Other random krag...

I'm always on the lookout for interesting examples/tidbits of user experience failures. Mostly I feel like I should have some interesting examples to use when I give talks.

Here are some I've stumbled across in the past month or so. Not much analysis, just want to post them for my own notes.

The Name Game


What's in a name? What is the link between name and online identity? Users can have many goals behind their choice of "name" they use as their online handle/moniker. Do they want authenticity? Authority? Anonymity? Odds are they have different names for different goals. That's why getting the player's name right is important.

And getting it wrong can be a costly mistake...

Social/Casual Games and Popups


Games are all about players making decisions -- and then getting feedback on their decisions. Lather, rinse, repeat. Some games make it unduly hard for players to simply make a choice.

Not enough primary and secondary buttons here, are there... First I feel the pain in my eyes, then my brain, then back in my eyes again.

Let's Give Away Money -- People Should Love That


My wife's aunt posted this, but I'm sure she wasn't the only one:

She's a pretty typical FarmVille player. I wonder how many CS tickets have the title "user doesn't understand how to use FB Credits". I'll bet that the typical user doesn't know whether to contact Zynga or Facebook to solve the problem which can lead to further frustration if you end up contacting the wrong CS support (and add extra cost to the non-responsible party).

Anyhow, back to work!

What I learned about Facebook games from my Mother-in-Law

So, I have a new job. I'm a Senior User Researcher at Zynga Game Network.

I'll still continue to play a wide range of console, pc, indie, AAA, student, free, casual, and social games. But I'll just be restricting my actual work to games we're creating at Zynga.

I'd been doing a bunch of consulting and contracting at Zynga before we decided to formalize the relationship -- and I really couldn't be happier with my new job.

Anyhow, enough about me. Let me tell you a bit about Anita, my mother-in-law. We both use Facebook to keep up with friends and family from both near and far. We also both enjoy several different Facebook games. Sometimes we even play the same game. Either way, I can expect to hear complaints from Anita when there's a bug or something exceptionally frustrating or confusing about a game.

One thing that really caught my attention the other day was her comment that she had completed a game of Cube Crash (from MindJolt games) by wiping out all of the cubes... and she never got any kind of bonus reward.

She mentioned several types of award that she would have considered appropriate:

• Some sort of "victory" animation and sound FX that congratulated her on her achievement (wiping the screen is actually not that easy to do in the game).
• A chance to share her accomplishment by bragging to her friends who also played the game.

She had to resort to calling me on the phone to brag -- and to complain about the above points.

I just love, love, love the fact that we can talk about games together -- and that something as "hard core" as achievements and social bragging are now wide spread and cross the generational gap.

Can't wait to have kids and have to tell them to be sure to "gift drills to grandma" to thank her for their birthday presents :)

Word Spasm -- It's no Griddle, but it'll mostly do for now

I've been taking a look at some game portals on Facebook recently and all complaints aside, I've managed to discover a game or two here and there that has captured my attention.

MindJolt brings us Word Spasm. It's like Boggle in a number of ways, and the leader board takes me back (almost) the the incredibly fun times that were Griddle before it got yanked.


Word Spasm is like a mash up between Boggle, Bookworm Tiles, and a gem matching game (forget the name, but it might be Jewel Quest) where you have to fill in a certain number of board tiles before you can move to the next level.


On the plus side:

• Games are quick, so spoiled/sub par turns don't feel that painful (and there are easy ways to fail as I'll note below).
• Keyboard accelerator is present. I'm amazed that there are still word games out there that do not let you type words in.
• Leader boards are reasonably well designed to encourage both social play with known friends, and to provide "stranger" top scores to inspire the more hard core competitor (like me).

On the minus side:

• The keyboard accelerator is suboptimal when it comes time to choosing a particular letter path. Unlike in Boggle where you just need to submit valid words (doesn't matter which 'L' tile you use if there are 2 or 3 valid ones), this game sometimes makes you care which tile you use when there are multiple options because you need to make sure that a certain percentage of tiles are used at least once. There is an option to Tab through various valid permutations, but this is frustrating and inefficient -- especially when time is running down.
• When time starts running out, the game just gets plain unplayable. A huge countdown timer displays over the playing surface. Although it is translucent, it is RED AND SCARY and completely distracts me. It effectively means that I hit the Game Over point when there's 10 seconds left because I can't play at all during that time.
• Although the basic rules are fairly simple to learn, there's no good way to uncover some of the scoring rules either officially or through embedded forums and discussion groups. Certainly I can try to optimize my score by trying different strategies, but I'd rather have a few hints or be able to chat with fellow players to collectively discuss the scoring system as opposed to having to break it down systematically.
• The lack of forums and discussion groups also highlights the real lack of community features here. I became completely addicted to Griddle precisely because there was always a group of people playing and we could briefly chat and congratulate each other between each round as we were checking the results of the previous round.
• More of an annoyance: The "gratz" messages the game displays each time you complete a level have spelling and grammatical errors. Kind of ironic for a word game :)

Red Dead Redemption, FB Game Portals... In Brief.

They did it. Finally Rockstar invented a car that handles in a way that I like to drive and doesn't totally make me feel like an idiot. This car, of course, is a horse (of course, of course...). I'm obviously talking about Red Dead Redemption which I'm currently pretty much loving.

It makes me think of riding my horse around Oblivion but with enjoyable combat and a set of challenges and crafting opportunities that strangely interest me, but that don't trigger an OCD behavior that Oblivion did for me. I played that game for 100+ hours and spent 90+ hours just harvesting stuff for the alchemy bench and transporting things from town to town to hide in various chests and closets. Weird and creepy.

RDR just captures (for me) the fantasy of roaming around the countryside in a way that none of the GTA games ever really captured. GTA IV appealed to me for the story and I quite enjoyed the mission progression through the first 15 or so hours. But RDR represents a place where I'll just go and hang out and relax and do missions if I please.

Are there problems? Yep. There are a number of rather jarring user experience issues I have with the game. And while they're mostly niggling in nature, they really do break me out of the relaxing and immersive experience I'm normally having.

• Sometimes (but not predictably so) when I exit a cut-scene my character decides to equip the revolver instead of the item I was previously equipped with. I've shot dead a number of poor bandits that I've meant to lasso instead, which is pretty darn frustrating. 
• Buggy quests. Well, at least they seem buggy because I can't figure out why I failed them. I'm just mosying along, thinking I'm on track and then I get a red "quest failed" notification. This has mostly happened on random/emergent quests and Stranger quests, which makes it extra frustrating because you can't repeat those quests.
• Frustrating weapon select model. I really only switch between a couple of weapons. Mostly it's between my Rifle and Lasso. Some encounters require use of more close-quarters guns, but most don't. I've been killed -- or let the target get away -- so many times when I fiddle around with the radial menu, wondering whether the weapon I selected has been equipped or not and wondering which weapon I have currently equipped. There are really a bunch of problems at work here: (a) can't tell what weapon is currently equipped when the weapon is NOT drawn; (b) hard to tell what weapon is equipped when there is a weapon in hand -- not big enough exaggeration in pose/animation/weapon model; (c) the selection wheel is too complex and doesn't have a satisfying "confirm" reinforcement sound and visual; (d) the selection wheel is too large - which makes my eye have to wander all over the screen while I'm getting shot at and losing sight of the enemy; and (d) there's no option to pause the game while switching weapon (a la Bioshock or DAO/ME2). 
• Change of weapon aim model 1/3rd way through the game. Dead eye starts out as an easy to use "paint" system (paint reticle across targets and highlight them to put them in a shooting queue). Then I arrive in Mexico and have to use a new "press RB to paint the target" aiming system. Is this cool as an option? Yep. But why require this for someone like me who starts on Default (normal) difficulty and is doing fine, thank you very much. I couldn't see a "revert to previous aiming model" option, so I tried the Casual aiming mode even though I feared it would make combat completely boring. Nope. No luck there either. I just lost a very cool feature that (to me) is something that could have been taught, but reserved for players who wanted to use an Expert aiming system.
• Too easy to get on NPC hate lists. I don't mean to grab the wrong horse (and quickly learned never to mount a horse that I hadn't whistled for). I don't mean to knock you over when I walk by you. Yet this happens constantly and is annoying because I end up in fights that I just don't want to be in.

