What Games Are

Do You Really Care? [Marketing Stories]

I had the pleasure of meeting Ian Roberts of Red Redemption yesterday. He's at Develop with his company's environmentally themed strategy game, Fate of the World.

Ian talked at length about the game, the motivation behind it and the educational value of games. He was animated about his subject, proud of his work, and had a sense of marketing story. He clearly cared, and that's an infectious quality.

Social Needs Scale [Social Games]

Yesterday at Develop I attended a number of talks about socialised games. The advice across all of them was largely the same: make it social.

There is, however, something to consider: For social to be valuable to a player, she needs friends in the game. It is exponentially less valuable if she has few or none, and gating that requires her to involve her friends becomes a much harder task from a standing start. It's Metcalfe's Law basically, and is why social layers work for games that already have millions of users, but not for small ones.

Instead, consider connecting strangers.

When Tolerance Turns Sour [Design]

Rovio have had less than £5 of my money, and for that I have received hundreds of Angry Birds levels. Whether in the main game, Rio or Seasons, it's fantastic over-delivery and should be applauded.

However, Angry Birds Seasons irks me. It has a tendency to lock level packs to dates. You only get a level per day. Worse, it insists on validating the date against its server on a per-level basis. So you can't play it on the Tube, on a flight or in a foreign country.