Are games converging on standard play lengths?  Other media forms have de facto ranges:  movies at 90-120 min, popular music at 2 – 4 min, concerts at 2 – 3 hours, etc.  There are plenty of exceptions, but even those are almost always within the same order of magnitude.

What about games?  Lighter, more casual fare allows for play sessions of a minute or two (everything from solitaire to various Facebook titles).  Many console titles ask at least 20 minutes of you.  And it’s hard to imagine having any meaningful experience in World of Warcraft in less than an hour.  These all feel a bit muddier than other media types though, and there’s no consistency across a given platform or market segment (i.e. the ranges are huge compared to movies, music, et al).

Does this lack of clarity help or hurt games?  Does it create tension for the user to not know in advance what they’re getting into?

Or have we gotten to a point where people do have expectations associated with a given platform or segment, even if many games aren’t following those standards?  Are they then disappointed when it doesn’t match, or worse, do they not bother to try a game because they assume all titles in that category require a certain time commitment?

I do think standard play lengths are a potential problem for all media forms going forward.  The interesting question to ask though, is whether consumers are helped or hurt by these formalized expectations (or for that matter, whether content creators benefit from these implicit constraints).

This short essay was first posted to my original blog on Jan 5, 2009.

My original post last summer about Games for a 10% Attention Span generated a fair amount of complimentary feedback from friends and colleagues, but also came with a number of questions. Most of those revolved around existing titles that might fit the bill;  the rest can be summed up as “so?”

I’ll address existing titles in future posts. Today I want to talk about the relevance question, particularly from a consumer adoption standpoint. For that I’m going to turn to some research done in the mobile game sector.

Several studies were done on consumer play habits in the mobile space a few years back, by companies such as Nokia, In-Fusio and (what was then) Sorrent. At the time, many of us in the space assumed consumers played mobile games when they had no other entertainment options available:  at the bus stop, on the subway, waiting for your dentist, etc. Given the availability of cable TV, the web or an Xbox, people would turn to those instead.

What they found was very different. Of those that played mobile games:

• About 60% played at home.
• Average play sessions were roughly 20 minutes, with a subset exceeding that by a fair amount (in the Sorrent study, up to 2 hours).
• Roughly a third played every day.

Now these are games built to be played in very short chunks of time, maybe five minutes, tops.  They’re typically light affairs, without a lot of depth.   So why would anyone pick them up at all when they’re at home, with more compelling experiences at their disposal?

The studies above don’t address that.  But my takeaway is that these games are:

• Accessible:  The most accessible product is more likely to garner consumer attention, not the richest or deepest.  Mobile games are the kings of accessibility (at least, good ones are).  Shoot, every design I ever wrote for a mobile game included a section on how many key presses it would take to start playing the game, and whether you’d have to move your thumb at all during that process.
• Commitment Friendly:  Consumers probably didn’t sit down thinking they were going to play for 20 minutes (or more).  The likely turned to the mobile game because they could get in faster and be done in a couple minutes.  They just wound up playing again and again.

Consumers were facing the friction of playing something else and went for the mobile game instead.  It may sound trivial to go find the Halo 3 disc, turn on the Xbox, turn on the TV, find the controller and/or remote, and then assume you’ll have a good 20 – 30 minutes to play, but that’s an eternity compared to a mobile game.  And in a world of media overload and scarce attention, a game that asks less of the consumer has a greater opportunity to gain traction.

Now there are other problems with how the mobile game business works.  But the premise is still sound, and it applies to any game, mobile or not.  Games with a flexible attention requirement reduce friction:  the friction to try, the friction to keep playing and the friction to come back. Less friction means more consumers will try and stay with the game.  And consumers who play longer offer more opportunities to generate revenue;  their lifetime value increases.

Next time I’ll tackle an asynchronous web game that almost – but not quite – fits the flexible attention model.

This short essay was first posted to my original blog on August 7, 2008.

I have a fairly complex social graph (or social graphs, if that’s the right way to look at it): there’s the obvious work, family, friends breakdown; but I’m also an avid photographer and I play sand volleyball four days a week. And outside of work there’s really industry, comprised of people in my field I keep in contact with on a regular basis, and not necessarily about work-related things.

A number of tools help me stay in touch with everyone: email, IM, text messaging, social networks, blogs and so forth. I can see them in person too– I run into my volleyball friends regularly on the courts, and I sometimes play board games with fellow game industry folk.

Here’s my concern: the communities I am a part of are defined by my social graph and do not map well to the structure of the web.