 But enough about RDR. I'm going to still play a bunch more of it before migrating on to the newly arrived Super Mario Galaxy 2.

On to  Facebook game portals. I talked about the Konami experiment a while back: http://jackalshorns.blogspot.com/2009/08/day-27-konami-play.html

Sadly, the two most recent portals I've checked out suffer from similar issues:

GameHouse

• No effort is made to drive users into the “best” (i.e., most approachable, interesting, addictive, and fun) games. The user is left to choose from a multitude of options.
• The home landing page feels cluttered.
• The games mostly appeal to hard core gamers who like to also play casual games. For instance, I played the enviro-tower defense game (Bio Bots) offered on “easiest” (grass map) and had my ass pretty much handed to me.
• They don’t handle “stranger danger” gracefully. All I see are faceless profile pictures. On the plus side, the Real Games portal does try to contextualize strangers by providing flags to indicate nationality.
  They have to deal with split communities (mocha, game house, and Facebook leaderboards are all separated).

MindJolt

• The landing page is cluttered and doesn't drive players into top rated content. It's too easy to get dropped into a lousy game.
  
• There are lots of categories of games -- and most regular casual game players can sort themselves into the relevant categories -- but the link to the game category view of the game is hard to find amidst the clutter.
• Unlike GameHouse, the leader boards don't actively divide the community, which is nice (you can filter by "friends" or "world"). 

I'm also reminded by how much cooler these portals are once they start becoming popular amongst your own social graph. I love seeing updates in my feed when someone beats my score -- and I'm much more likely to try a new game if I see that a friend is playing it and likes it enough to post a feed update.

Horse Gaga... I say "neigh!"

My queue of games is stacking up, but I decided to try out Ubisoft's latest entry into the world of Facebook gaming.

The game is called Horse Gaga. I believe it is being positioned to attract female gamers who like to raise and train horses. My thoughts, of course, are based on my own experience (a non-female, non horse trainer). But I think there are still some valuable takeaways.

• Boring billboard tutorial. Raising and training a horse should be fun and should be taught in an experiential way. If I want to read a lot of text and click only the things I'm told to click, I could go to wikipedia. I've complained elsewhere about the perils of frontloading a user with tons of information and then hoping that they'll process and remember it all (if, of course, they don't become so bored that they quit first).
• Providing fun quests. My first post-tutorial quest was presented as follows: "Here's your first task: repeat what I just taught you and train your horse until it reaches maximum proficiency!" Task, Repeat, Train, Proficiency. Do these four words make you think "fun game?"
• Help text that is approachable and not derogatory. Horse racing sounds pretty fun, even to a non-horse lover like myself. However, hovering over the horse race tab yields the following help text: "No Newbies. You need level 2 to enroll in this competition". You just called me a newbie -- a term that is derogatory to folks who know it, and that is probably not even known to a majority of casual and social game players.
• Game play modes that are puzzling. I just leveled up by watering my horse and entered a race. I have no real idea how the race works (the display looks broken) but think I will know more in 30 minutes. I also wanted to breed my horse, but I have no idea what gender it is so I can't pick a mate... 

I don't mean to come down so hard on this game, but really the quality bar has been set for a while in terms of  what it takes to make a fun and approachable game. Moreover, stripping down the tutorial and writing quests and help text that are fun, approachable, and engaging is relatively cheap and easy to do. Racing and breeding seem like core game play components, but they are still pretty much a mystery to me after about 5-10 minutes of head scratching.

I look forward to seeing the next rev and will be on the look out for future Ubisoft social games.

No(gaming)vember to remember...

Actually, it wasn't "no" gaming. It was more bite-sized gaming without leaving enough time to post thoughts.

And I was on the road for over 2 weeks this month (one week working on a game that I can't talk about yet; one week on vacation in Maui which does not lend itself to sitting down and writing at my laptop).

Things I tried (and plan to write about):

• Getting a "sweet move" to feel just right: Comparing the challenge of catching the perfect wave with the feel of a sweet double jump.
• My silly obsession with completing all the achievements in Plants vs. Zombies (and why it makes a great bite-sized game experience).
• The Torchlight demo -- and my possible return to hardcore PC gaming.
• My current Facebook games: Why I continue to suck at Backgammon and why I seem to be getting worse at Scramble -- but why I still love to play them.
• My crush on the official Modern Warfare 2 trailer (the one with the Eminem track that hasn't generated all kinds of controversy) and why it not only got me excited about the game, but also got my wife excited.

I'm also in the midst of doing a bunch of judging for a Serious Games competition (can't talk about it yet) and the Indie Games Festival competition. I'm done with the serious games part and am super looking forward to the Indie and student games competitions.

December is going to be a bit of a reboot month for me. I'm hoping to dive deeper into several projects I'm interested in working on and will report results here.

And, of course, the stream of retail and social/online games continues... I plan to play and write about lots more games.

Quick thoughts: Uncharted 2 and Delta's lame in-flight game service

A couple of quick thoughts in between travel for work (doing some consulting on social games) and pleasure (Anacortes with friends, Chicago for a wedding).

Uncharted 2. This blurb appeared in a Facebook comment I wrote (a couple of friends were discussing the game -- one thought it "set the bar" the other thought "meh"). It's not really all that well considered and thought out, but is more of an initial reaction after playing a couple of hours:

So, I loved (loved loved) the first one. And I loved (loved loved) the intro to the second one -- a super treat for fans of the previous game and IP.

I've had a couple of lulls in the action through chapters 4 and 5 (getting stuck, being confused) but I'm super into it and can't wait to play more.

As far as cut-scenes go, they set the bar in v1.0. Then games like GTA IV met the bar. I think that they met the bar in this game, too. I actually WATCH all of the cut-scenes and enjoy them (PS -- I never watch cut-scenes in any other games).

Story quality-wise, so far it seems like a virtual copy of the v1.0 story. So, unless they shake it up soon my judgment is "serviceable but not great". Technically it's awesome (voice acting, mocap, direction) but the story itself is only serviceable.

In other news, while flying back to Seattle I had the "privilege" of not experiencing Delta airline's in-flight gaming options.

That is to say that I completely ignored it in disgust after being asked to pay $5 for the right to sample their game wares.

Now, $5 for 4.5 hours of entertainment is an entirely reasonable price. Heck, I'd pay more than that for a 90 minute in-flight movie. But charging for games before letting me try them out? It just doesn't make any sense.

Many of the games seemed to be versions of freely available titles already on the web. I had worries about the input device (touch screen) and have had mixed reviews trying out games on other in-flight consoles (I talked about Virgin airline's options in another post). Not having a try-before-you buy option is a non-starter for me.

But, the bigger question to me is: Why charge at all? The model that I have to believe would work better for all involved (Delta, game publishers, and the passenger) is to offer free-to-play content. Publishers would pay for access to the captive audience. Their motivation would be to provide fun addictive games to passengers to drive awareness and customer loyalty. Delta would get money from the publishers for distributing their content. Passengers would get high quality games that would endear them to both publishers and the airline.

