enough hours, they become reluctant to leave and throw away the invested time.
- Social interdependance. Allow players to assist each other. That way if someone does want to stop playing, they'll have to abandon friends who need their help.
- Constant progress. Players need to feel like they are constantly getting further and further, so an effective social game makes sure there is always a new milestone just ahead - and that there is a way to show off this success.
- Ease of promition: Make sure your players can tell everyone else they play via facebook.
Social games aren't about fun. They are about operant conditioning. Zynga has a psychologist on staff to advise their designers on how to make a game people will feel compelled to play, and the approach works.
None of these actually require the game be fun. Or have we forgotten Cow Clicker, the parody of social gaming deliberatly designed to be as dull and un-fun as possible, yet which still achieved a moderate level of success purely by following the rules of social manipulation.
I hate any company that is driven through spreadsheet thinking but I think this story only really applies to the Zyngas of the world. My beef is a little bit different. It is where multiplayer games slowly cut off all the interesting discoveries. Too perfect a sniping spot; modify it to make it vulnerable. Room too perfect for a grenade tossed by a defender; change it. Gun a little too powerful; tone it down. All these fixes make eventual sense in that once enough people make one of these discoveries then they exploit the crap out of it and it really ticks the other players off. But at the same time these discoveries are cool. When I find that perfect ambush site I will annoy a bunch of players until they just start tossing a grenade into that spot every time they walk by. So if the spot is too perfect by all means fix it but then create another "too perfect" problem. Let people find it and then fix it. Too many multiplayer games get fixed until it is just a boring stalemate while other games never get fixed and that perfect sniping spot just runs all the other players out of town. In real war you often have move/counter moves the whole war along which is the thinking that drives the whole "Fighting the last war" syndrome where after the war the winning side keeps countering the enemy's last move better and better. But in many games all the counter moves just fix existing problems while not actively seeking to create new ones.
Sounds like the way that Windows 8 was made. That development blog kept talking about "studying real world usage" or whatever.
Scott Adams nailed the tunnel-visioned focus on nothing but metrics.
'nuff said.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
U know the ones. The ones that don't mind playing boring, repetitive, puzzle games -_- IMO that average is full of people who don't who are lazy and love instant gratification.
I can understand why aiming for mainstream market share leads to homogenization initially. But why does it keep doing that? Doesn't there come a point where another mainstream game is going to lose out due to tough competition from the number of games they are competing with? At that point one would think niche markets would start looking attractive.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
"you can’t improve what you can’t measure"?
Huh?! Well, that doesn't preclude that you can improve what you can measure.
Yes, I believe that valuable insights can be gained from what you can measure. For example, if your data couldn't determine a success factor that is a valuable result in itself! The insight then is "there must be an unknown factor we have not included in our model".
What is the big deal? I also think that the unexpected can be found within a mainstream setting, it all but takes a glimpse of genius to discover it. Finding that genius recipe in the dark, without any previous experience is silly, ignorant and ill-informed. Think of the angry birds authors who had made about a hundred games before they hit gold. That was no luck. They had the experience. Systematizing that 'hovering feeling' experience into a mathematical model? Why not? It still takes genuine talent to make it fun and implement it well.
I know rite, people who make games using a feedback mechanism
terrible
as terrible as a "games designer" who spends all their time writing articles like this
Both things are equally bad, both things, unfortunately, work.
Any fun that might be had by the player is secondary to the game designers purpose.
The goal of the free game designed through statistics is to make money for the publisher. If the statistics say that changing the background color will eke out a few more users, and the average 'milk' of those users is worth more money, the game designer is right (from an employer point of view) to change that color.
While the point is largely true, the submitter is missing the most important point:
So-called "social games" aren't about fun. And they aren't games. The game is just the packaging. These things are basically drugs. Read up on the corporate background of Zynga and what kind of people they employ. They create designer-drugs that are scientifically designed for maximumg addiction potential.
The "fun" and "game" part are just the coating that gets you to try it. Much like a drug that you take for the first time because it promises a good trip or great sex or whatever, but that's just for the first few times. After that, it's the addiction that makes you take it, not the high, no matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise.
Social games aren't meant to be fun, they are meant to keep you playing (and spending, or creating ad-impressions).
