This debate over business-vs-design spawned a thread at Quarter to Three in which game developers are expressing their feelings over FarmVille and its ilk. Sample comments include:
“It’s not social games as a threat to game design, it’s money-driven treadmill games that’s a threat to game design. A coworker identified a similar problem with a money-driven free-to-play social game, in which they specifically destroyed the balance in key ways at times in order to persuade the players to pay money to fix their own game balance. It is a war. It’s suits versus the creative people.”
“I can’t believe one of the most important figures in strategy gaming [Brian Reynolds], the guy who had a major hand in bringing us absolute classics like Civ 2, Alpha Centauri, Rise of Nations, and Rise of Legends is now Chief Designer for those creeps at Zynga.”
“I don’t like that at all. It turns my art into a business intent only on making as much money as possible. And while making money is the goal for the large industry, the fact is that we’re still as much about creating great experiences first and foremost, and the money is a happy second. With FarmVille and such, the premise is to make a lot of money, and that is the drive that informs every single decision.”
“Making the game worse can make it generate more revenue. The lesson is to focus on generating fast bucks over improving the artistic quality of your game. Enjoyment isn’t as important as long as they keep paying and playing. The dividing line flaring up is an old one; are games an artistic endeavour furthering culture or are they just slot machines to be designed for revenue maximization?”
“FarmVille makes overt use of known psychological techniques to influence and control behaviour and ties that directly into revenue generation. When you have games industry professionals from large companies arguing that we shouldn’t worry about making a game less enjoyable as long as it generates more revenue – to me that is something to be concerned about.”
“FarmVille’s formula is simple. Make it easy to scream forward to the point where you can’t properly spend your coins anymore without spending real money… Do not misunderstand me, I am saying, without any ambiguity, that doing this is wrong. I see very little difference between this and tactics at stores such as raising the price of something, removing functionality, and slapping a “On Sale 40% Off!” sign on it.”
“The question will be, when it comes to tuning Brian Reynolds’ Facebook game, will the guiding principle be increasing Zygna’s revenue or making the game more fulfilling?”
“The Zynga guy said, you need to identify what people are doing most often in a game, because that’ll be the most fun activity. If that were true, the funnest activity in StarCraft is building Zerglings and the funnest in late-game Civ IV is clicking END TURN.”
Obviously, developers are wary of how Facebook gaming will change the industry in the years ahead. (Compare the importance of business metrics now with 1997’s Ultima Online, which lead designer Raph Koster points out “wasn’t designed around any business model in particular.”) The irony is that Facebook games typically share four characteristics that really do promise great things for both gamers and designers:
- True friends list: Gaming can now happen exclusively within the context of one’s actual friends. Multiplayer games no longer suffer from the Catch-22 of requiring friends to be fun while new players always start the game without friends.
- Free-to-play business model: New players need not shell out $60 to join the crowd. Consumers don’t like buying multiplayer games unless they know that their friends are all going to buy the game as well. Free-to-play removes that friction.
- Persistent, asynchronous play: Finding time to play with one’s real friends is difficult, especially for working, adult gamers. Asynchronous mechanics, however, let gamers play at their own pace and with their own friends, not strangers who happen to be online at the same time.
- Metrics-based iteration: Retail games are developed in a vacuum, with designers working by gut instinct. Further, games get only one launch, a single chance to succeed. Most developers would love, instead, to iterate quickly on genuine, live feedback.
These four pillars are the reason why many game developers are flocking to Facebook. (Of course, many of these characteristics are not exclusive to Facebook, but combining them together with such a large audience makes Facebook the obvious choice right now.) However, Jesse Schell is right; a war is brewing over who will call the shots. However, the question is not simply one of suits-vs-creatives. The question is will designers take the time to learn the business, to learn how to pay the bills while also delivering a fantastic game experience? As BioWare’s Ray Muzyka put it during a panel on connected gaming, ultimately all decisions are made with a goal to make money, but the goal may be short-term revenue (“can we sell more blue hats tomorrow?”) or long-term growth (“does our community believe in what we are doing? are we creating life-long fans?”). The successes will not come from open conflict between design and business, but rather from developers who internalize the tension and attack the problem holistically.
I have to admit my own reservations about this transformation; game design itself simply might be not as much fun as it used to be. I cannot easily sum up how enjoyable brainstorming a game is during the early, heady days of blue skies and distant deadlines. With a release-early-and-iterate mentality, these days are now over, for good. Games will no longer be a manifestation of an individual’s (or a team’s) pure imagination and, instead, will grow out of the murky grey area between developers and players. The designer-as-auteur ideal is perhaps incompatible with this model, but I believe the best game designers are the ones willing to “get dirty” – to engage fully with a community to discover which ideas actually work and which ones were simply wishful thinking. Loss of control is never fun, but as Sid is fond of saying, the player should be the one having the fun, after all, not the designer.
Editor’s Note: For more articles by Soren Johnson, be sure to read his Designer Notes blog.
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Scott Steinberg is the CEO of video game consulting firm TechSavvy Global, and founder of GameExec magazine and Game Industry TV. Hailed as a top technology and video game expert by dozens of publications from USA Today to Forbes and NPR, he’s covered the field for 400+ outlets from Playboy to Rolling Stone. A frequent on-air analyst for networks like ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, he’s also the author of Video Game Marketing and PR.