 |
|
|
| |
VGS 09: Game Designers - Everything You Know Is Wrong
by Christian Nutt [PC, Console/PC, Mobile Phone]
|
|
| |
|
October 30, 2009
|
| |
Speaking at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco on Friday, Zhan Ye, president of GameVision, commented that he has worked on traditional, single-player PC games as well as new free-to-play games in China.
In fact, he's brought experienced developers from the West to China and seen the culture clash -- because the two types of games, while seemingly similar, have important differences, he says.
Changing The Way You Think
"As I was working with designers in the U.S. and China, I couldn't help but notice the huge contrast between the old way of doing games that I was used to, and the new way I've learned from the young designers in China," says Ye. "You have at least three decades of history; in China, because the industry is so young, we don't have a lot of traditions."
"If you are a designer and you start on a free to pay project and you start with those old assumptions, you will fail -- no matter how good a designer you were in the old days," warns Ye.
"Ubisoft Shanghai has the best and brightest designers in China, and they were all trained by Western developers... but when they left and started their own projects, they all failed."
The End of Fun?
The assumptions designers make about games in the West just don't apply to the market, now matter how core and obvious they seem, he says. "As a designer, your first priority is to make the game fun." Well, not in China.
"In the old days, [designers] didn't have to worry about how to make money. It's the business people's evil job -- you just worry about making the game fun, and people will come to it. That's not true anymore," says Ye. "Making a game fun is not enough anymore. You have to operate under dual objectives -- you have to make a fun game that can monetize well, and those two objectives are equally important."
When he first met Chinese designers, Ye "was very surprised to find how much they talk about monetization from day one of the project" As a Western-style developer, "You can view it as a burden; it's a huge change. It changes your approach to game design completely. Every game design feature, you have to look at it from two perspectives."
Users Don't Want Art
When it comes to Western design, "Another assumption is games as an artform."
When the medium began to get more cinematic in the late '90s, says Ye, that idea has seriously taken root. "Starting from then [1997's Final Fantasy VII] video games began to be treated seriously as an artform. For over a decade, that's the direction the old game industry has been moving towards. In the free-to-play world, all of that might not matter anymore."
The audience is what is driving that change, says Ye. "The gamers are paying attention to something else -- and as a game designer, you have to do the same thing. If you are still thinking about making a game as a piece of art that people can admire or respect, I think you'll be in big trouble."
Content Creation? No, It's World-Building
Content creation is the primary focus of game development in the West, but Ye, again, says that's just not applicable to the free-to-play market. "I think the traditional game business, especially in the U.S., is based around buying or selling content -- you're buying a traditional game, you're getting 11 or 12 hours of content. And as a game designer you look at it from that perspective -- you want to do more and more content, better quality content."
When it comes to F2P, says Ye, "Consumers are not going to pay for content. Game designers don't feel like they're selling content. They just look at the whole game development from a different perspective. And from a logistic point of view, the whole purpose is to try and keep people playing for a long time, so they'll start to pay..."
Experience dictates, says Ye, that "if we can keep the gamers for at least two weeks, they will stay, and if they'll stay, they'll stay for years." However, he says, "It's impossible to create content for a year or two years of gameplay; you have to create an environment or a setting in which a lot of people can interact with each other. Ultimately it's not the content that keeps the people playing, but the people."
Not Fair!
Western developers are also often deeply concerned with fairness. Says Ye, "A lot of old-school game designers think we should treat everyone equally in the game. They're worried that if we reward those people who pay more money, then the balance in the game will be destroyed and other people will leave. Those concerns are very valid."
Ye sees fairness as just another tool in the toolbox rather than as a core concept. "But in the free-to-play world, especially in China, a lot of game designers believe fairness is not a goal, just a means -- the goal is to create a highly dynamic environment and community where a lot of conflict and drama can happen; if it helps to create conflict, fairness and unfairness can be used as tools to create those conflicts and add tension to the game world."
In short, "If we believe a game world is a reflection of the real world, the concept of fairness in a game should not be taken for granted."