The reason we (I'm a game designer) talk about things like "gamification" in the work environment is not that it is fun, but because we've found ways to make people repeatedly do things that they have no intrinsic reason to do and that are not rewarding in themselves.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
All of these analytical processes and gathering of statistics during the centrally planned development process, striving for ever more fairness, balance, and equality--not only in the game mechanics but in the themes and storyline as well--are precisely why games such as Guild Wars 2 ultimately become boring, flat, and dead to many players. Sure, when the game first came out, it was fun digging into it, but for all of the fairness and equality in the reward system, you came to loathe the game for not offering you a path to play it more freely, more independently. There is no way to game the game. And those that discover and attempt to exploit holes left in the games mechanics, purely out of boredom and happenstance, soon feel the wrath State with permanent account revocations. After all, those who resist the revolution and dare throw off the shackles of enslavement must be sacrificed for the benefit of the Proletariat! Trotsky would have been proud.
This article only makes sense if you assume that "social game" or F2P game developers actually care about those metrics because they are trying to find "fun."
They aren't. They care about those metrics because they are trying to maximize revenue for the current title. After experimentation, they then take the combination of factors that had the maximum revenue for the previous title and then repackage it into a rebranded version of the same game with that combination as the starting point. It's more like casino design than game design.
By and large F2P games are not really about creating a "fun" experience. They are about creating an addictive experience loop which yields them income through impulse micro-transaction purchases. While "fun" is a factor (the game has to be interesting, after all) it certainly is not the primary goal of this part of the industry. Although some games buck this trend, the top-grossing ones are certainly not games which would typically be considered wholly "fun" compared to standard console/PC game titles.
None of these acronyms have found their way into mainstream console or PC title development. They are all monetization terms which are primarily applicable to "games" which have the sole purpose of monetization. This should not be surprising.
What's a sig?
.. one should try to write games which one likes playing. Human beings are not that different from each other, despite what hate media in different mediums might have you believe..
Having said this, Yes I am a software developer and no I have not invested the (great) amounts of energy and time required to become a game developer.. I'm earning my bread the easy way.. by being a Ruby on Rails developer.
I've nothing against the RoR community or framework - it earns my daily bread - I just respect the game developers because I know how tough it is and working in a game company is always a risk even after one has acquired a lot of skills.
The problem is not analytics. The problem is that the analytics are applied exclusively to what will sell more games, and not to what makes better games. Obviously, they have to devote some or perhaps even most to selling more games, but they should devote at least some time and effort into making better games.
Decisions made in the absence of evidence will almost never be better than evidence-based decisions. That's why when you get sick you go to a doctor instead of a shaman.
Imagine what is possible when you don't assume (because of pre-existing incomplete data) what the outcome will be.
"the ones who'll scrap interesting game mechanics in favor of making the game more easily understandable to a broader market"
Chess, quite possibly the worlds most popular game couldn't be developed today.
To ignore statistics and customer feedback is to display an arrogance that can result in an awful experience for players.
The biggest example of this in recent times is FFXIV. Throughout the betas and previews they ignored feedback and imposed what they felt an MMO should be like on their users. The result? An incredibly bad, high budget MMO where design choices got in the way of the user at every turn (a server side UI that was slow and painful to use, limits on the amount of quests you could do, awful crafting, awful economy, unhelpful maps and quest descriptions).
There are more general exams when making genre games too. If you're making a colourful JRPG with a bunch of cute characters, the JRPG audience isn't likely to be turned away if you use a battle system based around AD&D and give it a dark, gritty plot with lots of violence and disturbing events.
Even for simple design choices it can be a big deal. Halo 2 has no brightness controls and has some very dark levels, I played it on an old TV with the brightness at max and could only play it for short periods before eyestrain kicked in. Kid Icarus on the 3DS requires use of a stylus and the control pad, this means you have to use the stylus in the right hand, making the game near impossible for lefties (thankfully you can use an add on control pad to make it playable). Ignore customers needs when designing something and even great games can be ruined for some or all.
All you said could as well apply to MMO really. From the time sinks to constant progress. Social gaming did not invent skinner box for games, they just refined it with cost effective way.
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The results of their so-called "user experience" reporting? The problem was that the only people that allowed that thing to spy on them were the dumb ones so that's who Microsoft modeled their Ribbon interface for.
Joust and Tempest are fun, but weird. In the first, your only controls are flapping to control how high and fast you fly, and directional left-right. In the second, it's totally a "WTF kinda drugs was this designer on?" experience. While not nearly as developed as modern games, these provided me with plenty of entertainment when I was a teenager. Don't be afraid to do something completely different, because if the gameplay is cool enough, the game sells itself.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
In my eyes the problem isnot running spread sheets and having lots of numbers but:
a) the conclusions you draw
b) the verification of your changes
Most people are completely dumb assed about the conclusions, in other words they rig the spread sheet and collect only the numbers they want to support the (wrong) conclusions they already made.
