Inside Social Games

Since the Facebook Platform’s launch one year ago, Blake Commagere has come to be loved and hated by millions of Facebook users. As the creator of Zombies, one of the earliest social games on Facebook, as well as the entire suite of “Monsters” apps (including Vampires, WereWolves, and Slayers), Commagere has pioneered merging concepts of social network virality and traditional game design. I sat down with him to learn more about his process of building the Monsters franchise and future plans for building the business.

Blake, can you tell us about how you’ve gone about designing your games over the last year?

It’s been a learning process. Some things I intuited, some thing I read, and I’ve trusted user feedback on a lot of things.

My guiding principles for building new features into the games has been simple: 1) It has to have a social aspect. 2) It has to be easy and obvious. 3) It has to be fun and/or funny. I’ve noticed I’m a lot more forgiving of games that may lack awesome graphics if they’re fun or funny. For me, that’s the end goal of entertainment. The whole genre of campy horror movies really caters to that.  It’s a little harder to do that in checkers perhaps.

One feature I wish I’d put more thought into in the beginning is the points breakdown. It’s kind of embarrassing to me (especially when I see others copy it), because it’s very subpar - it was a 10 second decision that can’t easily be changed now.  I’m very confident that if I brought in experts, it could be much more optimized and more fun at the same time. However, as it is, it’s apparently good enough.  It’s kind of cool that there’s a margin for error, and you don’t have to be perfect yet.

In the beginning, my only real feature was creating an army. The type of feature users wanted next - a way to fight/compete with friends – was clear, but exactly how it should work wasn’t. It’s hard to do synchronous experiences if you want it to be just between your friends, so it had to be asynchronous.

The next big thing to decide when designing fighting was the points breakdown.  When considering whether to make it turned based, requiring requests and accepts seemed to boring - I wanted immediate gratification. But if you give immediate gratification, you can’t take points away from the other person.  I’m not totally sure if the decision to give points for getting attacked and winning was the right one, because it’s created an incentive to spam, and that’s been an ongoing challenge (though I have done some things to mitigate it).

I’ve also gotten user complaints about the chances of winning. But ultimately, I’ve come to realize that with user feedback, what users want isn’t always equal to what is fun.  Users want to win, but part of gaming is the discomfort of not having won yet, and having to do some work to win. If you make it too easy, it’s not fun. I suspect the Blizzard guys are experts at this.

I’ve also added some new things recently, including the ability to put your friends in a chicken suit. This is a very polarizing feature – users either love it or hate it. It’s a big deal when you change players’ avatars – you have to make that really expensive (all other weapons don’t effect look). I just thought it would be funny and amusing. That has driven many features in my games. In some games you can tell that the designers have added a little personal charm that really shows they love their work.

One last feature I didn’t appreciate the importance of when I initially created it was leader boards.  As soon as I made a global leader board, the competitive landscape changed from being friendly to being very cut-throat, and a lot more people starting trying to cheat and game the system. This is probably very obvious to traditional game developers, but it’s not to many Facebook game developers (I know many Facebook game developers that hate their leader boards and now spend all day dealing with security issues like injection attacks). People will go crazy for points.

Where do you think we are in the evolution of social gaming?

Before a really amazing game is made, either web 2.0 experts need to become experts in game design, or vice versa. I suspect that the latter will happen first, because I think there’s less to learn about what I do than what they do.  Nobody on social networks has the game that WOW does. Their DAU are something like 40%, but if you do 1 million users with 10% active on Facebook right now, people look to you like you’re the expert.

People doing Facebook games know how to get installs, but people like Blizzard know how to get engagement. I look to WOW as the standard for MMORPGs. Those guys have 9-10 million people paying $10 a month (though they also have a huge budget and can do lots of things most people can’t.)

So where do you think you will be in a year?

I like doing games a lot, and I want to continue doing games as long as I can. Because it’s a hot space, we’re likely to see more traditional game design talent moving into the field. I think it’s really fun, and I don’t want to work my way up the ladder in the game industry. However, I do miss the feeling I got working on Causes. The chance to make software that really helps people is rare, and I think that’s really cool.

