Justin Gibbs

Joining Playdom and the social game phenomenon

justingibbs — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:56:35 +0000

I start at Playdom on Monday. I’m incredibly excited to dive head first into the social game arena and with a company like Playdom. The market is wide open, it’s the Wild West and I feel incredibly fortunate to be getting in at this point. Being the Wild West I hope to test the medium’s potential for interactive drama. Unlike virtual worlds, social games have the audience and they’re hungry for something new, for interactive entertainment.

Hollywood meets A/B split testing

The opportunity is also exciting because it’ll allow me to use my experience as a Product Manager building online apps and apply that toward entertainment. Imagine applying the type of feedback loops we see on the Internet to movies? Split test a movie or video game in real-time? I’ll also get the opportunity to leverage my years of studying screenwriting. It’s a very different world from trying to optimize a feature in Yahoo! Messenger to trying to figure out what game feature or story twist was more entertaining. It’s a different game and one I’m desperate to get into.

Saying goodbye to Visual Purple

It’s with some trepidation that I say goodbye to Visual Purple. I learned a lot about interactive story from the seasoned team there. Their roots are in interactive movies from the 90’s, producing such hits as Silent Steel and Blue Force. Beyond that they’re experience with interactive story goes as far back as Leisure Suit Larry.

I’ll miss reminiscing about Hollywood’s multiple attempts to make the medium interactive – from games or interactive drama. I remember returning from the 2009 Screenwriting Expo where Anthony Zuiker was pitching is digi-novel Level 26.

Scene from Leisure Suit Larry

I mentioned it at the office and was met with tale after tale of similar attempts to merge Hollywood and interactive story. From Mr. Payback and the doomed CSI Second Life tie-in, to expensive startups we’ve never heard of.

It was great learning about the convoluted history of interactive story and actually build training simulations that almost crossed over to interactive drama. I’ll miss it, but I’m hopeful social games will open up a new chapter for interactive drama.

Will social games push users to open data standards?

justingibbs — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:53:21 +0000

Social gaming is getting a lot of buzz lately. Not only is the industry profitable but it’s driving a lot of Facebook usage – the killer-app of social networks. A recent study from PopCap showed that many are using Facebook as a game platform.

Nearly half (49%) of the times when they log into social networks, social gamers do so specifically to play social games.

But no industry likes to be dependent on one company. Zynga has already begun to try and move away from Facebook by launching FarmVille.com. Social game developers love the Facebook firehose but don’t want to be dependent on it, which makes the latest version of BuddyPress interesting. With version 1.2.1 installation is as easy as adding a plugin to a standard WordPress blog.

Now you can use BuddyPress with your single site installation of WordPress, and you can keep your existing theme. Seriously, could BuddyPress have made it any easier for you to add social networking to your site? I know I can’t wait to try it out this weekend, how about you?

Which leads me to ask – will the growth of open independent social networks and protocols become a new platform for social games? And if they do, will social games in turn push users to these open data standards?

The first hurdle is registration

Having to register and setup an account had already kept me from participating in many an online forum and the same is likely with social networks. I can barely keep my Facebook account up to date much less MySpace, Friendster, and Orkut. With Ning I only have one login to access any social network they host. BuddyPress could integrate a similar type of solution using Gravitar or OpenID.

Second hurdle is content over connections

Ning has certainly made a good business out of servicing independent user-generated social networks. They aren’t exactly open but as an example they can be very telling. For one, Ning shows that it is more a content play than connecting with friends like on Facebook. Ning users setup networks around a club, organization, or a fan club. Much of its social networks can be considered niche.

Get a boost from social games

Ning has already proven that independent social networks can work, but like name brand social networks they can probably benefit from an infusion of social games. BuddyPress already supports a plugin framework which can be used to create some types of social games. Knowing that these independent social networks will be about content, imagine a social network about bread having a social recipe game? And if you don’t want to build it how about pulling from the WordPress plugin community or social game companies – who wouldn’t want more distribution.