Ye discussed a game where to attract rich users who could afford to buy powerful items, poor players were paid by the company to stick around. "Rich people were just killing poor people all the same time -- but you just have to solve that problem." This created a "welfare state" in the game, and tarnished both the game's and the company's image.
A better solution, Ye said, in all seriousness, was a game that allowed users with a lot of resources to form clans and attract followers, gifting them with items. "If you think about who these people were in the real world, they were business owners, used to managing hundreds of people." Rather than letting rich users mow down poor users, "We let rich people fight with rich people with the help of poor people."
Monetization, aka Psych 101
Monetization is, of course, the key to the free-to-play universe. And, says Ye, "This is not an add-on. You have to think about this from the beginning of the project." In fact, he says, games that change from a subscription to F2P model "are a disaster waiting to happen."
So what's the answer? "You just have to try a lot of things. Chinese game designers have tried thousands of ideas." Ye suggests studying ZT Online, as it's known in China as the "encyclopedia of monetization ideas."
When it comes to game design, in fact, there's an important distinction, says Ye. "Before launch it's monetization-driven; after launch, it's largely data-driven." Metrics are crucial.
And good social game design is rooted in an understanding of psychology, says Ye. "Good monetization design is based on a deep understanding of human psychology. The best game designers in Chinese people all understand what Chinese people want, what they think; their weaknesses, actually. Good free-to-play game designers are exploiting people's weaknesses in the game."
Key Impulses for Monetization
One tool for game design is conflict. "Conflicts make the game world more energetic and more lively," says Ye, but "more importantly they trigger emotions, and when people are more emotionally unstable, they'll make purchases."
Convenience items are important, but the recipe is not as simple as you think it is. Says Ye, "People will pay for convenience; however, what we found out is that convenience alone is not that powerful... you have to combine it with other factors. If you combine two or three factors you'll have a bigger chance to monetize."
For example, add peer pressure, and it becomes more more effective. "It's very easy to play with peer pressure," because of the volume of users in an MMO. One of the most popular items that Ye knows of is one that lets you respawn with your party when you die instead of returning to town. "Most people will say, 'I'll just pay', so they don't let their friends down." That's convenience and peer pressure rolled into one.
Items that allow players to show off in front of others are crucially important to the Chinese market, says Ye, "Especially if you create an environment where they're in front of their rivals or loved ones."
There's an item in one social game that is a gift -- of flowers. No simple bouquet, when the item is given, flowers fall from the sky and everyone can see them. Just as importantly, the game rewards the girl who gets the most flowers with a unique dress that can't be bought, and it will give her a special user title for chat. "[Girls] want to feel important, and being spoiled, that they're princesses. And there are a lot of male gamers who use online games as a dating tool."
|
| |
|
|
I know the conversation is moving towards the so-called "bubble babies" and a generation that grew up with saturated broadband access, much like they do in South Korea. I know the industry is moving away from packaged games. But is the west really moving towards a paradigm resembling that of the east?
I'm not so sure. I also might be out of touch. =)
As far as I can remember, game designers always had to design games to create fun and make money and as that article said... to have more people playing a game helps to keep the experience flowing.
This is nothing new. We have a tradition of this in the west as well: pulp fiction, B-rate movies, harlequin romance novels... stuff like that.
The problem is as soon as your audience becomes educated in a general sense, they start to see through your manipulation of them. They start to want something more than french fries and hot dogs - they want quality.
Awesome, it's like the virtual middle ages!
However, Halo actually suits well to chinese designers.
Chinese model: "You have money. I want it. Therefore I will manipulate you psychologically to get it."
Western model: "You have money. I want it. Unfortunately, so do a bunch of other people whom I can't forcibly shut down. Therefore I have to offer a service that's so much more satisfying to you than what my competitors offer that you will freely and consciously choose to give me your money."
That's not to say that Western MMOGs can't use psychological manipulation to make their product seem more appealing. But it's the difference between "you don't need to know" manipulation and "here's how our product is better for you" level-of-service competition that I find fascinating.