After making changes, ofc the numbers of their original spread sheet change. So they conclude: the change was effective. However they miss that another team also made a lot of changes.
E.g. a dungeon is unattractive. Players rarely go there. One reason is (players say so) the loot it drops is not worth the effort. Other players say: the dungeon is to hard.
So one group of game designers make the dungeon more easy (like WoW UBRS in old school WoW), and it provides better loot, so people are more actively looking to go into the dungeon.
Another group of developers however makes the "Dungeon Finder" feature. So you can search for other players with a mouse click and get automatically assigned to a group of players, to join a RANDOM dungeon. Depending on the gear average you get placed in the dungeon the other group of developers just made more attractive. So, the feature of the second developer group supports the numbers of the first. But they are completely unrelated. The numbers of group one are now worthless. Nevertheless their apparent success is used further as guideline for future development.
Anyway a big success for the company: more people go into this particular dungeon. OTOH: lots of players quit because of the dungeon changes and most overall changes. As some other posters pointed out: I only joined WoW again for nostalgic reasons and accidentally payed for a 6 month subscription, I regretted it after 2 days (yeah, I was slow).
Dont get me wrong, the success story of WoW is amazing and a dream of a gamer and programmer.
You played Warcraft 1 or 2 and saw Doom more or less at the same time you thought: wow a doom like world/enige and a warcraft like game and all that as multiplayer, that would be awesome.
And TEN YEARS later, well make this 15, they did just that. A wet dream of a programmer who stopped doing multiplayer online games in the 1990s because he thought: internet will never be so cheap that people will play it.
But now ... the game is going where ultima online and the other fantasy online games went.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Dance Dance Revolution on a standard controller can be played optimally by a bot loaded with the step chart. But that's not the point of DDR; the point is the physical activity from playing on a dance pad.
same Analytics BS is used by HR for hiring.
And you end up with people who cheat at it / people who really can't do the job.
This is exactly what happened to WoW
"You know the type; the ones who'll change the background color if they think it'll eke out a few more players, or the ones who'll scrap interesting game mechanics in favor of making the game more easily understandable to a broader market. Naturally, this leads to homogenization and boring games."
I would daresay interesting game mechanics were scrapped starting when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out, then Cataclysm for sure which really made it easier, and now Mists of Pandaria which have made it so easy now to the point that it's boring and more easily understandable to the broader market.
Thus, ensuring more morons who couldn't understand an MMO like WoW back in 2007 when Burning Crusade was popular and I felt was the pinnacle of that game with the mechanics it had at the time, are now playing Mists of Pandaria and further destroying what maturity the community had from 2004-2007 in that game compared to the community at large now. It's why I took a break from the game in October and may look at it again later this year with a newer computer the game just got dumbed down way too much to the point everything is practically handed to you now, you don't have to work for it like in Burning Crusade.
Also, certainly Blizzard becoming a part of Activision did not help matters much either as I am sure that has been whats prompting the "dumbing down" of WoW the last five years and a *LOT* of players leaving.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
Two vastly different effects of an over-reliance analytics.
This happened with Halo.
For Halo 2 they literally tested the game with soccer moms then made adjustments based on their play. They made it easier to aim and made it harder for one person to be too much better than another.
This had a very negative impact on the competitive gaming crowd. Some of them just kept playing Halo 1 but most toughed it out and played Halo 2. However, Halo 2 sold more copies and the Halo player base grew. It being easier to play likely had nothing to do with the growth, Xbox Live play was probably the only reason.
Halo 3 and the Halos after that continued the trend of making the game easier to play and made it a lot harder for one person to be better than another. It reduced the competitive play appeal and became less popular among the hardcore.
Eventually Halo was dropped from Major League Gaming (a professional gaming league) because it wasn't fun at a competitive level.
You risk losing your hardcore fans at the expense of picking up the masses. If you keep the hardcore fans pleased your game will continue to be popular for a long time but may not have as big of an initial launch. If you cater to the mass noobs it will probably have a big launch but popularity isn't going to last.
The trick is to make changes that cater to the noobs but do not ruin it for the hardcore players, but it is harder to do and most changes ruin it for one group or the other.
