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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,
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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.
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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.
Scott Adams nailed the tunnel-visioned focus on nothing but metrics.
'nuff said.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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