In the end it boils down to this: What would you rather have, the moral high-ground, or your job? When it comes to $2.00 for a team-spawn portal, the question is an easy answer.
I've been in China for the last 10 months, and it is a whole different industry here.
The only anomaly is World of Warcraft which succeeds in both the West and China. It is one of the few games that the West can point to and say: See, if you just make a fun and good game, you can do well in China. Of course, it probably helped that Warcraft III was one of their favorite games already (which they stole in GREAT abundance, but you probably can't see any sales figures for).
*sigh*...
Like Justin said, it seems that making fun games for everyone in the name of passion and devotion isn't possible anymore.
I know that we live in a world where power and money are prioritized, but still... I think that the goal of a game designer is to create game concepts for everyone along with new technologies and art.
Concentrate on the people and their culture, talk with them and search for their vision of what is fun rather than thinking in their place. Stop categorizing (my god...what I read about girls and gaming is just awful) and take time to LISTEN.
The more we are opened, the more people we touch. It is easy after to figure out the result of touching people.
We can spend years of our lives flipping burgers as a wage slave, flagrantly ignore and do nothing about prostitution, close our eyes to hunger and genocide, but shit, the instant someone pokes our notion of games we go ape crazy.
As with any other media, we are going to have our art and we are going to have our trash. We've seen this happen to every form of mass media in the last century, when are we going to learn?
So my point is, there's no need to get on a high horse and stone them for posting this. It's a topic of professional interest and this isn't a morality forum.
Something that is not brought up is the ludicrously high piracy rate in China and how this has shaped game development in the region. Sadly, it is essentially assumed (and realistically so) that there is no way you can get a legitimate sale of your software. The circumvention of this reality are F2P games that manipulate addiction, convenience, and micro-transactions for a steady revenue stream. Personally, I do not want to focus on a market under these restrictions in addition to overcoming cultural hurdles.
One topic briefly mentioned is the relatively young industry in China. I'd bet money that after another decade there will be a steady movement to games with a stronger narrative and traditionally western approach to presentation and game play. At some point strong diversity within the market will become a necessity. Of course, this is with the expectation that international trade negotiations that help contain piracy to a manageable level.
Of course the markets are different. However there is no way a game that exploits westerners "weaknesses" would be anywhere near as effective in the western world as it is in China. We are, to put it nicely, cheap.
We will not pay to resurrect with our friends. We will run back with our friends to where we died and have a good chat about our day. Sure the "hardcore" gamers will pay, but the "hardcore" are an extremely small market in the U.S compared to China, and trying to entice hardcore gamers to a game with very poor gameplay is difficult. If you ask the casual to, they will say "why should we bother, this is a free to play game isn't it? If I'm going to pay to play I might as well play WoW."
And that is the crux of the difference really. When there are so many high quality MMO's in the western market, when you ask players to pay, they will immediately say why, or compare your game to another game where they could also pay incrementally. And that is where you need high-quality game play. While these psychological tricks may work in China, I can assure you, they would not in the western world.
At the end of the day, content is king, at least in the western world.
Perhaps the article should have been titled "Game Designers - Everything You Know Is Wrong When Working In China"
PS:my English is poor, I hope u can understand what I mean^^
For that matter, how does it differ from many AAA hard core video games? The human weaknesses *are* different in the west owing to social and economic differences, and when people pay $60 for a game there are many other differences, but many games still amount to exploiting human weaknesses. In hard core AAA games these weaknesses are often related to feelings of teens and young adults, that they feel powerless or ineffectual, and success in the hard core games (remember, you can't actually lose, though you can give up) lets them fool themselves into thinking they're productive and effectual. (The essence of a typical shooter: "kill creatures and blow things up". Gee.)
ANY entertainment is, in large part, an "exploitation of human weakness." That doesn't make it evil. Virtually any human activity, stripped to its bare essentials, sounds rather grim if not ignoble. Zhan Ye has stripped FTP game design in China to its bare essentials.
