In Search of the Casual

In the last year or so there’s been a mounting interest in gaming media on casual games.  Publishers have no doubt been looking at the casual game space for several years prior - and understandably - as the current industry is valued at approximately 2.25 billion dollars and rapidly increasing.  You know what I think would be great?  If every time people talked about the casual games industry I didn’t see the picture below.

I know that Bejeweled makes PopCap a crapload of money.  It came out 6 years ago.  The sequel, pictured above, came out 3 years ago, but really it’s the same game.  There is other stuff going on, really cool stuff too.  And if there isn’t, that market segment is screwed, because you can’t sustain an industry when all anyone ever talks about in the media is one match 3 game that came out the same year as the Gamecube and original Xbox. 

Industries - especially fledgling industries - need their heroes.  Industries need companies who compete with each other, and those companies need to be able to point to examples of brilliance and say “That right there, that’s what we’ve got to beat”.  You need more than a 6 year (and climbing) window between iconic landmarks of innovation to grow an industry.  Now I’m not saying that nothing interesting has happened in the last six years in the casual games space, I’m saying quite the opposite, but the gaming media needs to stop pointing to that particular casual gaming poster child and bring some of the other orphaned children out of the cold (Like Desktop Tower Defense!).

Am I just deaf and blind, or is there an ongoing reason for this?

Kongregate

Kongregate will consume your soul and cause you to swear Oaths of Fealty.

As mentioned previously, I’m a huge achievement whore.  The concept of badges has entranced me since I was a wee Boy Scout.  I don’t take particular pride in showing them off to anyone, I just like having a record of tasks I’ve accomplished.  If you’re a fan of Newgrounds, which is the cradle of humanity for cool flash games, you’re going to lurrrrve Kongregate. 

Additionally, and this bit is kind of weird, Kongregate is the future home of a digital collectable card game.  The current manner for aquiring these cards is to complete an acheivement for a particular game for that week.  Presumably when the game is actually launched there will also be some mechanism for purchasing/winning additional cards for your deck.  Final judgement is reserved for when the game comes out.

On top of all that, It’s just clean.  Clean like Facebook used to be, you know, back in the day before they started plastering shit all over your screen like this was 1997.  Cleanliness is highly appreciated and improves the usability story tenfold.  Go check it out.

More Gaming Crack

In the previous post I discussed the fact that addiction and enjoyment are not the same thing, and I cited several games who have the addiction (if not also the enjoyment) down square.  What I did not talk about is how exactly you go about making that happen.

Casinos have boiled one technique down to a fine art: high payout at rare intervals.  Now it’s not simply enough to randomly dole out a large reward on an arbitrary basis.  Players need to understand why they’re getting this reward, even if there’s a lot of randomness to it, it must be as a direct result of an action they took.  The reward happens to also provide a fun element, but much as Crack is is much more addictive than its more expensive counterpart Cocaine.  Because the high is so intense, and so short-lived, it triggers an extreme desire to repeat activities that led to the high in the first place.

Examples:

• Any form of Gambling, Poker, Blackjack, Slots causes you to win big only occasionally, which keeps you playing another hand or pulling the lever one more time, just in case you get lucky again.
• Match 3 games implement this by having a normal scenario be the matching of three items causing a chain of new blocks to drop.  Occasionally the blocks that drop will cause a further match, and a cascade effect may occur giving the player massive point multipliers.  This is random to a certain extent because the player is unaware of what blocks will drop next.
• Diablo/World of Warcraft acts through rare item drops.  Players will do a raid dungeon over and over again on the pure hope that an extremely powerful and rare item will drop that they may be able to obtain.  Even if a usable item does drop, there is not a guarantee that the individual player will be the one to roll for it.
• Crack Cocaine works by releasing massive amounts of Dopamine into the brain.  This high only lasts a short time, and repeated hits will not achieve the same level of euphoria as the first round did.
• In experiments with mice, a mouse will spend proporionally more time pushing a button which dispenses food at random intervals than with a button that dispenses food at regular intervals (say every ten pushes of the button).  This effect is so pronounced that a mouse will spend the majority of their life tapping away at the button given the opportunity.  If the reward is of higher value than food (a non-narcotic drug), the effect magnifies).

Good vs Addictive

Here’s a fun experiment that you can all do at home.  Get a small rodent and a degree in Neurophysiology.  Then pop the rodent’s head open and put a few cuts on the ventromedial hypothalmus.  If you haven’t botched the job and killed the poor thing, what you will discover is that the rodent will binge and binge, continually eating whatever food is available, regardless of how full it gets. 

There are other similar experiments you can do such as getting your younger siblings addicted to cocaine, but they all illustrate a rather fundamental neurological principal: Craving something and enjoying something are not the same thing, they are related, but more or less independant, in so far as anything is in that mush of cerebral goo upstairs.

The reason I bring this up is that it has ramifications for games.  While not necessarly as direct as chemical or physical intervention, it is possible to trigger the same pathways that twitchy crack addicts get to live with every day in a more mild manner using behavioral stimuli.  What drug dealers and Daniel Cook have figured out is that it is extremely profitable to do so, if you can get the formula right.  Where Danc and I disagree is that I don’t think all games are drugs, only the ones who have the addiction tricks down proper. 

There are companies who specialize in this unique blend of addiction.  Blizzard has a strong history of getting this right with games like Diablo and its larger, more voractious soul-sucking older brother World of Warcraft.  Blizzard is, in fact, so good at this, that the only thing that seems to limit their ability to create maniacly addictive games is the amount of time they have to develop them - not something most can say.  Casual Gaming generally falls into this category as well.  The more popular games in this genre such as the oft quoted Bejeweled are not a particularly thrilling experience.  Nobody is deriving actual pleasure from playing Solitaire.  People play these games because they kill time and they’re innovative only in the sense that they’ve got the addcition formula down to a fine art, a formula which can be easily cloned from clone to dreary clone.

Blizzard is in a relatively unique position of making games which are highly addictive and at the same time very enjoyable to play.  Most game designers are generally aiming for the latter.  From a business perspective, there’s not much real advantage to aiming for the addiction formula if you’re selling premium retail games - by the time they’re addicted they’ve already purchased the title.  In cases where you have an opportunity to give them the first hit for free - and to tell them to come back to get more - the addiction is key to the survival of the business model. 

This doesn’t mean you have an excuse for making shitty games.  An enjoyable and addictive game is always going to win out over an addictive game, all other things being equal.  It’s notable that companies like Infinite Interactive have attempted to take the highly successful match 3 formula and inject it with some real enjoyment by adding RPG elements (and somehow making gamer crack all the more potent at the same time).

The point I’m rambling slowly towards here is that games that are popular are not the same that games that are good.  The philosophy that large groups of people can’t be wrong has never been even remotely true, and it’s certainly not here.  If casual games are going to be a hallmark industry in the future, we need to start seeing more of an approach that takes both of these into consideration.