Gamification & Social Games /Jon Radoff
The compression of time and space
If you're running a business that depends heavily on a physical location, how do you build a hub for interaction and experience? And if you're not very dependent on physical location, what can you do to give customers the feeling of being in a real place?
As the concepts of time and space get compressed, the meaning of 'on-demand' — consumers being able to access what they want instantly — has shifted too.
Before the novel era, having something 'on-demand' for your own entertainment was available only to the wealthy elite.
With the industrial revolution, newspapers could be written in one place, printed in the next, and delivered piping hot. The on-demand nature of newspapers came not just from ease of access but from the fact that you could fold one up, carry it around, and consume it whenever you wanted.
It was the industrial-revolution version of the iPod or a saved game.
The on-demand of the movie era took physical shape as the VCR — used as rentals through local video stores.
In the game era, distribution converges onto electronic streaming over the internet. On-demand has essentially become 'right now.' The future of on-demand, which many companies are already preparing for, is a media distribution network that can predict what you want before you know it yourself.
In the game era, as the number of creative workers grows, creativity becomes something everyone accepts as positive.
There are a few forms of creativity:
Unstructured creativity — where there are no serious constraints beyond the individual's imagination and the inherent limits of the medium.
Structured creativity — there are significant constraints on the options you can pick, but there are options to combine elements in unique ways that reflect your values.
Emergent creativity — highly unstructured creativity that depends heavily on a platform someone else has provided.
Choice is at the heart of structured creativity. Choice is a powerful tool, and games are fundamentally all about choice — but too many choices leave the player confused.
Like film, music, and books, games convey not just information but emotion. Emotion is the psychological glue that connects our memories to action.
What separates games from other media is the existence of rules. A rule is a set of choices that clearly defines the consequences of an action. Our brains are astonishingly good at forming abstract concepts, recognizing patterns, and uncovering rules. We decode the rules of a game using the exact same neural machinery that makes a child wonder why the sky is blue and makes a physicist question the properties of a black hole.
Games are a dramatic model of our psychological lives; they relieve certain tensions. Games are a collective, popular art form with strict conventions. In ancient and pre-literate societies, games were naturally treated as vivid, dramatic models of the cosmos or of external cosmic dramas.
— Marshall McLuhan, 'Games: Extensions of Man'
Numbers tell you which features people use most, how they spend money, and how effective your customer outreach programs are. (Outreach normally means volunteer or outgoing service work. In social games it's not precisely defined, but is assumed to mean programs that reach out to customers — email, feeds, Facebook pages, and so on.)
Agile development is about building software through a series of quick iterations carried out by self-organizing teams. The Agile Manifesto sums up the main goals this way:
— Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
— Working software over comprehensive documentation
— Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
— Responding to change over following a plan
Agile methodology can be applied beautifully to game development as well, with a few differences:
Iteration is no substitute for vision.
In the early stage of forming a game concept — when designers hunt down the sources of interaction and fun and experiment with various ideas — iteration is a very useful frame. But once the game's brand, fun, and key decisions have been made, the team has to stick with them. Agile isn't a substitute for vision; if you don't realize that quickly, iteration won't get you to a fun experience.
Success means everyone's participation.
You need a strong coach who can lead and involve everyone, not just engineers.
Some parts of agile don't always map onto every part of game development.
Games are hierarchical and contain enormous amounts of content and graphics resources. Once the needed resources are defined, they often have to be produced along a production schedule that's far from the agile process.
Finding the fun in a game and optimizing the numbers aren't necessarily the same job.
User-engagement metrics are a good way to measure success, but too many teams treat 'fun' as something to fix later through iteration, missing the timing to answer the most important question in every game — 'what's the fun part?' — and never getting there. So fun should be identified within the first prototype window.
Without an answer to what the fun factor is, getting useful customer feedback is hard.
Even when you don't have a perfectly polished demo to show potential customers, the team still has to find the best way to get market feedback. Focus groups can sometimes help.
Much of the game experience is driven by a unique look and feel, an innovative interface, or a brand.
Many agile teams make the mistake of avoiding those aspects like a debt collector. But a game's unique flavor and experience come from these elements, not from programming alone. Agile teams need to get comfortable pulling non-programming elements into the team.
Team skills
Game design
Expertise in designing point systems, badges, and leaderboards. You need to understand emotion and know how to create fun. You have to be a great communicator, able to express yourself and explain rules and systems to other designers. Depending on the complexity of the game, game design can have several sub-fields (item designer, story writer, level designer, puzzle designer, economy-system designer).
Data analysis
Expertise in analytics tools like spreadsheets and databases. Experience with website-analytics tools. In particular, experience building data-driven custom systems to measure conversion, purchase rate, and engagement.
User-experience design
Turning the hopes and dreams of players and game designers
into stories, storyboards, wireframes, prototypes, or visually polished interfaces.
Graphic artists
Depending on the project, besides a typical website art designer, you might need an illustrator or pixel artist, a 3D modeler, and an animator.
Frontend programming
The ability to use frontend tech like HTML, Flash, and Unity to build the functional interfaces players will experience in the game.
Backend programming
The ability to handle databases, application servers, and web development languages (Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Flex are the most common in social-media game development).
Project management
An agile coach and producer who manages resources and deliverables, coordinates and drives communication, and manages infrastructure like the issue-tracking system.
Quality assurance
Given the frequent change cycles of social-media game development, intuitive, hands-on testers are far more useful than those who lean heavily on scripted test environments.
Player-centered design
