PAX East, and reconnecting

Mostly I go to industry-focused or some academic conferences.  I love it. I love interacting with colleagues who have long since become friends, with learning more about the strange pursuit of game design, trying to tease out bits of actual game design theory, and always looking for what’s next.

It’s really different — and useful — to be at a consumer-facing/fan-based convention. Whenever I go to one of these (which isn’t often enough), I rediscover how strangely easy it is for me to forget that millions of people (all of whom seem to be in Boston right now) just love games. They really don’t know and don’t care about spreadsheets, production milestones, art styles, gamergate, or even game design! They just want to play games (okay, maybe talk about them a bit, exchange a few cards, meet a famous streamer, or show off their dedicated cosplay work).

It’s an entirely different point of view, and one that’s all-too easy for me — and I suspect, some of my game industry colleagues — to forget.

Ten years ago (oh man), Tycho of Penny Arcade (the same who started PAX) wrote about his experience in going to the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC)– my main conference each year. It’s entirely industry-focused, maybe too much. From his more consumer point of view, it was an uncomfortable experience:

Part of the reason GDC made me uncomfortable is that I could feel its culture pressing on me from all sides,  and I knew it wasn’t mine.  But the other part was that I got a sense of how brutal that life is, how unstable it can be, how maddening, and I just wanted to come home and match gems or some shit.  I didn’t want to see it anymore.  I don’t want to think about a cow’s quiet eyes every time I grip a hamburger.

He’s not wrong. Being in the industry can be maddening and even brutal. It’s always dynamic; some would say volatile, as in a volcano or an unstable explosive. But fortunately for me, the inverse of his experience is a welcome one: I get to reconnect with the people who play the games that devs pour their lives into making. It’s yet another instance of a bit of the Sullivan’s Travels experience — always a good idea.

Okay! Day 3 at PAX East! Saturday, the big day, the day when the lines to get in will be even longer than the half-mile lines of yesterday! My voice isn’t quite gone, and I managed to get some sleep! Let’s do this!

If you happen to be at PAX, come around to Booth #10044 and say hi!

Complicated vs. Complex: Why Game Development is Hard

Developing a game is difficult, to put it mildly. And it never quite comes out the way you plan. Despite this, many developers and (especially) project managers — smart, talented, ferociously hard-working people — continue to believe that somehow this time they’ll make the right schedule and be able to predict months in advance when their game will launch.

This never works (okay, unless you’re just copying someone else’s game). And yet, project leaders continue to create Gantt charts of doom, or to try out one production methodology or another in hopes of making game development predictable. As one pervasive example, Agile/Scrum has long been touted as the way to successfully develop a game. Unfortunately, as some have long suspected and recent data has shown, using Agile isn’t a predictor of game development success (but see below). In fact it scores about as well as using a traditional (and long-reviled) Waterfall process!

Okay, so making a game is hard. Really hard. We all know that. But why? And what can we do about it?

Onward and Upward, Once Again

It may be fitting that it’s been over two years since I’ve posted here. That time was my tenure at social/mobile game developer Kabam. I started there in April of 2011 and ended my time there this week.

In those two-plus years we’ve seen the indie social game market be swallowed by the Big Developers (which is one of the reasons I went to Kabam), seen the apex and initial decline of the Facebook game ecology (arguably after Facebook poisoned the well with a 30% “tax” on sales on their platform), and seen the fast rise of games on mobile phones and tablets.

The span of time when indies were making viable games on phones and tablets was even shorter than it was for web-based social games; successful phone/tablet games are now approaching AAA/console quality, and budgets and schedules are once again skyrocketing, leaving all but the most resourceful developers behind. Free-to-play is no longer an anomaly; there is still a lot to be learned, but companies are reliably making hundreds of millions of dollars in very profitable revenue using this model.

Discoverability is now the big problem for developers: players have to know about your game among the hundreds or thousands coming out every single week, or all your work is for nothing. And this has put Apple and Google in the position of kingmakers more than any publisher or retailer was back in the days of retail-box games.