Take photography, for example. I have my flickr site, flickr groups, photo news sites, online stores I regularly buy gear from, photo-centric blogs and the social network pages of other photographers. Not to mention my own blog, portfolio and Facebook pages. At any one of these locations I might participate in a discussion about photography (or about anything else but with people who share a common interest in photography). Do I really need to monitor a dozen different locations to connect with other photographers, particularly when many of the same people are monitoring the same sites?

The photography community I am part of is content-centric, not location centric. It’s not well defined — the edges are very soft. I might have eight online locations in common with one photographer, but only six with another and maybe four shared between the three of us. The way the web is structured now, I have to pick a couple places and because I can only monitor so many, I’m forced to cut out a number of others. And along with that I lose a number of folks who may partly but not entirely overlap.

I’d like to see a product that treated the internet as subservient to the content communities I am a part of. Something that layered on top of the web and viewed it through a community lens: where are the people in my social graph(s), what are they talking about, how can I chat with them without having to take the conversation to one particular place. For that matter, who else is at the same site as I am, whether I know them or not, that I can talk to about this temporary, shared experience we’re both having (i.e. the news / game / video / etc we’re both looking at).

Intentionally or not, a wide range of companies are circling around this issue: site-centric mini-worlds (Lively, Rocketon), browser replacements (Flock), shared browsing experiments (Medium, BumpIn), fancy IM clients (IMVU, vSide), and so forth. Even Twitter, social networks, mashups and stuff like Delicious and Digg probably qualify. All of these products have, at best, a nice solution to a piece of the problem.

However, I suspect the reason most of those products fail to meet our larger content community needs is that they ask us to exchange our current method of social communication for something new. But in their desire to change how people interact on the web, they hamper or disregard things that already work really really well. Take Rocketon. Here’s a cool idea: avatar chat with others who are at the same web page. Visitors can even move around the page in a kind of temporary 2d space. Except they cannot interact with the page itself in any way — which was the whole reason for being were here in the first place (yes, you can toggle Rocketon off to get to the page, but then you lose the chat).

There isn’t one single way I interact with a particular community (content centric or not): I read, browse, select, chat, comment, show off, save, contribute, modify, buy, sell, etc.  What’s missing from today’s community products is a way to bring these varied interactions together around the common interest (i.e. the context) of my social graph. But I can understand why no one’s done it yet– it’s a far more difficult problem than just ditching everything and proposing a new interface paradigm.

Of course, many of these businesses aren’t even concerned with my so-called content community problem — Facebook, Delicious and smaller products like IMVU are quite successful and have no need to go in this direction. But they could be so much more if they did.

This short essay was first posted to my original blog on August 1, 2008.

Most of the discussion on casual and hardcore games paints a mutually exclusive picture. But casual and hardcore aren’t two ends of the same spectrum: the opposite of a casual feature is not a hardcore feature.

There are, however, things that interfere or reduce a game’s ability to be played in a casual or hardcore manner. Why define what casual/hardcore aren’t instead of what they are? Because, for example, having simple controls says nothing about a game’s ability to be played casual or hardcore (it’s useful for both), but complex controls make it difficult to be played casually. This is all relative, of course, and heavily dependent on pre-existing knowledge. Driving a manual transmission is a pretty complicated UI affair, but once you know it the experience is largely transparent and becomes a non-factor.

Things that reduce casual play:

• Complex unfamiliar controls
• Multiple channels of audio-visual stimulus
• Steep (but not high) learning curve
• Long start up to start play times
• Long minimum play sessions
• Inability for players of different skill levels to play together or against each other

Things that reduce hardcore play:

• Lack of product depth
• Lack of replayability

There’s probably a few I’m missing; I was surprised I couldn’t come up with more for the hardcore list.

How a game is played over it’s life cycle likely has an impact too. A game with a steep learning curve and complex controls would prevent it from being played casually, but once past that (and assuming no other barriers) you could conceivably play it in a casual manner. That may be particularly valuable if the product no longer has the same hold on the consumer’s attention as it did when they first got it.

This short essay was first posted to my original blog on July 23, 2008.

It’s a truism to say we live in a noisy media environment.

In a world where most media requires our undivided attention for a fixed amount of time, and where the quantity and access to media are at an all time high, we are forced to make some difficult choices about which content we have time to consume. 120 minutes for the latest summer blockbuster? 15 minutes for a chapter in that book? 30 minutes for a quest in World of Warcraft? Choosing between them is hard enough, but it’s compounded by the friends, family, work and other things calling for our attention, potentially interrupting us at any moment.

In this brutal competitive landscape, the response of content creators hasn’t been to adapt. It’s been to scream louder, to flash brighter, to do anything possible to grab our attention and then hold it. Bigger explosions. Brighter colors. Higher recording levels. And we’re penalized if we stray: I need to see every episode of Lost, in order, to know what’s going on.