And me -- well, I'd have a reason to request regular coach-class seating. The touch screen is too far away from my seat to reach it comfortably while sitting in an exit row.

I'm playing and working, but not thinking and writing...

I've been swamped with work lately (the kind I can't blog about) and will continue to be swamped for the next week or so. Then, hopefully, I'll come back up for air and do some more posting.

What have I been playing lately?

• South Park (XBLA) trial version. It's a tower defense game with some co-op components. My initial experience was "meh" but I think I want to try it co-op with Liza to see whether that is where it shines.
• Defense Grid: Awakening (XBLA). I started out quite liking the game and still do enjoy playing it. It's a little hard to pick up and play after letting it sit for a couple of weeks (unit recognition and ID is difficult at default zoom; maps are getting pretty big and unwieldy given the camera limitations). But I'm going to keep going.
• Lucidity (XBLA) trial version. Think Braid but with time pressure right from moment one. The initial challenge ramp is just a little too steep for me to truly enjoy the game -- and this makes me worry because if the game only gets harder it will quickly become too difficult for me to play. I like the music, mood, art direction, and style of game play. I just want to be able to relax and enjoy it a bit more.
• Need for Speed: Shift demo. It actually kind of sucked me in even though I don't get into sim racers. I should actually talk a bit about why this demo was much more compelling to me than the Forza 3 demo. I should also talk a little bit about their more "casual" control options.
• Lots of Scramble, Wordscraper. Some Sorority Life and Cafe Wars (for Facebook).
• de Blob. This is a pretty relaxing Wii game that I'm going to spend some more time with. Some elements of Katamari Damacy with other more Nintendo like games involving cleaning and painting.
• Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Clue Bender Society. It's a DS game that I've been meaning to check out. I really enjoyed one of the latest ND games (a more "casual" release) but haven't enjoyed the core PC offerings and am not really enjoying the DS game.

I've been getting a lot of use from my Raptr account. I actually need to add my Wii account to it as I almost forgot about my de Blob sessions. What I'm most excited about is that now that I'm about to descend into a mostly PS3 zone with the upcoming release of Uncharted 2 and Ratchet & Clank. I'll still be able to track and share my progress with friends -- most of whom are primarily Xbox users. Thank you, Raptr.com for integrating pretty well into my existing social network flow.

What else am I looking forward to playing, thinking, and writing about?

• The "Top 20 up and coming Facebook games". I'm curious to see what these social games have going for them.
• Some previous games that I've worked on. I really need to get a couple of presentations together based on the learn-to-play tutorials I've co-designed. Because these games are published I can talk about what we learned, what we did, and how to turn these learnings and doings into best practices. It will also give me a chance to play around some more with video-capture tech I've been sitting on for a while.

Raptr and Mirror’s Edge

So, I had a friend heckle me yesterday about my Raptr updates. Specifically, Raptr was updating my Facebook status with information about the game I was currently playing. It’s what I thought I wanted out of the service.

But, as it turns out, what I actually want is for Raptr to send updates via the Raptr application so that friends can “hide this application” if they don’t want to be spammed with what I’m gaming.

Until Raptr plays nicely with my Facebook status feed I’m going to have to disable the real time updates. Well, sort of. I’m sending real time updates to my Twitter account and will try nightly one-time status summary updates to my Facebook account.

This actually ties directly into Mirror’s Edge because the specific friend who heckled me was wondering what kind of masochist I was to have put so much time into the game.

I was profoundly affected by the question because normally I stop playing games that I don’t consider engaging and fun (unless I’m doing research on a competitor – which I’m not in this case). And I really was not enjoying Mirror’s Edge despite being 75% of the way through the single player campaign.

Several key issues emerge. I feel kind of weird talking about this game so long after its release. And I feel kind of weird making some of the exact same comments that I’m sure others have made.

The main issue is that I never once, not even for a brief minute, actually felt like I was engaging in cool and flowing parkour. Even after hours of playing I felt like:

• Every hop, jump, and roll was activated by an uncomfortable controller input motion.
• Every free run sequence felt like it had to be replayed dozens of times because of blind leaps to my death.
• Every combat encounter (even after ratcheting down the difficulty to “easy”) made me feel incompetent.

The two experiments that I (and I’m sure lots of other folks) would like to do are:

• Compare two sets of controls. The current set (where Triggers and Shoulder Buttons performed key actions) and an alternate set where Face Buttons performed key actions.
• Compare two cameras. The current camera (first person) and an alternate third person camera.

That said, I do not think that the core of the problem is either controls or camera.

I think it is one of progression. The level of mastery required to make the game “fun” to play was unsupported by level design and progression goals. I’m absolutely convinced that this is the kind of game that shows extremely well when experienced players demonstrate cool ways to navigate the world and complete objectives.

Unfortunately for the new player, the game did not have a default path that encouraged the player to progress, grow, and master core skills in order to complete new challenges.

• There were no real opportunities to just “free explore” levels in order to get a sense of the lay of the land and what kinds of ingress and egress routes were available.
• There were “skill challenges” that encouraged players to try to solve a range of basic and advanced problems like a skateboarding game would.
• Combat opportunities were too spaced out at the beginning of the game for players to understand and master it. Yes, you mostly could avoid combat – but combat was required at certain points in the game and the experience was frustrating (even on easy difficulty).

Ideally, default mission flow would have encouraged players to familiarize themselves with the world, learn new tricks and techniques, and advance their martial ability using a progression of: Problem introduction, practice with feedback (and non-penalizing failure conditions), technique mastery, and then task discrimination (learning when to use this versus other techniques).

Less ideally, there would have been additional game modes included that provided players with fun and increasingly challenging ways to practice and master techniques and learn about the environment. The Time Trial mode did not fit this bill.

In the end, I really wanted to like both Mirror’s Edge and Assassin’s Creed precisely because I love the fantasy of performing parkour moves in a video game. Yet neither of these games provided me with the same level of enjoyment of other action-adventure/platform games as Tomb Raider, Drake’s Fortune, or Ratchet & Clank.

The common denominator in my mind seems to be suboptimal controls (I found both Assassin’s Creed and Mirror’s Edge control schemes to be overly complex and unintuitive), frustrating combat (unforgiving one vs. one dueling in AC and ME), and in-game progression schemes that allow me to go off the rails and try to advance before I had mastered the core components.

In some ways, I’m just not good at dealing with crushing failure. I don’t like to try the same thing over and over again and I don’t get the hint that the game is sometimes just trying to tell me “go do something else for a while – you’re not supposed to be here yet”. I’m sure this is why I tend to prefer scripted, story based games in general over sandbox endeavors.

Number Jumper for Facebook

Number Jumper was surfaced to me on a recent InsideSocialGames RSS feed item. It was described as a “deceptively simple” game – something that I love mostly because I associate this with thoughts of approachability.

The game boils down to a kind of mashup between Tetris. Minesweeper, and a match-3 game. Its name made me think that it was going to be some sort of Sudoku math puzzler, but really the numbers are only nominal in nature and most likely are included to help discriminate between different colored blocks (like balls on a billiard table). Unfortunately, the chosen color scheme probably prevents them from being useful to color blind players.

Although the basic mechanics were simple – click a numbered block and click an empty space – the game was somewhat difficult to figure out. The instructions were a big intimidating mass of unformatted text.

After restarting several times and then re-reading the instructions I was able to piece together the core mechanics and, yes, it’s a pretty fun and addictive game.

Would I like to dive in and help fix the initial experience? But of course:

• I’d love to create a learn-as-you-play sandbox mode where players could experiment in a controlled environment as they learned the basic rules.
• I’d also love (LOVE) to make the ranking system less pejorative. I mean who really wants to be called a “noob” when they fail to shine on their first few attempts.