Push for open data standards

If BuddyPress proves half as succesful as WordPress it will be a huge win for open data standards. It will also lend support for OStatus and other open standards. Combine that with Google Buzz, built on open data standards, and you can see a few cracks forming in Facebook’s walled garden.

But I think the biggest push might come from the social game developers trying to lessen their dependence on the Facebook fire hose. That might explain why Streamy CEO, Don Mosites, recently joined Zynga to work on a special project.

CEO Don Mosites, for one, is heading to Zynga to work on a “new, special project”. He won’t tell me what it is, but he promises it will be “big”. To be continued, I suppose.

If it’s true and social games are the killer-apps of social networks, it isn’t too much of a stretch to see their migration to open data standards migrating users there as well.

Sometimes story is more problem solving than art

justingibbs — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:47:22 +0000

Most people saw the previews for Law Abiding Citizen and rightly stayed away. I of course sat through it. As a struggling screenwriter I see a lot of bad movies to see where they go wrong. This one however went wrong for a reason I wasn’t expecting. The story and movie fail because the villain couldn’t clearly and concisely state their reasoning. At one point Jamie Foxx’s character asks the villain point blank why he’s killing innocent people and all the villain can come up with is “They’ll get the message.” If you know anything about creating movies, they’re all about questions. Will he get the girl? Will Superman prevail? In this movie we want to know if Jamie Foxx’s character will stop the villain but also why the villain is killing? It’s in the back of your mind the whole time because the movie keeps bringing it up but never answers it. Since the movie nor the villain himself can adequately answer the question the movie fails.

But how did the movie makers get themselves into such a predicament?

Convinced themselves that providing an answer was unnecessary
Made poor choices when designing the story

Convinced themselves that providing an answer was unecesary

The old adage is still true:

If you can’t put it into words, you don’t understand it.

For screenwriters that translates to – if you can’t put it into a log line or elevator pitch that excites people to see your movie, you don’t have a movie worth making. A novice and struggling screenwriter myself I of course tried to ignore this – “I know the log line isn’t that exciting but once you read the whole thing you’ll see it’s magic.” If anyone was nice enough to actually read one of my scripts it always came back with the same comment – it sucked. It’s a novice mistake to believe other things can get you by the old adage.

The makers of Law Abiding Citizen may not be as novice but they’re still guilty of the same offense. Maybe they thought other parts of the story would make up for it, or the actors could pull it out, or like I suspect – just hoped somehow in the end it would magically work. They were right about one thing; whatever they did allowed them to get studio approval to make the movie despite its glaring hole. A hole I suspect was present in the log line and pitch, though they still greenlit the movie.

Made poor choices when designing the story

Of course your villains don’t always have to explain their motivation or even be rational, they can simply be evil. But that isn’t the story Law Abiding Citizen wanted to tell, it wasn’t simply a story about escape from or stopping an evil villain. It was a story about how a law abiding and sympathetic character turns into a villain, then the escape part. The first scenes show how he’s the perfect family man – a loving father and husband. His family is then murdered in front of his eyes and next we see him arguing with the lead prosecutor not to cut a deal with one of the killers. Jump ten years and that same sympathetic character is now killing innocent people in the justice system. The movie never establishes that the justice system was particularly corrupt, just not perfect. So what we see as the audience is a sympathetic character turn into a monster killing innocent people. It’s hard to swallow. Basically you can’t have it both ways. Either he’s evil and must be stopped or he’s killing in the name of something. In this movie they try to make the switch and all with no rhyme or reason when the villain can’t even explain himself.

One of the most famous MacGuffins

This is a story problem. One that you face in telling almost any story. There are of course tricks and ways to fix story problems. If there isn’t enough tension add a ticking clock.

Add a ticking clock time pressure to the main plot goal and a little ticking clock to each scene if possible – bomb about to go off, meeting, deadline, race, running out of something important.

