Friday, August 31, 2012

Pax Dev Jesse Schell Keynote- 8 pieces of free to play

Note: Slides can be found here
http://www.slideshare.net/jesseschell

Note: By Jesse Schell's own admission this material is in 'Beta'

Notes on 8 pieces of free to play.
Lots of focus on Game Design is mechanics. People are often looking at free to play mechanics as a way to monetize their game. In a way this makes game mechanics like keys and player's minds become the locks. a good game will unlock a players mind.

However, if you want to make a key that opens a lock, you should probably examine the lock. Traditionally if you wanted to know about the mind, you consult psychologists. But psychologists don't know much about optimal experience and 'fun'. if they did, they wouldn't throw such terrible parties. In a way this makes game design at the fore front of the study of fun. This also means there really isn't any literature out there on the 'Mechanics of the Mind'.

So it's a jungle out there, but if you keep searching you will find things (like buildings in a jungle).

So in the study of the mind for game design purposes Jesse has found 8 'pieces' for better crafting an optimal free to play experience (Personally, I'm not sure if it's limited to free to play).

1. Self Determination Theory
Self Determination Theory states that beyond survival there are 3 psychological needs in an experience.
Competence - People want to feel effective at what they are doing (they make a difference).
Autonomy - People like to feel in control of their actions and how they do their job.
Relatedness - People want to feel as if they are part of a community or connected with others.


2. Novelty Seeking
People like to be surprised by something new.
Setting and achieving a reward gives a dopamine boost; being surprised by something cool gives you a greater reward.

Variable rewards tend to be better than a fixed reward schedules. The brain comes to expect rewards on a  schedule and they cease becoming rewards. (Personally I think the brain files them as patterns/ rules/ mechanics)

People also buy things to try them out and see what they are like.

3. Plans 
Cookies.
Simply, stating that 3 cookies are 1.20$ gets people thinking that they should buy 3 cookies (and they will). Basically they create or see a plan in their head.

A plan is a real thing. People want to execute a plan or mental model in their head.

4. Worlds
Star-wars was/is a a very popular world and people want to go to that world. Often when kids play with toys from a world (or IP) they make up their own stories that take place in their perception of the world. These toys and games really are selling access to this world.

Pokemon is a great example; there are so many ways to access that world...

These worlds of fantasy creates a inner 'psychosis' (Personally I call this a 'real fantasy', a fantasy I identify with. Its my my fantasy that I can sort of have in its own little place. People have the real world where you do the real stuff like eat and sleep and a fantasy world where you do dangerous exciting things that you would never attempt in the real world)

Fantasy worlds are real in the sense they are really important to some people.

In a way people can be broken into 2 groups:
Imagineers - people who really like fantasy worlds
Mundanes - people who are not in the fantasy worlds (they like sports, which have no fantasy)

5. Pleasure Seeking and Pain Avoiding
Pain avoidance and pleasure seeking are different pathways in the brain. In a way Pain avoidance is when you "Hafta" (have to or must) do things. Pleasure seeking is when you "wanna" (want to, like to do)

F2P hate often stems from when players feel like they "hafta" do something.
Leaving a F2P game is jokingly referred as a Divorce.

6. Status
All human interaction has status.
People have an innate status and will attempt to maintain that status with the individuals around them.

see Testosterone and competitive play (link provided)
http://www.lostgarden.com/2009/11/testosterone-and-competitive-play.html

7. Membership
People tend to choose to identity with a particular group (will act to conform to this).
People want to feel like they are a part of something bigger
This can be a negative group (like those saps who spend money on a social game)

For instance people don't want to buy-out of work.  Players want to feel like they earned it.

8. Utopia
People want to make the world a better place.
So often fantasies take place in broken worlds and the players goal is to fix it (or leave it in a better place than they started)
Everyone wants a perfect world, Game will let players actually be able to create it.

Epilogue 
I know I left some things out if you follow the slides (I can do a Slide by Slide breakdown of the presentation if requested).

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Keynote the Defense Grid 2 Kickstarter


The Defense Grid 2 kickstarter was a good way to start the conference. Many high profile funding ventures have been funded through kickstarter such as Double Fine Adventure, Planetary Annihilation, Wasteland 2, even the Ouya android game console. This has created a lot of wonder and skepticism through the game development community. The presentation denoted a bunch of interesting points about kickstarters from the Defense Grid 2 ‘s more modest experience.

Word of Warning
The first major point was that KickStarter is not in any way easier than getting funding from a publisher. Most Kickstarters are not successful, like 97% are not successful. However, your odds double to a 6% chance of meeting your funding goal if you try to get less than 20K $.


Pledges
However, there are ways to improve your odds. A good pitch video (with good audio), multiple pledge tiers, limited pledge tiers (ie an early bird special) pledges that get you something instantly.

Be specific with what people get with your pledges. Decimals and commas mean different things in different countries. People will not read your FAQ.