Addendum: I'm still quite enjoying the game, but I wish it did support more casual game modes. For instance, it would be fun to have a non-timed version just to practice moves without worrying about time pressure and the ability to tweak variables such as length of time, size of board, and number of block types (between 4 and 7 or 8). Theoretically you could figure out some interesting default modes and progressions based on the core mechanic and then have players flow through different variations depending on their skill and mood.

ScribbleNauts, Social Discovery, and Claustrophobia

So, I’ve been reading more about the pros/raves associated with ScribbleNauts in order to better figure out what I’m missing.

It seems to boil down to this: Some folks have identified wild and crazy (and fun) ways of completing some of the more interesting puzzles by summoning things like Cthulu or arming elephants with Bazookas or tying things to me and jetpacking across the screen. Hearing those anecdotes made me excited to dive back into the game and try these wacky things.

[As an aside, I did finally meet up with a creature that my bear could not kill: a “Megalodon”. Interestingly, my bear COULD kill a shark, its smaller cousin.]

So, what this means to me is that hardcore fans of the game who have read press releases, seen demos, and scoured fan forums will have a huge leg up on more casually interested fans who haven’t done research outside the game on how to play it.

In terms of approachability, this seems rather unfortunate. It seems like the equivalent of telling players to RTFM or search the forums before they play the game. Why can’t I learn these things as part of the actual game play experience?

What this really made me think of was Armadillo Run again. What made that game fun was that its core mechanic was quirky and fun enough to make learning by experimentation (both successes and failures) enjoyable. What made the game awesome was the tight integration leaderboards and game replays into the core experience. You learned from others’ triumphs by observing their ground breaking experiments. You were able to stand on the shoulders of giants who could see through the matrix and creatively engineer solutions that blew your mind open to new avenues and possibilities.

And you could contribute back to the community your incremental improvements – and your paradigm breaking innovations.

I’m trying to imagine what the ScribbleNauts experience could have been if it had been a Flash application for a popular social network like Facebook. Leaderboards would have links to replays. Popular levels would have their own discussion boards. Content creators could share new levels with others. It’s really the kind of game that cries out for this kind of social play.

I’m also kind of curious about potential synchronous game play modes. Imagine a sandbox where folks could strategize together in real time to solve more complex puzzles? Or where they could create simulations and ecosystems and pit them against the forces of physical and social entropy?

This sort of segues into the “Claustrophobia” portion of this post. I couldn’t help but have a sense that game screen limitations really worked against ScribbleNauts. Part of this was a controls issue (scrolling the map was tedious and the return-to-center “feature” was super annoying). Part of this was that larger objects and creatures really did take up a huge amount of screen real estate which made the environments feel cluttered. Operating helicopters and planes in rooms only 2-4 times their height didn’t really convey a sense of flight.

Which, of course, leads me back to wondering about choice of platform. Would this game be better suited for a browser window? There would be no need to scroll the map. Point-and-click controls could be made more crisp and precise.

To sum it up: I guess what I’m really talking about is how platform limits and defines the user experience. Not just input/output device platform (stylus and small screen vs. mouse and browser) but also social platform (Nintendo wi-fi vs. Facebook).

Day 27: Konami Play

I've been playing a bunch of social and casual games from the "native biggies" like Zynga, Playfish, Playdom, etc. Then there are the casual games portals who are also jumping on the social bandwagon (like Real, Big Fish Games, Oberon).

The big traditional publishers have also been getting into the social game. I haven't paid as much attention to these offerings, but Konami Play currently caught my attention based on a posting I saw on Indie Social Games (a great site).

The first thing to note is that searching for "Konami" or "Konami Play" on Facebook yields zero helpful results. Even clicking on the Konami Fan site doesn't help -- there's no mention of Konami Play or link to a relevant website. Perhaps there has just been a soft launch that will be followed up with an official campaign (notifications to fans of Konami, links to the portal, etc).

NOTE: Later on I discovered a link to the "Konami-Play" fan page -- but it still doesn't show up in any Facebook search results at the time of this writing.

Luckily I had a direct link to the external website from the blog posting and went straight to the portal page.

The portal page is a little cluttered and claustrophobic. Basically it suffers from the "I need to expose you to everything all at once" syndrome that many olde-schoole portals seem to do. It's hard to argue with success, but as an initial experience it's pretty overwhelming.

On the plus side, there is a "featured games" slide show that appears in a large bucket above the fold. The "play now" button is a tiny and easy to miss call to action, but the fact that you can jump right into a game from the home page is a big plus.

Jumping into a game was easy. More importantly, I did NOT have to register or log in. I could just start playing. Get me into the game in as pain-free manner as possible -- and if I'm having fun I'll bother to register/share/etc.

The games (and Konami) are oriented to the more retro gamer (Track and Field, Double Dribble) and more recent console offerings (Metal Gear Solid, DDR). To the extent that they are fun and have leaderboards, these games seem like a natural fit for Facebook's ecosystem.

Unfortunately, the game experiences themselves, are uneven. I got right into Frogger and played a bit of Double Dribble, but found Track and Field to be calibrated too hard for me to make progress in and was completely unable to figure out how to play Loco Roco 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4.

As it turns out, I lucked into Frogger first. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be any way for me to post results of my game to my news feed. There is a chat room for all Facebook users who are currently logged in and viewing/playing Frogger, but the actual sharing of a story with my friends is not contained in the normal game play flow. I can play as many games as I want and never be prompted to share the results with my friends. There are buttons labeled "Share" and "Challenge Friends" that appear outside the game window, but these are weak calls to action compared with a "You just scored 7,000 points in Frogger and unlocked the 'top fly eater' achievement... Publish to your friends?" prompt in between games.

The login/register/connect with Facebook pipeline could also use some tuning:

• The home page does have a couple of "Connect with Facebook" buttons, which is good. But it's unclear why I would do such a thing to begin with. All the pictures of people are strangers to me -- and it's unclear why I'd sign in to a website before I figured out whether it provided personal and/or social utility.
• Once I launch a game, my only call to action to "get social" with the game is buried under a really unfriendly button labeled "register". No one wants to register at this point. However, after I play a game or two of DDR I may decide that I'd like to share this information with my friends on Facebook. The problem is that I'd never think "register"... I might, however, click a clearly labeled "share with your Facebook friends" button. As I mentioned above, this call to action should be included in the "game over" flow.
• If I do think to click the "register" button, it does take me to a "scary registration page". The easy, one click "Connect with Facebook" option is kind of hidden on the right side of the page and might not be noticed before the visitor backs out or leaves the site altogether. Interested in learning more about improving sign-up/registration? Check out Bokardo's deck.
• Clicking on the "Connect with Facebook" button actually deadends the user at a boring "account" page. If I choose to read my profile information, I learn that I'm given some strange User Name and my only option is "Edit" (not sure why I'd do this -- and the edit page is rather scary) or Invite Friends. Note that my original intention was to play a game -- a game that I have no way of finding from this deadend page...
• At this point I want to log out. Logging out actually logs me out of both Konami Play and Facebook. I'm not sure if this is a requirement for Facebook Connect partners, but it does seem strange that I need to be logged out of Facebook when I only want to be logged out of Konami Play.

To summarize, I may not be the fan that Konami is looking for. Maybe I'm just too old and bad at games or don't care enough about some of their core IP offerings to ever become a passionate player of these games.

