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!

Bret Terrill has an interesting post using Compete stats to look at the effectiveness of the Zynga and SGN game networks in cross promoting traffic through their game bars that is worth a read.

Reader of this blog will know that I have a high degree of interest in Social Games. There are a couple of social gaming conferences coming up in the next couple of months.

The first is Interplay which is being held on May 22nd at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco. It specifically is focused on games being played on social networks. Some of the topics that the conference plans to address include:

How will the companies in this space turn their momentum into sustainable business models?
How will the social network platforms react if and when they do?
The virtual economies represent large opportunities, but how does one exploit them, and what role can advertising play?

I’ll be speaking at the conference so hope to meet some readers there. Click here for a 25% discount to attend Interplay.

The second is the Social Gaming Summit which Lightspeed is sponsoring and that I am helping to organize with Charles Hudson and David Sachs. It isn’t until June 13th, so I’ll post more about that next week.

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.

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.

Venturebeat reports that some game companies are planning on launching teaser games into Facebook primarily to promote the sale of their “full” games at retail:

Unlike the one-off casual games you’ll generally find on the internet, Gnosis makes theme packages like Candie’s Factory, which is billed as an action / puzzle game. The plan is to split off individual mini-games and place them on Facebook to gain brand recognition for the retail product.

“We’re trying to build up an audience on Facebook where you can develop the brand association, so when you see that same brand at retail, you’re already familiar with it,” says Threewave’s CEO, Dan Irish. “I think for this year, the retail proposition is still the most important.”…

Threewave’s ideas do seem to be in line with Electronic Arts ‘ plans. EA has a stealth division called Blueprint that is reportedly creating “brand extensions” for its games to be distributed on social networks.

This reminds me of the old saying that if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. I am excited about the innovation that is happening in social games where the gameplay occurs within Facebook itself (and other social networks). I think we’ll see far more innovation coming from startups who are focused on these new opportunities than from established game developers who may have trouble with the innovators dilemma in dealing with disruptive technologies, in this case, social games.

As I’ve spent more time looking at the games on Facebook, I’ve been trying to detangle the difference between a social game and a game on a social network. In response to my post on the top developers of Facebook games one commenter asked:

1. Andrew - February 13, 2008[Edit]

I’m all for the development of games on the Facebook Platform, and can even see the value and revenue model working…..but does it really need to be branded ‘Social Gaming’? The idea of playing multiplayer games isn’t exactly new, and even on a web model, Yahoo and MSN Games have existed for years….

Something about this didn’t sit right with me. Scrabulous feels like a social game to me, qualitatively different from multiplayer games on the web. But what is it that makes Scrabulous on Facebook a social game, but Chess at Pogo simply a multiplayer game? I think the difference is that social context has an impact on the game play and enjoyment.

Playing Scrabulous against my wife puts the game into context in a way that playing with a stranger that I met in the Yahoo games lobby simply doesn’t have. If I’m losing against a stranger, I might just abandon the game - not an option against my wife. If I’m taking too long to move, I’ll hear about it from my wife in a way that will cause me to play- not true for a stranger. The bragging rights on the win will be more meaningful and last much longer when I’m playing my wife. And finally, the act of playing itself has the subtext “I’m thinking of you” that is absent when playing against a stranger, where the game is the only concern.

That being said, many of the games on Facebook lack this social context. Warbook and Texas Hold’em, their success notwithstanding, are more like multiplayer games that happen to sit on top of a social networks - the social context is not a key element to the game itself.

One game that has strong social context is Parking Wars. Ian Bogost has a great discussion of the social context of Parking Wars over at Gamasutra:

In Parking Wars, each player gets a street with several spaces as well as a handful of cars, which come in different colors. Play involves virtually parking these cars on the streets of one’s Facebook friends. Each car earns money by remaining parked on the street over time, but the player can only cash out a car’s value by moving it to another space. Players level up at specific dollar figures, earning new cars as they do so.

