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Five Prescriptions for Viral Games
 Support Guilds and Clans
When you sell a game to one guild or clan leader, you are potentially selling to dozens more. This has implications for any multiplayer title, be it an MMORPG or an FPS game. The better you support player-created organizations, the higher your product sales.
Online roleplaying games discovered this first, and implemented features for giving guilds a mechanism for organizing their members and setting up private communication channels. RTS and FPS games have also added support for tagging under a clan, or organizing tournaments or servers around clan membership.
Guild and clan leaders are a rare breed of person. Nick Yee’s research1 has shown that only about 15% of game players ever try it, and most players describe the experience as very stressful. However, guild leaders are your most influential allies in promoting a game product. Make sure that any guild features you add to a game actually creates additional enjoyment and decreases work for these people.
Simply adding features that allow guilds to organize is no longer enough. In an MMORPG, it is really nothing more than a dedicated chat channel; for RTS and FPS games, usually only a way to label someone’s affiliation and give them preferential access to certain servers. If you really want a guild or clan to help promote your product to their members, you need to go a step further, decreasing the barrier to entry for their members.
Some guilds are large enough that they have their own dedicated websites. Unlike fan sites, they are more focused on coordinating activities, events or socializing with the people they know. You can embrace this community of players by providing similar XML-data interfaces that were discussed regarding fan sites. However, guilds are more interested in things that are very specific to them: they want to promote what their members have achieved, what victories their teams have had. The applications also need to be more plug-and-play, since the average guild leader will usually have less time and technical resources than the typical fan site developer.
Over the next few years, there will be a blurring of the continuum between the in-game and out-of-game components of guild/clan management. Applications that help coordinate rosters, events and communication will exist on the Web as well as within games.
Vanguard
Sony Online Entertainment has already started doing some of this, by providing Web-based interfaces in EverQuest 2 and Vanguard to many of the guild-information resources. The next step will be to make these features easy to add to the universe of guild websites. My own company, GuildCafe Entertainment, is developing a set of tools that game companies can use to bridge this gap, by providing standardized mechanisms for integrating guild management with external guild websites.
From a marketing standpoint, the advantage to a game company is colossal: guild members will learn more about what their friends are up to, and are more likely to try a game out.
Support Player-Created Content
Player-created content covers a wide swath, from the modding communities that surround FPS games, to interface mods for MMORPGs, to in-game content such as player created cities in games like Star Wars Galaxies. While the number of players that will invest the time in creating content or mods for a game is quite small, the advantage to the game developer is huge: these are the players who will act as evangelists for the game, not only enhancing the experience for other players but also spreading the word to potential customers.
Counter-Strike, the most widely played FPS game as of this writing, began its life as a popular mod. Some of the interface mods for World of Warcraft have spawned their own communities. Some of the player-made dungeons for Neverwinter Nights are as popular as some of the commercial expansions. By providing a means of enhancing the game, the developers of these titles have made a fantastic investment, going beyond simply creating a game to creating a platform that others can build upon. These third party developers become new channels for communicating the greatness of a game.
Almost any game can provide a meaningful set of modding interfaces, but like most of the features that will enhance viral marketing, it is best to plan for these things at the architecture phase. Because each game is different, it is important to think about the type of mods and changes that your players will find most compelling. Examples can include:
- Skinnable user-interfaces. Products like StarDock’s SkinStudio or KSDev’s SkinEngine can be used to add skinnability to a standard Windows program, which can be appropriate to many game titles, particularly casual games.
- Modifiable rule sets. If you define the rule set for a game with standard and popular scripting languages, you can enable players to create their own content for a game without learning to use a proprietary set of tools. A good example of this is how Civilization 4 used a combination of XML configuration files and Python scripts to define much of the rules for the game.
- Modifiable user interfaces: World of Warcraft uses a combination of XML and LUA scripting for its user-interface, which has enabled hundreds (possibly thousands) of player-made modifications. Everquest 2 and Vanguard have followed suit with a powerful modding interfaces of their own. Civ4’s entire user interface is defined through Python scripts.
- Level and scenario design. When you enable players to create their own scenarios and game-art, you can foster a very active and loyal community. It doesn’t mean you need to provide a complete set of development tools akin to Neverwinter Nights—just make things comprehensible enough so that a dedicated player/developer could figure out how to do things on their own.
- In-game content: everything discussed previously are things that players can create outside of the game. When you allow players to make a lasting impression on the content within a game—generally, only possible within a persistent MMO environment—you’ll encourage players to show their friends what they’ve created. Whether it is a player city, a crafted item, their own house, or something unique to your game, the player who has left something of themselves in a world has a strong incentive to share their creations with others.
The idea of player-created content is to cultivate a community of the most loyal players—the type of players who will go out of their way to show a game to their friends and associates. When designing a game, think about the ways that you can enable a player to become a contributor.
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