Nicole Lazzaro
Summary
I think Nicole is wonderfully off the wall, and this lecture underlined that. At the very dull GDC “roundtable” (where less than 10% of the audience opened their mouths) this year on Free to play, Pay for Items, she came out with the idea that we should be looking at making buying things in online games as enjoyable as shopping is in real life, and wondered why this inherently addictive real-world activity was so dull in almost all online games.
Unfortunately, I found the lecture a bit too off-the-wall, and very hard to follow, even having briefly looked at her proprietary “language of fun” docs before.
For instance, I’m afraid I completely lose patience when she decides to say “Draw Circles” instead of what she really means, seemingly for little other reason (none was given) than that “Draw Circles” sounds hipper. I can’t even remember what she meant – even by the end of the talk I’d forgotten, because it was some very simple concept that is perfectly expressible in Plain English, but she’d chosen to twist around into needlessly confusing words. That’s fine when you’re playing around trying to invent a vocabulary, but used in a talk like this I found it just made things more opaque with little or no benefit to me as a listener. I’m pretty sure it all makes sense if you sit down to read through it with a dictionary in hand, and carefully read her vocabulary first, but that’s not available when you’re listening to a talk in this alien language :(.
Fun Keys
[ADAM: Started off with a brief intro to the 4 Fun Keys – c.f. xeodesign.com – and Nicole’s background]
We created a new game, a new interface every week. We noticed that some stuck with you, that you wanted to keep going back.
3 factors
1: the “new undiscovered” quality
Always a treasure-map X to follow. e.g. Myst
2: iconic simplicity
the UI matched closely what you were trying to do – 3 visual areas for a 3-step process, etc
3: emotional feedback
the game-mechanic and the emotion had to go hand in hand
e..g Tilt for iPhone, where the tilting of the screen is core part of gameplay
Smiling is done with the eyes when honest, independent of smiling with your mouth
emotions are fluid, not static, you need to include time as part of your recording
fiero: “personal triumph over adversity:
– can be as simple as rejoicing at managing to move your character
How social emotions drive play
so … this talk: compare facebook with the most social of game genres: an MMO (WoW)
MSO: “massively social online experience”
From 4 keys: today we’re looking at people fun / amusement: player interaction + personalize fun
The act of a player taking choices which leads to the emotion; you as a designer cannot force it, you can only guide it loosely.
Just as wines have a “flavour profile”, games have a “player-experience profile”.
Social bonding is possibly where the real gold is in this space.
All of this wasn’t working in the context of FB and WoW
It’s not about the mechanics of what people experience in the game, but about the emotions people experience sitting on the couch as a conversation with each other, an emotional conversation that happens congruent with their play activitiy.
MMO vs Social Media (SM)
MMO emotion: centred around friends, ability, and actions
We found differences: ability to connect friends, ability for the interaction to have feedback and keep going, and the ability to personalize the overall experience (not just the avatar)
SM: zero barrier to entry, no need to co-ordinate time + place of avatars to play together
SM actions are friendly – “poke”, not “stab”
SMs have: amusement, closeness, excitement, flirtation
MMOs have: fiero, anger, disgust, fear, excitement, amusement
Other issues: trying to scale these experiences.
Building stonehenge in your backyard needs two stones as pivots, not one
Web 2.0
There is no “web” in “web 2.0”; it’s not about technology, it’s about people. People now drrive the distribution, rather than using broadcast media as the challenge.
[ADAM: I certainly agree that it’s about the people…]
The “2” in web 2.0 means “it takes 2 people to make this all work”.
[ADAM: … but that’s a bit OTT for me :)]
Step 1: connect people, more than one at once
FB’s connect:
– people transition from acquiantances to friends. Few go from friends to close friends.
– the social context within which a video is shared is what provides the emotional content, not the video itself
– youtube response videos are now becoming comparably popular as original videos – the conversations are now dominating, not the individual videos
Step 2: feedback loops
[ADAM: people who lean against the projector to take photos of slides that are being put online anyway should be shot. Stop doing it! It’s very annoying to have the slides jump left and right by 6-12 inches every 30 seconds]
[ADAM: here she talks about Vampires vs Werewolves] Wave-based gameplay: it passes through the players, then vanishes. When everyone’s a vampire, there’s no more people to add to the ponzi-scheme, and the whole game dies out. By comparison, feedback loops never end.
[ADAM: and then she re-iterates the “design what happens on the couch, not what happens in the game / on the screen”]
Step 3: personalization
The subversion of things to mean different things because of private joke contexts.
[ADAM: slide of “what makes people feel closer” – worth reading this slide]
It’s a big part of WoW’s success that there are very different emotions for different parts of gameplay. The mounts are emotionally different when flying vs walking, there’s characters dancing, etc.
Final thoughts
At the moment in MMO industry, we’re designing a Social Calculus, one feature at a time. We’re trying to design this experience that we’ve all felt, but we don’t yet know how to do it, and we’re only managing to recognize and reproduce the most basic, trivial interactions. We’re a long long way off the advanced, deep understandings of this stuff.
What features do we need to define to bring people closer together? Take that thought away and think about it.
I give Social Media a slight edge over MMO’s when it comes to summing up the amount of emotions present in them.
What would it take to make a massively social online game? Connect, provide feedback [loop], and a deeply personalizable experience, like private conversations. But we must be careful not to sacrifice what we’ve got: mustn’t just blat a chat window on top and say “it’s done”.
In an MSO, emotions drive play
– connect friends
– offer social tokens
– feedback
– draw circles [ADAM: she meant something odd here, she explained it earlier in the talk]
– personalize
– share secrets
– keep it simple
Q: you didn’t mention SL at all? what do you think of that
in the study, we didn’t have any SL players.
From my personal experience, there’s a bit of barrier to entry. The F2P is great, but the barriers are: cost, ease of use, and then how evocative is it.
If I gave you a nuclear reactor, would any of you NOT immediately go for the “cause core meltdown” option? No – so you need to control what happens a bit.
Q: what other FB apps do you think are interesting examples, other than Parking Wars?
I really like PW because it feels very next-gen. We’ve been doing multiplayer research since 1995. Mostly it’s been cloning the SP game and doing it with more people, but WoW’s been great because the actual gameplay changes a little when doing MP raids.
But PW is different because everyone has their own street, which is brilliant and interesting, it’s different for everyone.
I think there’s a missed opportunity in the quizzes: when it says I’m 75% likeness with a friend, what next? Well, nothing, the quizzes don’t DO anything with that info. What would it be like to create the next step in the interaction beyond that?
Q: so, do you think FB is worth $15 billion?
I’m not an analyst, I look at the player opportuniities, and I see very big ones there.
Mii’s have a life, they go off and play even if the player fails to. I see next gen FB / social media is that social networking of today will in the future become as basic and normal as the addressbook is today.
Q: more of a comment than question. FB rewards iterative dev so much that I’m wondering what will appear next, and I’m expecting it really soon. And I’m worried that we’re not iterating rapidly enough, that by the time we get stuff out there everyone else might put the same thing out at the same time.
I strongly recommend you iterate and prototype on paper first. It’s a great way to prototype games.