Fear and Loathing in Farmville

For gamers, here's an interesting post by Soren Johnson that's something of a follow-up to my previous post, Design Outside the Box. Apparently, the 2010 Game Developers Conference was pretty well obsessed with Facebook (if you're wondering, Farmville is a Facebook game). The sheer number of potential players - and the potential profit - has a lot of these people salivating.

And among computer game developers, it appears that there's considerable conflict between people focused on making as much money as possible and people who really want to make a good game. Many of the latter are angry that their passion for games is threatened by unethical "suits." In fact, Johnson calls Jesse Schell's presentation, that I noted before, his "now infamous DICE talk." But he does recognize some advantages to the Facebook model.

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.

Facebook doesn't interest me, nor do multiplayer games of any kind. But that's the way the industry seems to be heading. And I still find this all very interesting.

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 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 [Meiers] is fond of saying, the player should be the one having the fun, after all, not the designer.

And, of course, there are still the Indie developers, creating a great variety of different games,... and mainly just because they love games. Few of these people are going to get rich, and they know it. With the Internet, marketing and distributing a game is a lot easier than it used to be. So I guess I'm less concerned with this obsession with Facebook than I might otherwise be.