In this final post on emergence in games, I want to talk about how emergence impacts the business model.

Discovery

Emergent games are inherently social.  The more emergent a title is, the higher the volume of novel content generated by the players:  there are more surprises, more varied progress, and more opportunities for self expression.  As a result, there’s not only more to share, but more that players want to share.

Just look at The Sims:  that product has more shared content than almost any other on the planet despite being single player and lacking built in viral hooks.  Or Minecraft, a game with no marketing budget and a ridiculous amount of commerce and distribution friction.  Giving players interesting things to share — and by interesting I mean things that appeal to non-players — dramatically increases the native viral coefficient for the product and reduces the cost of discovery.

Player Life Expectancy

In previous posts I’ve noted that emergence increases the possibility space for players, which in turn increases their engagement (by reducing the pattern matching problem and increasing the likelihood of finding something interesting to play).  Greater engagement increases player life expectancy, and players who play longer are more likely to monetize.  The data Kongregate has data been sharing the last few years is particularly compelling on this point.

Development Expense

Launching a live service-based product puts you on the content creation treadmill:  you’re in a race with your players to author content faster than they can consume it.  That’s a very expensive proposition for most games if they want to maintain player engagement (it’s not enough to re-skin content or re-purpose mechanics since players will have already pattern matched the play dynamics).

In an emergent game every tiny bit of new content combines with all the old content, refreshing it and exploding the possibility space all over again.  Balance issues aside, both initial and ongoing content creation costs are small and manageable.

The Business of Play

So emergence lets us use the underlying mechanics of the game itself to drive discovery, increase player life expectancy, and reduce development expense.  That’s a much better approach to long term sustainability than optimizing LTV > CPA and trying to re-capture players in another game when they churn out.  In fact, emergence allows us to re-think core assumptions about how we make games.

Our industry is in the business of selling experiences through play.  Traditional game companies make products with a finite life, and they offer players more play by creating new products.  This approach comes with some inherent problems:

• A short product life cycle means the threshold for success is high.  You need a large audience to return enough revenue to cover expenses, which in turn drives up customer acquisition costs.
• It’s very difficult to find this level of repeat success, so companies use portfolio strategies to offset risk.  This raises the success mark even higher, since now a few hits have to cover a bunch of duds.
• Milking the hits you do find can help, but sequels only take you so far (see Eidos and Tomb Raider as one of many examples).  These product lines get tired over time, due in part to the small possibility space that offers little in the way of new play.

This is what we call a hit-driven business, because if you fail to keep making hits, you die.

With emergence, you offer players more play in the same product.  There is more play in one emergent game than in 100 traditional games.  I’m being arbitrary with that ratio, but my point is that the possibility space is so large players never run out of interesting things to do.   As a result:

• These games last forever.  A long product life cycle requires a smaller audience to generate the same return, thereby reducing customer acquisition costs and making less competitive niche genres viable.
• With a long product life and a large possibility space, you have a lot of flexibility to adapt your product.  You take multiple shots on goal with one game, not many.  That’s less expensive than building new products until one hits.
• Games of this type stay fresh for a very long time — there’s less risk of player attrition due to product exhaustion, and there’s no need for sequels.

You have to re-prioritize many of the metrics we use for evaluating success if you’re going to build products this way, but if you’re willing to take the long view emergence can get you out of the high risk hits business and into a safer, more sustainable model for making games.

The entire series on emergence can be found here:

Games Have An Attention Problem
Attention and Emergence
Emergence and the Build-Try-Fail Loop
Key Challenges Creating Emergent Games
How Emergence Changes The Business Model

When I talk about the build-try-fail loop, I’m talking about the time it takes a player to set up a strategy, try it, and determine it’s success.  The build-try-fail loop applies to any game, emergent or not.  For example, Clash of Clans has a very long build phase (it can take several hours to collect the resources and create the units for a single raid), a short try phase (at most three minutes), and failure is moderately difficult to assess (you can’t build units specific to the defensive target’s setup).  By contrast, Candy Crush Saga has a modest build phase (the time it takes for energy to accrue), a lengthy try phase (several minutes), and failure — which isn’t known until the end — is hard to evaluate due to the random initial state of the puzzles.

