By Doug Hill
For 2010, the Austin, Texas, edition of the Game Developer’s Conference was officially dubbed GDC Online to emphasize a focus on the online market. Although MMO games were definitely present, they took a back seat to the emerging sister industry: social games.
In his GDC Online Keynote, Brian Reynolds (Chief Game Designer, Zynga East) discussed the creation of premiere social game FrontierVille, the recently released social sim in which players strive to build a small town in the Wild West. Brian discussed how the game is a hybrid of the most compelling pieces of two other Zynga hits — FarmVille and Mafia Wars — while also incorporating new features that would make the game more actively fun to play and more compelling to socialize with other players. He emphasized prototyping, experimentation and user testing as the most compelling ways to ensure the best content. In fact, they described their production process not as agile or waterfall, but as JSI-RSO: Jam “Stuff” In/Rip “Stuff” Out.
One of Brian’s statements in particular stuck out to me: He said that social games are our television industry. Although he focused more on the need for live support and episodic content, the analogy rings quite true. AAA games are our blockbuster, high-budget movies. Titles such as Braid and World of Goo are our indie films. Now, social games are our television industry — and as such, they truly act as their own industry and not just an extension of “traditional” video games.
Raph Koster (Vice President of Creative Design, Playdom) further pushed these points in his two talks. In AAA to Social Games — Making the Leap (a talk he inherited from his absent partner, John Donham), Koster presented a series of facts about social games, including:
• There were 219 Facebook games with at least 1 million users in August.
• More than 50 percent of social gamers play longer than 30 minutes per session, and 10 percent play more than three hours per session.
• On average, social gamers play more than one session per day and also play more than one game.
Raph went on to discuss the business side of social games, emphasizing areas such as virality, acquisition rate per user and metrics are the responsibility of everyone on the team. Specialization is no longer encouraged unless you are large enough to work across a multitude of titles.
In his second talk, Classic Social Mechanics: The Engines Behind Everything Multiplayer, Raph literally mapped out 40 multiplayer mechanics, some of which were standalone core mechanics (helping someone else), while some were combinations of many of the blocks he had discussed previously (guilds, for example). This was a massive talk with lots of great information (160 slides!) Raph will be posting on his website.
Not everyone is completely sold with the social games movement, especially in its current form. Ian Bogost (Associate Producer, Georgia Institute of Technology) talked about his social game experiment Cow Clicker. The game, which was made based on a friendly challenge from Raph, was his attempt to break down the core of many social games into their base functionality. Much to his chagrin, the game actually became popular despite the only gameplay element being to click on a cow and (if the player chooses) post about it. Ian had many concerns about the lack of depth in many social games, that they may prey on human addiction and that their makers are not being honest about their emphasis of monetization.
GDC Online also hosted several summits, including the Game Narrative Summit. Many of the industry’s most well known and respected writers gathered to share their knowledge with colleagues and a multitude of students eager to break in to this newer discipline.
Tobias Heussner (designer/producer, Bigpoint Berlin) discussed the importance of crafting deep characters, while Jeff Spock (freelance game writer) discussed the importance of thorough world-building. Both are necessary elements for game writers to determine what their characters will say and how they will act and react to the scenarios you place them in. They were also both fun sessions, as Tobias had the room do group character creation exercises, while Jeff had a well-crafted slide show that helped emphasize his points.
In another session, Dennis Mathews, Carl Varnado and Rhianna Pratchett discussed the importance of adding diverse characters to game narratives. They state the industry is getting better, there are still far more male than female characters and most characters are Caucasian. They also noted a disturbing trend in stereotypes for minority characters and emphasized diversity also should be added where it will have meaning and not haphazardly to a game in which it does not belong.
The Game Narrative Summit Keynote was by Joseph Staten (creative director, Bungie), who discussed what it was like to craft the Halo universe over the span of a decade. Staten noted they did not start with plot or characters, but instead focused on creating a world that, when players saw it, they would want to go there and explore. He noted that working on plot early could actually be detrimental to the long-term development process, as potential rewrites would have a ripple effect on the rest of the game’s development.
This article does not do true justice to any of these sessions, and sadly, there were many other sessions I was unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts. Luckily, many of the sessions were covered in detail by Gamasutra and a multitude of live bloggers. Most also will be available in the GDC Vault in the near future.
The best way to experience a Game Developers Conference is by being here, and I feel fortunate I was able to attend. It was incredible to see so much discussion on the ins and outs of social games, especially by members of the larger companies who easily could have kept this information to themselves. I look forward to a bright future for this new sister industry, which is definitely in good hands. I look forward to hearing about the steps social games have taken when I attend next year.
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