Welcome back, everyone! Thanks for the merits for last week's entry. I strongly invite your feedback, criticisms and comments. Case in point: I completely misspelled the word "console" as "consul" last week. We're still working out the kinks, for sure.
Alright, then. Last week I left you with a homework assignment. I invited you to go play a game and think about what that game was trying to get you to do. This week, I'm going to talk a little bit about the works of Zynga and what their games are designed to get you to do.
Two disclaimers before I proceed, if I may. First, this article is not a condemnation of Zynga, nor an affront to their business practices. We're just talking here. That's all. Second, I can't claim to have any data or numbers on this right now. It's just what I observed from playing their games for the first year I had a FaceBook account. There. Disclaimers aside, let's proceed.
Last week, we talked about how games will always try to encourage you to do something. Free-to-play games are only different than their pay-once-to-play counterparts in the complexity of their business model. In exchange for entertainment, these games generally want you to do some or all of the following:
- Buy in-game currency for real money, funding the game.
- Play their game often and regularly, increasing the likelihood you'll buy in-game currency (see #1)
- Invite your friends to play, let people know you're playing, and interact with them as often as possible, thus increasing the chance that they'll play the game regularly (#2) and/or buy in-game currency (#1).
There're other things they'd like to see you do (blog about it, write on the wiki, "Like" it on FaceBook, et c.), but for now, we'll talk about these three.
Take a minute to check out my horrid rendition of what I'll call the "Zynga Curve" for the rest of this article. As has been observed on far more well-established blogs and reviews, your experience playing one of Zynga's games tends to follow a fairly predictable pattern. Start off at Point A. This is your first introduction to the game. Either you had a friend send you an invite (see below) and you're at least a little interested in playing with a friend, or you found it yourself, and something about it seemed worth creating an account. Either way, you're going to start off with at least some inherent "fun." If you don't enjoy your first couple of minutes playing the game, you're probably not going to keep playing, and the game has failed. That's part of why the first few missions or quests in games like this are designed to be easy, accessible, and, whenever possible, indicative of the kind of experience you'll have playing the game. You'll plant crops, visit your "neighbors" (real or otherwise), fight other vampires or mobsters, and generally get your feet under you. You're getting the hang of the game, while also starting to personalize your layout (your character, your farm, whatever).
As time goes on, you'll find the tasks set before you ramping up gradually. This requires more engagement, but by now, you're supposed to already have some investment in the game (since you've got your log cabin in the place you want it, your Sorority girl has some nice clothes already), and it's a task you figure you can accomplish, so what the heck.
Then something funny happens. The game introduces a punishment mechanism of some sort. All games have consequences for character choices or failure to jump fast enough, or the like. What this game offers you is something altogether different, though. It tells you when you're supposed to play. You're faced with a task to accomplish. If you don't log back in again to play again in the allowed time-window, you're punished. Your crops wilt. The magic chest slams shut. The weeds and rocks you'd cleared to build a home have respawned, and threaten to overtake you if not regularly cut back. Regardless, you failed your second task as a gamer (to play regularly and frequently), and the game makes you pay for it. The price is nominal, but the effect is powerful. You try again, and try hard next time, and the game rewards you.
Of course, the actual reward isn't especially interesting. It doesn't have to be. You've already completed it, living up to objective #3, playing the game. The biggest reward they can offer you is the sense that you accomplished a challenge. The handful of game-coins and experience points are just sweetener. It's just sweet enough to reinforce the behavior, but by now, you're probably just likely to complete whatever quest, just because it's there.
These tasks are a carefully balanced mixture of "just click this thing enough times," "Click this thing in the right time-frame or be punished for it," "get your friends to interact with this game" and the most powerfully-reinforcing "grind this until the intermittent operant conditioning Skinner Box gives you X number of a thing" task. Each game walks the fine line between asking too much of you and failing to step up your required engagement a little each time. Meanwhile, most of the time, you have the option to pay in-game currency to skip some or all of the mission. Perhaps at some point, you reach a task you'd rather not accomplish, and you've built up enough e-scratch saved up that it's worth your while to pay the price to skip it and move along the content chain. (Point B on the Curve, the green representing you paying money to skip the normal curve). You do so, and are confronted with another task to accomplish, perhaps similar to the last one. The game just got you to spend in-game money, moving you a little closer to objective #1, if it hasn't already, which means it's doing its job.
Anyway, things progress along this curve of increased engagement, increased investment, and the game asking increasingly complex things of you until somewhere along the way you find yourself between C and D. Here's an important point. You're still having fun. You're probably having more fun and/or more engaged in the game than you've ever been before. However, something's changed in the game. Maybe you've reached the point when gaining "levels" stopped unlocking new content, and just serves to refill your Action Bar. Maybe you've finished all the preexisting missions. Maybe you've just reached the realm where the missions set before you are asking a critical mass of engagement. Maybe the game wants you to add one more friend, and you've already created a dummy account for your cat. (Hey, no judgments, people. Like you've never done that before). Either way, you're faced with a choice. You could keep playing in a world in which the rewards are going to come more infrequently and your friends have already given up playing for the next new thing, cutting your losses and abandoning your farm/city/vampire/gang/castle after spending so much time and effort building it up (following the orange curve until you have the self-respect to uninstall the game). Alternately, you can pony up and start actually paying for the content you've been consuming for free all this time, which starts a vicious cycle of pretty much paying just to stop the game from hurting you (hence the little green mini-curves), an experience we know mirrors addiction in some very spooky ways. If there's a way to reach homeostasis, where you're enjoying the game consistently without shelling out increasingly money to make each step of progress, I'd love to hear it.
The fact is, though, this is part of the business model. See, when you're on the up-swing, you're happy to show other players your game, because you're having a good time and want to share it, especially if the game offers you a reward for it. You're fulfilling the second and third goal of the game, and maybe the first, and you're increasingly invested. Once you've reached "Peak Fun," the oil well hasn't run dry, but your role to the game gradually converts from player-recruiter to deep-pocketed patron. You've probably invited all the people in your social network who're going to play with you during the up-swing, and once those reserves are tapped, you'll either start shelling out money or stop taking up server space. And if you do leave, odds are, the company's servers will keep your game data saved, just in case you happen to hear something cool about a recent expansion and have a relapse. That's how the game works.
Now, this might look like a dour, cynical look at a company that makes free games to entertain first-world consumers. (Alright. You've got me. It is). However, the point of this thought exercise is instead to look at the game, what it wants you to do, and how it nudges you toward doing that.
Now, then. For next week, let me invite you to play a game you haven't heard of as of this moment. Find one of the multiple off-brand free games on-line. Play a demo. If you must, pay some money and go buy a game with real currency. Either way, try to find out some things about the game play and what it's doing to your action.
Then, if you please, post the game's name and what you observe in the comments below. Next week, we're going to look at another well-known free-to-play game with a similar, but distinct business model. Have a great week everyone, and thanks for your participation. Cheers!
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