Here in Silicon Valley, people look at you like you’re not an entrepreneur if you’re not building a billion dollar company. But folks like the Hot Or Not guys made good money, had a decent exit, and had a lot of fun. I think that’s OK. I refuse to believe there’s only 1 type of entrepreneur – there’s a lot of in between.

I’m confident that I’m going to do what’s right for me. People ask me often if they should take investment or join SGN or Zynga, and I ask them, “What do you want to do?”

Finally Blake, have you spent much time working on monetization?

I think great game design and making money should go hand in hand. This has enormous potential, but I don’t think I’m anywhere close to it. With the right people on board, I think I could do a lot more. I’ve just done what’s good enough so far. My approach is that if you can figure out the game mechanics first, take monetization into account as you go along. But getting the game mechanics right first is more important.

I’m secretly hoping that Facebook will help guys like me out. They’re in a better position to do that than anyone else, and they’ve got all the data. Once they crack the nut, they should work with developers. I’m convinced I would still do better with them. It’s only a matter of time.

Scrabulous is an adaptation of the game Scrabble for the Facebook generation. You can play against your friends in Facebook, host an open table, or join a table.

The gameplay itself is basically online Scrabble with several bells and whistles to make it more approachable. You can use the online dictionary (generally frowned upon by purists) and the help section details the rules for those who don’t know it. You can’t play words that aren’t actual words, which makes “challenging” a bit redundant in my opinion. You can also skip turns, trade in scrabble blocks, and other subtleties of the rules. The help tab is very useful.

Hosting a table is easy - just set up what dictionary you want to use, the game speed, and whether the game is suitable for adults or people of all ages. The last decision seems trivial until you try joining a table. I found that I couldn’t find a game that was suitable for all ages, and when I changed my search to “adult” I found many of the games to by people wanting to chat “dirty.” Yes, each scrabble game has a chat feature and yes, it seems that Scrabulous has achieved some unfortunate notoriety… I guess people with big vocabularies are sexy.

It’s nice to be able to be able to play both your friends and random other people online and switch between games quickly. I played three games at once and probably could have handled more. When you’re playing with friends, the social pressure to continue makes the game very addicting. In how many other Facebook applications do friends email and IM you to take your turn?

The search feature could obviously be fixed so it was less buggy. But other than that there is very little criticism to level at this game. Adding bots would be nice, but next to impossible from a technical standpoint. How do you create an AI that generates words from random letters and doesn’t beat you easily?

One final note - the game has drawn a lot of flack recently because of its ongoing legal battle. Without touching on this political minefield, I will say that much of this game’s success is due to the popularity of the initial game of Scrabble. That said, without the hard work of the developers and some very clever features, the game would never have taken off. It’s a solid multiplayer game for people who like vocab words, strategy, and triple-word scores.

Developer’s Score: 7/10
Gameplay Score: 9/10
Odds this game will get shut down due to legal dispute: 5/10

While explaining the idea behind social gaming, many people act a little confused. “Are social games really that different from multi-player games?”

What makes “social games” different from the multi-player games (that are most often played with strangers) is that the game play experience of social games (especially when played with friends and family) is significantly enhanced and affected by the context of playing in a social network environment. The social context created in social networks allows for significantly new kinds of game-play experiences - enough to create a whole swath of new online gamers.

For example, take Scrabulous. What makes playing Scrabble with friends and family different than playing with strangers? Jeremy Liew describes how the social context affects game play within Scrabulous well:

Playing Scrabulous against my wife puts the game into context in a way that playing with a stranger that I met in the Yahoo games lobby simply doesn’t have. If I’m losing against a stranger, I might just abandon the game - not an option against my wife. If I’m taking too long to move, I’ll hear about it from my wife in a way that will cause me to play- not true for a stranger. The bragging rights on the win will be more meaningful and last much longer when I’m playing my wife. And finally, the act of playing itself has the subtext “I’m thinking of you” that is absent when playing against a stranger, where the game is the only concern.

Another example of how game play is significantly affected by the social context is Parking Wars. In Parking Wars, your personal knowledge of your friends’ real-world schedules allows you to surprise your friends and succeed in the game. As Ian Bogost, founder of Persuasive Games, notes on Gamasutra,

Playing Parking Wars is an exercise in predicting friends’ schedules. A colleague in Europe is likely to be sleeping during the evening in the States, and thus his street might offer safe haven at that hour.