- Writing A Great Script Fast In A Nutshell

Probably the most famous of these tricks is the MacGuffin. You may not know what it is or why people need it, you just know that they have to have it.

What the makers of Law Abiding Citizen did was equivalent to putting in a MacGuffin, only to turn around and require the story to tell us all about it. Making him sympathetic painted themselves into a corner. They had to explain the killings and as we can see, they never did come up with an adequate solution.

I wish it was more magical

This is also the type of story problem Pixar runs into but solves using a creative team and they do it better than almost anyone in Hollywood. They understand story and aren’t willing to try and skirt the problems, they hit them head on. When I started writing screenplays I found myself hoping for that magic more than ever. In fact my education in screenwriting could be summed up as constant beatings at the hands of readers to make me realize that there is no magic. Screenwriting is more problem solving than magic. Your first lesson – if you can’t put it into words you don’t understand it.

But we all believe in magic don’t we? This quote from Adam Rodnitzky about startups seems only fitting when you switch “technology” for “magic”.

It’s important to get customer validation early on. You can have the greatest technology, or website, or service, or whatever, but it’s ultimately meaningless if you haven’t verified that there are actually customers willing to spend money on or around what you do.

Interactive drama won’t be about the technology

justingibbs — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:38:00 +0000

Tim O’Rielly recently posted about a dream he had for augmented reality and fiction.

I share this dream as a reminder that the fiction and entertainments of the future may have a very different form than the fiction of today. The first metamorphosis is just to change the medium, in the way that the paper map or atlas morphed first into online mapping sites.

In a lot of ways what he’s describing in his post is interactive story, or more specifically interactive drama. The technology is usually what draws people to interactive drama, but it’s the story that makes them run for the hills.

Story is hard

As Robert McKee has a funny line comparing aspiring writers to aspiring music composers.

If your dream to compose music, would you say to yourself: “I’ve heard a lot of symphonies… I can also play the piano… I think I’ll knock one out this weekend”?

McKee’s message – story is hard and it takes study. I’ve spent the last 10 years just trying to write a good screenplay. I’ve written lots of screenplays, none of them good so who cares. If the story can’t hold an audience no amount of technology is going to change that. It might prompt some posts on TechCrunch but the buzz will fade and the artist will move on to more rewarding projects.

Adding technology only adds to the difficulty of creating story

A few people have been plugging away at the interactive drama conundrum for nearly two decades. I’ve been plugging away for 5 years and have nothing to show for it but half-finished scripts, mock-ups, and this blog. Chris Crawford is probably the most dedicated in a field where I’ve seen more than a few come and go. It’s a tough problem to solve and it gets old when no one finds mainstream success. To this day when you explain interactive drama most people reply, ”You mean like those Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 80’s?”

Choose Your Own Adventure diagram by David Sky

There’s a reason Choose Your Own Adventure books were for kids, they’re really hard to write. David Sky does a great job of mapping out the branching storylines. Seeing it laid out you can better appreciate when Chris Crawford discusses the problems of branching storylines. The author had to keep everything in their head and resolve every storyline in a satisfactory way. It’s hard enough to perfect one storyline, try multiple intermingling.

Even though branching is the most common method for creating interactive drama there are others, or at least other theories. Chris Crawford has his approach. I think there is a lot that can be done with perceived agency.

Unanswered question

In many ways those of us in the field plug away with one unanswered question hanging over our heads – do audiences actually want the interactivity in their stories? The question has probably been the impetus for more than a few to leave the field as we can’t get the answer we want until we find mainstream success.

I know personally that it was the interactivity that drew me to the Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, however I also remember jumping back and forth to see how each storyline played out. Was it the interactivity that I enjoyed or was it the story? It all reminds me of how for years people told ATT they wanted picture phones. Hundreds of millions of dollars and decades later they gave them the Picturephone, but all people did was dial and walk away.

