GDC Trends: Anxiety and the bandwagon. Also, hats.

From the first day at GDC – I’m mainly attending the AI Summit and Social Games Summit.    Every year I watch and listen for trends, to get the vibe of where the game industry is and where it’s going.  Thus far, I’ve seen a few things – an unnerving anxiety, a fast-rolling bandwagon.  And hats.

GDC Week & Predictions

Like a lot of others, I’m heading to GDC today.  I’m mainly going for a couple of summits, some meetings, and to see people who are good friends whom I see once or twice a year.  It’s a bit of an odd sort of relationship, as it feels sometimes like a deadly serious meeting of circus clowns.

Anyway, I’m not going for the talks (and am not giving one this year)… and so I have pretty low expectations of anything significant coming out of them.  But as this is also sort of the beginning of the game-year, I thought I’d take a few minutes for some pre-GDC predictions for the conference and for the rest of the year – social games, MMOs, 3D, AI, the works.

The Mysterious Revenue Gap

One of the big questions with people looking at social games is, “sure they have lots of people playing, but how much money do they really make?”  The amazing thing is, there’s actually data available on the web to answer this.  For once entrepreneurs and other game developers aren’t left completely in the dark trying to figure out what they may reasonably make on their game.  And this data identifies not only a great revenue stream, but an interesting gap.

It turns out that the question isn’t whether these games are making money – the question is, why aren’t they making significantly more?  In fact there are similar games making as much as 5x or 10x more than social games currently are.  So why the gap?

Cramming SimCity into a FarmVille-shaped Hole

In the past few days at least two new “city building” social games have been announced: Playdom’s “Social City” and Digital Chocolate’s “Nanotowns”.  (The near-simultaneous emergence of these with strikingly similar UIs and gameplay reinforces how small a creative community Bay Area game development still is, if nothing else.)  These aren’t the first city-builders to have been put up on Facebook: My City Life is doing well with over 4M MAU to date (and steadily climbing), and My Town is just behind with about 3.2M MAU (others such as Metropolis, EnerCities, and TinyTown are slightly earlier entrants that haven’t fared as well).

The art is a bit higher quality in these latest entries than in some past social games, and there are a few gameplay refinements in each.  Still, this doesn’t represent a new generation of social games so much as another time around the same track: first we had x-wars and farming, then restaurants, now city building.  Hard to say what will be the next flavor of the month – dungeon-crawling or dungeon-making, maybe (a ‘lite’ take on the venerable Dungeon Keeper?).

The thing that struck me about each of these is how much they are leveraging the gameplay tropes of the Farmville generation (no, it wasn’t the first, just the exemplar of that group): they are still largely single-player with mini-missions, the drive to grab neighbors, “employ” your friends from Facebook, etc.  Not surprising, as these publishers believe they (or someone else) has found a set of game mechanics that work, that are familiar to the audience, etc.

But it makes me wonder how long people who have played the same game in the guises of Farmtown, Restaurant City, Farmville, CafeWorld, etc., will joyfully sign up for (and pay for, at least 2-5% of them) another version of the same game.  Do these social games have a half-life that is being reduced with each revision of the same gameplay?  Or will they prove to be evergreen with some portion of the millions of people still flooding onto social sites like Facebook?

No Elder Game for Social Games?

Like millions of others, I’ve been playing a variety of “social games” online.  I’m struck by several aspects common to these games, including the overall poor gameplay.  I think that will change, slowly, as game developers figure out what works and what doesn’t.

But what has also struck me is that these games have no “elder game.”  In terms of a linear, limited form of media (book, movie, single-player game) you might say they have no third act; there is no summation or reconcilation.  Of course, in an online game you don’t want a summation — you want people to keep playing!  And yet, each of these games seems to run out of steam for the player experience sooner or later.   You amass enough “stuff” (coins, guns, troops, mana points, whatever) and either the challenges you face are uninteresting or non-existent.

So (as always) the question is, what’s next?  How can social games transform their gameplay to remain engaging to the “elders,” those who have mastered the main part of the game already, to keep them playing and (of course) paying?

Or is this the right question to be asking?  Might it be that social games simply have a lifespan on a per-player basis — when you’ve done it all, you’re done, thanks for playing, bye-bye?  Is it expecting too much of social games to deliver fun experiences for the new player, the up-and-coming player, and the elder player?   If it is, what does this say about the staying power of social games as a genre (is faddishness a built-in Achilles’ heel?), and if not, what does that say about the current state of social game design?

A Year Later and… Facebook it is!

I could have waited one more week and made this post officially on the one-year anniversary since my last post, but I hope to be posting more often, not less.

It’s interesting to look back at your posts from a year or more ago that have been perfectly preserved by the Internet.  In this case it turns out that my thoughts on Facebook are being validated — and that MMOGs are indeed evolving fast.

The New Killer Platform for MMOGs is… FaceBook?

Since my last post was pretty theoretical, I thought I’d bring this back to earth a bit.

The MMOG market continues to be very hot, and possibly all but impervious even to our current economic chaos.  I continue to see MMOGs in development for ever broader demographics and more obscure (or focused) niches.  Despite the difficult times for some and the demise of others, investment and development in this area continues to be strong.

And yet technology continues to be a huge thorn in the side of any developer.  There are a number of middleware suitors trying to woo developers, but recently an unusual one has appeared on the field.  Can it be that Facebook will save MMOG development?

Did Maslow get it wrong? (and why this matters for games)

You may be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (more on this below the cut).  Maslow’s theory has heavily influenced the architecture of our AI technology, which is why I’m attuned to discussions of it or instances that support or undercut it.  Recently I ran across a theory in education known as “CBUPO,” an ungainly acronym for “Comptence, Belonging, Usefulness, Potency, Optimism” designed by Richard Sagor at Washington State University (an accessible introduction can be found here (pdf)). Sagor’s theory suggests some interesting modifications to Maslow that have consequences for how we understand ourselves — as well as the motivations for gamers and AIs.

(Warning: psychological theory leading to AI and game-relevant thoughts below.)

The Uncanny Valley (yeah you should know this already)

From James Portnow’s blog, a terrific Zero-Punctuation-style video on the Uncanny Valley.  You probably know what that is, but it’s worth watching the video and passing this on to others who don’t.  And if you don’t know what that is and how it applies to games and AI, you really should watch it.

Games for Learning?

People like games.  People also like learning — mostly.  And of course adults like it especially when their kids learn.  Many valiant attempts have been made to use games to teach kids or adults, but with few real, intentional successes.  This is largely an unknown art, and one where when learning does occur, it seems almost accidental.

For example I learned about the geography of the Caribbean, I’m abashed to say, by way too many hours spent on the old Pirates! game; and my son learned a surprising amount of history by playing Age of Empires.  Many people have fond memories of Oregon Trail, and this often comes up in discussions of “games used for education,” but still this area has languished rather than flourished.

Why is it so difficult to make games for learning?  Is it the topics we’re choosing, or a too-pedantic approach, or something else?  I don’t have any solid answers on this one, and would love to hear others’ opinions.  What do you think?