And just as some meter-maids don’t get around to patrolling real streets, so some players of Parking Wars don’t get around to patrolling their virtual one. Of course, such players might just be busy, or they might even be baiting their colleagues so that they can later issue a whirlwind of unexpected tickets.

Receiving a ticket in Parking Wars isn’t a prank on the level of spreading dog poo on the underside of a buddy’s car door handle. Rather, the combination of latent, ongoing play and occasional “gotchas” makes plays in Parking Wars feel like pranks.

The game weaves its way into the player’s ordinary use of Facebook, rather than requiring complete immersion. This latency creates a credible context for surprises, just as the flow of the work day sets the stage for switched desk drawers or shoe polish-smeared telephone receivers.

Gotchas come in at least two forms: in giving or receiving a ticket (which pops up as a big, yellow overlay across the screen), and in the silent knowledge of having taken advantage of another player’s inattention.

Many games give players the opportunity to trick, fool, or swindle an opponent out of resources — just recall the pleasure of seeing an opponent land on a particularly valuable property in Monopoly. But in Parking Wars, players aren’t always expecting it. By setting up an ordinary social environment for disruption, Parking Wars becomes a medium for pranks, a kind of video game whoopie cushion.

What do you think distinguishes social games from multi-player games? Are they really that different?

Bubble Town is an arcade puzzle game developed by I-Play, the object of which is to launch little “borbs” that look like smiling people into a cluster above you. By matching up three or more similar borbs, you not only clear them from the board, but also gain points. Clearing the board of borbs will advance you to the next board/level. Try saying that five times fast.

The game has several menus to invite friends, a mobile option, and the ability to see scores on a global scale. However, the game’s selling point, and why it continues to thrive, is completely tied to its gameplay.

On the consumer side, the game is plenty addictive and extremely fun, with strong attention paid to graphics and variety. The game gets more difficult with each level, and players are rewarded with powerup “borbs” and combo points for particularly effective matches.

The interface and instruction menu are some of the best I’ve seen. The developers even created an instruction animation sequence to show how to play the game, making it much easier for beginners. Despite the impressive animations, quirky icons, and challenging gameplay, I can’t give the game a perfect score knowing full well that I’ve seen this game before.

There is room for improvement, however. There are no attempts to build a community around the program, something that many competing applications have begun to do.

Like many other Facebook games, Bubble Town owes much of its success to being a Facebook adaptation of a formerly popular game, Snood. The developers should be commended for their brilliant adaptation, and we can only hope their creativity will lead to new and original projects as well.

Gameplay: 9/10

Developers: 6/10

Feelings of Déjà vu: 8/10

Armies by Frozenbear is a game that takes full advantage of the social networking context offered by Facebook. The game asks you to raise your armed forces from a trainee to a full fledged army. In order to get credits to upgrade your unit (more on this later) and purchase better units.

Players are offered a variety of options to accrue credits. The most obvious route is to get credits by going to war. You can compete against players with similar strengths in the World War tab (a smart move as this ensures the really strong players won’t bully the noobs). Or you can fight the Army Kid, a computer bot. After you click “fight,” the computer determines who wins based on your respective strength. Even if you have less overall strength, there is still a chance you can win so there is little incentive not to try. You can also challenge your friends.

By winning, you are given a certain number of credits that you can use to buy weapons upgrades (like knives, artillery pieces, and M-16s) or better units (like grunts, battalions, or fire squads). The big units cost thousands upon thousands of credits, so you either need to spend a lot of time fighting or use alternative means of procuring credits.

Inviting your friends (”drafting” them in the game’s language) helps, and the game does a good job of enticing you to invite your friends to build up your forces. But even without them, this game can be fun by simply challenging the bot, challenging random people in the World War, or playing the “Build Morale” mini-game which allows you to risk credits to gain credits - a pseudo-gambling feature.

The game also has several partnerships with other applications and outside companies. By giving their partners business, you get a lot of credits (some are worth a couple thousand). It’s a great business strategy - Frozenbear gets strong marks for pushing you to help further the game’s interests.

There is also a strong social component to the game. Aside from the friend invitations, there are a number of larger armies players can join (or you can start your own). People really get into their armies and try to take on opposing armies, so that opens up a group mentality and shared cause dynamic. You don’t need other people to enjoy the game, but having friends to challenge and join your ranks makes it a much richer experience.

