A lot has happened to the social game space in the last year or so. Shortly after EA’s purchase of Playfish in 2009, a lot more developers began working on Facebook titles, and a number of new shops opened up to specifically target the platform. From the player’s perspective, there have been developments too – people are starting to scoff a little less at the idea of playing a game on Facebook as a legitimate activity, players have become increasingly comfortable with parting with money for the experience, and the more dubious methods for extracting revenue have largely fallen by the wayside.

What about the games?

These developments have more to do with the business imperative for games on Facebook, though, and less to do with what’s happening in the games themselves. On that front, things aren’t moving quite as fast. The bulk of the new games are generally functional copies of older ones, and even the more novel designs still feature a lot of plain token-passing and grind for the sake of grind. In particular, very few games are making use of the fact that they’re connected to an enormously valuable data source: The social network.

Making more out of the network

Social networks typically have “a high degree of partial overlap”. A person has an average of about 150 friends, and might share 75 or so with their closest friend, 60 with the next-closest, and so on. By looking at these measures of overlap, as well as indicators like wall-to-wall messaging, we can build a picture of who these friends are and what a user’s relationship to them is. A game could exploit this by encouraging cooperation (or rivalry) with your closest friends, or encourage you to get back in contact with people you haven’t spoken to recently. Finding clumps of densely-connected people probably means you have a ‘clique’ that might enjoy operating as a group in the game, and so group quests can be offered to them to encourage that participation.

Good for business

A better understanding of the of social connections – and quality of those connections – is going to be better for business, too. If a person has a higher friend count than the average friend count of their friends, they are generally a more influential person. If a ‘hub’ user has good things to say about your game, that praise will go out to more people. In fact, if you want to get really sneaky, you can bias the game in favour of these users, giving them more free stuff and making things slightly easier for them. It’s effectively making the game ‘cheaper’ for them in recognition of the fact that they’re likely to increase the Average Revenue Per-User (ARPU) through encouraging others to play. From a marketing standpoint, they are essentially micro-advertisers rather than sources of revenue. This tactic is hardly new – the promotion strategy for the first commercially-available toothpicks consisted of giving free packs to influential students at Harvard University, with a special request that the toothpicks be used as conspicuously as possible. The field of Viral Marketing calls these people Alpha users, though discussion seems to focus mainly on finding these users in the first place, rather than the tailoring of an adaptive system to bias alpha users in favour of it.

Other types of users

Another user of particular interest to social gaming is one who spends money on playing the game. These users are referred to as “Whales”, a term borrowed from the casino industry. In casinos, these people can often spend millions of dollars in a single visit. In social games, however, the figures are much more modest – a “Whale” is generally someone who spends around $20 per month. Often, though, it seems that players with money would be happy to spend a lot more. It would be possible to reveal progressively more extravagant purchases for a “Whale” to pick up, where the emphasis could shift from gameplay to collection and memorabilia. Examples could include a figurine of their in-game character, large-format schematics of a player’s farm/city/restaurant/etc, books that chronicle their progression through the game or simply an alternate electronic view of their game-worlds. As the top end of the available purchases climbs higher, the number of purchasers required to justify investment in them should hopefully decrease, since one purchase at a hundred dollars yields as much return as twenty purchases at five dollars.

While the discussion of these strategies here might seem cold, the role of the game designer is to pick methods for engaging the player, or game mechanics, that are appropriate both in the context of the underlying theme and in combination with one another. If used in the right context, a socially adaptive model can lead to a more personalized experience for individual players. It can expose certain mechanics to people who are likely to appreciate them, and keep those mechanics out of way the for people who won’t. Everybody wins!

[UPDATE] It turns out that Zynga does allow users to spend a lot more than the $20/month figure, but it seems like people only have a good reason to do so in their Poker game. Since poker requires players to engage in oneupmanship in the form of ever-increasing bets, it’s not really making use of an adaptive model for determining the best way to make use of a user. Still, it’s very interesting to know that someone is offering players the opportunity to spend as much as they want – and that some players are doing just that!

NOTE: This requires Flash player 10.1, a very recent update – if it isn’t working, chances are you’ll have to grab it from here.  Due to feedback issues you might want to mute your system while it’s playing.