The examples above have artificially long portions of this loop for monetization purposes, and it’s hard to argue with their success at doing so.  Nevertheless, the more emergent a game gets, the more it benefits from shortening this cycle.  Specifically:

• Experimentation is encouraged. The longer it takes to set up and make an attempt — a new level, puzzle, raid, whatever — the less risk a player is willing to take.   Reducing this time investment gives players the freedom to try new strategies and explore the entire possibility space the game has to offer.
• Learning is accelerated. The more frequent the attempts, the faster the player will come to understand the game and it’s potential.  And if you agree with the thesis that fun is primarily about learning (solving problems, figuring out new strategies, etc.), then more learning means more enjoyment for the player.  An emergent game with a large possibility space has more available to learn and therefore more potential fun to be had.
• Failure itself becomes fun instead of frustrating. The less invested a player is each time they try something new, the more likely the results will be treated as interesting or entertaining instead of unpleasant.

This is the second part of a two part series on games and attention.  The first part can be found here.

Last week I talked about how games compete for a consumer’s attention, and how existing casual and hardcore products represent flawed solutions to this problem.  We ideally want to enable casual and hardcore play in the same product, but doing so means taking a different approach to game mechanics.

How?  Make better use of emergence in our designs.  To enable emergent play, a small set of core components are recombined to produce an unlimited number of novel play dynamics.  Here’s what we get with this approach:

• Simple and easy to understand game mechanics (ideal for casual play)
• A massive possibility space, with complex dynamics (ideal for hardcore play)

Games of this type avoid rule complexity (and burdensome learning curves/commitment) by working with only a few mechanics.  The rich output gives the game legs and enables deep, engaging play.

The classic example is Go, a game with only two rules but an incredibly varied output in terms of games and play styles.  A modern example would be Magic:  The Gathering and other CCGs.  More recent:  Little Big Planet, Minecraft, The Sims.

Examples of games that are minimally emergent, if at all:  Pac-man, Heavy Rain, the board game Life.

Most game designers are already familiar with emergent concepts, and indeed, all games have some degree of emergent play.  But we tend to shy away from designing heavily emergent systems because the large possibility space is difficult to balance (many designs introduce top-down constraints to control this, like classes in RPGs, but that simply reduces the possibility space and undermines the benefits of an emergent system).

It’s also important to recognize that emergence by itself will not help a game attract players interested in both casual and hardcore play.  To be effective:

• You really have to constrain the number of core elements and their respective functions.  Many games are deeply emergent but they get there with a crazy amount of rules and systems that undermine any potential for casual play.
• More output doesn’t mean more choice.  Farmville has great emergence in terms of user expression, but it’s functionally meaningless.  Backyard Monsters’ non-orthogonal design elements lead to a relatively small set of strategic choices (a few dominant play strategies).
• Emergence doesn’t automatically mean accessible and deeply engaging.  You still have to avoid other annoying frictions (like bad UI design), and a large possibility space isn’t much good if it’s boring.

Ultimately, making stronger use of emergence won’t expand the potential audience for your game:  a player still has to like abstract strategy games if they’re going to play Go.  But it will increase how many of those potential players choose your game over all the other media choices they have at their disposal.

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.

There’s an old saying I heard when I first started making games almost 20 years ago:  in the arcade, you want a 90 second experience to feel like 90 minutes;  on a pc, you want a 90 minute experience to feel like 90 seconds.

Game play lengths have changed a lot over the past two decades.  There may even be a case against thinking in discreet segments at all.  Nevertheless, it’s worth applying the general concept to the wide range of gaming platforms available in 2012 (inasmuch as individual platforms tend to set certain expectations).

Which of the following should feel like more time has passed than actually has, which ones less?

• Arcade
• Console – Retail
• Console – Downloadable (e.g. Xbox Live)
• Console – Handheld
• PC – Retail
• PC – Downloadable
• PC – Web (e.g. flash games)
• PC – Social
• PC – MMO
• Mobile

I’d say arcade, handheld, web, social and mobile games want you to feel like more time has passed.  The rest — retail and downloadable games, plus MMOs, want your play experience to feel shorter than it is.  That may not be how they should or could be designed, but the current expectations of the audience suggest that breakdown.

Agree or disagree?  The original phrase isn’t exactly symmetrical:  the economics of the arcade drove shorter play times, so they had to feel much longer to create the perception of value.  At home on the pc, with more time available, you wanted the player so immersed they didn’t notice the passage of time (which is less directly about value than maintaining engagement).