What Games Are

Marketing Amnesia [Why Context Is King]

Go looking into almost every successful game since whenever and there are always roots, always some way to say "that's just a copy of X" and demand justice. Everything begins somewhere else. Every painting has history in other paintings, every poem in other poems and every movie in other movies. Even across genres and whole classes of creative endeavor, everything has its origins.

And yet the market doesn't seem to mind, or even notice. It doesn't remember everything that was ever released and maintain a vast internal catalog. It remembers generally only within a platform, within a couple of years (maybe 3 or 4). It isn't paying as much attention as you think it is. For some this is hard to accept, particulary the long term fans motivated by certain types of marketing story, but it basically explains everything.

The reason why movies of certain types get made over and over is that although you might remember previous efforts, younger versions of you do not. The reason why some franchises persist through the decades is similar. You might think they should be sick to death of playing a FIFA, say, but it just recycles. New players come into it, older players experience enough passage of time that they feel like picking it up again. Professional marketers call it "churn".

Yet this does not mean we're all just a little bit of history repeating. Enough true fans exist who do have long memories and care enough to share them. Enough individuals exist to establish the tone of context, to judge one game worthy over another, that the marketing story persists. While it may have amnesia for a while the same themes and cares emerge. Things repeat and founderworks decline, but masterworks evolve in their place.

Formalists and Zinesters: Why Formalism Is Not The Enemy

Prior to emigrating, I found myself vigorously defending Raph Koster on Twitter. It started as a result of this article, in particular this quote from Anna Anthropy:

"Videogames have been one of the most exclusive communities i've ever encountered," she said to me via email, "some dudes, like Raph Koster, insist that when he says dys4ia 'isn't a game,' that's not a value judgement. That's bullshit. the attempt to label games like dys4ia as 'non-games,' as 'interactive experiences,' is just an attempt by the status quo to keep the discussion of games centered around the kind of games it's comfortable with—cus if there's one thing existing videogame culture is good at, it's making a certain kind of dude very, very comfortable."

I've noticed a recent uptick in this "certain kind of dude" argument. On the one hand it's about the acceptance and treatment of women, minorities and other groups within the game industry - and rightly so. On the other it's about the perception of patriarchy. It's saying that a "certain kind of dude" oppresses creative people with his view of an industry organised around keeping him happy, and he uses the definition of "game" as an exercise of power. 

This assertion is far more contentious because it conflates three different discussions. The first is political and asserts that passivity or apathy are actually forms of complicity. The second is to do with market preference, asking why is it that the white-dude market buys certain kinds of game endlessly while ignoring greater diversity. This point lays the blame at the feet of the industry, whereas the industry maintains that market dynamics are evolutionary and so the industry chases the market rather than dictating to it. 

The third discussion is about critique. To many formalists (myself included) many new kinds of interactive art are either not games, or not very good when thought of as games. Many are gamelikes, gamified systems, limited, persuasive, personal interactive stories. Some are virtual worlds. Some are more conceptually interesting than playable. Many are reliant on knowing the author's intent.

In creating a "game" not meant to be played or won, its creator is saying something. To then call that work something other than "game" can seem like an attack directed at its creator. Particularly for the group that could loosely be termed "zinesters", "game" has become a highly charged art-politik battleground that has to be won. Increasingly zinesters have taken to folding formalism into the patriarchy, complicity and "certain kind of dude" debates to paint all with the same broad brush.

Not only is that yet another attempt to win the debate over games through equivocation, it has the effect of dissuading some otherwise-interesting voices from engaging. Some, like Raph, continue to try such as with this open letter in which he discusses the debate and its personal side (an indie developer he respects crossed the street to avoid him at GDC) only to find himself yelled-at once more on Twitter. The question for zinesters is this: Is yellers and name-callers essentially all you are?

Because if so, zines will inevitably flame out.

The Free-To-Play Triangle [Game Economics]

I often see free-to-play game designs where every interaction is a potential monetisation path. These games want to sell energy, buffs, character unlocks, aesthetic items, rule adjustments, experience points and so on. Usually this is because their developers are trying to make the business cases for their games. By showing that all roads lead to cash, the hope is that the project will be signed off.

Creating many roads to monetisation might sound good but there's a point beyond which it becomes pay-to-win. At that point the game loses a reason to be played, and players sense it. You can sell a lot within a game, but its important to always have at least one dimension of it that can't be bought as that ensures the motivation to play. So I've created the Free-to-Play Triangle, which you can hopefully use to sanity-check your economy.

Nobody Loves A Beggar [Marketing Stories]

 

For most studios the big problem these days is discoverability. When they make their game, get into the market and try to make sales, they discover that they are just one in a sea of many. They're not on the front page of the App Store, not being reviewed and not attracting fans. Nobody tweets about their game or likes their Facebook page.

So they try every kind of tactic they can think of to get precious eyeballs and clicks. For example: I receive a lot of automated newsletters, tweets, press releases and emails from game makers' publicists. Some even offer me money to write about their game. Similarly, many gaming websites are falling down with automated advertisements begging me to click, to play and to tell my friends.