UPDATE: This also suffers from the ‘default input device’ problem that my webcam experiments experience – in order to get this to work, you’ll need to open the ‘settings’ panel by right-clicking and selecting the microphone icon.

Select this section and check that the right mic is selected.

I just got back from AnimFX 10 this weekend, and it was a fantastic experience!  It was a great opportunity to learn about what Zynga thinks about their games, how Popcap manages to polish the way it does and what the pipeline for making a film like Avatar looks like.  I’ve taken lots of notes on the sessions and will do a more complete write-up of the sessions that I have something to say about, but for now I’d like to thank the speakers and the GAV NZ Trust for putting on such a great show, and all the attendees from all around NZ and Australia -it’s fantastic to know that there is such a talented and interesting community of people here working on such fun stuff!

Since the first time I started thinking about game design (admittedly only in about 2004), I have been interested in what happens when you break convention.  How do you make a first-person shooter from the perspective of a blind person?  How can you play a game without moving a mouse or pressing any buttons?  What do we have access to that we could try to read information from that people can use in a game? The bandwidth, or amount of information that can be transmitted back and forth between a computer and a person is determined by the Input-Output systems available (IO).  In future, we will hopefully have access to facial recognition, galvanic skin response and, eventually, brainwaves – although at this point it’s anybody’s guess how to make sense of them!

In the meantime, without bolting extra sensors on to a computer system, the range of input mechanisms is somewhat more limited.  We can at least play around with what’s generally available, though.   One thing that I’ve always been interested in is making use of voice input to play a game – and not necessarily a game about singing, either.  The way I see it, the voice can represent at least three different values at once (pitch, volume and ‘envelope’ – basically the vowel sound).  In theory, you’d be able to control each aspect independently, and have a continuous, three-dimensional mode of input even before you touched a button!   If people got precise with it, it could be a way of learning how to form certain sounds, develop a sense of rhythm, or learn perfect pitch – It’s a long shot but there’s only one way to find out!

Spectrogram of Dolphin Clicks, Whistles, and whines (Wikipedia)

As a starting point, the relatively recent update of Adobe Flash Player to version 10.1 has exposed the actual waveform data that gets taken in from a microphone feed.  This means that we can start trying to look at that wave data and look not just at the volume, but everything about it.  I’ve made a super-simple prototype that takes in the voiceprint, picks the loudest overtone and lets us see it.  In this case I have made it specify the altitude of an hilarious cat, which is trying to catch all the goodies it can.  Whistle high to push the cat-balloon up, low to make it go down low, and anywhere in between to reach the height that a pitch corresponds to.  I’d love to hear what you think of the concept!

By default, Mac computers have a number of ‘microphone devices’ attached like ‘firewire’ – make sure the selected mic is something like ‘built-in’.

A couple of things that come to me from the limited testing I have done:

1. Quite a lot of people can’t actually whistle.  The choice to use whistling as a driver is not out of malice, but because it’s such a ‘pure’ waveform. I’m going to try and increase the sensitivity of the analysis so that singing would work too.

2.  I got quite a lot better at estimating pitch after playing the thing for 5-10 minutes.  Having such a direct mapping, with visual feedback about how close an attempt is to the actual goal seems to make it a lot easier to estimate my error as a whistler.

3.  I can’t make it to more than about 25 points without cracking up from the silliness of it all.  With a little more variety in the goals and the kinds of interactions and I think we’ll be on to a winner!

Of course, it’s great when GTA and WoW do it because you know that any investment you make in your character customization is going to be worth it.  Each new installment of GTA offers gameplay for dozens of hours, and you can play WoW, for better or worse, for as long as you can stand it without running out of things to see.  In games of this calibre, the new customization options are a welcome sight, and I enjoy discovering what new options are available as time goes on.

In a new game – particularly one without the backing of recognizable names – customization screens can have the opposite effect.  Without knowing a little bit of what I’m in for, it’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm to define my character.  If it’s a requirement, which it often is, I make rash decisions in a show of contempt for the system that end up making my avatar look something of a mess.  The remainder of my play experience is then realized through this hash of a character, and ends up tarnishing my experience of the whole game.  A difficult-to-implement feature, that is often considered a must-have for social games, can end up ruining it.