Rather than fight some attention grabbing arms race with every other piece of content in the universe, I think there may be an opporunity to design products, and games in particular, that adapt and live in this crowded environment. There’s room, and possibly a need, for a more flexible media product that doesn’t ask people to commit, and makes it easier for them to experience it on their own terms.

So what are the characteristics of a flexible media product? It should be:

• Interruptible
  • The rest of the world will intrude at some point, at any point. The consumer knows this in advance and will shy away from products that require a large time commitment they may not be able to give (at least, not if there’s a competing option). Or they’ll choose the product anyway but experience less of it (e.g. watching a movie while taking care of a child).
  • No death penalty (re-entry is painless). The consumer needs to retain minimal historical knowledge to jump back in and re-immerse in the experience.

• Commitment Friendly
  • The consumer doesn’t have to lock up the next 30 minutes of their life or have to remember 50 different rules/characters/plotlines.
  • No strings attached, be they financial (e.g. required fees to play) or technical (complicated install and/or subscription process; interferes or modifies other apps unintentionally; etc)

• Attention Span Agnostic
  • Content can be experienced and enjoyed with a reduced or fluctuating degree of focus and attention to it. People consume media from multiple channels at once: playing solitaire while talking on the phone; watching a football game while making a sandwich and listening to music.

• Always Resident
  • While a consumer’s focus has to be interruptible, the media itself can continue to exist and function until the consumer returns to it. That is, you don’t actually have to hit the pause or save button, you just go do something else and come back to it.
  • Exist in the consumer’s world, not the author’s. I don’t log into a game and play it via some specialized client. The access point is my own blog, facebook page, a Firefox extension, etc.
  • Logging in does not mean logging out of the rest of the world. Consumers are ok leaving it up 24/7 because there’s minimal to no cost in attention or resources or screen real estate to do so.
  • Access is easy and fast, if not invisible.

To be clear: there is tremendous value in complete immersion. It’s not that people won’t make that commitment or won’t devote 100% of their attention to a game/movie/book for hours on end. They will. But they only have so much room in their lives for those kinds of experiences, and a product that dials the immersion level up and down as needed could find broad acceptance.

I think there’s a lot more to be said on this subject, some of which I may touch on in future posts (and may have already been covered by others), including:

• Part of the attraction of games like Solitaire is that they fit this model. What else does? Some of those asynchrnous games on social networking sites? PMOG, Web Wars? What about examples from other media? Sporting events can be tuned in and out fairly easily. Music runs in the background almost everywhere we go. Others?
• If it’s ok to come and go from content at any time, that’s one less barrier for that content’s acceptance. Does that limit the range of content that can be built? Are we talking lightweight facebook apps and simple puzzle games or is there room for something with some depth?
• Who decides how content should be experienced? I’m not just talking about where (home/work/car/etc), on what (tv/pc/handheld/phone) or for how long (minutes/hours/days), but the experience itself. Buying gold in MMOs changes that experience and is an example of the consumer attempting to play the game the way they want to. How far down the path from authorial intent to consumer control should we go? Related to this, why does a modern consumer expect to have that kind of control in the first place, and why should they be granted it?
• There’s a tremendous amount written about the subject of attention — almost 70 years of research on the subject — that I haven’t touched on. When you start poking around the web you naturally run into Linda Stone (“continuous partial attention”) and Herbert Simon (who pretty much nailed it on the head a few decades ago when he said “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”). Most of these folks were concerned with how we manage our attention and general purpose solutions: a work philosophy, a piece of intelligent software and so forth. If we imagine a world with many flexible media products, do they help or exacerbate the attention problem Stone, Simon, et al identified? Are we simply crowding another channel, overflowing the number of things that can sit at the periphery of our awareness?
• Does immersion trump ease of interruption? Or does flexibility translate to a higher likelihood someone will try, and stick with, your content because you’re not asking them choose?
• To what extent are flexible media products part of the overall trend of blurring product boundaries with their environment?
• There was a great post recently about whether we use “on” or “in” to describe where we are. That is, we’re on facebook, on the NYT web site, on IM, on the web. But we’re in WoW, Second Life and other online worlds. How does the way we conceptualize a product as something we’re on vs. in affect our immersion and attention? And where do games like Scrabulous, Bejeweled, or The Sims fit into this paradigm?
• The need to grab attention has led to a focus on spectacle or outrageousness at the expense of substance. That’s nothing new, but is the crowded, access-to-everything media world encouraging it? If so, what does this say about people who enjoy niche, smaller products of lower production values that better serve their particular interest (and likewise about the benefits of spectacle)?