But, I still do like Frogger and played it on XBLA and tried to beat the highscores of my friends. And I'm still willing to try new games and share my results/thoughts with my friends to the extent that it's easy to discover these games via existing social network channels (for me, this means Facebook or Twitter) and that game results are fed into interesting and entertaining stories by default (as opposed to having to figure out how to share them outside the normal "play->game over->try again" loop).

I look forward to see how Konami Play evolves over time -- and how other external game publishers and portals continue to integrate into existing social networks.

Day 26: Part 2, Quiztastic

So, I've been paying attention to some of the Playfish applications on Facebook. They seem to be releasing some interesting and polished user experiences that are worth investigating further.

Today I played with Quiztastic. It's a usable and polished quiz creator, aggregator, and distributor that is similar to Everybody Votes for the Wii. Before I talk about the application itself, what I would really like to see Facebook (and FB app developers) figure out is how to let people discover and share this kind of content without spamming everyone's news feeds. Most of my friends have started to self-police their quiz taking, and those who don't self-police get hidden from my news feed.

What I wonder is whether Quiztastic might be too late to the party if all it is really going to do is make it easier for people to annoy their friends.

The social power of the application is clear, though. It allows users to easily distribute quizzes to select groups of friends, all friends, or the entire Facebook community. So, as a platform, it's easy for people to target their creations in meaningful ways (do they want to come up with custom content for a few close friends; or do they want to create the next quiz sensation that ripples through and beyond the Facebook platform?)

In terms of usability and user experience flow, this application serves both content consumers and content creators very well.

For content consumers, the application surfaces interesting quizzes in many ways.

• It has a feed that tells you what quizzes your friends have taken (and with one click you can compete against them).
• After completing a quiz it suggests other content-related quizzes.
• You get awarded (or penalized) with points after taking each quiz, which can be very reinforcing. I haven't played long enough to figure out if there is some sort of leveling system or economy where you can spend points on socially/personally desirable things.
• Browsing quizzes allows the user to filter by relevant categories and sort by useful categories (e.g., star rating, recency, number of people who completed it).
• And there's a "Quickmatch" feature whereby with a couple of clicks you're dropped immediately into a new quiz.

For content creators, the application does a number of cool things.

• Players are required to rate each survey after completing it. Ratings are great ways to reinforce good surveys and punish bad ones.
• Although it's hard to find, there is a dashboard where creators can monitor their quizzes (how popular, how rated) and edit or delete them.
• The content creation pipeline is straight forward and easy to use.

A couple of quibbles:

• For the Personality Quiz, I'm not sure how to set thresholds (e.g., if you get a certain score you are a "big jerk", otherwise you're only a "medium" or "smalll" jerk).
• It's hard to find the dashboard (where you can monitor quizzes you have created). Burying it under "profile" doesn't seem like the right place for it. Note that there is plenty of usable space on the Main Menu (where there are only "play" and "create" options) that could be used to tease recent updates/stats on quizzes the user has created. This could also be teased on the Create Menu page (something like "monitor your existing quizzles").
• I wish there was a better way to design the status update blurb. It's a huge chunk of screen real estate that essentially includes a generic icon for the application (not needed) and a large image that may or may not be related to the quiz itself.
• It also seems like there should be a better way to educate the content creator about how best to make the headline and image associated with the quiz inviting and engaging, and there might be a better way to streamline the feed item so that it isn't so aggravatingly large.

Overall, I think that this application is pretty easy to use for both content creator and consumer. I just wish that there were better ways to integrate these kinds of social data into my already cluttered Facebook feed.

Day 22: Country Store Beta

Day 22. And I've sadly fallen behind in a serious way from my 30 in 30 goal. And to add insult to injury, I forgot that there are actually 31 days in August. I guess I should rename this challenge '31 in 31'.

Luckily when I get back to Seattle I'm going to have a bunch of free time to start working through the backlog of games that I've meant to play along the way.

After today I will be 15 games in 22 days. Now, I did play and write about 3 Intuition Games, but I'm only counting them as one game as they were really short 'gamelets'.

Before I dive into Country Store Beta, I should mention that I played a bunch of N+ yesterday afternoon and evening with a good friend. We worked through the co-op multiplayer campaign so he could play throught the single player campaign on his own. Although the challenge ramp was uneven, we had a blast and were entertained for hours. It reminded me of some Gears of War co-op sessions I had with a friend on insane difficulty. I was a terrible player and we died over and over again. But the death sequences were hillarious and eventually we perservered through a couple of missions. Both GoW (co-op) and N+ (co-op) remind me to always be mindful that there is a fine line between frustration and engaging challenge -- and that we need to calibrate these challenges based on both social and individual game play needs.

Now, on to Country Store Beta. It's another in a series of farm games that are, apparently, hugely popular in China. After playing a couple of sessions across two days, I'm definitely enjoying it more than I enjoyed Farmville. Farmville seemed, to me, less like a game and more like just another social "pass-me-a-drink" application on Facebook. Sure, adoption is huge (and still growing, at least among my friend base). But its entire focus on the "social" (gifting, messaging, inviting, reciprocating) make it less fun to me in terms of moment-to-moment game play.

Country Store Beta seems to take a different approach. It instead focuses on the solo game play experience in order to draw new players in. There's a ton to do (questing, exploring, farming) and the learn-as-you-play seeding of activities is pretty well thought out, at least over the first hour or so of game play.

I haven't encountered many social quests yet, so I worry a little bit about the ability of this game to grow virally. Yes, I love the fact that it doesn't seem to require me to spam my friends. What I wonder is whether it will keep me playing long enough so that when I get to the "invite" call to action I actually follow through. I took a quick glance at the current quest list and there do seem to be some "introduce yourself to your neighbors" quests. But, this will not work well for folks who are early adopters and who don't have many friends who have installed the app already (I currently only have two friends who have installed the app).

In terms of usability quibbles, I have a few:

• I do appreciate mouse cursor state changes (something Farmville and other Flash applications seem to be missing). That said, there are not enough of them. It's great to show my character holding various objects (watering can, hoe, etc) but they aren't readable from certain angles.
• Perhaps more importantly, I need better sound and visual confirmation of when I've performed a valid vs. invalid action. When I click an unharvestable plant with my basket I should realize right away that the game registered my click and why it is an invalid click. This should be differentiated from a "missed" click on a valid target and a "hit/engaged" click on a valid target.
• I love the fact that I can interact with a neighbor's garden (other than just to "rake up leaves" by clicking OK on a text billboard). But the options, beyond just watering their gardens, are somewhat confusing. I can't tell whether I'm "stealing" by taking some of the crop yield (which would be an antisocial act -- and could lead to serious griefing) and I also couldn't tell how to use "friend points" when asking a friend for assistance.
• I couldn't figure out how to gift coins/items. Whoops. I have the quest item to do so, but there was no explanation of how to do this and I've tried multiple things (clicking on my UI buttons, visiting neighbors and clicking on their UI buttons). No luck.

All in all, the options and depth of this game are keeping me interested at this point. I'm going to do a little more questing and try to figure out some more of the social mechanics.

We'll see if more of my friends notice these actions in my stream and jump in.

EDIT: A couple of extra notes after I went back and played some more.

• I eventually figured out how to gift. It was buried in the "Storage" menu, so I mainly discovered it by accident.
• There could definitely be some improvements to the general buying and managing resource UI flows. There are lots of examples of where I need to make extra clicks to close pop ups when I could instead have buttons leading to associated/related actions.
• 'Reverse questing' seems to work some times and not others. By 'reverse questing' I mean when I complete a quest objective without realizing it (before it becomes available; or after it's available but before I noticed it in my quest log) and then return to the quest giver. I'd like the quest to autocomplete and remind me what I did to complete the quest. This seems to happen some times, but not all the time (I need to leave the quest log and wander around or re-do part of the quest to complete it).