So customization screens as a first port-of-call are annoying, but so is a lack of customization options.  It can be made an optional, progressive task, as in GTA: San Andreas, but most games can’t afford to demand the sheer amount of time that GTA can.  In addition, games in a highly-connected, social space have to make this a requirement in order to make concurrent players distinct, so it has to be done, and done before a lot of the fun can begin – so the question we’re left with is “How do you give people a meaningful custom avatar without forcing them into a customization screen?”

Web development to the rescue

I’ve done time as a web developer before, and one of the technologies that has made the job much easier since the 1990s is the development of  Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS.   The Cascading part refers to a neat technique where more general definitions are are inherited by more specific ones, unless otherwise specified.  Basically this means if I want all text to be red, I say “All text should be red”.  Then, headings, subheadings, body and caption text will all be red – unless I want caption text to be green, in which case I say “All text should be red but caption text should be green”.  This has a significant advantage over defining each piece of text colour by hand in that it’s smaller to load, faster to write and easier to change if you decide you want to go with a slightly less gross colour scheme.

..So?

What I would like to borrow from CSS here is the idea that definitions can start out as vague, and become more specific with time – not just definitions of web pages, but definitions of character customization too.  Say I often have pale skin, wear glasses, grey shorts and a red-and-blue T-shirt (I do).  It wouldn’t be a bad place to start for every character I start out as to possess these properties,  and if I want to refine them further, I could.  If a game demanded a character that was an elephant instead of a humanoid, I might decide that I would prefer it not to wear glasses, but I’m not likely to resent the attempt, particularly if it was done automatically.

To an extent, Nintendo already does this with the concept of the portable ‘Mii’, which can represent you in a number of different games.  However, Nintendo requires that the Mii be presented indentically in all the games it appears in, which either limits the aesthetic of the game to the standard set by the Mii art, or jars with the artistic style employed in the game.  On the other extreme is Second life, where there are next to no restrictions on what you can do to your avatar or to your island.  The results of that aren’t pretty either.  I’d suggest we not go there.

I think it would be possible to find something in the middle.  If players could define a character appearance once. with some kind of open standard, then it would be possible to use that as a basis for any new character in a game.  If those parameters were made available to game developers, they could be integrated into the game in a manner that was in-keeping with the artistic direction of the game.  Players get avatars that they can immediately identify with, without having to invest time in building them,  Developers get a recognizable source of customization data that they can interpret how they like.  Everybody wins!

A few months back I started playing through all of the main (free) Social Games available – I went through most of the games by the two major figures in the space, Playfish and Zynga, and a handful of the offerings from other competitors. I’m hoping to turn this into a series of posts on my observations through these games.

Why can’t you play nicely with the others?

One thing that struck me about these Social Games is how little social interaction actually occurs.  Mafia Wars, the most popular social game, puts you in the position of a mafia boss.  Friends of yours who also subscribe to the game comprise your mafia.  You are able to request assistance on specific jobs from your friends, give them gifts and swap special ‘collectible’ items with them – but participation goes no further than this.  All that distinguishes one friend from another is their name, avatar and experience level.

In fact, for a price, you are able to enlist random strangers into your ranks, who behave no differently to your peers.   Equally, you are treated in an identical manner – your name used as a largely meaningless token in your friend’s Mafia engagements.

So?

To an extent, this is an inevitable part of gaming – if I create a game-world with a limited complexity of representation, some features of my personality will be rendered irrelevant.  The fact that I like long walks on the beach is likely to be insignificant in a game about intergalactic space battles, just as my intergalactic space tactics are likely to be unimportant in a game about long walks on the beach.  In Mafia wars, though, not even my views on the Mafia make the cut – not so much as a D&D-style moral alignment or request to sacrifice progress toward one goal for another.  Likewise, any charitable acts I engage in – sending out an “Energy Pack” or giving a gift to my peers – carries no consequence to me.  The items are not available to me in the first place other than to give to others.  Without any opportunity cost there is no decision for me to make, and no way to make my mark or distinguish myself from other players.  When I play, no aspect of how you play has any impact on my game’s representation of you, and vice versa.