What we need are more artists

Film pioneers first occupied their time filming Vaudeville acts and oncoming trains. It wasn’t until the discovery of continuity editing that artists created the modern film. And when you really look at it, modern film doesn’t make much sense. We know logically that Superman will win in the end, he always does. But we still go along and emotionally feel that he might not. The artist is able to weave his tale and play with our emotions.

I hope the same will be true for interactive drama. Right now we mostly have technologists in the field, what we need are more artists. And I think they’re coming for a few reasons:

There’s a captive audience thanks to Facebook – artists can get feedback and social gaming companies are looking to feed that audience anyway possible
Hollywood model is dieing – they need to find a new model
Technology is cool – it draws buzz

Remember, it’s about the story

All that said, there are some examples of succesful interactive dramas – just from Japan. Look at visual novels and dating sims. To some these might only be scratching the surface of what the technology is capable of, however remember that it’s mostly about the story. I hope we see more variations, but it’s more about the story. Dan Hon said pretty much the same thing in his piece about ARGs – it’s not about the tricks and games but the story.

Will Google Buzz support social games?

justingibbs — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:56:17 +0000

I’m catching a lot of flack for being a believer in Google Buzz. Interestingly enough most of the flack is coming in through Google Buzz itself. One theme I keep hearing is “Where’s the social games?” The launch of Google Buzz brings up an interesting debate – are social games are the killer app of social networks.

With Google’s launch of its social networking feature for Gmail and mobile devices, Google Buzz, Tuesday, some are already speculating what’s next for new service. A killer app for Buzz? Social games.

If social games are the killer app, the question then becomes – is Google Buzz going to support social games? Off of the top of my head I can think of a few reason for and against it.

Reasons not to support social games

Facebook is already having difficulty striking a balance between viratlity and spam
Social games have the potential to change the dynamic of the social network itself – A-ya Chiu of Taiwan added over 4,400 friends on Facebook to decorate her virtual house in Pet Society
Have to deal with app developers – It can be a pain as we’ve seen the flack over Apple’s app store, however Google has already dived into this with the Android app store

Reasons to support social games

Certainly promotes usage – Facebook has a good idea of how important social games and apps are to its daily usage numbers
It can promote mobile use of Buzz – People have to get the game fix on wherever they are
Promote location-based features through augmented reality games – Also lends nicely to Google’s geek cred

Reasons for supporting social games beyond Buzz

Can push Android and Chrome OS for netbooks – If they’re also working on a tablet version of Chrome OS, the games piece might be critical to its adoption
Drives transactions – Anyone remember Google Wallet, maybe they can dust it off
Push open data standards which will loosen the grip Facebook and Twitter have on users
Push Google’s campaign for HTML5 and 3D in the browser – Google Chrome OS doesn’t support Flash; they spend their own money building out O3D while at the same time supporting it’s open competitor WebGL

Google hasn’t always been consistent in their message but overall they seem to support open web standards over proprietary formats. My guess is that open standards are in their blood and they think they can out compete anyone no holds barred. If the world was using HTML5 and WebGL at the expense of other game engines and Flash they couldn’t be happier. Some have already speculated that Google could change gaming and that’s a whole new market for them to cash in on.

Problem is Gmail is a tool, not a service

Of course Gmail, the home of Buzz is a tool and not a true social network. I use Gmail for personal and business where as I use Facebook more for fun – wasting time. Google search is also a tool, and we’ve seen how much they’ve cluttered their search homepage with ads or anything else that might be of interest. Google knowingly leaves hundreds of millions of dollars on the table not putting ads on their homepage.

I’m betting that Google won’t be able to resist the chance to dive into the social game market, the question is if they do it in Gmail or outside of it? They could easily launch Buzz as a stand-alone site – get people use to it in Gmail but let it all hang out on the stand-alone site. Then again maybe they have a few tricks up their sleeve to strike a natural balance between virality and spam? It might be odd to play a game inside of Gmail, but they could also let you jump off site for the playing experience. In this scenario Buzz is just the communication piece. If that’s the route they go I would also expect them to require O3D or WebGL as they’ve already stated that they restricted Chrome OS to only web apps for security reasons.

