Gamasutra summarizes a panel discussion at ION today about designing games with gold farmers in mind. I recently noted some of the challenges of dealing with in game inflation when designing games. This panel deals with some other game design challenges when you have a virtual economy:

On the topic of the need to plan an economy before the community develops its own, Big Fish Games’ Toby Ragaini pointed to Asheron’s Call as an example: “In Asheron’s Call, they made money weigh something, so rich people couldn’t carry their money around. So players came up with their own exchange for a small, lightweight item (shards). Everyone traded based on these items.”

Habbo Hotel developer Sulake Corporation’s CTO Osma Ahvenlampi noted, “In Habbo, at first they made the currency non-tradable, but players were trading everything else. They finally decided it would make it easier for everyone concerned and made bags of gold etc. When that happened, it reduced eBay transactions because it was easier and more trusted by players to do it internally.”

Many social games developers are taking an iterative approach to their game design. In general this is a great approach. It allows developers to quickly react to what your players like about their game. However, virtual economy design is one aspect that deserves a substantial amount of design work up front. Neglecting it can create a situation where success begets failure because the economy gets out of control and ruins the “fun” for your best players.

Last week I mentioned that I’m speaking at Interplay Con on May 22nd.

Another great conference focused on social games is the Social Gaming Summit on June 13th, also in San Francisco. Lightspeed is the Platinum sponsor of this conference and we have been working closely with Charles Hudson and David Sachs to organize the event, invite speakers and so on. Here is the critical info:

What: Social Gaming Summit
Where: UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center, San Francisco, CA
When: Friday, June 13th 2008
Register Here: http://socialgamingsummit.eventbrite.com/

Charles, David and I have been discussing the agenda for the past month or so and have settled on the following five panel topics as areas where there are emerging best practices that are not widely understood.

Casual MMOs and Immersive Worlds.

Asynchronous Games on Social Networks

Building Communities and Social Interaction In and Around Games

What Makes Games Fun?

Monetization and Business Models for Social Games

User-Generated Games in Social Networks

The aim of the conference is to have practitioners talking to practitioners, sharing real life lessons learned. We’ve chosen speakers who have live experience with launched games. Speakers include:

Respected game designers and theorists including Amy Jo Kim, Ian Bogost and Nicole Lazarro,

Developers of social network games including the teams from Friends For Sale, Zombies, (fluff) Friends, SGN and Zynga,

CEOs from casual games companies like Addicting Games, Playfirst, Kongregate and Mochi Media,

Leaders of virtual worlds and MMOs like Sparkplay, Habbo Hotel, Acclaim and Puzzle Pirates and

CEOs of communities like Dogster, IMVU, Gaia, Go Pets Live, NeoPets and Stardoll.

It should be a great conference.

Readers can use the code “LSVP” at checkout to save 15%. That discount is good for general admission and student tickets.

We hope to see you there!

Siqi Chen, CEO of Serious Business (publisher of the Friends for Sale game), pointed me to an excellent white paper on the money supply impacts on an online economy recently.

It notes that in most games, players control the rate at which new cash is introduced into the economy. To avoid hyper-inflation, it recommends four steps:

Consumables are important in creating new Cash – If large amounts of new cash can be created without consumables, then there is no economic brake on cash creation.

Players set the prices of Consumable – This is the other side of the coin, since only player set prices can legitimately respond to changes in the money supply. Attempting to do this programmatically in such a diverse economy as a typical MMO is to invite failure. National governments have not been able to do this.

Fixed drains need to be in place – This provides a mechanism to remove a Crafter who is economically irrational from the business game, as well as to provide equilibrium in prices and money supply. Thus a regular fixed cash fee for doing business is required, and set by the game.

Variable Drains via percentage commission of the sale need to be in place – This provides a damper that mitigates wild swings in the money supply. Fictionally Sales commissions provide this damper. The percentage is set by the game, on Facility Type basis.

People building social games should read the whole thing.