On the gaming side, the lack of animation and strange slowdowns at points can be frustrating. None of the artwork to depict your armies is original, and the language is oddly colloquial, so it doesn’t maintain the “military” motif very well. The game is well developed, but still obviously very cheaply made. Hiring a staff artist to depict uniform pictures and inserting some flash animation for the battles wouldn’t take much time or resources these days.

The game also doesn’t require any skills - just time - which can be a deterrent for some gamers. And by time, I mean eons. Unless you plan on inviting everyone you know and taking a lot of the partner offers, getting the really big stuff is like trying to win a stuffed animal at a fair - it’s there for show but almost no one actually wins it.

Still, many people will be drawn to the social aspects and the openness of the experience. Even on a basic level, playing “soldier” is fun.

Developer’s Score: 9/10
Gameplay Score: 6/10
Days it will take you to amass credits to buy a bomber: 1,984

Three weeks ago, Mashable had the news that social game developer Bunchball has raised a $4 million Series B from Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures on top of an earlier $10 $2 million A round.

Writing about the funding, Tenuki’s Bret Terrill said, “In many ways, Bunchball is much further down the path than either Zynga or SGN. Bunchball has an amazing product, a complete game platform and analytics suite, complete with avatars, currency, leaderboards, etc. Rather than focusing on attracting eyeballs with hopes to get acquired by EA, Bunchball has sold their services to large media brands like NBC.”

While Bunchball has yet to achieve the success that SGN and Zynga have in terms of growth or engagement on Facebook, the additional funding should give them the resources to make a significant go of it over the coming year.

Update: Bunchball CEO Rajat Paharia responds in comments below that the company is not planning on taking on SGN and Zynga directly on social networks, but is focusing on building its business around building game mechanics into websites.

Two weeks ago, Serious Business, Inc., makers of popular Facebook social game Friends For Sale, announced that it had raised a $4 million Series A venture round from Lightspeed Venture Partners at an undisclosed “healthy double-digit” valuation. The investment was disclosed by Lightspeed’s Jeremy Liew, who is becoming a board member, and Siqi Chen, co-founder of Serious Business, at last week’s Games 2.0 panel at Web 2.0 Expo.

Serious Business and Liew claim that their idea of baking virality into the game mechanic - instead of layering games on top of social networks and using them for distribution - is the special sauce that will allow them to build a business in social games.

Read the full interview with Serious Business co-founders Siqi Chen and Alex Le at Inside Facebook

Snowraft is a snowball fight action/strategy game by Matt Burton and Amir Amini. Employing adorable flash animation and an annoyingly catchy soundtrack, the game is simple: command your little army of red kids to throw snowballs at the blue kids. When you get hit with a snow ball, you freeze and can’t move. Too many hits and you’re dead. Last team standing wins.

In order to get bigger snowballs and better health, you need to invite your friends. Once it becomes obvious that you’re dead in this adolescent frozen arms race without proper armament, you decide to invite everyone you know.

Developers could learn a lot from this game because it incorporates simple flash animation, an easy-control system (click, drag, click), and an economy that is tied to perpetuating itself through invites.

Yet, this is also one of the more player-friendly games I’ve played. You don’t have to rely on your vast army of friend invites to move beyond stage one. The challenging AI makes it so the initial two stages are enticing enough to get players to want to keep playing. There’s a chance that players could quit before getting upgrades (and inviting friends), but it’s a worthy risk by the developers. If the game is any good (Snowraft is), players will invite their friends not only to keep playing it, but also because they want to share it. Once they’ve added the application, you can challenge your friends to earn more points and bragging rights.

While the gameplay isn’t difficult - you essentially move your characters as close to theirs as possible and then click repeatedly - it’s both fun and addictive enough to keep playing. There’s a certain element of strategy too in terms of how much you want to micromanage your team.

I found it really easy to keep dodging with one and then attacking the enemy while they reloaded. This often left my other two guys as sitting ducks, which meant the game was more strategy-intensive than I had initially thought. Still, even with the upgrades this game isn’t going to become an addiction that is going to get you fired at work and lead you to living a life in a box. So, it’s not the next Snood, but it is worth a chance for a couple hours.

