The Metanarrative

The game is framed in an overarching narrative that gives everyone a sense of purpose – a story about military defence against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. You’re put in charge of a small, sparsely populated island that has just been bombed by a group called  ”The Dark Alliance.” You’re led carefully through the initial part of the game by tutorials framed in this narrative. Even after learning the ropes, the story still guides you, with three or four missions related to an aspect of your island’s development. Having a broad and inclusive enough plot to frame the activity is important, because players need to feel like they’re bringing something of their own to the world. However, if the plot is too vague, the player’s actions become meaningless. It’s a difficult balance to strike and Empires & Allies has done it well.

Managing the resources takes strategy and skill

Empires & Allies has in-game currency, two primary resources, and four metals. Money comes from farms and houses, oil and lumber come from wells and mills, and metal comes from mines. The player selects a ‘production contract’ with a cost in time and money for a specified amount of a resource, e.g. you might pay $200 to get 10 oil in 5 minutes. Shorter contracts have greater payoff, but are more demanding on the player’s energy. In addition, a player has access to only one kind of metal on their island, e.g. you might have iron and your friend may have copper. It’s possible to purchase metals for in-game money, but it’s vastly cheaper to make more of your own metal and trade your excess with friends for their surplus. This trade system is a great reason for interacting with other players, and is a welcome departure from the social incentives offered in previous games. In earlier Facebook games, many items necessary for progress could only be obtained by receiving them as ‘gifts’, but those gifts were completely free to send, undermining any notion of scarcity and the strategy that comes with it.

The wither mechanic is (nearly) gone

Zynga caught a lot of flak for this one since they introduced it in Farmville. If you planted a crop that took 6 hours to harvest, and didn’t return within 12 hours, the crop would “wither” and the ruined crop would remain as a blight on your farm. Not only was your money wasted, others would be able to see that you were a neglectful virtual farmer. The response was polarizing – many people accepted it as reasonable, and arranged their lives around making sure they could make it home in time to tend their crops.  Others called the mechanism manipulative (or were embarrassed by their ruined raspberries) and refused to play along. However, with each game released since, Zynga have introduced more forgiving measures. They’ve increased the time that the player has to collect resources after maturation, and allowed your friends to intervene and ‘un-wither’ crops – an excellent social feature, even if a little unrealistic. For the first few weeks I had actually thought that the wither mechanism was entirely gone. It turned out that the time-scales have shifted so that it appears less as a punitive measure than a natural outcome of leaving one’s crops for too long, which is less offensively intrusive.

Combat is more than just clicking a button

In most social games, the outcome of the player’s actions have about as much strategy as a coin toss, but Empires & Allies is a little more complicated than that. There are land, sea, and air units, and three classes of unit per terrain type. These units follow a paper-scissors-rock pattern for dominance. In preparation for a battle, you first choose the terrain type and then the specific units for that terrain, e.g. if you choose air then you might select a bomber, some fighter jets, and a helicopter. For story missions it is necessary to enlist friends as ‘allies’ who can be called on in battle. Doing so will give you a randomly-selected powerup, such as field repairs on your vehicles or an air strike against the enemy’s forces. What is available through your allies is determined by their level of experience, and the balance of their “infamy” and “honour” ratings. This results in your play style having an impact on how others benefit from you, even without your explicit involvement in the battle.

Infamy and Honour

Your levels of infamy and honour are determined by the kind of involvement you have with your friends in the game. If you visit their islands and assist their efforts, you’re rewarded with ‘honour’, which gives you experience and means that when called upon as an ally, your bonuses are biased toward constructive, defensive powerups. If you invade and plunder their lands, though, your ‘infamy’ level rises – which also gives you experience, but means that your powerups are biased toward attacking, destructive ones. Infamy probably results in a greater XP payoff, but comes at a material cost through the risk of losing your military forces in the invasion, as well the fact that your friends will be less likely to cooperate in future. The sting of being invaded isn’t quite sharp as it could be, though – it’s still possible to go about your business; it just takes more energy to do so.

Collections are a thing of the past

Collecting sets is one of the central features of Mafia Wars and many other games on Facebook. While I don’t mind it as a mechanic, it is often used to gloss over an inherent shallowness in the game – objects are desirable simply for the sake of possessing them, there are no costs to possessing more, and the only difference between one item and the next is its name perhaps a small icon. This feature is entirely gone in Empires & Allies. A player could collect all of the kinds of tanks, or plant all of the different crops to make a picture with the harvest – but the items have an intrinsic utility in the game, and goals like this are imposed solely by the player for the sake of self-expression. When Zynga makes a game complex enough that there is a genuine reason to obtain a full complement of Civil War moustaches, I’ll welcome the collection system back with open arms, but in the meantime I am happy to see it go.

So far, so good!

Between these features, there’s a lot that is new and interesting. Many of the shallow and manipulative features are totally gone, and others are toned down significantly. It’s not perfect, though, and while some of the problems simply come about because of the game’s target market and the Facebook platform, it’s worth examining them to see if anything can be done to improve the game. I’ll go through those problematic features – and some proposed solutions – in an upcoming post.

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!

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.