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 and open up their ad targeting functionality to developers. 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.