Category Archives: Gamification
The Gamification of America, Part 2
This is the second part of a presentation I gave at the USC Institute of Multimedia Literacy about my career and recent developments in the game industry. In Part 1, I discussed how indie development and digital distribution now allow for a greater variety of games, much as it was when the game industry was in its infancy.
Of course, this begs the question, “what is a game?”
For me, a game must have many of the following elements:
- Be fun to play
- Have goals for the player to reach
- Have rules for obtaining those goals
- Provide choices in how the player meets those goals
- Present conflict that is an obstacle in meeting those goals
- Gives the player feedback on whether the player is meeting those goals
- Has a clear “win” or “lose” ending state based on whether the player has achieved those goals or not
- Fun: For many people, especially the artistic.
- Goals: Whatever you set for yourself.
- Rules: None. You don’t even have to use a brush or canvas.
- Conflict: Your ability to put onto the canvas the picture that’s in your mind.
- Choices: Infinite.
- Feedback: What you and others think of your work.
- Win/Lose: Whether you like how your painting turned out.
- Fun: For many people, especially grandmothers.
- Goals: Earn more coins than you put in.
- Rules: Put in a coin, pull the lever.
- Conflict: The odds of getting matching objects that pay off.
- Choices: None.
- Feedback: Pictures of fruit and other objects that line up in the viewing window; coins that are won.
- Win/Lose: Coins at end vs. coins at start.
- Fun: For many people, especially kids.
- Goals: Reassemble puzzle pieces to form a picture.
- Rules: All pieces must lock into each other correctly.
- Conflict: Correct orientation and placement of each piece.
- Choices: Many at start, few at end.
- Feedback: Visual and tactile clues about piece placement.
- Win/Lose: Play until you put the puzzle together correctly.
- Fun: For many people, especially ones who are alone.
- Goals: Place down all the cards in the deck.
- Rules: Some cards are placed down in a particular layout; the remaining cards must be placed on a placed card that is precisely one numerically higher value.
- Conflict: There may not be a placed card that is of the right value.
- Choices: There may be more than one card that is of the right value.
- Feedback: The numerical value placed on each card.
- Win/Lose: Player wins if all his or cards are placed, loses if not all of his cards are placed.
Let’s look at four activities and examine whether or not each is a game.
Painting
For me, there are too many subjective or ill-defined elements to consider painting to be a game. To turn this activity into a game, I would add in the rules of Pictionary: require the player to paint an image representing a phrase and within a limited amount of time (or with a limited number of guesses) have other players guess what that phrase is from the painting. Thus, I will have added more concrete rules, goals, conflict, feedback and win/lose conditions.
Slot Machine
Where this activity fails as a game for me is the lack of choices given to the player. To make this more of a game, I would allow the player multiple pulls at the lever for each coin put in, but allow the player to push a button to freeze one or more images after each pull. Thus, the player has is provided with choices for improving his or her odds before the final payout occurs.
Jigsaw Puzzle
Where this activity fails as a game for me is that there is no loss condition: you simply play until you achieve the win condition (or give up). To make this activity into more of a game, I would require the player to complete the puzzle within a limited amount of time.
Solitaire
This is the most game-like of the four activities.
In Part 3, I will examine each of these elements that make up a game more closely.
The Gamification of America, Part 1
One of the moms in my son’s Boy Scout Troop happens to be an adjunct professor at the USC Institute of Multimedia Literacy, and last week she invited me to speak to her Mobile Applications Design class about anything I wanted. I pulled together some topics from pervious talks I had given and chose what I thought was a dramatic title: The Gamification of America. Here are some excerpts from my talk.
What makes this image of an elderly couple playing a video game so funny? Partly, it’s because we’re watching them from the perspective of the video game. But mostly, it’s because it defies our expectations. We tend to think of videogamers as teenagers, especially teenage boys. However, our expectations are not the reality.
According to a survey conducted by the ESRB in 2010, gamers aren’t necessarily teenage boys (40% of all gamers are female), they aren’t even necessarily teenagers. In fact, only 25% of gamers are under the age of 18, while slightly more (26%) are over the age of 50. So, the image of the two elderly gamers above is as close the truth than would be the image of two teenage boys playing games.
Now, when I first started making games in the 1980’s, games were made by computer hobbyists, games were sold in computer hobbyist stores, and games were played by computer hobbyists. However, as the game industry grew, large publishers such as Activision and Electronic Arts formed, and games were marketed to the teenage boys who previously played pinball and arcade games in America’s arcade parlors. Game development became more sophisticated, with larger teams and higher production values, and so did game distribution, which penetrated big-name retail chains like Toys R Us and Walmart.
I would sum up the trends I saw during my first 25 years in the game industry as follows:
- Big market (AAA) titles increasingly dominate game sales and settle into a small number of well-defined game genres
- Team size, budgets and retail price grow larger and larger
- Games sold in “brick and mortar” stores — originally just in “mom and pop” computer hobbyist stores and then increasingly in big retailers like Walmart
- PC game market gets eclipsed by console game market
- Games played either in family room or in console game market
- Games mostly played by “hardcore gamers” (teenage boys)
- Blending of big market (AAA) titles alongside smaller market (AA) titles
- Indie and small development teams continue to rise
- Mobile market continues to grow
- Digital distribution has been a viable source for purchasing games for years and shows no sign of slowing
- You now must be logged in to play games, although the games may be free-to-play
- Games being played by everyone, everywhere, all the time
However, about a decade ago, several technological changes took place and began to reverse these trends. The acceptance of the Internet for online purchasing gave game developers a route around the big publishers and retailers who decided which game concepts were appropriate for store shelves. Digital distribution through such outlets as Valve’s Steam allowed developers to offer their games directly to potential customers. Social and casual games playable on the internet, usually with a free-to-play option, found an audience much broader than the traditional hardcore gamer, spanning both sexes and all ages. Finally, the development of mobile phones capable of purchasing, downloading and playing games created a market for games of a smaller scope and made with a much smaller budget than those offered in retail stores.
Thus the trends over the past ten years have been as follows:
In many ways, the game industry has come full-circled to where it was in 1980, where a broader variety of games are available to play thanks to removal of the structure and restrictions that developed as the industry first matured.
In Part 2, I will define just what is a “game”.
David Mullich 