It’s a solid little game that is simplistic in its formula but is unobtrusive in its requests to perpetuate. In other words, the game doesn’t sacrifice self-perpetuation for gameplay.

Developer’s Score: 7/10

Gameplay: 7/10

Odds soundtrack will get stuck in head: 8/10

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While there are many more developers of Facebook games that are growing in popularity, two companies - Zynga Game Network (Zynga) and Social Gaming Network (SGN) - are taking a broader approach. Instead of just building games, they’re building “game networks” across Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and more in an attempt to become the largest game distribution channel in the social networking world.

That means SGN and Zynga are building their own “platforms within a platform” that enable developers access to 1) enhanced services like game feeds and analytics, and 2) promotional opportunities to reach the network’s large gaming audiences, like the game bar.

Zynga and SGN have both launched their own developer tools and APIs and are working feverishly to build out their networks with the best games and developer services. Already, both have acquired smaller game developers and signed up many more.

And the competition is fierce. Recently, SGN announced the acquisition of several independent game developers (Suleman Ali and Jamal Ashraf of Esgut, Zach Allia of Free Gifts, and Adam Gries and Wayne Mak of Nicknames), while Zynga has been quietly acquiring top developers and adding them to its ranks as well. Top game developers have multiple options on the table.

For those choosing to remain independent, joining a network still has its benefits. Both Zynga and SGN have been aggressively courting game developers into their corner.

And some developers are switching allegiances. For example, Chad Boyda of Launch 10 Labs, developers of The Dot Game, recently moved from Zynga over to SGN. According to Chad,

We switched to SGN near the end of March. We found that despite getting tons of clicks on the Zynga bar, our growth had actually gone flat. While this can be attributed to many factors, we found the most significant one being our users’ experience with the large Zynga bar. Our hypothesis is that our users were confused by the large Zynga bar featured at the top of our game. We decided to try SGN because of its simple approach and smaller footprint.

How will the battle for game developers shake out? Stay tuned. At the same time, Zynga and SGN continue to develop their own games in order to best understand the needs of the developer community - playing the combined role of developer and distributor.

Texas HoldEm Poker is the flagship game by Zynga Game Network, and it’s little wonder this game is successful. The combination of simple flash animation, any easy interface, a vibrant community, and an already-addictive game make Texas HoldEm an unsurprising hit.

Developers should pay attention to the plethora of options that Texas HoldEm provides the player. The digital chips used for placing bets can be bought using real cash, won in the game, or earned in a number of ways. Players can earn chips by signing up for an offer at one of the many Zynga partners or installing another application that has integrated support for Texas HoldEm. If that isn’t your thing, inviting your friends is another quick way to get chips and perpetuate the game. Once inside, you and your friends can set up a private table.

Texas HoldEm has a distinct advantage over other games by because so many people are already familiar with the game (and often play it with people they don’t know). But Zynga smartly invested in some decent Flash animation and a few bells and whistles to make the experience more than just a card game. In order to prevent the game from stalling due to indecision or idleness, each player is given a timer to call, raise, or fold. This helps prevent a game’s arrest at the hands of someone who left their desktop to go make a sandwich.

You can play anyone in the world - not just your friends - just simply click “play” and you’re at the table with several other players from all over the world. There is a ranking system that is kept up to date so players know how they stand in the larger million plus community. One can also achieve a star status that corresponds to an ability level (Shark, Playa, Poker Pro, etc). During the game, a side-scrolling text window shows the last few moves of the table and a chat window allows players to communicate with one another. There are also digital “drinks” players can pass each other to further lend to the atmosphere. Each player can add their own icon (your poker face, if you will) to enhance the interactive experience.

Beyond the game itself, the supporting features are quite staggering. In addition to the ranking system, there are player profiles, leader boards, an active forum, and a help tab for players who are new to the game. I had to refresh my memory on some of the rules and the help tab was largely informative, though it skips on some of the more obtuse rules.

Overall, Texas HoldEm is the definitive poker app on Facebook. The developers do everything in their power to make the game as interactive and personal as possible. The game is able to survive not only because of partnerships and not only because of its invites = chips economy, but because the game is just really, really fun.

Developer’s rating: 9/10

Gameplay: 9/10

Likelihood you’ll be caught at work playing this game: 9/10