CNN , the Times of London and others have been covering Miss Bimbo recently, which Jezebel describes as:

essentially an online competition in which each registered player is given a “Bimbo” all her own to take care of — sort of like those Tamagotchi pets, but, well, not. According to Miss Bimbo rules, the goal of the game is to make your Bimbo the ” the hottest of hot Bimbos,” which involves dating “that famous hottie,” becoming a “socialite and skyrocket[ing] to the top of fame and popularity,” and even resorting “to meds or plastic surgery”, because girls should “Stop at nothing to become the reigning bimbo!” According to CNN, “Breast implants sell at 11,500 bimbo dollars and net the buyer 2,000 bimbo attitudes, making her more popular on the site.”

Unsurprisingly, most commentators are horrified and worry that this online game is providing bad role models for young girls.

This reminds me of the furor that the Coolest Girl in School mobile game produced in Australia for similar reasons. As Gaming Today noted:

Emerging as a rpg for teens, the game sets a stage for girls where “stealing, sexual dalliances, drug use and gossiping pave the path to teenage empowerment”. In the game, the objective is to “lie, bitch and flirt your way to the top of the high school ladder”, and the developer, Champagne for the Ladies, is billing their new game as the young woman’s answer to Grand Theft Auto. In the game, the player is encouraged to “experiment with fashion, drugs, sexuality, cutting class and spreading rumors” in an effort to win.

Champagne for the Ladies states that in the game “teachers exist to be manipulated,” a “looming parent signals potential social death,” new clothes are “procured by stealing from the mall”, and “bribery is an exit strategy for sticky situations”.

Game Set Watch has a good overview of the gameplay.

One of the keys to the viral appeal of these games is the comparison to Grand Theft Auto. The appeal of these “game of new stimulation” (one of the four types of fun) is correlated with the “bad” fun of stomping on a sandcastle, as Bateman notes:

… one of the reasons the recent Grand Theft Auto games are so successful at tapping into this side of ilinx is that they are not wholly realistic… The tone of the games is realistic in a certain sense, and certainly they are drawing upon mimicry, but there is an unreal quality. This is expressed in part by the shrewd choice of a non-photorealistic art style, and also by the presence of ‘game-like’ elements in the game world, such as “power up” tokens. This is real, but it is also a game. That empowers the player to, for instance, go on a murderous killing rampage, and laugh as they do it. I do not believe there is anything morally wrong with this, and the unreal quality of the game facilitates this freedom to misbehave.

The joy of ilinx is reckless abandon… it can be the vertigo of speed, or of wanton destruction; it need not be violent, but it is always irrepressible - the temporary abolishment of conscious thought.

(I hope) people playing these games enjoy the satire and understand that these are fun and no more role models than Homer Simpson.

The vast majority of games that we see are of the first three types of fun: competition, chance and simulation. It will be interesting to see if we see more games of new stimulation which derive their fun from crazy behavior. It will also be interesting to see if these games can hold on to players over time as these new stimulations become less novel with increased gameplay.

Scientific American has an overview of how some MMOGs manage their economies (found via Massively).

The article discusses the approaches of EVE Online, Entropia Universe and Second Life in trying to keep their virtual economies balanced. Getting the balance of crafting, economics and other such features right can drive behavior like specialization/division of labor, guilding etc, as Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, EVE Online’s economist, notes:

The new player who isn’t able to succeed roams around space trying to make ISK[s]. He tries to be a player-versus-player pilot and loses in battle. He needs help to succeed in the community. Players themselves have found ways to deal with this by creating corporations and alliances. It’s not just economics, but also socioeconomics in general.

For new game designers, keeping virtual economies in check is a non obvious but extremely important element of game design. While most designers spend a lot of time thinking about how to add money into a system and how to price virtual goods, some do not spend enough time thinking about how to balance these two elements. If you allow users to transfer virtual currency between each other, trade in virtual items will emerge. If the economies are unbalanced, you run the risk of side effects such as inflation in pricing of virtual goods or too many “high power” items in the wild. Both of these can make it hard for a new player to join the game after it has been ongoing for a while as they are either too poor or too weak to be able to do anything fun. While these things can be managed after they become problems, it is better to have spent some time thinking through the issues before launch.