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People are more likely to do an activity if there are random rewards, with reward size proportional to how infrequent the events are. That's why slot machines work.
People love art. Music, Film, Games, Performance. By the very nature of art, its a unique, dynamic and inspired moments of human insight, expression, understanding, enlightenment, communication. The act of attempting to formulate this process, is like climbing up a cow's ass in an attempt to witness the magic of grass turning into milk. In both cases the outcome invariably ends up mixed with cow flop.
Enough already with the endless attempts to turn a film into a franchise then milk every atom of joy, love and money out until these Scrooges ruin the whole thing for everybody. Enough already of safe projects built to ride the mean average of everything hoping to appeal to everyone and further drain already depleted wallets. Most of all, enough with soul-less accounting minions measuring the worth of a film by the number of tickets sold. By that logic "Dumb and Dumber" is a greater movie than "Raising Arizona". I understand movie making is a business and box-office is the final measure of success, but for those who are more interested in the art, the humanity, and the beauty that people create, the box office is a side effect. Great art isn't for everyone so, bankers will never be interested in great art (save that which can be invested in, stored in a vault, and later resold at great profit.) So for the love of all that's Holy(wood), let the artists thrive and make art. Support and empower them. There will be magic, and wonder and beauty. Occasionally there will be wonder and pain and genius. This was a spectacular year for film. You bankers bank... its what you're good at. Let the artists art.
even if [the newly discovered particle] is the Higgs all it does is confirm what we already knew.
But more importantly, it busts the various Higgsless models.
By Mary Shelly. GG intarwebs you've made people who are meant to be the top of something closer to the nadir.
Remember Mass Effect 2, where weapons suddenly had to be reloaded (despite needing no ammo) and loading screens were introduced (because kids were confused and bored by elevator rides)?
You can't just summarily clump together all F2P games. Farmville is pretty far from Teamfortress, and they are both far away from League of Legends. None of the forementioned are Pay2Win, but they behave totally differently from eachothers. TF is getting on with being "fun", Farmville is using addictivity tricks, LoL is "fun", but also trying to apply to the hardcore pro gamers by trying to be an eSport. Not pay2win, but if you want to paly with the pros without really being hc gamer yourself you are going to have to pay to unlock all the champions( in theory you could not have them all, but..) If you play a lot you'll get the champs anyway. It's actually pretty balanced mix.
Welcome to what has happened with the music industry and film industry :/
Investment into fewer, larger projects that are targeted for mass, bland appeal.
This article doesn't describe WoW at all. The article is about NEW games. When WoW was released, it gained immediate success precisely because it broke the mold of previous MMOs in some important ways. The evolutionary nature of the expansions is to be expected. It's still supposed to be the same game.
The article does, however, describe virtually all of the so called "WoW Killers", which all failed do to essentially being buggy remakes of WoW with different skins.
When something becomes popular enough to make big bucks, big money men become interested.
Blandness does NOT occur because of conspiracy. Blandness occurs because of the definition of popularity. The MOST POPULAR in an already existing market is by definition the lowest common denominator. In a new market or new presentation, then things get stirred up.
None of the money men will pick a dark horse such as O Brother Where Art Thou? sound track. They aren't venture capitalists.
The big money will invest in Taylor Swift's country and Beyonce's pop and get a reasonable return. The innovation occurs in the back alleys as usual, the various production companies trying to get a pilot on television and the independent film producers and the random garage bands being formed irregularly.
Bluegrass, Rock and the Hula Hoop are not obvious winners before release.
I’ve been a hard-core gamer since I was 12. In the last few years I have virtually stopped gaming. Why? I’m bored because all the big developers that produce the best quality games have just been selecting from a pool of idea’s that worked before and replicating. There are few places that differ from this. Eve online I think is one, but it’s been doing it’s thing for years. Companies take so long to produce a working game that they stick only to what they know, sitting comfortable in the boundary of what they know. Skyrim is just oblivion, for oblivion see morrow wind. Wow hasn’t changed much since the start, apart from you need to grind for longer. Battlefield, call of duty all the others are doing the same thing they have been doing since the start. Deus ex hasn’t improved since the first one, only the detail, to get the different endings you had an option of buttons, there was no divergence in the story, making choices along the way.
The only thing that gives me any hope is kick starter, maybe there will be a couple of revamps or new games that want to do something different(minor contradiction there), maybe one or two will achieve something before they implode in on themselves.
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