Some spaces have special rules, like “red cars only,” or “no parking allowed.” It’s possible to park illegally in these spaces, but if their owners catch you they can choose to issue a ticket, which tows the player from the space and forfeits the money earned to the space’s owner.

When possible, it’s best to park legally. However, in practice this isn’t easy, since many players vie for the limited resources of their friends’ collective parking lots, just like we do with our coworkers at the office. Moreover, very occasionally the signs on spaces change, so no one’s guaranteed to be safe.

Playing Parking Wars is an exercise in predicting friends’ schedules. A colleague in Europe is likely to be sleeping during the evening in the States, and thus his street might offer safe haven at that hour.

And just as some meter-maids don’t get around to patrolling real streets, so some players of Parking Wars don’t get around to patrolling their virtual one. Of course, such players might just be busy, or they might even be baiting their colleagues so that they can later issue a whirlwind of unexpected tickets.

The social context - knowing which of your friends are diligent about ticketing and which are not, and who might be too busy (or sleepy!) to be ticketing at a particular time, are key elements of the gameplay.

MindJolt, Jetman and Diveman are all games that use the “challenge” dynamic as their social context to drive repeat play.

I’m looking forward to seeing more games involving explicit social context get launched over time. What games do readers think have social context as part of their gameplay, thereby making them social games?

The NY Times has a story on Nickelodeon planing to spend $100m on 600 exclusive casual web games over the next two years. They certainly have a huge audience of people playing casual games across a network of sites:

With a series of customized sites for different age groups (preschoolers, tweens, teenage boys, moms), Nickelodeon calls itself the “biggest gaming network in the country.” Movie studios, video game publishers, and toy makers are among the top marketers on the sites. In the online games market, its stiffest competition comes from Yahoo Games, which had 15.5 million unique visitors in February according to the measurement firm comScore…

The N, Nickelodeon’s teenage network, has dozens of games for children aged 12 to 17. Slightly younger players are directed to Nick.com, which drew an average of 2.1 million visitors in February and is expected to add 185 games this year. The youngest players of all are welcome on the sites of Nick Jr. and Noggin, where games are meant to be played by children “on the laps of their moms,” Ms. Zarghami said.

The company also owns Neopets, a virtual pet Web site. The investment will add scores of new games to each site in the coming year…

MTV Networks acquired three sites to strengthen its gaming brand in 2005 and 2006. Of the three, Addicting Games is by far the most popular, averaging 9.4 million unique visitors in February, a 50 percent increase over the same month last year, according to comScore.

paidContent.org has more details:

Among the initiatives included in the investment :

– the launch, planned for September, of ad-free subscription service myNoggin, being offered with cable companies Charter, Cox and Insight and through direct subscription online.

– The transition of Neopets to NeoStudios, which will focus on creating new virtual worlds and further developing existing ones. The first new launch is slated for the end of 2008 with “a goal” of launching a new one every other year.

– The branding of Shockwave as “the” games destination for families. Somehow that includes new opportunities for “prominent integrated advertising.”

– AddictingGames is getting into the casual MMOG business with AddictingWorlds.

– The planned early 2008 launch of The-Ngames.com, dubbed “the first major casual gaming site to focus solely on teen girls.”

– A subscription product for Nickelodeon called the Nick Gaming Club, “a safe gaming environment.”

– 3D Slimeball. Now there’s the Nick we all know and love. Actually, it’s one of the multiplayer games for Nick.com. Nictropolis also gets multiplayer games.

The idea seems to be grab them as young as possible and keep them moving to various age-appropriate options.

From the sounds of the article, Nickelodeon primarily plans to primarily monetize through both subscription and advertising. Given their existing advertiser relationships and their huge reach, they should be able to help establish some standard advertising units in the casual games industry. That will be great for the industry. New forms of advertising are hard, and standard ad units lift all boats.