Michael Agustin, Gendai Games

Introduction

 
60 million people played Farmville last month. In a very real sense, the quest to make video games an everyday and accessible part of mass market popular culture is over: video games have arrived.

So, if video games are finally for everybody, now what? Successful social games so far have been defiantly simple and strategically shallow. Beloved game genres and mechanics which offer players a richer array of meaningful choices and gratifying moment-to-moment gameplay have defied or at least challenged all attempts at both monetization and virality on the social platform.  From a design point of view, it is non-obvious where to go from here.  With this background in mind, this working group decided to tackle the question of "How to make Social Games Better".

We believe that there is room for growth and innovation in social games, but that there are a number of open questions that we need to consider:

       Overall, are social games popular despite their incredible simplicity/shallowness, or because of it? Is it possible to create deeper, more meaningful gaming experiences without losing the ease of learning and low commitment that makes these games so mass market? The lesson from casual games suggests that it is possible, given that most successful casual games start simple, but become more complex over time. (Examples: Diner Dash, Zuma.) Yet, if this is implemented in a social game, do we risk that power gamers make the game unbalanced / uninteresting to other players? Or would that problem be solved simply by minimizing the competition between players?  Can we imagine games that reward cleverness rather than simply grinding, or is grinding the big equalizer?

       What is the larger place of social games within the field of video games? What are ways to leverage the social graph and the other possibilities of social networks, and that elevate the use of the social graph above just spamming friends or the lightest of asynchronous interactions? Are social games just a flavor-of-the-week, or a critical turning point in the history of the medium? How can the "art" of games exist harmoniously with the business-side of games, in a free-to-play/virtual goods universe where business and design are so intertwined?
 
In order to propose answers to these questions, we have divided the report into two sections.

1. In "The State of Social Games", we examine the current state of social games, identifying what we believe are the currently successful design and business strategies. We then identify a number of problems, gaps, and opportunities with these existing designs.
2. In "Solutions and new directions", we propose a number of ideas for remedying the flaws in current social games and for moving social games forward in general.

The State of Social Games

It is clear that social games are very successful, but what makes them successful? We identified a number of properties of existing games, and we identified a number of problems and opportunities.

What are the design elements that make social games work so well?

• They connect to the existing social graph.
• Asynchronous play allows players to play at their own pace; where and whenever it suits them.
• Allowing people to make friendly gestures by helping (giving gifts, etc.) because there is a shared knowledge of game goals
• Single-player experiences embedded within real and imagined communities
• Efficient and streamlined social communication
  • Simple one-to-many communication
  • Low-effort notification of game events to friends
• Ease of entry. Easy-to-understand short- and long term goals. Easy-to-parse game state.
  • Browser-based
  • Free to play, hence no purchase barrier to entry
• Low required time commitment
• A sense of constancy: Feels like you are always playing them. Thinking about the game even while not logged on; waiting for crops to grow etc.
• Most social games do not strongly reward intense time commitment. (Unlike WOW, for example.) Hence the playing field is leveled.
• Game design, marketing and virality are integrated.

Opportunities and gaps

• Intrusive communication and solicitation from the games
• Little "deep" gameplay
• How to integrate and monetize popular game forms that aren't naturally viral or social
• How to harvest the creativity of the community
• How do we make it so newcomers can better work together with experienced players?
• How can we expand thematically while keeping mass market accessibility (theme, story, aesthetics)?

Solutions and new directions

The group spent time focusing on possible future directions to bridge the gaps enumerated above. Nineteen ideas were brainstormed, but we focused on the following eleven ideas.

1) Collaborative games (including role differentiation)

The working group explored the topic of play patterns that seemed like natural fits for the social platform but had not yet been aggressively pursued. One such play pattern discussed was collaborative challenges where each member of a social group or team plays a differentiated role. Perhaps you and your team set out to build a village. Perhaps instead you and your team set out to slay a dragon or cure an epidemic or run a school or farm or a restaurant!  If you are building a village you will need a planner, an architect, a builder, a foreman, a landscaper, a gardener etc.  Each member of your team, group or guild may contribute an important (and asynchronously played) role. This asynchronous guild play taps into the collaborative nature of project play and allows for differentiated talents and personality types and allows for group bragging upon success.  Drawing from the success of collaborative guilds in WoW or board games like Pandemic, it was felt that this idea had enormous potential.

Example of collaborative group play: Players can invite other players to an instance-like challenge where they must breed new kinds of flowers. During the course of 5 days, players are notified that they need to bring specific types of flowers to the instanced garden. If 75% of the requested flowers are delivered, a new rare breed of flower is created. If 100%, two new rare breeds of flowers are created.

