Early in 2009, Monty Kerr and I went out to GDC to do a little research.  We’d both built multiple game development startups, often for new media or new channels (e.g. mobile phones in 2002 or Windows in 1994).  We’d been watching Facebook expand as a platform and wanted to pursue the space, but we hadn’t found an angle we thought was compelling.  Were we too late?  Was the ocean too red?

By the time the show was over, we had what we thought was a key weakness in the social ecosystem and a way to address it.

First, a clarification of terms.  Social network and social graph have been used almost interchangeably the past few years, and not without some confusion.  It doesn’t help that Facebook and other sites are called social networks in the online service sense, which is distinct from the actual social networks they may utilize.  For the purposes of this post, I’ll stick with the current Wikipedia definition of social network:

“A social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes”, which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.”

Put more simply, it’s a set of relationships we have with others based on a specific, shared context.   We are each part of many different social networks based on various contexts, such as family, classmates, a book club, or a sport we play.  Some of them overlap.   And while much of the time we spend with these connections may have nothing to do with the what brought us together, that context is the reason for the network’s existence and is the always available fallback for any future interaction (i.e. if we cannot find anything else to talk about we can always talk about the one thing that clearly interests us both).*

A social network service, like Facebook, is not a social network.  More important, it doesn’t provide the context to create a social network.  All a social network service does is improve access to pre-existing social networks already developed by the user and help new services (like games) seed their products with users.  That’s tremendously valuable, but makes all added interaction secondary instead of primary.

Why is that a problem?  Because secondary interaction is wholly dependent on a pre-existing (primary) social network.  If you stop playing a game, you don’t lose contact with the individuals you were playing with – you already had an established bond with them beforehand.  The game has a tenuous hold on you because it’s not the reason for your friendship with those you play with.

The same could be said about Facebook as a whole:  if it went away tomorrow, all your social networks would continue to exist despite greater friction of communication within them.  In other words:  Facebook doesn’t own your social networks.

Another problem with being dependent on pre-existing social networks is that the number of users you can play with is artificially capped.  Only a small subset of friends from your pre-existing social networks will have any interest in the same game as you.  That means fewer people validating your interest, fewer people to share it with, and fewer reasons to keep playing.  The result:  less engagement and poor retention.

A game, however, is a context just like any other shared interest.  A new social network can be built for the user based on players they come to know while playing.  A game-centric social network has several advantages:

• It’s primary in the user’s mind.  If the game goes away, so does their connection to everyone they know because of it.
• It’s self-reinforcing.  The more people I know playing, the greater the validation that what I’m doing is worthwhile.
• It’s uncapped.  There’s no limit to the number of friends I can play with (other than natural limits, in the Dunbar sense).
• It’s platform independent.  Because the game is the primary context, any platform it resides on – a web portal, a social network service, a hardware device – has less power over the game’s audience and, by extension, the game itself.  If the platform goes away, or the developer would like to leave the platform, being the primary context for a user’s social network goes a long way towards moving them to other platforms.

A game-centric social network helps engage and retain users for much longer periods of time.  I’m not talking about gains measured in weeks or months but years and decades.  Think about all those pre-existing social networks you have – those are based around interests you’re likely going to be involved with for the rest of your life.  That’s why a game-centric social network is so much more powerful than sitting on top of a pre-existing one.

Just to clarify again, because the terms are annoyingly close:  a game-centric social network is not a game-centric social network service (building such a service would make the service primary not the games on it, although that would still be one up on Facebook in terms of owning their audience).**

We raised some seed capital against this concept in the fall of 2009.  Since we rolled the business up into a larger company shortly thereafter I can’t say whether we were right or wrong, but in almost three years I’ve yet to see anyone really push this model.  To me that still smells like an opportunity, particularly as increasing engagement has become more important for those still building games for Facebook’s red ocean.

Footnotes:

*A social graph, by contrast, is really just a tool for mapping a social network. You could, to some extent, use this interchangeably with social network, except that social graph has actually come to mean the entire mapping of your relationships within a social network service.  So I’ll yield to the more popular interpretation (which is interesting in a business sense but not terribly useful in understanding the reason for people’s relationships to each other).

**We also now have interest graphs, which are related to but not the same thing as a game-centric social network.

I find it odd that traditional game developers take a dim view of those who work on smaller platforms like mobile, handhelds and the web.  These games do tend to be simpler on the whole than their console and pc counterparts, and they lack the same level of production values.  Therefore, the argument goes, making a small game for a limited platform does not afford the developer the same quality job experience as working on a mainstream title.

I’m going to make the case it’s just the opposite.

I used to do a fair bit of sailing.  I even lived on a catamaran for about nine months.  One question that sometimes came up, if you needed crew for a longer trip, was what sort of experience you’d look for.  Sure, some open ocean experience was nice, and a guy who’d sailed everything from Olympic Solings to 65′ Swans was great.  But given a choice between someone with mostly big boat experience vs. someone with mostly small boat experience, which would be better?

Small boats are light and nimble.  They turn on a dime.  But they have fewer conveniences and tools to make them easier to sail.  They are extremely susceptible to the smallest variances in the water and wind, and every little change the crew makes — trim the sails, point slightly higher, whatever — can be felt instantly on a small boat.

Big boats are large and cumbersome.  They move and respond slowly.  As a result, they conceal many of the little changes going on around you.  If you haven’t already acquired a feel for the environment and how a boat behaves in it from sailing smaller vessels, the mistakes you make will be harder to recognize and resolve.

You can see where I’m headed with this.  Consoles and PCs have become large, bloated systems.  They have so many resources available that developers are spoiled.    Yes, more resources enable grander games and new play styles.  But there are so few limitations that developers don’t gain the necessary experience for recognizing and dealing with many problems that do arise.

Developers of mobile, handheld and web games are far more constrained.  Every little detail of these platforms matters, and resources are limited.   When we were making mobile games six years ago, we were trying to squeeze full NFL teams, rosters and playbooks onto devices with 100k-400k of RAM, 1 inch screens, keypads with 200ms latency to the OS, buggy JVMs, untested firmware updates,  and absent documentation.  Uphill in the snow both ways.

It wasn’t Madden, but it was far more challenging to produce a quality, fun experience on, say, a Motorola T720 than a PS3.  And the project’s developers learned far more about the fundamentals of game development because they were constantly made aware of, and forced to deal with, the limitations of the platform.

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.