Day 5: Bubble Town: Party Plant Beta

Busy day today. I mostly want to spend some more time with Kodu (the game-making game on XBLA) tonight, but managed to get a little new gaming in today that's worth posting about.

In addition to a quick puzzle session or three on Professor Layton (my Day 4 game), I noticed a couple of line items about Bubble Town: Party Place Beta in my Facebook feed. I figured I should go check it out -- and once I loaded it up, I realized that I had installed it previously but mostly forgotten about it.

I dove deeper today and spent about 45 minutes with the game. All-in-all, it's a good free time-waster type of game. It's a variant on Match 3 games with a flick/pinball launcher type variant found in games like Peggle or Zuma. Basically you launch game pieces at clumps of similar-looking game pieces and try to make enough matches to clear the board.

Some of the cool things this incarnation has going for it:

• The different pieces ("Borbs") have personalities. This means they have custom "you got me" sounds when you wake them up or eliminate them.
• Elimination of Borbs isn't just via match-3. You can also eliminate anchor Borbs and all of their children Borbs will fall down to the ground and refill your Borb gun. This is super fun to do and adds elements of risk reward (do I play it safe or go for a trick shot?) and plays into the achievement system (can I figure out the most efficient way to eliminate all the Borbs).
• As much as it is a casual (and somewhat social) game, there is a reasonable amount of strategic depth to the game. If anything, I wonder whether the game is calibrated to be too difficult for beginning players (more on this below).

I'm definitely going to play a few more games to see whether a combination of mastering some of the strategy and figuring out some of the parts of the game that confused me (next section) helps me improve my score and progress further.

Quibbles:

• Aiming just never felt right. For this kind of game, this should have been a deal breaker, but there was enough going on that it ended up more of an annoyance. Part of it was not feeling like my mouse movement was linked 1:1 with an aiming reticle on the shooter. Part of it was that my mouse cursor was invisible -- which left me startled when it actually slid outside the game board hit zone and began to interact with other parts of the screen (power ups, friends list, achievements, etc). Interestingly, Peggle solves for this by always leaving the mouse pointer cursor on-screen so you have a sense of where you're leading the Peggle gun. Not ideal (and I actually prefer the console version better) but it does work better.
• Related to the aiming issue was the fact that aiming guides were not that helpful. First, side guides that seemed to indicate the angle of a ricochet would mysteriously appear and disappear for reasons I could never understand. This made the feature confusing and relatively useless. Second, there were aim guide powerups, but they were hard to use for a few reasons: Because you couldn't see the mouse pointer, you couldn't just pick a spot and have the gun aim where you needed it to "automagically" as you could with Peggle; moreover, the aim guide would go on ad infinitum until it intersected with an object which made it even harder to figure out how to aim for a specific object because you couldn't understand which line you were controlling with the mouse.
• Powerups were confusing to me for a few reasons: First, they generally were NOT introduced through gameplay, but needed to be purchased with BubbleBucks. The help text descriptions were vague and not that helpful which meant that the player needed to spend hard earned bucks before knowing the potential value of the powerup or how to use it. Second, I couldn't reliably use powerups. I moused over them several times -- sometimes I could click on one and have it activate. Other times, now matter where I clicked I couldn't activate a powerup. There was no feedback to let me know what I was doing wrong. [note: I was using Chrome as my browser, and it's possible that some sort of focus-bug was preventing me from using powerups]
• I felt like the challenge ramp was too steep for a casual game. Thinking back to the first time I played the game about a month ago, I'm pretty sure I failed pretty early on and had to restart. This time around I still felt like it was too easy to lose before feeling a sense of success at the game.
• I couldn't figure out the "click to adjust your performance" eye icon. It just switched back and forth between a hi-res and lo-res eye icon.
• I did like (once I discovered it) the 3 helpful mouseover demos. I wonder if these useful demos would have been more useful and discoverable if they just ran in a sequence from top to bottom without requiring the user to mouse over each button.
• A minor point: There were lots of typos. It's a Beta, so no big deal. But I seriously wanted to edit the typos and do some additional copy editing/writing for clarity.

A couple of "interesting" notes.

Interesting note #1: Social dynamics.

So, the game does provide a lot of achievements (which drives status updates in friends' news feeds), has leaderboards, and allows gifting amongst friends. But is that enough of a social tool set to really consider it a "social" game? Are the social aspects of the game compelling enough to drive other players to install the game, play it a bunch, and invite additional friends?

The game can take a long time to play once you get the basics down and I wonder if it might take too long to complete a game to have people play over and over again in an attempt to beat a friend's score (as compared to Farkle or Bejeweled Blitz where games take only a minute or two to play).

I was also left wondering what my incentive to give tokens and levelpacks to other friends would be. I receive no return on these investments (I don't get Bubble Bucks that I can then spend on powerups) or unlock new content for me. Moreover, I can't expect much in terms of reciprocation because I need to have something to give it away... And the "have nots" aren't likely to have anything that I might need in return. There needs to be some sort of reciprocation possible -- gift recipients need to be able to give me things I don't have and/or I need to get some sort of "reward" for being magnanimous in my giving behavior.

Interesting note #2: "Spare Change" currency.

One of my side interests in the games space that I developed while at Amazon.com is online payments. How do you convince people to put their cash into the system in order to engage in all these micro-transactions that biz types keep talking about.

I've tried out some of the "watch advertisements for credits" models with varying degrees of success in the past. One shortlived service provided me with credit towards my Gamefly account for watching targeted ads. I also tried one disasterous and shady example this via Facebook where I needed to click all sorts of ads and enter all sorts of personal information to get some in game currency (of course I refused).

If I'm actually going to shell out cool hard cash to play these games, then: (a) the game has to be compelling in a way that these games currently aren't right now; and (b) the payments system needs to be secure and low friction.

The Spare Change app is designed to try and address part (b). And I think it's getting a step closer. What it really seems like is a portal to a variety of existing payment sites (like Paypal) that people will likely have already heard of and trust. Specifically, I don't have to give my credit card to yet another internet service provider. I can even pay by phone if I have this service set up with a partner of Spare Change. This is definitely a step in the right direction -- and if I had some idea of what other games and apps currently supported Spare Change I might have added some cash via Paypal right then and there.

Day 3: Woxel Word Game

So, a friend and former work colleague recently came out with an iPhone game called Woxel Word Game. As a lover of word games, I was intrigued.

I don't have an iPhone, but I bought one for Liza (my wife) for just this kind of occasion. I've been meaning to play more iPhone games and to write about the app store more generally (I'm very interested in the digital distribution of game content -- especially via social platforms).

One thing that became instantly clear: It's got to be hard for developers of new games to compete with existing publishers. For instance, Bookworm Adventures (a spiritual ancestor of Woxel) already exists in the iTunes store for the same $.99 that I paid for Woxel. As a potential customer, I need to know how Woxel is going to offer me something different and better than an established game that I already played. In the absence of this kind of comparison information, I'm likely just going to go with what I know.

Fundamentally, this is mostly where Woxel let me down. It felt less fully featured and polished than its key competitor and didn't offer anything new. Moreover, Woxel felt less like a "casual" game and more like it had been calibrated for hard core play.

• The initial experience seemed calibrated for people who already knew that you could extend a word in any direction, not just from the last letter that had been added (as per Bookworm).
• The first board seemed to be unduly "hard" in terms of finding lots of words at a glance. There was no ramp up.