2) Collaborative group play, team vs. team

The above can also be envisioned as team vs. team. The mechanic of team vs. team is found in everything from card games to first person shooters. It is well understood by a broad audience. The challenge is to implement this in asynchronous form and without intimidating players.
 
Example of team vs. team: A player can issue a team vs. team challenge to another player in a sheep vs. sheep battle. If the other player accepts, each player is given 24 hours to collect the largest possible team, and these players must in term gather as many sheep on their farms as they can. When 24 hours have passed, the battle takes place, with the winning team being the one that has amassed the most sheep. The game generates an animation of the battle and notifies the players. Winning team receives and shares the sheep of the losing team.

3) A metagame service, below which there are different games

The working group explored the topic of game genres that have devoted fan bases but are not natural fits for the social platform (typically because they are not naturally viral or do not monetize well through virtual goods).  In order to bridge this divide, the group imagined a compelling social meta-game that offered a service to players that might incorporate modules, minigames, compartments or episodes where gameplay and achievements in those minigames/episodes and compartments laddered up to the metagame allowing players to progress, unlock or reveal or purchase new status tiers, new gameplay elements and new items, within the context of an aggressively viral loop.
 
Such minigames or modules, it was thought, might allow for a variety of robust and beloved mechanics to enrich the social games landscape offering game designers a broader toolbox for richer, more gratifying moment-to-moment gameplay mechanics --mechanics that might then be able to thrive within the social platform. Games genres and mechanics which the working group discussed were:

• Popular mechanics from the casual download space such as match-three, time management and hidden object
• Card, board and party games (think Truth or Dare, Pictionary, Taboo, Apples to Apples)
• Episodic narrative content
• Inventory adventure games
• Music and rhythm action games
• FPS
• RTS

4) King for a day (dictatorial powers to a player)

Imagine a game divided into small communities … say 5 to 10 people.  The gameplay mechanics or the setting/theme could be almost anything. One player within the community has dictatorial powers within that community for a period (say, 24 hours). They can assign resources, give rewards, take away possessions, and even change the rules of the game. However, this player couldn’t be all that capricious or vindictive or unfair, because he or she would know that within the next few days, all the other players they are affecting with their decisions would become King, and could repay them in kind, or worse.

For example, imagine a feudal farming game with 7 players in the community. Six days per week a player farms his or her field, buying resources from the King, selling resources to the King, paying taxes to the King, and using weapons provided by the King to defend a homestead against attacking Barbarians. But once a week, the player becomes King, and decides how much resources cost to sell or buy, sets a tax rate, gives out weapons, etc. As King, you give fewer weapons to a given player, and thus keep more of the royal treasury to yourself … but at the risk that two days later, when you’re a peon and that player is King, you won’t get any weapons and Barbarians will steal your crops. And so forth.

This would be a fascinating playspace that plays with the dynamics of groups, deal-making, kindness and meanness, shared goals, conflicting goals, and many more.

5) Rating content created by other users

This mechanism is already used to great effect in sites like YouTube, Hotornot.com, Flickr, Slashdot, etc.  Any form of user created content game, from simple to complex, faces the problem of letting people find the "good stuff" from among the chaff.  Users rating what they see goes a long way to solving this problem.  Submitted content could be anything from making levels for a puzzle or action game, decorating your home, building post-cards or comic strips from pre-supplied art, all the way to games with overblown scripting engines that let the users decide what kind of fun to make.  Providing in-game rewards for the most popular content can give an incentive for the most creative users to produce more entertainment for the rest of the players.  Though if this is pursued, some caution should be taken to keep players from being able to "game the system".  (Requiring a minimum number of votes before accepting the average vote value, discarding multiple votes from the same computer, etc.)

6) Communities building things on a massive scale

Allow the community to build infrastructure such as a monorail system like a Disneyland. In order for this feature to become available to the community they must build it first by dropping off x number of items and or in game currency at the build site. Once all the resources have been gathered the feature is build and now available to all. Expanding on the Disneyland example, this idea can apply to opening new worlds or lands. You must gather the resources then build frontier land before it becomes available. This type of design combines well with giving the community tools to vote for new content.

Building facilities within the game can also be combined with maintenance mechanics where the community must also upkeep the facilities or react to random breakdown of facilities. Think of these as sort of Tamagotchis shared by the community.