Last week I asked what distinguishes a social game from a multiplayer game and suggested that for social games, social context has an impact on gameplay and enjoyment. Parking Wars is a great example of a truly social game on Facebook

When I asked readers for suggestions of social games, a few people suggested Friends For Sale. I agree that FFS is social; social context has a big impact on what players do. I’m not sure that it is a game though in that there is no “win” endstate, but that may be just quibbling with definitions.

The NY Times highlighted another great example of a social game last Friday when Brad Stone wrote a profile of GoCrossCampus:

This winter, the armies of Yale invaded Massachusetts and conquered Harvard. Cornell’s troops turned Dartmouth’s militia into a vassal force. Columbia allied itself with Yale and occupied Long Island, before getting routed by the Princeton-Cornell alliance.

The historic rivalries of the Ivy League have reached the Internet.

Eleven thousand Ivy League students and alumni have played out these scenarios as part of an online computer game called GoCrossCampus, or GXC. The game, a riff on classic territorial-conquest board games like Risk, may be the next Internet phenomenon to emerge from the computers of college students.

Techcrunch notes another company, Kirkland North, with a similar model.

Both games rely heavily on social context (namely school, department, and residence loyalties) to provide a framework for alliances, gameplay and motivation. It appears that both have also been able to draw a significant proportion of the students on various campuses into games, spreading virally.

I really like the approach that all three companies have taken to building social games, both on social networks and on a standalone basis.

Thomas Edison is credited with the saying that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”.

Many of the most successful web 2.0 companies understand this intuitively and it is reflected in their product management. Although they all have a general vision for their product, it does not spring full formed from their minds. Rather, they build A:B test harnesses to explicitly test their hypotheses on live users. They don’t ask their users what they want, but rather they watch what they do. They try multiple versions of everything (title text, call to action copy, buttons versus links, number of screens in signup etc) and they let the data decide the direction of the product. They’re not driven by philosophy, but by the scientific method. Examples of companies that take this approach include many of the standout viral growth companies of the current generation, including RockYou, Slide, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tagged, Flixster and many more. (Disclaimer: Lightspeed is an investor in both Rockyou and Flixster)

For game design, the equivalent would be the trend towards metrics driven development. Raph Koster wrote up the Master Metrics presentation given at GDC by Dan Arey and Chris Swain from USC. They talk in part about Microsoft’s approach to metric driven design:

MS User research group… using heatmaps. When a project goes thru MS, 3 people from the user research group assess the gameplay experience. They are a real thought leader in this area.

1. usability testing - can user operate software
2. playability, does user have a good play experience
3. instrumentation, how exactly is the user playing, using tracking software

This is the first year that they are talking about this stuff publicly, the Wired article (Ed Note: Halo 3: How Microsoft Labs invented a new science of play), etc. Here’s a picture showing black dots on the Halo map. So dense on deaths that there is no info. So let’s tie it to color intensity. Then patterns emerge, you can see a pattern of where people tend to die.

In single player:

- tracking time on task, red zone indicates usability problem
- comparing if designer intent matches what players do… designer maybe wants intense “speed through gauntlet” feel, but heatmap shows players moving slowly…

In multiplayer:

- tracking deaths by weapons lets designers read exactly how players use items, more useful than written reports or lists of data. Designers collectively tend to be visual thinkers.
- Designer tuned placement of items and terrain to achieve most satisfying play experience.

User researchers independent from developers. Researchers help quantify into something measurable. Designers say “We want feeling of chaos” — researchers help pin that down.

Researcher are passionate about good game experience, but dispassionate about design specifics. Developers tend to fall in love with their designs.

Danc had a nice summary of metrics driven game design a couple of years ago that is worth re-reading.

As we see more games move to the web, allowing for much better real time data, true A:B testing against live users (not just beta testers), and shortening development cycle times, I would expect to see even more of this metrics driven approach to game design emerge.

