Fun Inc. (5 page)

Digital distribution has ushered in a whole new class of medium-priced ($5 to $20) titles with less glossy production than the biggest budget titles, but far more scope for experiment and, often, old-fashioned gaming fun: good news for consumers, and for levels of creativity in the industry as a whole, but bad news for companies for whom such offerings won’t be able to replace the kind of income generated by an old-fashioned boxed sale.

While consoles remain by far the most valuable sector of gaming for the moment, it’s above all on the open internet that gaming’s future is taking shape. And, for all the success of the mid-priced movement, this is looking increasingly like a tale of two extremities. At one end are the makers of virtual worlds – companies creating realms that millions of people can enter, embodying themselves in virtual alter egos and struggling to attain virtual items and achievements within an entirely absorbing context. At the other end, though, is perhaps a more unexpected class of game that draws as much inspiration from the industry’s very early days as it does from the glittering prospect of evermore-advanced technologies. This is what is known as the causal or ‘independent’ gaming sector, a field that is enjoying more growth in terms of actual games and users than the rest of the industry combined.

Casual games tend only to cost a couple of dollars, or even to be made available for free and make their profits via a combination of advertising, micro-payments and one-off charges for various kinds of premium access. It’s a model that owes everything to the internet, but that has itself rapidly become one of the greatest engines of online innovation around, not to mention a magnet for an entire generation of ambitious young programmers, designers, and even writers and artists.

One of the most influential of all casual gaming companies is Playfish, a firm that has devoted itself to the social side of these games. Specifically, Playfish makes games that can be played via the social networking site Facebook, which at the time of writing had more than 200 million active users worldwide and ranked among the world’s ten most-visited websites. The games themselves are simple, but beautifully done: a geography quiz, a series of word puzzles, a game where you look after a cute pet, a four-part intelligence test called
How Big is Your Brain?
But the social integration they offer is subtle and extremely powerful, seamlessly integrating with users’ Facebook accounts so that they can instantly keep track of – and attempt to better – their friends’ scores, or admire each other’s pets. And behind it all lies a network of data analysis and tracking that sets a global standard not just for gaming, but for anyone hoping to make money from media in a digital world.

Playfish’s CEO, Kristian Segerstråle, has a successful background in game design for mobile phones. Yet, as he explained to me at Playfish’s London office in mid-2009, the scale of success that Playfish has experienced had caught him by surprise. ‘It’s fair to say that we have been overwhelmed. We started off eighteen months ago with four of us. We are well over 100 people now in four offices: China, America, London, Norway. Our games have been installed nearly 80 million times globally. We have around 30 million monthly players. Our first game, launched in December 2007, has had more than half a billion game plays since then.’ By contrast, the most popular video on YouTube (founded in 2005) has been played around 120 million times, more than four times fewer.

Social and casual gaming offers not only a new model of tapping consumer demand, i.e. integration with social networks, but, more importantly for the industry as a whole, a radical new way of thinking about games as a media service rather than merely a product. ‘With a social game,’ Segerstråle explains, ‘you only invest a fraction of the total development cost in the pre-launch, because you want to get it out as soon as possible. You don’t have a separate publisher or a crazy crunch at the end to deliver a huge project on a set date. What you want to do is get something out and get a sense of how big it might be. If it’s a dog, you should kill it as soon as possible. If it turns out to be a success, you add more.’ Gone are the massive – and massively risky – up-front investments. The majority of spending occurs instead after a title has launched, and can thus be based on direct feedback from and observation of users’ habits.

It is, Segerstråle acknowledges, a model that has a lot in common with the web industry, ‘where people are incredibly used to the idea of tracking traffic through a site and optimising it’. And the data generated by playing a game – an interactive process far more complicated than the use of any other website, that might involve many hundreds of actions and reactions with mouse and keyboard within the space of a few minutes – yields insights into users’ behaviours that are far beyond any conventional online analytic tools. Playfish itself tracks over 100 million data points every day, giving it a fantastically detailed real-time picture of exactly how all its games are being played: information that it can follow up with targeted email surveys, asking individual players why they behaved in a particular way.

Like other creative media, though, the most important single variable between any online game and its users is something less easily quantified than efficiency, accuracy or ease of use – enjoyment. An entirely feedback-led product also tends to be a boring product, something that contradicts the entire point of a game. It’s a fine balance between creativity and responsiveness that Segerstråle sees as one of the defining features of the games industry in the future – and that other media would do well to attend to. ‘The trick is not to get lost in the data. That means figuring out what desirable behaviour is on the part of your players, and the skill set for doing that tends to be quite different from the skill set of dreaming up something original, which is a projection of what you think is right in a game. One big challenge for structuring games companies in the future is going to be finding the right balance between being both creatively led and reacting to data.’

As other media have discovered, the constant feedback that a digital product offers can be as disturbing as it is informative: noting which articles get the most hits and provoke the most comments on a newspaper website is, for instance, not necessarily a good guide to either their quality or the benefits they bring to the company in terms of public perception and willingness to spend. In a data-driven age, however, games are out there on their own in terms of both the quantity and quality of information on players’ actions they offer, not to mention the potential sophistication of relationships they offer between fellow players, and between players and the company.

One corner of the Playfish office is devoted to player feedback and, as Segerstråle puts it, ‘you’d be amazed at the stuff people send in’. Stuck to the wall are drawings and photographs that people have made of their virtual pets in Playfish’s hit game
Pet Society
, including, in one case, a snapshot of a two-foot-high cat knitted out of thick blue yarn. It is, he notes, not what the media conventionally thinks of as a typical gamer’s enthusiasm, although it’s in fact far more mainstream than most of the violence that tends to dominate press coverage. ‘The people who want to blow things up in games are a narrow bunch. What we are doing has a broader appeal. In the past, so much of the game world has been focused on these very male fight-or-flight emotions, really until the Wii it was like this. We recently did a game on Facebook called
Restaurant City
, which is all about working with your friends in a restaurant. It’s completely non-traditional, but that title has grown faster than any of our previous games.’