What do you think – will Buzz support social games?

Google Buzz will nullify Facebook

justingibbs — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:16:43 +0000

The echo chamber is abuzz with, we’ll Google Buzz. While some are negative:

But like many Google services, it lacks any imagination or compelling reasons to use it. (Starting with the name, a rip-off from Yahoo.) As a result, it’s probably not a threat to any of the services it’s trying to disrupt.

I’m a little more positive. Google Buzz relies on Google’s strengths – email and algorithms to surface your connections automatically based on who you correspond with. This is your own social network without the setup.

Won’t kill Facebook but will nullify it

The Silicon Alley Insider article asks who would make the switch to Google Buzz.

Why would they switch to this Google service when there are no compelling reasons to do so?

And if Google isn’t going to actually kill Facebook with this thing, what’s the point?

I disagree that the point is to kill Facebook. Users have been notoriously transient with their Internet use. First it was Friendster, then MySpace, then Facebook. Some say many have already moved from Facebook to Twitter. However one thing that has proven rock solid is email. Google Buzz is an instant social network, better than that it self-adjusting. People I haven’t talked with in a year will fade to the background, rather than hang around on Facebook prompting me to ponder when and why I added them.

Even today I hear, “don’t Facebook me, just send it to my email.” Email is where users return to time after time. It’s what goes at the top of their resumé. It’s the most sure-fire way to get in contact with someone besides their phone number. When users return to Gmail they’ll slowly begin to use Google Buzz and over time nullify Facebook. It won’t kill Facebook but it will take a chunk out of it.

What does it mean for social games and Flash?

I wonder what Google Buzz will mean for social games? With Facebook trying to strike a balance between virality and spam, how will Google tackle the issue?

There is also the issue of Falsh. Flash is to work on Google’s mobile OS Android, however not on Chrome OS for netbooks (and possibly tablets). Google is also a big proponent of HTML5 and pushes O3D as a direct competitor for Flash.

How do virtual worlds build community?

justingibbs — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:50:31 +0000

More virtual worlds and virtual world projects are shutting down. Some may remember Google Lively died a year ago. More recently it’s been vSide, Metaplace, and now Project Wonderland. It really does seem to be the end of Virtual Worlds 1.0. I and a few others have even begun to ponder what will be part of Virtual Worlds 2.0 – rise from the ashes of 1.0? But it’s also a good time to review lessons learned.

Community is a chicken and egg thing

As the old saying goes, there is no shortcut to success. The strategy for most Virtual Worlds 1.0 revolved around a thriving community to interact with and supply content (User Generated Content – UGC). All you needed was an instant community, and apparently you get those by developing some cool technology like 3D scenes, avatars, etc. However at the same time user studies were showing that all that technology still wasn’t enough for typical users. It was essential that they capture a community – it was a chicken and egg problem.

How do you solve the chicken and egg problem, well virtual worlds tried to tackle this in various ways:

Google Lively
Google Lively launched hoping the Google name would bring so many users that enough would stick. But not that many stuck as this Google Trends graph shows.

It also didn’t help that the odd collection of avatars left users utterly confused as to the context of the world.

IMVU
One of the first movers in the 3D chat space, IMVU relied heavily on AdWords to drive early traffic. Being a first mover, IMVU also wasn’t paying much for those AdWords. Eventually they were able to tweak their product enough to find market fit and amass a community. A community heavily based on flirting but a community none the less.

Metaplace
Founded by game design legend Raph Koster, Metaplace’s approach was to appeal to game designers. They built some powerful scripting tools, however that presented its own problem as Simon Newstead’s , CEO & Co-Founder of Frenzoo, pointed out:

3/ Built for the builders, but not for the mainstream users

This one is a bit clearer, there was a great amount of feature support and tools added for world builders, but less tools or attractions for your average every day user. It seemed like a classic chicken and egg situation – not enough users for attracting game devs, and not enough games/content to attract users? The existing games on the site were ok but not up to the same level as many great flash games now, and the social elements and avatar stickiness perhaps wasn’t up to many average users expect. Perhaps MP should have jumpstarted some high quality gaming with internal development and showcase, and in parallel giving users something to get hooked on…

Of course IMVU’s strategy was the most successful, but it’s a little difficult to duplicate as the first mover advantage is gone.