So shipping merchandise and items to people who pledged also costs money. The suggestion is that this should be around 10-20% of the price of a pledge (Kickstarter take 10% of your pledges, so you lose 20-30% of this pledge).

Kickstarter is a service that handles donations, not shipping, not distribution, not getting your stuff to the people who pledge. There are “Pick and Pack” groups that will handle this for a price. (from other panels on kickstarter I know there are stories of people who do this themselves. this is a good way to alienate your friends)

Defense Grid 2 team actually wrote a program that parsed the website to give out beta keys to their previous game (and Kickstarter was ok with this).

While this seems like a lot of work it is necessary; Giving pledges some sort of instant gratification was noted as a reason for success. Also donations of hardware and a PR firm also helped.


Getting the word out
Marketing and getting the word out about your game isn't easy! Contacted EEDAR regarding when they should try to run this Kickstarter for maximum press. Basically the 2 weeks on either side of E3 is a bad time to release new stuff.

The press also do not want to do a story on a Kickstarter, they want to do a story on a game. Remember it’s not about the Kickstarter it’s about the game.

A news story will energize your kickstarter for Hours. A big article can bring in a several thousand dollars into your kickstarter.


Did you know that if you pay people a salary you are a rich developer? This is what people think, so unless you are living on a ramen budget in the room above your parents garage you are going to be seen as rich.

Keep things simple. People don't want to hear your complex funding strategy or get a 101 course in running a business. have a simple strategy people can see.

Part 2 
This blog post is finished up here:
http://tommyhanusagames.blogspot.com/2012/09/keynote-defense-grid-2-kickstarter-pt2.html
Comment if you have any ideas about how you want to see my notes!

Pax Dev Notes

I will be updating my blog with notes regarding the Pax/Pax Dev Presentations and Panels I attended (or will attend at the time of writing). Basically these are my summary of the takeaway points from the presentation, and not a substitute for actually attending the panel itself and I’m not trying to put words in anyone's mouth. If you think I’m wrong, post a comment! I'm considering restructuring the posts to be based on smaller topics rather than panels to reduce their length. So things may shift around in a couple of days.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Explaining Game Design

Intro
When I was driving to Oregon with my father we began talking about some rapid prototyping game design classes I was struggling with at DigiPen. Through our discussion (and his confusion, since he doesn’t even play video games) he asked me to break down “Game Design” into 5 parts. Well I couldn't do it on the spot, but lucky we were going on a family backpacking trip. During some time spent resting in seclusion at the top of a waterfall I came to my answer (apparently, that kung-fu movie stuff really works). So to explain game design (even to your parents or people who just don't understand), I broke it down into the following 5 parts. 

1. Theme
Having a theme, central message, or motto to your game will help you make decisions during development. All the work in a game, the art, the music, the mechanics, the level content, will contribute to a theme. If you never set one, the work in your game may speak quietly to different themes and in the end it may appear as if the game has no theme at all. At worst you may have a confusing theme or two or three competing themes that confuse the player.

2. Style
Games need to have a style or a type of consistency in how they deliver and create and experience for players. This means that the art, music and narrative presentation are done in a way that serves the game and is consistent. If a game doesn’t have a style it often means that the assets will clash with others and confuse players.

3. Usability
A major portion of Game Design is usability and accessibility of a game. This means having good controls for the game and feedback regarding actions (both successful and unsuccessful). In addition to feedback and controls the player must also be given training and explanation regarding the actions they are required to take (ie there needs to be some sort of tutorial).

4. Flow
The Player of a game improves over time. The game designer is responsible for crafting an experience that facilitates or helps a player reach a flow state (see Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Essentially this means a game designer is responsible for making sure a game isn't too hard or isn't boring (as dictated by their Theme and Style).

5. Mechanics
It is the responsibility of the game designer to determine the rules and goals by which a games takes place. Basically they have to develop the game mechanics. These mechanics and rules (even the game genre) are determined by the Theme and Style of the game and further adjusted for purposes of Usability and Flow.

Epilogue
With this foundational understanding of game design, I hope people better have a better understanding of what game design is (Oddly, still a problem in the industry). I also hope that this helps prospective and current game designers become more aware of the problems they will face when they create a game.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

My blog needs a post...

Ok, I said I was going to write some game reviews and I honestly stalled because when I started putting games to the metrics and reviewing them, it wasn't working. I felt like I was judging the games in a way that wasn't exactly fair. I essentially had a bad criteria. Anyway during my continued studies and school work we were shown the idea of using the MDA paper as a way to classify games. This works better then a metrics based judgement system because it tires to describe what the game is as opposed to if it is good or not. It's kinda like food; if you hate sour foods, it doesn't matter how good something is (especially by someone else's judgement) you aren't going to like it. I also learned that perhaps committing to specific updates is a bad idea. My school keeps me too busy to let me update this blog with any sort of regularity. However, I will update with things; at some time, at some point, eventually. (and I will try to get some more things up here!)