Is he one of a few radically-capitalistic developers in the industry or just part of a growing horde of monetizers? (Having lived in the region recently, I'd have to guess the latter. Honestly, his approach to video games sounds a lot like the way many Chinese businesses approach everything from mining to autos: Profits first. Profits last. Period.)
But all of this is not to say he doesn't know what he's talking about: Apparently, Ye has worked as a consultant for China's Giant Interactive, an NYSE-listed company and leading publisher of Chinese online games (http://www.ga-me.com). Seems he now works (under the GameVision name) as a China market-entry consultant to foreign firms. The Web site for GameVison is simply Ye's bio (http://www.gamevisiongroup.com). His bio features little more than his speaking history. Another site with a small profile of Ye says he has a masters in HCI from Carnegie Mellon (http://www.xmedialab.com/mentor/zhan-ye) ... odd he wouldn't put that on his own bio.
Regardless of all the unknowns about this guy and what he's saying, it's still great to read about the Asian market which will soon make the NA market look like a middling backwater. More Asia coverage, please.
When we get down to it, we aren't seeing a huge difference here, the main difference is that the societies have different psychological desires at times. While Easterners don't care about art and fairness, Westerners do. And us in the West need space marines with biceps the size of cannons and cannons that are proportionally larger to (compensate) or fulfill our inadequacies that spawn from stupid gender roles that our society predominately enforces by the media. Or you can have a 'hot piece of ass' that continues to objectify women.
However, I think there is something good to be said about making money. Earning a living wage is not 'selling out.' It is necessary to pay the bills, to be a productive member of society. Someone in your family unit must have income for which to support the others, even if everyone does not contribute by making money. Where we draw the line is when you become greedily exploitative. That is worse than selling out. For lack of a better example in the West I'm going to make an enemy by putting Kotick on the spot. http://www.industrygamers.com/news/bobby-koticks-goal-to-take-all-the-fun-out-of
-making-video-games/ Other people tend to agree though. Here's my point: the bottom line should not be increase profit all the time.
The bottom line on the other hand should be: Give your developers a living wage, at least decent quality of life while delivering to your consumers a product or service that is fun and satisfies one or more of their desires (I do not mean that with double-entendre; simply meeting psychological needs, the majority of which are not sexual). If one person makes more than 10 million, at least the way the economy is right now, you are likely doing things wrong. There should be a point when we can say "enough is enough" and realize we should be thankful for a healthy salary, benefits, good working hours and not have to suck anymore money out of the free market like despicable leeches. Being on CEO welfare is way worse than being on government welfare, because CEO's have the education to know better. They should not suck money out of lower socio-economic people that work for them or buy their product service.
So to summarize: Both sides of the globe exploit people, but in different ways for different people. Making money = living wage is good. Making less or more money than that is very bad. Games should be fun above all else and provide consumers with enjoyment. Games that do not do this are not actually games at all.
These are the stupidest lines I've read in my entire life.
They even make it known!
If you read this article and pick it apart they are openly saying we don't care and take advantage of everything.
Items that allow players to show off in front of others are crucially important to the Chinese market, says Ye, "Especially if you create an environment where they're in front of their rivals or loved ones."
Feeding off insecurities of not being good enough for the other around them....
"You have at least three decades of history; in China, because the industry is so young, we don't have a lot of traditions."
Preying on the uneducated
"In the old days, [designers] didn't have to worry about how to make money. It's the business people's evil job -- you just worry about making the game fun, and people will come to it. That's not true anymore,"
This is the greed of the all popular dissallusioned "american dream" Everyone wants a buck for everything they do without actuall doing anything... Like bars they don't care if your an alcoholic they only care how much you have so you buy up the bar so they make their dollar.
"The gamers are paying attention to something else -- and as a game designer, you have to do the same thing. If you are still thinking about making a game as a piece of art that people can admire or respect, I think you'll be in big trouble."
In many ways this is sooo un true.. I do not touch a game unless I am find myself attracted to it. Visually stunning and great game play you'd have a perfect game. In order to attract the audience you have to have the artictis value to it.
