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Designers behind Civilization, Super Meat Boy, Spore, and more weigh in on the Facebook gaming phenomenon and the morality of social gaming mechanics.
At the risk of understatement, social gaming is huge. The phenomenon of free-to-play, microtransaction-supported games has grown exponentially in recent years, to the point that the estimated worth of leading social publisher Zynga was pegged at $5.51 billion, overtaking that of traditional publishing giant Electronic Arts earlier this month.
"I think that's just the wrong word," Meier said. "It's fun to play. As game designers, we want to make an experience that you want to continue to play and play again and replay. So I'm hesitant to make that a bad thing: that games that are fun, that games are things you want to do, that you want to keep doing. Because that's our goal: to create a great experience. I just want to be careful that we don't make [it] a negative that games are too good. 'They're too much fun, they're too compelling!' Games should be fun. They should be compelling. They should make you want to play."
"There are certain industries in which the majority of revenues come from the minority of the customers," Bogost said. "Without citing numbers, it is generally incredibly sinful, morally questionable industries that are like this: alcohol sales, gambling, and tobacco. And we might want to ask ourselves what we think about that. When you have a game that does not have a spending cap and the vast majority of revenue is coming from a minority of players, 10 percent of players generating 90 percent of revenues, how do we feel about that? It's not a simple question, but it is something I think can't simply be brushed under the rug. We can't say, 'Well players will do what they want, and it's none of my business how they spend their free time.' A lot of game developers take that position. I think that's unfortunate."
Bogost also took issue with the way social games treat friends as resources, saying there was "some violence" involved in the process. It's something people do all the time, he admitted, in networking to find a job or getting a message out to a broader audience. But he worries many Facebook games do too little to actually cultivate or strengthen friendships.
"My worry is from the player's standpoint. If the research carries over to gameplay as it does in other [fields], it will actually turn people off games in the long run. It emphasizes the shallow, dumb, non-interesting tasks, and it decreases motivation for interesting tasks that might be intrinsically motivated."
Hecker said his hope for games is that they become the preeminent art form of the 21st century in the same way film was for the 20th century. His concern is that the industry is engaging in trends now that will hold it back from achieving that goal in the future.
"The way you become the 'preeminent art form of the 21st century' is not by giving people more achievements and stuff," Hecker said. "It's by making deeper and more compelling games."
While some might find the social gaming model insidious, other designers find the nascent nature of the genre downright inspirational. One such creator is Spry Fox cofounder and chief creative officer Daniel Cook, whose career has been following an increasingly experimental trajectory since breaking into the industry with Epic Games' 1995 PC shoot-'em-up Tyrian. During a stint with Microsoft, Cook worked on titles like the live game show 1 vs. 100, and for Spry Fox, he has developed the browser-based Steambirds and games for Amazon's Kindle e-reader (Triple Town and Panda Poet).
"I personally adore the microtransactions model," Cook said. "To me, there's always been something fundamentally dishonest about the way retail works. Most games are purchased without reading the reviews. There's a box on the shelf and someone spent an insane amount of marketing dollars to get someone to look at the pretty picture on the box and buy the game. As a game designer, I would much rather have someone try my game for free, and if you like it and find value there, pay a little bit of money. I'm absolutely in love with that model."
Taking Measure of Metrics
Another benefit Cook has spotted in the social gaming model is the abundance of metrics available. It's easy for developers to make minor changes in social games, take them live for a short period of time, and get detailed data on exactly how the player base reacted.
"A lot of game design historically has been designing in the dark," Cook said. "You don't know what people think, and more importantly, you don't know what they're going to do. The metrics give us very up-to-date, rapid information on areas of gameplay that we never would have had insight into previously. It's like someone is turning on a light bulb for the whole design process."
Cook acknowledged the possibility that some designers may rely too heavily on metrics, but he said they were just tools to be used judiciously, like focus groups or a designer's own instincts.
"I've seen intuition create incredibly horrible games, and I've seen metrics create incredibly horrible games," Cook said. "If you use the tools badly, then yes, they will lead you in the wrong direction."
Meier downplayed the impact metrics have on the overall design of his games, saying metrics primarily help with small-scale optimization.
"Most of our design decisions are pretty big and broad," Meier explained. "Take this in, put this out, double that. The idea that we need to add 3 percent to this or make this green instead of blue…those aren't the kind of decisions we focus on to make the game. Our game is based on big ideas, fun concepts, and interesting ways to play a variety of strategies, so metrics are not really at this point a big part of our game design process."
McMillen said Super Meat Boy was designed without the aid of metrics. And while there was one focus testing session for the game, most of the feedback was thrown out. (One tester suggested that having a static loading screen would be preferable to a cutscene that couldn't be skipped for the first few seconds because the level was loading in the background.)
"The funny thing about [metrics] and business in general is the idea that they think they're perfecting something and they're going to be more successful by perfecting it," McMillen said. "When in reality, I guarantee you something will come out in the next few years that will beat out these games, and it will be something nobody knows about, and something nobody knows they wanted, because the thing that people really want is something they don't know exists."
Looking Forward
One common theme expressed to varying degrees by all of the developers above is that the notion of a social game isn't inherently broken and that things could get better.
"I'm sure you can make a responsible, fun, even competitive Facebook game," McMillen said. "Facebook has the ability to become like an Xbox Live system, where if a good game came out and was fun like a Geometry Wars type game and you could compete for high scores, I think that would be just as successful and a more responsible gameplay experience."
Describing himself as naturally optimistic, Hecker focused on how far Facebook games have already come.
"If you look at Facebook before Zynga and Playfish and all these guys, they were selling apps that let you put fake vomit on your friend's wall," Hecker said. "There was no gameplay whatsoever; it was just junk you would spam on your friends' walls. And the game developers basically put all those guys out of business by making just the simplest games. And that gives me some hope because it means that maybe deeper gameplay will steamroller over the current list of really shallow games. It's not a huge step forward, but it seems like it's going in the right direction."
Finally, Meier took a long-range perspective on the issue, like a Civilization player on the first turn, looking at a lone settler unit on barren plains and hoping in time to turn it into the heart of a globe-spanning empire.
