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I'm very curious about your use of metrics in light of the discussion of bad metrics versus good metrics. Tracking the wrong thing, or tracking things, and getting the wrong interpretation of what's going on. Have you found there have been a lot of pitfalls with the way you've approached metrics?
AT: Well, I think that's always the case, right? Everything can be done the right way, can be done the wrong way. But how you track things the right way is a difficult question for sure. I think that a lot of the time, you don't necessarily know what you are doing...
I think maybe the way to avoid having bad metrics is to always tie everything at the end -- even though the problem may be very, very complex, at the end, the conclusions, the cause and effects have to be really crystalline clear to people.
If someone cannot understand what you mean after analysis, you haven't done a good enough job. Part of analysis is not to make things complicated. It's to make things simpler and easier to understand for people to make decisions. If it's not simple, if it's not easy, probably your analysis is not right. I think that's probably all I can say.
You discussed how, with Mafia Wars, the team implemented boss battles, and that didn't really increase the metrics you wanted to increase, versus adding a simple lottery system to FarmVille. You made it sound like these mechanics could be repeatable across multiple games.
Do you feel that developing social games is more about defining successful mechanisms and then targeting different audiences with the same mechanism via different ways of presentation?
AT: You should always look at best practice metrics and mechanics. You always see how they can apply. I think it's one of those things where there's no clear-cut answer. Some things can be applied across games, because people are people, right? People are people, and they have the same psychological drivers.
But some things cannot be applied to other games because game types are different. People's expectations of how a game will behave is different. For example, if I start selling guns or tanks in FarmVille, people are going to say, "What the hell is that?" [laughs] That's beyond people's expectations.
But things like daily returning rewards, that can be applied to both Mafia Wars and FarmVille. Again, it's kind of a case-by-case basis.
With every new platform that comes out, it seems that people start trying to define new ways to go with it, and then a couple approaches become successful, and things start to coalesce around that. Do you think that's happening with social games?
AT: I think that's the [current] stage of development, too. So, right now, social gaming seems to be a couple different categories, but still many, many categories and genres have not been "socialized" yet, shall we say? I think what you said, actually literally, may be right.
It was interesting that you talked about that game [Guild of Heroes] that Zynga worked on, the Diablo-ish game that ended up not really panning out. And the concept that you can't really "socialize" a single-player game experience.
AT: I don't want to say you can't really socialize... [but] It's really, really hard. I think it's really, really hard because you can definitely take a lot of mechanics, but it's really hard to take a whole single-player game, add five social mechanics, boom, voila, you have it.
I mean, that's a simplistic view that many people have. But ultimately that will not really work because people have very different expectations. Again, it's about player expectations, what they want to see with the game. Do your future expansions jive with that? And that's one of the problems which makes single-player games hard to work as social games.
FarmVille, ultimately, is a one-player experience, right? You manage your own farm. You interact with other people, but it's not fundamental to the core gameplay interactions. First of all, it's asynchronous. What separates that from a traditional game in terms of a single-player play path?
AT: Traditional console games, you don't have any interaction unless you go into multiplayer battles, during campaigns. The single-player is self-contained. But like you may not necessarily want to be at a party 24 hours a day, I think there's something cool about the pace and tempo of social gaming interactions.
Because it's asynchronous, you don't have the huge pressure you [could] have, "Oh, I must respond to this person," [instead, it's] "Okay, I can respond to them a little later." But that doesn't lessen the social obligation or social capital that you have.
I think it's precisely because it's asynchronous that people feel "I can come back to the game anytime." Because remember, for social games, unlike MMOs -- a synchronous game -- we don't expect, require, or design a game for users to play hours a day. It's like 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day.
I know there have been some surprises, like session duration not necessarily at first being the same as developers anticipated. Through metrics and through application of design, does player behavior now align with what you anticipate, and can you maintain that?
AT: I think after a couple years, you understand more about player behavior through metrics. One way the metrics can definitely help you is to understand how players really behave, how they really think. Another way is you always ask your user to get qualitative feedback.