Knowing the lead designer on the project (and his *insane* word game skills, cf. Typing Maniac leaderboards) and after thinking about the initial challenge curve of the game I wonder if it might be worth thinking about how to make this game more appealing to word gamers who are looking for increased challenge and competition. Of course, both of these requests expand the scope of the game dramatically:

• Increased challenge means additional modes, puzzles, and variants. Not only do these features need to be implemented, they also need to be calibrated and balanced. And there probably needs to be some sort of set of achievements and unlocks.
• Competition means community. I'm not even sure how iPhone as a platform supports this (if at all).

Another approach might be to come up with a cool, competitive Facebook app that incorporates community features (leaderboards, play with friends, play with strangers) and takes some of the approaches that make games like Griddle and Bogglific so darn addictive.

The goal for the iPhone app, then, would be as a practice module that could be upsold during free Facebook play.

Now, turning my attention to the game itself, I do have some user experience related quibbles.

• The game takes a little while to load and the Unity splash screen is not animated so it is unclear whether the app has frozen or not.
• The main menu slider/spinner didn't immediately look interactive, so I ended up trying to swipe the "Swipe" label. This wasn't nearly as effective as swiping the screen real estate above the "Swipe" label (a fat cushion around the actual spinner).
• I found it hard to swipe the spinner without accidentally pressing hard enough to activate my choice and launch the currently selected mode. This may just be my lack of practice with an iPhone or may be something specific to the app.
• There probably needs to be a sound effect and pulsing icon of some sort to indicate when the next board has loaded. The screen looks too static (and I didn't notice the change in text from "loading" to "has loaded").
• The music is probably too loud by default relative to the other game SFX. It would also be nice to be able to shut off music and sound while within game.
• There was no way to call up a pause menu during the game (where I could adjust options or restart) which meant I needed to hard-reset the game several times in order to change options or start over.
• After I turned the music off, there was no "game has started" notification on game start. It seems like there should be a "game started" notification sound and visual effect. Because this is a timed trial, even having a countdown "3... 2... 1... Go!" might be a nice addition.
• I frequently hit the bottom right letter in the grid by mistake when I meant to hit submit. This was super frustrating as it deselected my word and I needed to start over.
• I wanted to play the game with my thumbs, but they were simply too big and covered too much of the screen to be effective. I felt like using my pointer finger was more accurate, but slower. The size of the letter tiles really made me want a stylus and I wonder whether they're just too small and smushed too close to the sides and bottom of the screen.
• I also wondered what a horizontal treatment might look and play like.
• The dictionary seemed quirky (a common complaint for word games). I wonder if SOWPODS or OSPD4 are available rights-free?
• It could have used some more game play modes. At the very least, some sort of "free play" mode where the player could play relatively unconstrained in order to get a feel of the game without time constraints.

All in all, it was definitely worth the $.99 I spent. I'll play some more of it whenever I get my hands on Liza's iPhone. But, as others have mentioned, the plethora of high quality content available at this price means that expectations are going to be high. Games need to deliver well on some specific aspect, be it best-in-class game play, polished and balanced content, excellent competition and multiplayer features, or some other feature that fills our vast set of social networking needs.

30 games in 30 days.... Day #1: Eets Demo

So, I've decided to mix things up a bit and force myself to play more games.

Specifically, I've decided to try and play (and blog about) a game a day for the entire month of August. I'll be traveling a bunch (for work and play) so it will be a challenge. My approach is as follows:

• Start creating a spreadsheet of games I have lying around that need to be played.
• Hit various PC platforms and portals so I can play games on the road.
• Play trial versions when necessary. Obviously if I like the game and it's at the right price point I'd buy it. But if it doesn't convert me, then that's OK, too.

Day #1: I installed Steam on my laptop (I already have an account and have purchased various games using Steam) and surfed the list of "casual" games. I sorted by "Top Rated" and found Eets. I downloaded the demo and...

The demo was short (less than 10 mins) and left me unconvinced it was going to be worth $19.99 (the price I paid for Plants vs. Zombies).

Usability issues are mostly minor quibbles:

• Hard to tell what primary action buttons are some times (modal windows did NOT appear modal; it was unclear which options were slectable; primary action buttons did not stand out clearly). For instance, usually I was instructed to "Close Window" as opposed to "Continue Playing".
• Game screen appeared cluttered even during the first few puzzles. It was hard to tell where my guy was, which objects were interactive, and which objects were repositionable (or even if there were any repositionable items).
• Once you started a game (pressed "Play") you could no longer see the items that were available to you. This caused a couple of problems: (1) you could start the sim and not realize that you had other items to play with, making you unsure how to complete the puzzle; and (2) you had a tougher time reverse engineering how to complete the level because you couldn't see what tools were available to you when your guy got stuck or killed.
• I actually got stuck on the 3rd level because I couldn't deduce one of the key powers of one of the puzzle elements: The Ginseng Factory. The helptext was vague, and when I used it experimentally it did not provide useful feedback. As it turns out, I have no idea what shooting my guy once or twice with this device does... But if I shoot him a third time he'll get pissed off and run and jump farther than he normally does for a while. Hmm.
• I don't get the Exploding Giant Marshmallows. They seem to destroy everything in the game -- but they don't harm my guy. Just seems silly.

After playing 6 boards I just couldn't judge whether this would be fun enough to continue playing -- and paying for.

Notice that if this were an XBLA game that a bunch of my friends were playing, were placed at the $10 price point, and had a reasonable set of Achievements I probably would have picked it up. The social network benefits (can see what friends played it; compare progress against them; add to my Gamerscore) really influence my spending on "bite size" games. Of course, they also influence my platform of choice for cross-platform games, too.

I wonder if I would do more Steam gaming if there were some platform-wide achievements and a Gamerscore equivalent? To be effective, it would probably have to be tied into my Facebook account via an app so that I could compare against friends and discover new content through them as well.

And there you have it. Day #1. Game #1. Post #1.

The first rule of working in the games industry is: There's never enough time to play all the games you want to play

Sigh.

After finishing Afro Samurai a couple of weeks ago, I haven't had much time for "big bite" gaming. My panel at Casual Connect went well (I'll post a link to slides when they're available) and I've been keeping busy with clients trying to get their games out for the holiday season.

My gaming needs have mostly been filled with "small bite" experiences. Mostly Facebook games like Farmville, Farkle, Scramble, Wordscraper, and Backgammon. And I've sprinkled in some short doses of Plants vs. Zombies (mostly playing through the campaign again and trying to harvest some new plants in my water and night gardens).

Scramble, Wordscraper, and Backgammon make sense to me. I love anagram games -- and I'm willing to play Backgammon with folks who want to extract revenge on me for beating them soundly at said-anagram games. I truly suck at Backgammon.

Farmville is one of those Zynga games that I'm basically playing as an exercise in learning more about how this kind of sim/god/world building game integrates into users' social networking workflow. Farkle is just a silly addiction that I can't seem to shake.

Seriously, though, it's time for me to recommit to gaming again. August is almost here -- and I wonder if I need to commit to a game (and a post) a day. It will be hard to pull off (I have a bunch of work and pleasure travel) but if I stay committed, I can make it happen.

• Keep my "at home" time restricted to console games (my coverage of both retail releases and marketplace releases on all three systems is woefully inadequate).
• Keep my "on the road" gaming confined to laptop, DS, and my wife's iPhone platforms.

I may even need to set up a spreadsheet and a schedule.

Maybe I'm on to something.

On the road again (and again...) and some self-promotion

I haven't been able to play much in the way of traditional gaming since, oh, the end of April because I've been pretty much constantly on the road.

Two weeks were all about fun and games -- my wedding and honeymoon -- but the remaining weeks have been bouncing around Chicago and Eugene (OR) working for a client with a game shipping this holiday. Oh, and then there was E3 week in L.A. But that was mostly a family visit.

