Last week I talked about how mid-core games aren’t the answer to consumer engagement issues.  This week I want to take a closer look at some of the underlying design problems with casual and hardcore thinking, and how we might better address them.

It’s been several years since I first talked about games and attention.  At the time, I noted that games compete for our attention with other games, other media, and interruptions from friends, family and work.  Despite all the advances in friction reduction over the past decade, games are hard pressed to thrive — nevermind get noticed — in this noisy media environment.

Looking ahead, the trendline is not positive.  Content creation costs keep dropping, so the amount of content available keeps rising.  Our choices are unlimited but our time is not.

Traditional solutions to the attention problem fall into two buckets:

• Reduce friction (a.k.a. the casual solution)
• Add depth (a.k.a. the hardcore solution)

In general, good casual design affects a player’s willingness to play, while good hardcore design affects their desire to play.

The Casual Solution

The friction reduction method requires games to:

• Have few barriers to entry
• Be commitment friendly
• Be attention span agnostic
• Have a short build-try-fail loop

That’s all good.  However, while these characteristics reduce friction and increase a player’s willingness to play, they don’t actually generate a desire to play (or to keep playing).  In an effort to meet the requirements above and make the game more accessible, most designers simplify the game’s mechanics and the way those mechanics combine, effectively reducing the play dynamics as well (in the MDA sense).  The result is a shallow product with a small possibility space and little long term retention.

Casual games succeed by demanding less from the consumer — they don’t ask you to sacrifice attention you might prefer to devote to other things, complementing rather than competing with other media.  The best of these products tend to have large audiences with low unit economics and short user life cycles.

The Hardcore Solution

The depth approach, on the other hand, means the game:

• Has extensive and varied play dynamics
• Has a lot of content to consume
• Gives the player a reason to make a deep personal investment (often through persistence, identity and relationships).

Again, a good list.  Games of this type tend to create a strong desire to play.  Unfortunately, they also erect a lot of barriers to someone’s willingness to play.  To create a wide range of play dynamics, many designers simply pile on the game mechanics (i.e. they keep layering on the rules and systems).  That’s a lot for someone to learn and then remember from session to session, and with a lot of mechanics to comprehend, 100% focus is required.  The only players willing to do that are the few that will make a large personal investment in the product.   The result is a deep product with a large possibility space and great long term retention, but it bounces most consumers at the start.

Hardcore products succeed by being more compelling than other media — they ask for your undivided attention and tell you it’s better spent on them than competing options.  High quality hardcore products tend to have small audiences with high unit economics and long user life cycles.

Hardcore + Casual

There’s nothing inherent to these two approaches that makes them incompatible, but you can see how solving for one can easily lead to problems with the other (it doesn’t help that, as an industry, we’ve set up a false dichotomy that places casual and hardcore products at opposite ends of the same spectrum;  mid-core is the latest iteration along these lines).

Much of the problem starts with the game’s mechanics, where most casual games have simple mechanics and simple dynamics, and most hardcore games have complex mechanics and complex dynamics.  There’s a reason for that:  they’re much easier to design and balance (simple dynamics imply a small possibility space, which presents fewer outcomes to balance;  complex mechanics make it easier to isolate systems for independent tuning, particularly when dealing with the large possibility spaces associated with complex dynamics).

What we really want are games with simple mechanics and complex dynamics, because simple mechanics are easy to learn and remember, while complex dynamics are deep and engaging.  How we do that is the subject of next week’s post.

The game industry continues to believe that casual and hardcore players are separate monolithic audiences interested solely in games reflecting their respective play styles.  The latest entry along these lines is the mid-core game, which seeks to claim a middle ground between the two.

The underlying case for mid-core players is genuine enough:  there are many players who would like a deeper, more engaging experience without the burden of a steep learning curve or large time commitment.

But mid-core comes up short for the same reasons traditional casual and hardcore thinking does:

• It confuses product specific engagement and commitment characteristics (where they are valid) with demographic characteristics (where they are not).  To claim there is an audience of casual players, hardcore players, and now mid-core players outside the scope of a single product is nonsensical.  These are different people for different products, and one game’s hardcore player is another’s casual player.  And remember:  everyone is hardcore about something.

• It falsely assumes there is a spectrum of play from casual to hardcore where a given product falls, instead of treating casual and hardcore play as separate and compatible in the same game.  To make a game more casual is to make it more accessible;  to make it hardcore is to make it more engaging.  Good casual design increases a player’s willingness to play but does nothing to increase their desire to play.  Good hardcore design improves a player’s desire to play but does nothing to increase their willingness to play.

• It takes a very narrow view of player behavior:  that an individual seeks the exact same play experience every time they sit down to play.

Of these, the last is most important.  In the busy, chaotic world we all live in, our ability to engage and commit to a product varies from day to day. When you build for mid-core, you haven’t addressed this problem any better than casual or hardcore approaches because you’re still building for a fixed level of player engagement.  Which means you’re still going to lose consumers when they want to engage more and there’s nothing interesting to do, or you require them to engage more and they don’t have the time.