How it normally works

Most multiplayer games have been based on either symmetrical (largely turn-based) or synchronous play.  Symmetrical games like Chess require that for every move that you make,  I make one too.  Synchronous games like Warcraft 3 and Halo  rely on the fact that we are both given the same opportunity to act – they assume that every player is giving the game their full attention,  so that any difference in impact comes down to a difference in skill.   It’s not possible to rely solely on these techniques for creating a multiplayer experience in the social space –  I may rack up ten times the average play-time of my friends in a week.  A symmetrical, round-robin approach would mean that nine-tenths of my time in the game would be spent waiting for others to catch up, while a synchronous model would require that I be online at the exact same time as my friends in order to collaborate.

These traditional methods for creating a multi-player experience may fail in a larger social context, but they were  also designed for a different quantity of players.  Chess requires exactly two players to allow a game to proceed, and games like Warcraft or Halo require between 2 and 16 players.  A typical social game has players in the thousands – Mafia Wars has membership in the tens of millions.

The second difference is in the length of engagement.  A Counterstrike match  is generally around 35 minutes, and a game of Warcraft 3 can last between 30 and 120 minutes.  Mafia Wars and Pet Society offer a single, persistent game experience which lasts indefinitely, often with players racking up 30 minutes or more every day of the week.

Options

The differences between normal videogames and “Social Games” do close off some possibilities for how to establish a shared experience, so while we can’t rely on symmetrical play patterns from a core set of players, we can make use of much longer time-scales and a vastly larger pool of players to draw on.

Rather than a single, one-to-one sequence of interaction, social games can make use of the wider network of contacts – engaging in multiple parallel ‘quests’, each one requiring roughly equal participation from its members, where the number of quests allows the player to scale their level of involvement.  If I play 2 hours a week, I might participate in 3 quests,  where someone who spends 10 hours will join 20.

Another approach is to let the game play itself – or at least to for friends to interact with a simulated version of the player,  which is refined over the course of their play-time.  Say I’m predictably good-aligned in most games (I am.) – If a friend of mine requests my assistance on a mission which requires some morally dubious action,  It should be possible for my approximated self to decline any requests to participate.  If it is necessary at some later date to request the services of a character with such dull and unflinching moral fortitude, My virtual character may offer his services up (or at least ask me directly whether to do so).

That’s weird.

While breaking the convention of a game following a single, coherent thread, or providing a simulated copy of me and my behaviours sound like strange approaches, this is essentially already happening in these social games.  Many avid “Social gamers” are registered in several services – and often several accounts – suggesting that thy feel that the maximum level of engagement available under a single game / account is insufficient.  Likewise,  any time a character bearing my name, experience level and portrait appears in a social game, it is effectively a simulation of me.  It just so happens that the simulation is  so poor that no two characters with the same level of experience can be considered behaviourally distinct.

What do we get out of this?

Using either (or both) of these approaches, we can come closer to having an actual social game experience.  By relaxing the requirements for symmetrical participation, we can play alongside a number of friends – and be playing with them, rather the  poor approximation we have now.  By relaxing the requirement for synchronous play through improving that approximation, we open up new opportunities for participation.

A lot of these guys have flickr accounts that show off some of their more entertaining screenshots as well, so I browsed through them too – it’s equal parts amusing and disturbing that the straight-up photography that we do*  ends up so strikingly similar – the sun at a certain angle, a piece of bark which must have looked spectacular at the time but looking somewhat nondescript on screen. I think there are some recurring images and patterns that we just like.

Anyway, I digress.  On Quasimondo I found a fantastic and reasonably lightweight face detection library.  I’ve been hankering after one of these for years.  I tried it, and it works reasonably well – better than I would expect in flash, certainly. This must be the lib that oaxoa used in his Rorshach mask – Mr. Doob too.  They both applied a large opaque decal on top of the face region, which looks great.  I wanted to try something different though, so I started to think about what you could use this face data for.    It might be possible to get some Johnny Lee stuff happening – I’ll need to play around with it a little more to decide if it can hold up to that – but what I ended up with is a 3d variant of Worm or Chopper or whatever you want to call it.  Here’s how to play:

Navigate through the space and collect as many of the tokens as you can – They were going to be carrots, and I started going down that road before realizing it was something of a Maxi-min, so they’re stuck as orangey-red triangular pyramids.  Here goes!