In the mean time, I had a couple of panels accepted at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this summer. The first part is going to be a joint presentation by some awesome folks who have worked on a variety of casual and board games (including the inventor of Pandemic... How cool is that?). I'll be talking about my work on Catan for XBLA. The second panel will be a brief interactive workshop on how to improve your own on-site usability/focus testing. I'm super excited about putting this together with my co-panelists.

What I have been able to do is experiment with "microgaming" in the form of Twitter games. I can't say I've found the killer app, yet, but I'm guessing that there will eventually be some sort of microgame that captures my fancy to the same extent Scramble has on Facebook.

The Twitter game I'm playing most is called BeatMyTweet. It's basically an anagram name (a genre I love) where @BeatMyTweet sends out an anagram every 15 minutes and people RT @BeatMyTweet the answer. A link to results (people are ranked by time of correct RT) is tweeted and takes you to the host website. Not the best game in the world -- and I'd probably have dropped it by now if I weren't a fiend for anagrams -- but not a bad start. Some issues:

• Limited dictionary. Seems like the same words come up fairly frequently.
• Limited leaderboards. It's hard for an infrequent player like me to keep up with folks who are glued to their PCs or cellphones all day. I need contextual leaderboards that show me how I'm doing relevant to similar others. Unfortunately the current leaderboards only display top 5 players and there's no way to drill in further to see how I'm doing.

I've also tried Spymaster which is basically a Mafia Wars knockoff for Twitter. The level of visual polish is high, although it does suffer from some UI annoyances. Unfortunately this is just not my kind of game -- and it is far too spammy for my liking. I hate cluttering up others' feeds with some silly messages from my game. I figure my Facebook friends will tolerate occasional game feed updates (and can block them specifically without blocking me) but my Twitter followers will likely drop me if I send too many spammy messages their way.

My hope is to find a Twitter game that is compelling enough that it drives me back more often to consume interesting data from the Twittersphere and (hopefully) pipe more interesting updates out to my followers, much the same way that taking my Scramble and Backgammon turns currently drive my Facebook behavior.

Gaming on the sly: Plants, Zombies, And Yet It Moves

Travel. Between work and my recent wedding and honeymoon, I’ve been traveling a heck of a lot lately. Traveling so much that I haven’t really had a lot of time to sink my teeth into many games. Not surprisingly, my writing has suffered.

It’s abundantly clear that I need an iPhone. I don’t care to do the kind of research and amount of thought required to rent or purchase games for my DS. I want to consume games on my portable device much like I consume games on Facebook: See what’s popular, give promising looking apps a chance, and then either keep playing or move on. My biggest worry is that unlike Facebook the Apple Store doesn’t seem to support much in the way of social surfacing of games I might like. There are top sellers and reviews (both important things) but there’s no Xbox Live or Facebook Feed to help me discover what my friends are playing.

So, in the meantime I’ve been mostly doing my tried and true social Facebook games: Backgammon and Scramble. Lots of my friends also play Mafia Wars, but I just couldn’t get myself to struggle through the UI long enough to feel like the effort would be worth the fun. It still amazes me that I put up with some of the usability annoyances of Backgammon and Scramble, but these games are small and personal enough (I play mostly with far away friends who I care about) that the friction is not a deal-breaker. Really, in many ways, the games are glorified asynchronous chat clients. I hate talking on the phone or by email, so they provide enjoyable ways to keep in contact with people I miss.

That said, I have been exploring some new games. Specifically, I tried the demo of And Yet It Moves and purchased Plants vs. Zombies. I also briefly interacted with several educational "games” (and watched children play these games) at the Monterey Aquarium.

And Yet It Moves was a fun little demo. It was hard core in the way that Braid was hard core. Game play was reasonably intuitive once you “got it” but there weren’t a lot of learn as you play hints to prod you along.

That said, the designer did pay attention to some basic principles of layering and distributing game concepts. The player was not forced to learn every single concept in the first few minutes (only to subsequently forget them before they were needed). Challenges progressed from simple tasks that could be completed without penalty of failure to more and more difficult versions of the same challenge (e.g., penalty for falling to far; penalty for having object fall on you; penalty for taking to long to make a decision).

My biggest worry was that after completing level 3 (the final demo level) the puzzles would simply become frustrating instead of challenging. Why? Because the key vectors of challenge seemed to be (a) navigational (find the right direction to go in); and (b) reaction time oriented (fight the gross camera movements in order to achieve precisely timed and directed falls). The former challenge wasn’t interesting to me (this wasn’t a game about exploration in my mind) and the latter challenge seemed like it would simply become frustrating because the controls were not designed for precision.

Some other thoughts:

• Camera was pretty difficult to use.
  • It was virtually impossible to use until a friend told me I could remap the settings. This fixed my problem of always tilting the camera the wrong way.
  • I was also unsure why the camera movement was snapped to 90 degree angles instead of free move. I agree that complete free move may have been difficult to calibrate (sometimes you want to nudge the camera; sometimes you want to turn it 90 degrees) and I don’t believe that adding more complex controls (fast vs. slow rotate) would have “fit” the feel of this game. I guess I would have just liked to see a 45 degree snap version of the game to see if it was less disorienting to use.
• Occasionally it was hard to tell where to go next. I’m not talking about “how to solve the puzzle” but just “where in the heck is my next objective”. This mostly seemed to happen on the last demo level when the camera would zoom in pretty far. I felt like I couldn’t tell which direction I needed to go.

I did enjoy the game, but I’m not sure whether I enjoyed it enough to purchase the full version. I’ll need to look into it some more and check out pricing first.

Plants vs. Zombies, however, had a compelling enough demo to make me purchase it right away. Yeah, the strategy part was a little light… But the aesthetic was refreshing and pleasing and the production value was top notch. Moreover it is a relatively complete buffet of my casual game needs:

• Challenging RTS/Tower Defense modes for when I want to challenge myself.
• Fun and silly puzzles for when I want something less mentally taxing, but more addicting (time waster games).

Moreover, the time waster games served the same purpose as “grinding” in an RPG: These side games yielded points that could be spent to unlock special features in the core strategy game – which made the strategy game easier to win for folks struggling with the main progression path.

The topic of serious games is something that is gaining huge momentum. It used to be that you’d teach with TV shows and movies. These are now being supplemented by games. Interactive games are a great way for people to learn either individually or socially at their own pace.

Unfortunately the “games” that I saw at the Monterey Aquarium weren’t all that enjoyable as games. They were more like interactive exhibits with some surface features that made them seem like games (like computing a score or having a competition amongst 2 or more players).

Some of the key problems (please note I didn’t take much time to study the games, so I’ll need to validate these thoughts in the future):

• The games weren’t very fun.
• The games had usability issues.
• The games taught mostly simple concepts and did not focus on generating deeper understanding or engagement with the concepts.

Given the immense popularity of children’s social/community games like Webkinz and Habbo Hotel, it seems like we could be better harnessing both technology (more autonomous mobile devices for older kids; supervised computing for younger kids) and engaging game design to improve the educational experience of an aquarium visit.

• Children could generate quizzes for their peers to take. Give them a digital camera, a lesson plan of objectives, and a simple quiz generation utility (like the one on Facebook) and let them go.
• You could create either real life or virtual simulation and strategy games to demonstrate the effects of scarcity, environmental hazards, over-population, disease, and other factors on our ecosystem.

In some ways the list is endless. The tools for making games are becoming easier to use and children are becoming even more savvy at content creation and sharing. I definitely need to look deeper into the world of educational and other serious games.