Build community the old-fashioned way – around a product

Just as Google came out of Web 1.0, some virtual worlds will rise from the ashes and drive into Virtual Worlds 2.o. I think Frenzoo is one such world.

It started out as a fashion site, heavily sided toward user generated content. They made it easy to design your own 3D clothing and model it on an avatar. But that was about it when it started in 2008 – no virtual world or personal scenes. However I could create my own fashionable outfit. From day one it filled a need – how many girls dream of becoming fashion designers. It didn’t need the instant community to be useful, yet the more community it had the better an experience for the user.

Having already built a community Frenzoo then transferred them into a virtual world, complete with 3D scenes. It wasn’t a cake walk, but they applied age-old techniques of product and community management to make it a success.

That woke us all up! So the first couple days after the launch we we dropped everything to concentrate on fine-tuning the camera, angle and lighting settings and get our avatars looking better again.

They know their audience, they’ve cultivated their community long before transferring them into a virtual world. It’s the same strategy Japanese CyberAgent took launching the incredibly successful Ameba Pigg.

It can’t be just about the technology

Compare Frenzoo to Google Lively, IMVU, and Metaplace. The product they launched day one was mostly cool technology and they expected the community to magically form around it. When I first jumped into Google Lively I could customize my avatar and set up my own scene. I guess the “product” was self expression through 3D maybe? Everything else involved interacting with other people – the community. It’s the chicken and egg problem again. Trying to form an instant community around technology turns out to be pretty difficult and leaves you with some interesting issues as Simon Newstead points out in analyzing Metaplace.

4/ Who was the audience?

This is an interesting one. When I spent some time on the site I was struck how there seemed to be two distinct groups of users. Those older, technically proficient game dev types who loved being able to tinker and create world. And then a very young tween/young teen female set with “HoT ChiCs” clubs and looking for 14yo boyfriends. It almost seemed to confirm the 2d avatars suited the young female crowd and the game APIs suited the game devs.

Social gamers aren’t looking for games

justingibbs — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:48:14 +0000

Talk to most hardcore gamers and they don’t consider social games to be games at all. Talk with many social gamers and it’s likely they don’t consider what they’re doing a game either. So what exactly are they doing? Facebooking, that’s what.

Urban Dictionary defines Facebooking as a verb:

To check your facebook profile, search for something on Facebook or use one of its many apps.

Social games are apps, so social gaming is Facebooking. Daniel James, Co-founder and CEO of Three Rings spoke about Facebooking at a recent panel on social gaming.

They are mentally Facebooking. They are not there to play games, they are there to Facebook. And as a part of their Facebooking they are engaging with game experiences.

However that might be a little out of context as even he points out that the big question is if they think they’re playing games at all?

The big question that no one really knows yet is when someone is on Facebook are they in fact mentally, in there little mind, playing games at all?

So if the users don’t feel like they’re playing a game, can it be a game? That might be more, if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it… We could turn to some of the experts in the field of games for more help. But according to Daniel, they might not have high opinions of social games.

A lot of people, especially in the game business have a very snooty opinion about Facebook games. They describe them as basically, they won’t call them a game, “that’s not a game, I won’t call that a game, it’s a distraction” is a term I’ve heard used.

Social games are just a distraction - really?

A distraction! Now that isn’t very nice. But given all this, it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume two things:

Facebook has found a captive audience
Social gamers aren’t looking for games

In a way it’s a captive audience

They’re all on Facebook and they’re looking for a distraction, that makes them a captive audience. They aren’t looking as much on AOL or Yahoo! these days but they sure are on Facebook. Facebooking might be the modern form of channel surfing.