It’s not the smoothest of interfaces, but I’m sure it can be improved upon, even if I have to drop Flash for something more robust.  I recently noticed that the NeHe openGL resources are still being maintained, which is extremely tempting – especially since working in FlashDevelop has made me much more comfortable  with Visual Studio and “Real Programming”, although Ian has tempted me greatly with the promise of a genuine visual programming environment in Quartz Composer. We’ll have to see once I get some real downtime.

What do you think?  What would you do with this new face-detecting superpower?  I’d love to know!

* I consider myself part of this fraternity of flash dabblers, or would at least like to join them in due course.  I must learn their secret handshake!

Click in the panel to get focus, then use left and right to steer your accumulation buffer-derived snake to victory.  Good luck!

There are countless videos on Youtube of people trying these things out – stacking barrels in Farcry or balancing helicopters on top of other helicopters in Battlefield: Vietnam.  Constance Steinkuehler, an academic in the field of Educational Communications & Technology, asserts that kids in Lineage and World of Warcraft have been unwittingly conducting experiments according to the scientific method in order to understand the world around them!  This behaviour seems to be quite common.  If you look through any forum dedicated to a game you’ll find extensive write-ups of all the units, power-ups and a weigh-in on whether something is worth having or doing.  Http://strategy.diii.net, a site for Diablo II, h0as links to strategy guides which outline the principles of experiment design. A site dedicated to World of Warcraft,  thottbot.com, calculates the probability of a monster dropping an item to three significant figures!

In one respect, this is a wonderful development.  People are using rigorous, principled methods of investigation in order to understand the worlds they find themselves in.  On the other hand, those environments are not only artificial – video games are necessarily artificial – but worlds with such a feeble resemblance to reality that no relevant knowledge can be gleaned through experimentation.  This is tragic.

This is not an attack on all games, though.  This frustration is aimed at worlds that purport to some degree of realism – racing games where an autopilot takes control when you spin out (Ridge Racer), or momentum values that are tweaked with no justification to make a spacecraft more maneuverable as a game progresses. I don’t think all games have to have Newton-perfect calculations of mass and velocity, but I think there ought to be games that at least try.

Towards that end, here’s another update of what I’ve been working on.  It’s really hard to resist holding off on an update because I’m so close to a breakthrough, but I’ve found that after one breakthrough is made, it always seems ‘close enough’ to the next to hold off again. Consequently, there’s a lot in now that wasn’t in the last build. The list of what’s new is probably less interesting than the thing itself, so here it is:

• Colour sliders: Now, rather than relying on the colour of a mirror being made on the fly, you can select the colour of all the elements, setting a laser to beam only red light, or a mirror to reflect only yellow light etc.
• Rotation: Works now.  You click to select a pivot to rotate the selection about, and drag around to place ‘em.
• Tooltips: Finally, there is a little feedback about what things are and what to do with them!
• Cirlces: Only work with lasers at the moment, but they are solid, circular mirrors that could be considered to have a “mass”.  One day.
• Polygons: These do work with beams and lasers, but do some silly things with beams (when you point the beam on to an angle less than 180º) . These could also be considered to have mass one day.

What’s next?  Remote loading and saving (I’m going to need some help with PHP for that), and then Box2D!  I’ve been messing around with some ideas for games that could actually use this engine, and I’ve come up with one idea, which I’ve sketched out on my Flickr page, but that’s as far as it goes right now.  When I have more, I will show it!

Maybe not everyone.  Gamers seem to be in violent opposition to the idea of changing input methods.  On Slashdot, Gametrailers and other forums I still see people insist that the two-thumb controller is the best input method for platformers, a mouse the best method for Realtime Stragety (RTS), and a mouse and keyboard for First Person Shooter (FPS) games.

Gaming in 1990 (click to enlarge)

I find that reaction disappointing.  For a start, It’s probably not true.  Prior to Quake, most ‘gamers’ (though they did not exist in the same numbers or have the same recognition as a demographic) insisted that a mouse was an unnecessary and fiddly complication to the task of moving a character around, and that looking up or down could be done easily enough entirely with the keyboard. As strange as it seems, gamers and technophiles in general appear to be a very conservative lot.*

Second, even if it were true, and it is a possibility – it is only because the RTS, FPS and platformer genres have been forced to work as effectively as they can the available systems.  They’ve been designed with these input methods in mind, so of course they’re going to seem like the only option available.