The big question for many of us is, where does game design fit in this back-to-the-future world of visual polish and revenue-creating pinch-points? I think it’s still an open question. It’s entirely possible to make good games that spread their ability to bring in revenue over a wide range of payment opportunities… but I have yet to see a design (even of my own) where this business model didn’t affect and to some degree twist the design off of its natural course.

I don’t know that this is inevitable, or that better designs necessarily need to avoid various forms of “pay to win,” but I think we will have to explore a lot more to figure this out. And meanwhile, the market moves on, rewarding companies with astounding riches if they manage to strike a balance between accessibility, visual fidelity, and some degree of fun.

In the past two years I’ve worked on some terrific projects and gotten to know a lot of great people. I also learned a ton by being on the front lines of social and mobile game design, development, and operations. But, as always the game market zigs and zags, and companies have to act fast and be nimble just to keep up.

I’ll let Kabam’s strategy speak for itself as it emerges over the coming months. For myself, I’m looking back to my roots as much as possible: real, deep game design and (in some combination) social AI.

I’ve managed to keep up some amount of AI work, even publishing a couple of papers (see the paper “Toward a comprehensive theory of emotions for biological and artificial agents“). I’m now in the process of stripping down and re-architecting the AI “People Engine” itself. I’m going to do my best to chronicle this re-development here, focusing on the more difficult questions I’m facing.

And oh yeah: I am looking for my next opportunity in games. I still believe that games are the vanguard of technology development and adoption. This is the place to be, in one form or another.

Where I’ve Been and Where I’m Going

“Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me. I want people to know why I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.”  – Will Rogers

A lot has happened since I last posted here.  We had one major project slowly grind to a halt, abandoned by the publisher. Not a fun story, even if we did learn a lot.  And we had another flash briefly, just long enough to prove out the design and technology, if not long enough to make back its production costs.

Social games have continued their astonishing fast-forward pace.  The game industry changes faster than any I know of, and I have never seen things change this fast.  One of my new mottos is

If you don’t have whiplash, you’re not paying attention.

What was a wide open blue-ocean part of the games industry a year ago is quickly consolidating and stratifying into Huge Players, Big Players, and Everyone Else.  There are good games and money to be made at each level, but on different scales and with different difficulties. And game designs or production practices that worked less than a year ago have to be discarded now to stay current with the market.

For myself and my company, Online Alchemy, the latest blows we endured were too much.  I’ve rebooted the company before — after a triple-play debacle in 2007 (DARPA project killed by world events, development contract pulled at the last moment, and the long-lamented demise of the Firefly MMO at the hands of Fox and Universal), so I know how to do it.  And I have an amazing team of people to work with.  But the costs of rebooting again now seemed too high and too risky.

So, time for a pivot: I have joined Kabam as an Executive Producer.  This is a terrific company with a clear focus and top-notch talent all around. I’ve been very impressed with the blend of agility and process I’ve found there. I can’t yet say what I’m working on, but as with everything in this part of the industry, all will be clear soon enough.

Online Alchemy will be sticking around, but will be returning to its focus on “social AI” research and development.  This is definitely an area for research, building on the company’s existing work in artificial emotions, relationships, and reputation, but as yet no real consumer market has appeared for such AI.  I still believe one will, but it may be ten or twenty years before it happens.  I’m content to be patient, and persistent.

So, what’s next?

 

Virtual Characters and Real Emotions

Jesse Schell is one of the most articulate, insightful people developing games and talking about their future.    At a recent keynote at a Unity3D conference, he talked about virtual characters  as a crucial part of the future of games and other online experiences.  As usual he makes a lot of excellent points about virtual characters remembering you and conversing with you, but on one — how we interact emotionally with virtual characters — I have to disagree with him:

“Emotions are easily recognized by humans, but computers must be part of that, said Schell. “Once we can do that we can sense your emotions,” said Schell, developers can create “a game where you actually have to act, or feel emotions. A game where someone tells you where there dog just died and if you can’t manage to cry then no, you’re not getting to the next level!”” (as covered by Gamasutra)

First, I appreciate Jesse stepping up with concrete predictions and other musings — as he says, this is a great way to predict (and create) the future.  That said, this one is exactly backwards: the emotional connection with virtual characters doesn’t come because we emote effectively, but because the characters themselves have and display emotions that we then relate to.  Their emotions make them more real to us, and allow us to feel something similar.