7) Scarcity

Most current games simulate an infinite supply of every acquirable item.  Some methods of introducing scarcity into a game economy include Gaia Online and Dreamscape's method of offering items for a limited amount of time, which makes them rise in value over time after they've gone off sale. Or alternatively, Magic the Gathering and other trading card games give players packs of random cards, with some of them ten times less common as others. In games like EverQuest or WoW have certain items that only become available briefly in certain locations, at rare intervals, on a first come, first served basis.  (This method can lead to some distinctly anti-social behaviors, however.)  The possible approaches are endless.

Regardless of the method chosen for introducing item scarcity, having robust means for the players to trade and sell items to each other is important to gain the most value and gameplay from this approach.  Being able to trade with other members of your social network gives a fun activity to engage in together.  Being able to trade with strangers as well can expand social contacts, though again it can also lead to negative behaviors that need to be considered in the design stage.

8) Auction mechanics

There are many board games that use an auction mechanic as a core gameplay mechanic: Modern Art, Masterpiece, Ra, Bohnanza, Power Grid, and many others. Also, many hardcore MMOs feature an auction house that players love to participate in; many people consider it a game within a game.

Despite the popularity of the auction mechanic, and its inherent socialness, and the presence of virtual goods of varying value within social games, the auction mechanic has not appeared in social games to date.
Imagine a game that rewards players for completing collections, as in Mafia Wars or Treasure Mania, but instead of gifting or trading between players to complete collections, items were auctioned off. (This gets even more interesting if these items are of variable scarcity, instead of being equally common as has been in the case so far in games with collections.)

Or imagine a game with an important resource you need, such as seeds or fertilizer in a farm game. Each day, a certain amount of these resources are made available to a small community, such as you and your neighboring farms. Players bid on those resources, with players trying to get the resources for the smallest possible cost. Because of the changing situations of players in the game, the value of resources vary from player to player and from day to day, creating a ever-changing dynamic and many of emergent behaviors and patterns.

9) Mechanics & Roles for Super nodes

In a social graph, some individuals are connected to more people than others; these people are the super nodes in the community.  In many social games today, players are often rewarded for recruiting as many people to their faction or cause in an almost pyramid-style scheme.  However, this experience could be taken further by adding a mechanics where these super nodes can take on different role or gain new powers.  These roles could involve abilities such as the management of resources for a guild, steering the direction of a ship or of an organization, being able to instantly effect the environment, or simply playing a support role to give other players a significant boost in stats to turn the tide of a competition.

10) Gameplay that determines which charities receive money

Freerice.com demonstrates a straightforward way in which game design can have a concrete positive social impact. We would like to go beyond that by integrating charity more directly into game mechanics. The following examples are effectively modernized ways of branding a product as "giving x% of our proceeds to charity", except that players feel more directly responsible for the good deed.

Example 1: Donating a virtual item to charity. When receiving a virtual item from a game action (any reward qualifies - growing, item drops, chance), the player is offered the option of donating the item as money to charity.

Example 2: Game success causes donation to a charity. A game has several goals that players can choose between, knowing ahead of time which goal is tied to which charity. Goals can be on many different levels and of many different scopes. (Grow 20 plants of a specific type; defeat a monster; play intensively for two weeks then not log in for a week; leveling up.)

When players reach a certain goal, this causes a donation to a charity. This means that a) players feel that they are making a personal commitment and b) players are incentivized to complete game challenges, which in turn generates the income needed for the donation. In the ideal case, there is a logical connection between the type of in-game action and the work of the charity.

11) Democracy where players vote to change rules or add content

In any group of people there will invariably be differing interests.  Social games can give players a grand sense of agency using political mechanisms such as democracy. In the MMO game Tale in the Desert, players take on the role of citizens to help found a civilization. Players can vote to add or amend laws that changes the way that everyone is allowed to interact within the community. Social games could also give the community tools within the game to allow them to vote on new content.

Example 1: There can be facilities within the world where players can adjust slide bars to prioritize their wish list for new content such as Avatar items, mini games and meta features.

Example 2: There can be predetermined under construction building locations where players can view 3 pieces of concept art for 3 different mini games. Players vote on which mini game they would like to see in the built. At the end of the voting period the new mini game is placed in the construction area.  

section 4

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select a section:
1. Introduction  2. Executive Summary  
3. Choosing Between Right and Right: Creating Meaningful Ethical Dilemmas in Games
4. How to make Social Games Better
5. Free Your Inner Suit: A Capitalist’s Guide to Survival in 21st Century Game Development
6. Schedule & Sponsors