Gaming in 2000 (click to enlarge)

When you change the range of input devices, though, the options broaden.  It’s not hard to imagine a shooter where the player can lean around corners, duck projectiles or operate machinery with a little more nuance than just a ‘use’ button.  With RTS games, we could issue two orders simultaneously with each hand, draw out formation plans with gestures or guide the attitude a subordinate AI officer commands with through a facial expression.

While I’m glad that “Motion Control” appears to be the bandwagon to jump on at present, I urge developers, gamers, and the public at large to see motion gaming as a ‘gateway drug’ to better and weirder things. We can turn this into a watershed moment in history not just for gaming but for computing in general, where we decide that the main challenges in computing today are with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), rather than computation or processing.

Gaming in 2010 (click to enlarge)

One relatively recent breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence is the realization that agents are far, far more effective if they are properly embedded in the environment in which they operate.  That means having both consistency of – and plenty of – sensory information. Problems involving vision become (comparatively) simple when a number of camera views are added and combined as input, the problem of balance is made much easier if acceleration and force data is collected directly from multiple points rather than modelling ‘expected’ values internally.

It follows, then, that the task of making sense of what a user wants from a computer would be made easier by giving it more information.  What may be less obvious is that it works the other way around, too.  The more sensory input from a system we have, the more sense the system is going to make, and the more immersive that system becomes.  The “next big thing” in mobile devices after touch-screen interfaces is tactile feedback from interfaces.  The Nokia Haptikos display will try to simulate the press of a button by shaking on confirmation.

I welcome the shift in emphasis of the console vendors.  We need to ignore the grumbling from current gamers and game developers, who are very stuck in their ways.  These detractors are ignoring the trends in gaming that have led us to this point, and where these trends indicate that gaming will go.  I hope that by the time I have kids who are old enough to lecture, I can tell them to go outside and play a videogame.

Gaming in 2020 (click to enlarge)

* As an aside on the conservatism of technophiles, I remember that, at the ripe old age of 10, I was incensed at the suggestion that people were installing “sound cards” and other add-on hardware into IBM-PC compatible computers.  PCs were supposed to be generalized computing devices! If you wanted sound that badly, you should wait until the CPU could process it all in software! If I had heard that people were going to then go on and make cards that dealt exclusively with 3d graphics, I probably would have passed out from sheer indignation.  I was an unusual child.

I think what Koster is talking about is this:  After concentrating on the electric guitar for four years, a person may have developed the equivalent of two years of xylophone training, one year of drums and so on.

This model is suggested in most physical fitness plans (so I am told,) although after a certain amount of specialization, it’s often suggested that a person’s more general fitness actually decreases, given the finite resources that the human body has.

We need to be cautious about suggesting that training for one thing will result in losing skill in another, since it gives us an excuse not to perfect one particular skill set. The way in which a human being can incorporate a variety of different skills is what makes us great, and in particular, the incorporation of a diverse (and seemingly conflicting) set of mental skills is probably the coolest part.

I also think that the breadth of knowledge that people get from learning a single thing is very different. Someone learning the guitar for 10 years may only have the equivalent of 5 years’ skill by the end of it, but may end up equally skilled on trumpet, vibraphone, violin and the drums.  Conversely, someone may end up with 15 years’ worth of skill on the guitar, but be completely useless on everything else.

With musical instruments, it’s easy to see that an accoustic guitar would be closely related to an electric, where a banjo or a ukelele would be slightly less related.  If we look at sports and take baseball as the central sport, then it would make sense that softball and cricket would be closely related, and that soccer and football may come into the mix too, but to a lesser extent. Somewhere in the distance, someone’s snooker skill may improve too.

What about quadratic equations? Very few people will ever use quadratic equations for any reason other than to pass the test on quadratic equations, but we learn them anyway.  If we think about this breadth of knowledge, though, we can see that we aren’t just learning about quadratics as we stare at the graph paper and crunch the numbers.  We might learn a little about algebra, graphing, calculus, and possibly things outside the realm of mathematics altogether.

Basically, everything that we do has unintended consequences.  Destroying an enemy base tends to damage civilian infrastructure, and we call that Collateral Damage.  It’s terrible, but it’s taken largely for granted.  What isn’t taken for granted, though, is that learning about one thing tends to make us think about other things.  I like to call it Incidental Learning, and I like to talk about it a lot.