What they are doing is begging for a response, like Shelley Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross. They need the exposure but the best tactic they can think of is using brute force to achieve it. If they can snag us, they hope, some of us will convert to customers and love them. But nobody loves a beggar. 

Free-to-Play and the "Freecore" Gamer [TechCrunch]

I have a new post on TechCrunch this morning talking about the rise of free-to-play, the decline of retail sales, and the plight of mid-level publishers. It also asks whether there really is a hardcore free-to-play audience or whether that is just a pipe dream.

Here's the article.

Do You Need Pixie Dust To Market Your Game?

A curious blog post over at Develop maintains that big-console developers and publishers need to be secretive to avoid over-promising features and getting yelled at. Whereas independent developers can apparently be open because indie players are much more forgiving.

Anyone who works in metric-led development will probably see this as flawed reasoning. They come from the school of minimum viable product, customer validation and proof. Hiding your game and ensuring that nobody gets to see it until you are ready to rock? That's just another way of saying you want to spend millions of dollars inflating your ego for no real purpose (in their view).

Are they right? Mostly. 

If Platforms are Countries, Marketing Stories are Religions

If it helps to understand the power and role of marketing stories, think of them in this way:

Platforms (PC, Steam, Facebook, iPhone, Wii, board gamers, roleplayers - think loosely) are like countries. Players are members of the country, understand the country's rules and play within its borders. They may be aware of other countries, but their on-the-ground awareness of them is often shallow. Only a few especially motivated gamers are true internationals, and even they often have a favoured platform or two where they spend most of their time.

Marketing stories are like religions. They are the causes, memes and ideas that matter. Some go across many platforms, but many don't. Stories that motivate Steam players are unintelligible nonsense to Facebook players, and vice versa. Although the processes of many platforms seems similar (much as the laws in many countries are), it's the people and why they are there which is different. Values and identity are different. Customs are different. 

It's very important to figure out whether your chosen country has the religion you want to tap into. Many don't, even if they seem like they should. There is no Facebook indie audience, for example, even though it seems like there could be. There is no audience for streamed cloud gaming like Onlive, even with all the funding, technology and strategy documents in the world. Nobody cares. 

It's especially important to understand this now: The platform rush of the last five years is basically over, and even the new platforms (Windows 8, for instance) are likely to fill very quickly with the same content as you see on other platforms. The next phase is the marketing story phase, and the renaissances and reformations that go with them.

Though you may not realise it yet, you're basically in the church business. 

Freemium Is Not Shareware 2.0

This morning I read the sorry story of Gasketball. The game is an above-average puzzler in which you bounce a basketball off walls and other objects to shoot hoops. Like many such iOS games it's charming, pretty good fun (though not amazing I would say).

However, despite achieving 200,000 downloads, its developers have ended up homeless and borrowing money to survive. They released the game for free and using Apple's in-app purchasing model to allow the player to upgrade to the full game for a one-off price of $2.99. So far they've had 0.67% conversion (or 1,340 sales). Their reasons for only having one purchase are moral.

Like many developers, they believe that freemium business models are abusive. Their idea was to use the same system, but only have one payment. In other words they confused freemium with what we used to call shareware. Unfortunately it seems that nobody told them that shareware was never that great to begin with. 

On Ultraviolence in Games and the Lessons of Porn

The gaming sphere (myself included) debated about whether E3 had gone too far and had the ultraviolent kinds of game on show were representative of games any more. Many a journalist reflected on their personal feelings of depression in the wake of the show, thinking that for all the high talk games had not really moved on. All fair points, but studios go to the extreme like that for a reason.

They need the coverage, even if bad, because obscurity is the enemy of all creative endeavour. If you're not remarkable then you're not remarked-upon, and that means you're invisible - so nobody buys your game. Ideally game makers would all love to be talked about for their design, technology or aesthetics, but those attributes are often unreliable. A splashy, gory, over-the-top video though? Money in the bank, or so they think.

The problem is that that kind of extremity eventually gives way to apathy, and from there it's a short hop to commoditisation. The approach of being bigger/better/faster/harder than the other guy ultimately results in a bland white noise where even the most shocking act is no longer really that shocking. In this, the E3 games industry may find itself traveling down the same sorry path as the adult entertainment industry. 

Theatrics And Charlatans [Marketing Stories]

The game and music industries have two things in common. The traditional primary market for both tends to be younger, and video plays a key role in inspiring those markets. Video is arguably more important for games because the final product is unknowable until you play it. Video makes even more sense in the age of Youtube, filling in a role that magazine previews used to perform. Live broadcasts of conferences are now for everyone. Trailers and tech demos are easy to share and dissect, often in high definition. And finally there are interviews, previews and video podcasts. 

This makes it important for a game maker to have a sense of theatre. To be able to sell a market on the vision of a game, to speak excitedly and inspire is best done with your voice, your sound and your passion. It's amazing how far your message might travel in this way, especially to markets who don't have the inclination to read. It gives you the opportunity to tell your marketing story, but it also brings with it the temptation to act the charlatan.