"Consumers are not going to pay for content. Game designers don't feel like they're selling content. They just look at the whole game development from a different perspective. And from a logistic point of view, the whole purpose is to try and keep people playing for a long time, so they'll start to pay..."
Again... Returning to this preying on insecurities and feeding on their wallets as well... In order to base a monetary amount on something they think if they make that person addicted or feelas though they are socially accepted in a fake enviroment it will allow them to feel better and continue doing it. It is a disasterous way of making someone feel less then human. Which obviously would be folowed up in the next paragragh "Ultimately it's not the content that keeps the people playing, but the people."
"the goal is to create a highly dynamic environment and community where a lot of conflict and drama can happen; if it helps to create conflict, fairness and unfairness can be used as tools to create those conflicts and add tension to the game world."
Really and we wonder why some kids have anger problems? This is a great way to make a happy normal person become hatful and completely lose their minds because they feed into this trap that the chinese have laid out for them. This is the perfect excuse for those angry parents to step in and bring down the gaming universe. In the end this is a grea way to bring down an industry as one designer will ruin it for a lot of others. This is a bully technique and should be banned.
"If we believe a game world is a reflection of the real world, the concept of fairness in a game should not be taken for granted."
Again... Really? Isn't the purpose of a videa game to escape reality for a moment?
A better solution, Ye said, in all seriousness, was a game that allowed users with a lot of resources to form clans and attract followers, gifting them with items. "If you think about who these people were in the real world, they were business owners, used to managing hundreds of people." Rather than letting rich users mow down poor users, "We let rich people fight with rich people with the help of poor people."
Isn't this why the community is sooooo mad at politicians? How's that working for us?
"Good monetization design is based on a deep understanding of human psychology. The best game designers in Chinese people all understand what Chinese people want, what they think; their weaknesses, actually. Good free-to-play game designers are exploiting people's weaknesses in the game."
And they admit it... Feeding on insecurities or "weaknesses" as they call it... I find this disgusting... Quite honestly this would make me not want to touch any game made, designed sponsored by the chinese. We are the western civilization because we care for one another. Sure we've made our mistakes but we do not sit here and TRY to destroy our fellow americans. I believe these tactics are no different then trying to break down your community because they begin to have their own minds. I have NO RESPECT for these designers. They should be banned from production or even speaking on this topic. They need to stay away from youth and go see a psychologist themselves to deal with their internal conflicts they faced growing up. Perhpas they were bullied, told they aren't good enough, cried to their mommies cause no one would accept them? It's time to grow up and move on. Get over it.
Really happy to read your reply.
In the west they use all the same tricks in the marketing department as the Chinese and Koreans use in the design department of the free to play market. The west also sees all these same psychological manipulations in play with scoreboards, achievements and trophies. (I realise these are all male centric manipulations but the point still stands)
This isn't about eastern and western design. It's about the need for a different design strategy for a different style of game.
Ubisoft Shanghai create a number of high end console games very successfully with a combination of Chinese and western trained designers.
I had been in game dev for both west and east (Enlight games, Joan of Arc, Restaurant Empire...etc) and currently lead designing 2 projects.
From what I see, it's the focus. Most chinese games focus on making the most money within the short lifespan of the product. Unlike the western mmo environment, the Chinese have over hundreds of mmo to choose from, as oppose to the few AAA titles driven western market (WOW, Aion, Guildwars, warhammer, ...etc).
It will cost a lot of money to develope an AAA title over here, not to mention the marketing cost. And most product over here have a very short lifespan, around 1 to 2 years. The gamers pretty much just hop from product to product. Therefore it is important for the game dev to focus on short term revenue as oppose to long term.
Let's say you created an AAA title that is very well balanced and a lot of fun to play, and the revenue model is well balanced and will generate a lot of money given time.
The problem is you don't have the time. Almost all games are 'free to play' and the gamers here are all habit 'game hoppers'. It is simply too hard for a game to keep it's gamer base.
While we may frown on this (myself included), but the game dev over here in the east are just doing what they need to do to survive.
If you want to make art for yourself with no concern for making money, that's great, but it would be good to have another source of income to help support your hobby.