Erik Bethke of Go Pets Live gave the standout presentation of day one of the Worlds In Motion Summit at GDC. He talked about applying game dynamics as a panacea for operators of virtual worlds.

From my notes:

1. Use points and leveling up to get people to do ANYTHING. (similar perspective to Amy Jo Kim’s application of game dynamics to social media). Bethke noted the “completion bar” on Linked In and how it got him to complete his profile by spamming his friends for testimonials; the first time he had ever spammed his friends for anything. He said that he was mad that he couldn’t “solo LinkedIn”, but it still was effective in getting him to do the “group quest” of gathering testimonials.

2. “Quests” (especially those given by marked NPCs) are an established gameplay mechanic that can be broadly applicable. They work because they give people something to do when they first show up (and thereafter). This “Goal Interface” design is more important than User Interface design because it provides a framework of “what to do” that distinguishes games. “Transaction based” goals (ie measureable goals) are the best goals/quests. (see #1 above)

3. “Crafting” (turning less valuable resources into more valuable resources) is another established gameplay mechanic that can be broadly applicable. Players will engage endlessly in a series of many micro goals of attainment for self gain.

4. Free to play can mean casual (to start) but if you want to get paid, you have to focus on the hard core. They are the ones who will shell out real dollars for digital goods. There must be a satisfying hardcore experience even for casual and social games. Not only are they the sources of your revenue, they are also evangelists, and beacons on the horizon for new players. If you’re missing hard core, you’re missing deep fun. [THIS WAS A LIGHTBULB MOMENT FOR ME].

5. Even for a social virtual world, adding functionality for all four Bartle player types (not just socializers, but also achievers, explorers and killers) increased time spent in game. [ALSO A LIGHTBULB MOMENT.]

Bethke noted that it took Go Pets a while to identify who their hard core players were (measure everything and take a scientific approach to testing hypothesis to discover this), and what distinguished them from other players, but when they figured it out, they put in directed content to create more such players and were able to double ARPU. In the US and Japan his ARPU for paying users is $20/month.

More coverage of his presentation at Worlds In Motion.

Over at Lost Garden, an old but still good list of principles for multiplayer game design. Summarized here, but head over there to see the much more useful annotated version and relevant links:

1. Build in the “Norm Effect” if at all possible.
2. “Zero sum” is bad.
3. Pacing needs variety.
4. Strategies need “wiggle room”.
5. Legends must grow.
5. Court your newbies.
6. Allow personalization.
7. Keep the features down.
8. Include audio/visual subtleties.
9. Avoid numbers.
10. Include spectators.
11. Facilitate relationships.
12. Use time limits.
13. Include chance.
14. Keep the balance.
15. Include cooperation.
16. Make ‘em stay.
17. Allow handicapping.
18. Facilitate special events.
19. Leave room for ads.

Travian is a popular in-browser asynchronous massively multiplayer game; you build a village in “Roman” times and set off to expand your empire, raid others and form alliances. It has many of the games 2.0 characteristics that I’ve been blogging about and has been growing nicely, as Alexa shows:

As a passive web game:

it’s persistent. it’s massively multiplayer. it’s competitive. it’s social. it’s portable. it’s passive.

passive web games are setup to permeate your life. they become habitual. they are inherently attractive to gamers with little time — whether that time is taken up with work or other games. they fit unobtrusively into the corners of your life, taking as much or as little time as you want to invest.

… it’s a game you’ve never heard of, but, it gets 225 million page views a day

Most game reviews are glowing, noting the appeal to both casual gamers and obsessive gamers. One review though notes that at heart this game is about negotiation and diplomacy:

Politics is the name of the game, as while there’s room for intelligence to make a difference in combat, in the end, if someone has enough troops (and the resources required to build them) they can crush anyone. So friends are important, or at least fellow wolves

The reviewer complains that the scale of the player base ultimately becomes a problem for a diplomacy based (ie social) game. With 20,000 or more players, it far exceeds Dunbar’s number.

I can’t help but think whether building such a social game on top of an existing social map might improve gameplay even further.