They aren’t looking for games

If they’re just Facebooking and don’t consider themselves gamers they can’t possibly be looking for games. They’re looking for a distraction, for anything. Well not everything, they seem to gravitate toward interactive entertainment. From Daniel again (I love pulling quotes from this guy):

I don’t know if that necessarily plays to the person wanting to a have a deeper more engaging, generally social experience. If they are there for distraction maybe that’s all the large scale market wants.

The opportunity is bigger than just games

What all this means is the opprotunity to experiment is huge. Everyone loves a captive audience and we know what they’re looking for – interactive entertainment. That’s a pretty broad category however. You can throw games into that, but it’s not just games. If I go to GameStop it’s likely people there are looking for games, not so much with a random sampling of people from the food court. The same is with people Facebooking, we don’t know exactly why they came to the mall but it’s safe to say it was to shop. What we don’t know is what for. So shouldn’t we try to throw everything and the kitchen sink at them?

To see the opportunity for social games as just games might be missing a whole lot. What about visual novels? Dating sims? Both are huge in Japan. I know I continually harp on how we need more story driven stuff but this seems like the perfect fit.

A friend of mine is addicted to Professor Layton. The game is a series of puzzles and for each you unlock you get more of the story. It’s nothing new but apparently my friend has been hooked by the story. So much so that she read blogs about the upcoming games in the series all the while professing that she does not like games.

People follow stories, gamers follow games.

As humans we can all follow a story; we think and learn in story. We can all play games as well but they don’t grab all of us equally. Some people love games, others can put them down at any moment. If I’m at GameStop my captive audience is looking for games, if I’m on Facebook what they’re looking for is much broader. Currently we throw games at the that captive audience. For one, it’s what’s working and bringing in profits. Second, it’s a great way to enhance sociability. However there has been little experimentation in interactive drama – outside of Japan that is. The classic example thrown around in the United States is, “Oh do you mean something like those Choose Your Own Adventure books?”

Facebook delivers a captive audience for interactive entertainment and the opportunity to experiment is huge. It goes way beyond what we’ve traditionally thought of as games.

Hollywood, meet multivariate testing

Let’s say the social gaming industry begins to experiment with interactive drama, just imagine what they could do. This is an industry built on metrics, on split testing – think of what you could do if you applied those techniques to a movie? Continuous deployment? You could start with a minimum viable product that isn’t very good and over time evolve it into something worthy of an Academy Award. That might be stretching it, but it’s very different from the screen tests Hollywood does after shooting has ended. This would be the true digital revolution Hollywood has been waiting for.

Social gamers don’t comparison shop

justingibbs — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:17:50 +0000

Zynga’s strategy to copy and crush the competition could be more successful than it was for even Microsoft because social gamers don’t comparison shop.

One way Zynga creates huge hits is by identifying popular games from other studios, creating a near replica, and then beating the original with a bigger marketing budget.

The fact that Zynga can do this tells you a lot about the audience for social games. Actually it reminds me a lot of the market I was working with while at Experian. More specifically their Consumer Direct division which was responsible for those sometimes cute but always annoying FreeCreditReport.com ads. As you can expect it’s a marketing company through and through, but they’re also a product company. FreeCreditReport.com is your credit report plus a service to monitor your credit. It’s just not a very good one, but neither is the competition. The reason is repeated in the conference rooms and halls like a mantra – no one comparison shops for credit reports. Why spend money and time adding a new feature when that money can be better spent on more ads, on locking competitors out of a lucrative channel, etc.

The service has to work of course, just as Zynga’s games have to be fun but simply put – they aren’t winning because they offer a supperior user experience or novel game play. I could argue that it was very different for Microsoft when they employed the same copy and crush strategy. People did comparison shop. There were articles comparing products to one another, people would argue vehemently about which was better than the other. I never hear a word about which is the better social game.