Wait for It…

More news coming soon (no, I haven’t died or lost the keys to this place).  We’ve been working hard on a couple of very spiffy things and we’ll be saying a lot more about them  shortly. Sometimes not saying something too soon about what you’re working on is one of the most difficult things about this business.

In the meantime, have a look at this terrific image from an upcoming app of ours, or read this very insightful article by Trip Hawkins, CEO of Digital Chocolate, about using the wealth of publicly available information we have to assess the health of social games and social games companies.

We really do live in a time of unprecedented change in the games industry: faster development cycles, much closer relationship with the customers, much more resilient revenue models, incredible metrics and marketing tools, and — I hope — the ability to create new kinds of games on that foundation.

 

Why Blizzard and Zuckerberg Are Wrong

or, The Persistent Case for Social Scientists

There are some lessons people in online businesses persistently don’t learn.  A lot of these are grouped into the area of “social concerns are just as real as technical ones” or “social issues do not have technical solutions.”

Recently a couple of major players in the online space have shown a stunning lack of regard for social concerns in ways that have long-term effects and that can safely be filed under “Lessons Learned.”

The Early Game

I’ve talked a bit here about the need for depth in social games — the need for an elder game that keeps you playing after you’ve grasped the primary gameplay.  This need is showing up in the “dangerous curves” we’re seeing in many of the first-gen social games topping out and drifting downward as people tire of the same-old gameplay.  There’s no doubt that it’s important to “avoid the VOID” in game design — where VOID is Varies Only In Difficulty (coined by Dan Arey, I believe).  In other words, if all you do is dial up the difficulty as the game moves along, it gets boring pretty quickly.

But on the other end — the nearer end, the one you have to get through to be able to worry about an elder game — things are heating up too.

Is Facebook Strangling the Golden Geese?

Facebook is in the process of introducing Facebook Credits, its entry into the burgeoning ecommerce/virtual currency area.  Given that Facebook is the prime destination for people playing social games, this is hardly surprising.   However, in so doing, is it in danger of driving away the sources of its fast-rising revenue?   Is Facebook strangling the geese that lay its golden eggs?

Dangerous Curves and Social Games 2.0

I’ve written here a few times about the business model for social games and why I think this is a very good area to be working in.  I continue to believe this is a large market in its early stages, with more people spending more on virtual goods in the past year, and with  at least one recent study predicting incredible revenue growth over the next few years. We’ve all seen the meteoric rise in this sector in the past couple of years, both at the top end in Zynga, Playdom, and Playfish (now EA), and in the medium-size and long-tail developers.

But recently, some of the shine seems to have come off this area. This is most clearly seen in the dropping MAU and DAU in the top social games — Farmville for example has dropped from a high of about 83M MAU in March to 66M today.   66M is still a number that no one else can touch, but it’s also a huge drop in a game that had been rising steadily.

And it’s not just Farmville.  If you look at the graphs for the top games that have been around for a while, rising continually (e.g., Texas HoldEm, Cafe World, Pet Society), each shows a peak and a subsequent fall-off.   Notably, this isn’t just due to the age of the game: some more recent games like Treasure Isle and Hotel City show the same dangerous curve at around the same time, even though they haven’t been around as long.  Some like Nightclub City show a rising MAU curve — but a daily users curve that has peaked, indicating that the trailing MAU indicator will show this soon too.  Still others, despite strong PR-backed launches in what seemed like good areas, have fared much worse from the start (indicating among other things how critical repeat play is to the success of these games).

So other than the fact that simply putting out a social game isn’t a license to print money, what does this mean?