It’s a lot like picking a single price point for your product — it can work, but it’s not terribly efficient compared to free-to-play models.  And it’s a poor strategy for any product hoping to build a long term relationship with the player.

We should enable high levels of casual and hardcore play in the same product, not find a happy medium between the two.  Doing so doesn’t re-align your product with a different demographic or change the level of engagement;  it expands your product’s audience to include a much greater number of players, without sacrificing one group to make room for another.

This is part two of the four part series on value creation in games. Part 1: Value Creation in Games; Part 2:Engagement and Content Volume; Part 3:Engagement and Personalization; Part 4: The Game Engagement Landscape.

In my last post I talked about how value creation in games falls into two large buckets:  access and engagement.  This time I want to focus on the engagement portion, and more specifically, how we increase it.  I’ll give the usual disclaimer about how there’s many ways to slice this, but in my view there are two ways to increase engagement:

• Increase the volume of content
• Increase the personal meaning of content

Increasing the volume of content – the sheer amount of it that can be consumed – increases the possibility space and therefore the likelihood that the consumer will find something that engages them.  That may evolve over time – i.e. initial bits of content may grow dull but, due to the large amount available, new bits are available that may extend interest.

Increasing personalization reduces the possibility space in a way that’s meaningful to the individual player.  It does not reduce the possibility space for the game’s audience as a whole.  Think of it as the percentage of interactions an individual has in the game (relative to the total interactions they have) that are interesting to them.  What’s interesting to one user may not be interesting to another, of course.

In general we use three methods to increase the volume of content:

• Author a lot
• Re-use content
• Emergence

Authoring can come from developers or consumers.  In the hands of skilled developers the content is often extremely well-made and balanced, and difficult to pattern match.  But it runs out quickly, a lot goes unused, it doesn’t adapt well to varied player interests, and it’s expensive and economically hard to sustain except at very high sales volumes.

Letting consumers author the content (i.e. UGC, or what I like to call the infinite monkeys solution) generates an almost unlimited supply and the cost of creation is very cheap.  But it has its own challenges, including a terrible signal-to-noise ratio, difficulty maintaining cohesion and consistency with the overall product, and a dependency on some level of creative or technical expertise to generate interesting content (the burden of creation, at least for some portion of the audience).

Another alternative is to simply re-use content.  Far less expensive than developer authoring, it’s also relatively easy to balance.  For example, we might use meta-structures like high scores, scenarios or levels, difficulty settings, quests and so forth to package what is essentially the same core game loop in a larger play mechanic.  That can generate more long term interest and extend play, but it doesn’t actually solve the pattern matching problem since the core game loop remains the same (potentially leading to boredom fairly quickly).  Procedural content generation is another variation on this theme but tends to produce undifferentiated content.

That leads us to emergence.  In emergent play, core components are recombined to produce novel new play dynamics (in the MDA sense).  In the mid-90s, the colleagues at my first company often mocked my constant preaching about “complex combinations of simple, distinct elements”.  Emergence might occur at the systems level, or it might come from adding other people to the game (but not necessarily friends).  As with simply re-using content, emergence is inexpensive.  And it’s hard to pattern match, making it difficult for players to optimize play and get bored.  But it’s terribly difficult to balance.

Next time I’ll talk about the personalization side.

This is part one of the four part series on value creation in games. Part 1: Value Creation in Games; Part 2:Engagement and Content Volume; Part 3:Engagement and Personalization; Part 4: The Game Engagement Landscape.

I’ve been stewing a lot lately on how we create value in the games industry.  Given that there’s no explicit utility case to be made for our products, everything we do appears to fall into two buckets:

• Increasing Access
• Increasing Engagement

Increasing access is about friction reduction.  The electronic game value chain is filled with friction – everything from problems of discovery and delivery of product to basic commerce issues (payment types, price points and whatnot).  Even existence has friction when you consider the barriers to creation:  technical expertise, difficult of the platform, access to tools and development resources, and so forth.  Within the game itself, simply the demands of play – learning curve, short and long term time commitments – create friction for the user.

Reducing friction can often enable otherwise average titles to succeed.  A great example of this was consumer reaction to mobile games before the iPhone came along (2002 – 2006).  Multiple studies (from the tail end of that era) showed consumers reaching for their phones to play games in their homes despite the presence of superior products on consoles, handhelds and computers.

On the other hand, increasing engagement is about creating desire.  No matter how much friction we eliminate from the system, there still needs to be something on the other end that engages a consumer’s attention and pulls them to the product.  In fact, just as low friction can enable weakly engaging products, strong engagement can overcome absolutely ludicrous frictions (witness Minecraft).  It’s stating the obvious, but as long as engagement exceeds friction, you’ve got your customer.

Both methods of value creation are key to a successful product, but it’s important to understand the difference.  Early entrants to a new market segment might succeed by making mediocre products highly accessible, only to fail in the long haul if they don’t know how to increase the engagement side (or more telling, recognize the importance of doing so).