It’s a new audience

Along the way Experian has faced much better product offerings in the credit report space, but they’ve all failed to offer much of a challenge. Experian Consumer Direct understands their audience and they should, they practically invented it. They started as a private company with a novel idea, give users their credit reports directly over the Internet. Prior to this you would only hear of your credit report when you tried to buy a car or rent an apartment. Experian dealt with car dealers and landlords, not individual consumers. But Consumer Direct went directly to the consumer through the portals like AOL and Yahoo! What they eventually discovered was a new audience - one that they learned doesn’t comparison shop.

Zynga and the other social gaming companies have done the same. Through the social networks they’ve discovered a new audience. They aren’t your typical gamer. They’re more female and most wouldn’t consider themselves gamers. They don’t comparison shop. They aren’t going to read magazines about games, they don’t care about Gamasutra, they enjoy social games that they hear about from their friends or see in an ad.

Understand your audience

Experian Consumer Direct certainly understands their audience. Their audience uses AOL and Yahoo!, they don’t use Google Wave. They typically are not heavy Internet users. Heck, they know the percentage of their audience search for keywords like “free credit report” vs. “credit report”. They know it all the way down to which search engine they use.

I bet Zynga is learning the same thing as I write this.

Why are movie based games failing?

justingibbs — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:01:52 +0000

While Avatar the movie is a huge hit, it seems that Avatar the video game is a flop. What’s even more interesting is it seems the industry is turning away from licensed franchises. The game industry has a long and lucrative history with licenses, so why are they failing now?

“Our plan is to take more care of our high end franchises, we will leave less place for licensed games,” CEO Yves Guillemot said in a recent call to investors. “So the goal is to reuse the investment and licenses and put more emphasis on the making of our brands bigger and make sure they can come more often with high quality. So it doesn’t mean we will stop but we’re going to spend less in licenses in the future.”

In the days of Atari 2600 and ColecoVision game developers rushed to license content. Of course games in those days were sold based on the box cover. Look at E.T. the game compared to the box cover. They couldn’t be more different. But that isn’t what screwed up E.T. the game and consequently killed Atari, it was the game play itself. It’s practically unplayable.

If you make them somewhat playable you could have a major hit as many developers have learned – Spider-Man, Lord of the Rings, etc. Avatar the game might not have the best reviews but it is no E.T. So why are they all of a sudden not meeting expectations? That might be for two reasons, which can be summed up as evolution.

Nick Saint points out that expectations have risen as game developers home grown franchises turn into brands.

But the biggest problems with licensed games is that more and more game franchises have been built into recognizable and beloved brands. No matter how popular a new movie is, a video game version will never mean as much to gamers as a new Mario, Final Fantasy, or Call of Duty title.

Makes sense, the industry has learned to support their own brands. Not only that, but the games themselves have evolved and learned to embrace the medium. Just as you would never see a beautiful sculpture and think “why don’t I make that into a painting”, you wouldn’t see a game and think that would make a great movie. Oh wait, we do exactly that. But the turning away from licenses is a sign that things are changing. I know Hollywood would love to turn every popular book into a movie, but audiences are learning what screenwriters have known for decades – some stories just don’t transfer well. Probably one of the best page for page translations to film was Watchmen, and see how well that did. Mediums evolve to embrace their defining characteristics and as such can’t support all types of stories.

As for games, look at LittleBigPlanet - the world it creates is wildly entertaining. Super Mario Bros. created a similar world with mushrooms, bricks, and sounds. Those worlds doesn’t transfer well to the movie screen as we saw. Most games also can’t support films, just look at Doom or the trouble Bungie has had trying to get Halo made into a movie. They’re two different mediums.

Avatar the game can put you in a similar enough world to the movie but lacks the story, the character development. I remember playing Spiderman 2, which was a very successful game, but being annoyed I had to save people. I know that’s what Spiderman does, but he does that in the movies if I’m playing him I want to take him somewhere else.