Increasingly, it seems, the games industry has discovered that the most successful games of all are those that come closest to real life, not in terms of ever more expensively produced realistic sounds and images, but in terms of the range of social interactions and opportunities for expression they offer: simple, fundamental things, done well, that are a pleasure to share with friends or while away a few moments on a smart phone during a commute. This is far from the sum total of gaming, but it is its nimblest and fastest-growing sector, and reveals, rather like
Spacewar!
did, the full potential of computing machines, not as isolated marvels, but as interfaces with the human world.

Finally, while it is the players who are the ultimate test of any game’s success, it is also the workers who are the test of any industry’s vigour. And gaming, here, is enjoying a golden dawn. According to a survey of teen career preferences by MTV, ‘video game designer’ now tops the league of aspirations, beating astronaut, sports star and actor. The best and the brightest are flocking towards the medium, drawn by its incredible growth and potential for innovation, by its increasing cultural dominance, and by the sheer diversity and creative energy it represents: writers, directors, programmers, producers, actors, artists, animators, engineers and design philosophers all have their place in a successful games company, even if the hours are notoriously long and the risks substantial.

As the world plunges headfirst into the digital revolution, video games are emerging as one of its most significant nexuses: a many-headed, compulsively innovative pool of talent and possibility. Like any other medium, parts of the industry will have to adapt to the changing order of things, or face disaster. But most gaming companies’ relationships with their consumers are growing ever closer: it is not only the world’s fastest growing medium, but also the fastest growing area of global expertise in how to entertain, retain and connect twenty-first-century consumers. If the future is looking more and more like a game, it’s partly because the science of satisfaction has never before been so precise, so powerful, or so profitable. Where play goes, the world will follow.

C
HAPTER
4

A beautiful science

A video game’s relationship with the world appears to be simple enough, no matter how complex the game: it offers delight and diversion, and does so by simplifying and reconstructing reality in pleasing ways. Behind this, however – and behind the idea of fun with which this book began – lies a particular complexity that holds the key both to games’ extraordinary appeal and their extraordinary potential for challenging the ways in which we understand our own relationship with the world.

Take the act of jumping. As many commentators, including Raph Koster, have noted, a great number of games involve jumping as a key aspect of their control system – from Nintendo’s
Mario
games (Mario was in fact called ‘Jump Man’ in the very first game he appeared in, jumping being his defining attribute) to the free-running titles currently taking the console world by storm. It’s a mechanism that clearly holds a deep appeal for players. What’s remarkable, however, is that the amount of time characters spend in the air while jumping is extremely similar across a huge range of titles.

Why is this remarkable? Because the time taken to jump could, theoretically, be anything that a game designer wants. And yet there is an incredible consistency to the jump time in a whole host of games – and not in any sense that directly echoes reality. The jump time from
Mario
onwards tends, in fact, to be considerably longer than is physically possible: around double the duration of the time that an ordinary human can lift themselves off the ground for. The unspoken gaming consensus is something almost Platonic – an idealised version of the ‘right’ kind of leap. As this suggests, what we are often seeking in games is not so much an escape from reality as a more perfect, and an infinitely reproducible, version of certain aspects of it.

This perfection is perhaps most clearly visible when it takes on a distinctly unreal form, and one of the most distinctively Platonic forms any game has ever achieved can be found in what would be many people’s nomination for the greatest single-player game of all time,
Tetris
. Devised in 1984 by the Russian computer scientist Alexey Pajitnov,
Tetris
features just seven pieces, each composed of four blocks (collectively known as ‘tetriminoes’). The player has to fit them together into a perfectly solid structure as they fall one by one down the screen in a random, unending sequence. The only method of control is rotation and horizontal motion. Make a line, and it vanishes; it gets faster over time. That’s it. And yet this simple creation has outsold the biggest movie blockbusters, made more money than the most expensive artworks, and accounted for more human hours than even the most compelling soap operas, thanks to 70 million global sales of the original and several times as many sales again of its clones, sequels and variations.

In a sense, Pajitnov didn’t so much invent
Tetris
as discover it. The game is based on an ancient Roman puzzle involving pieces composed of five squares (known as
pentominos
), itself based on Greek and other more ancient forms of play. Crucially, though,
Tetris
translated a sophisticated mathematical recreation into real time and into the tiny universe of a computer, where score can be kept and pieces thrown at the player in an endless stream. It’s a perfect demonstration of the ability of digital media to give an unprecedented form to a very ancient human fascination; and to generate the kind of complexity that in the days before computers could only come from locking horns with another person.

Why, though, is
Tetris’s
brand of complexity quite so enjoyable? Part of the answer lies, once again, in its combination of great sophistication with immaculate simplicity. You can work out how to play
Tetris
in seconds. But the challenge it represents is not just hard, but fiendish. Mathematically speaking, it’s known as an NP-hard problem (which stands for a ‘non-deterministic polynomial hard’ problem). In practice this means that there is no way of ‘solving’
Tetris
in any conceivable amount of time by generalising from a set of rules. The optimum way to play can only be understood by an exhaustive analysis of every possible move available at any particular moment in time. The significance of presenting such a complex problem so accessibly is in the degree to which it raises the boredom threshold of a player (the free game
Minesweeper
, which comes bundled with copies of Microsoft Windows, is also an NP-hard problem). Playing
Tetris
is a mathematically endless undertaking. You can never say you have mastered it in terms of exhausting its possibilities: you can only improve your tactics. Moreover, it is a mathematical inevitability that even the greatest player is eventually doomed to lose.