Quantitative measurement and qualitative feedback need to go hand in hand. Metrics can tell you how they're doing it, but not why are they doing it. Sometimes you may not be able to answer that -- like qualitative feedback from users sometimes doesn't really represent what they actually do.
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Stop right there. If the aim was to produce eyeball hits and comments, that's understandable, but if the aim was to offer more detail into the factors that make up the balance of this issue, it may have been more helpful to highlight this more:
"... that metrics are a tool to hone that craft, essentially. And that is your philosophy."
While we can agree that expanding our sources of input (from other disciplines, other forms of design, from science, from related industry) to solve problems of the Art and Business of Game Development is very helpful and informative, inviting an imbalanced presentation to set up simple contrary opinion seems a reliable way to lose traction on the discussion. I expect more from Gamasutra, frankly.
This is a business philosophy, and an enlightened, reliably valid one that design must coordinate with intelligently, but do not frame it as a creative philosophy. Suggesting so appears to do a disservice to the creative talent and effort of Zygna and other creative professionals.
To illustrate the disconnect as presented is not difficult:
"So, how do you, as a gamer, build a game that can be continually enjoyed by the really, really non-gamers, like the students, like accountants, lawyers, like housewives, househusbands, children, etcetera?"
To suggest we need to adhere to customer metrics and analytics, then to off-handedly categorize students, housewives and ... children as non-gamers appears ridiculous. It doesn't seem realistic that this perspective could be lost during the composition of this article. And at the end of the interview, the clear "designer as auteur, designing for herself" zero-sum mentality is discussed as if fact; which is an obvious powder keg for this community, the design community at large, etc. Personally, I have other things that seem interesting to talk about surrounding this issue and various points raised during the interview (novelty-agnostic success, retention tactics, design/business philosophy crossovers, etc.), but it almost appears pointless to try.
One can reasonably expect this imbalance to be highlighted by heated comment responses from this community in three, two, one ...
The what now?
really non-gamers, like the students, like accountants, lawyers, like housewives,
househusbands, children, etcetera?"
I found that quite a silly statement. Just because a game designer is a gamer, it doesn't mean they can only design for gamers. Surely a good game designer can design for any demographic.
That's a bit like saying surely a great literary novelist would be able to spin out pulp fiction. Not all designers are able to work to all ends of the market. There are subsets.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Metrics are a dream tool for any designer. Who doesn't want to have that closer relationship with the customer? Unfortunately it's a numerical relationship that will be good at delivering what people want but (if powers that be push it as the end-all solution) may prevent creative people from giving people something they didn't expect.
It saddens me that this man (and perhaps most of Zynga) believe that creating games is all calculations and business. What ever happened to the contention that games are art or could be considered as such?
I do think his idea that games are just a craft isn't supportable though. He's confusing late-stage optimisation with craft, and they're not really the same thing.
CityVille, for example, is clearly based on the roots of many other city-making games before it, which at some point required other people to create (Will Wright, for example). Games definitely ARE an art, but it's more like saying that Zynga regard themselves as Jerry Bruckheimer's formulaic CSI franchise compared to Hill Street Blue.
Which, actually, I have no issue with. The pinball industry and many other kinds of game have had much the same attitude (if not quite the ability to measure it) for years. It doesn't really harm games as an art for someone to have come along with an optimising approach, because in the end of the day it is still drawing in way more people to play games than otherwise would have. Some of those people will go on to look for more engaging/creative games.
That makes sense to me if creative design is understood as using human insight and experience to perceive "fun gaps" and then dream up features that fill those gaps, while also understanding metrics as a reductionistic way to identify where existing systems can be made more fun.
How is that not a best-of-both-worlds, art+craft approach to serving customers? (Maybe even holistic-reductionistic, East+West philosophy of design?)
"the general manager... creative philosophy"... it's good to remember that the designers of the games they cloned did things they though were cool...
Some of the most cloned game designs may have been born from that leap of faith creative people make day in and day out.