Exposing Social Gaming's Hidden Lever
blog.betable.com
blog.betable.com
A while back when I was working on a roguelike (i.e. dungeon crawl RPG) I stumbled onto the same realization: assured incremental improvement + random chance for something awesome = addictive gameplay.
This is how almost every RPG works at its core: every battle ends with a little guaranteed experience and gold plus a small random chance of an awesome loot drop.
Why? Because you die. A lot. And when you die, you need to start all over again. And you make progress further and further into the dungeon on successive games, by learning from your mistakes and honing your strategy. And if you don't learn, you don't progress.
Contrast to WoW, where (as I understand it without having ever played it) death is merely a mild inconvenience, and you forever level up and up and up just by grinding away at it -- getting to the highest level is largely just a matter of being patient.
WoW still has very well designed game mechanics that are fun on their own. Learning (ie advancing up the learning curve) and decision making play a big role in having fun in RPG's. These are also true game mechanics (meaning they're fun without reward mechanisms).
On one end of the spectrum would be a game like Team Fortress 2, which is fun because of it's mechanics; on the other end of the spectrum is a Zynga game that is fun for the reward mechanisms. WoW, and other RPG's would be somewhere in the middle.
Though things get a little bit easy once you get your two blessed scrolls of charging, blessed Platinum Yendorian Express Card, blessed Orb of Fate, blessed +3 silver dragon scale mail, and whatever else you can wish up from the remaining charges.
"Random Reward Schedule" and "variable interval reinforcement schedule" look like different names for the same concept, but looking closer the former seems to cover both time and reward, and the latter focuses on the time component. Am I reading this correctly?
"The biggest thing that unequivocally separates social gaming from gambling is that the players have no ability to tangibly recoup the money put into the game."
Oh you mean like the video games I used to play in arcades? Like Gauntlet, which was one of the first quarter suckers? How many days did I go without a lunch so that I could play Spyhunter, Elevator Action, or Gauntlet? But I had fun. That's the whole point of gaming, isn't it?
When you buy a video game like Doom, Call of Duty, etc, aren't those same elements present? The only difference is that there is a front-loaded payment as opposed to something like Farmville where there are micropayments, which, by the way, you don't even have to pay if you don't want to!!
The comparison to gambling is a complete stretch. Sure they may use similar tactics, but so what? There's no gambling element in the sense that there there is risk vs reward. That's like saying that in Plants Vs. Zombies, when I buy a "mystery plant" for my zen garden, it's some form of gambling. It's not!
With games like Farmville, you are paying to play, like old school arcades. To compare "social" gaming to gambling is just wrong. (Even the term "social" gaming to Farmville is misplaced, there's nothing social about it except the ability to visit other people's farms. Nothing about the game is enhanced via the social aspect.)
This is entirely different from a slot machine where "if I just do 10 more pulls, I might win $1MM! My luck is bound to turn sooner or later!" It's a completely different mentality. You put money in slot machines because you consider it an investment in hopes that you will make back more money than you put in. If you removed the ability for people to win money, the casinos would probably be empty, despite how many blips and bloops you put into the game.
There is overlap, especially in RPG's, but the big difference is that you can enjoy traditional games without the rewards.
If you read the following presentation from the Farmville developer, the reason why Farmville was so popular was because it was designed to be simple with a very easy reward system. It was made for the single moms who have spent an entire day taking care of their kids, and they want to sit back and relax to something fun that isn't particularly challenging.
http://www.slideshare.net/ctrottier1/designing-games-for-the...
Surely something like Farmville has some gameplay elements, right? I've never played it, but there are some choices to be made (shall I get chickens or cows), right?
'strong game loop' was vague, what I meant was what I said in the last sentence, that you can enjoy playing a traditional game without rewards. It is fun to play on its own merit. If you take away the rewards from a social game, it can't stand up on it's own as a 'fun game'.
In Farmville, there are gameplay elements, but its very minimal. In Cow Clicker, another social game, there are no game mechanics at all. There are some 'hardcore' social game companies, like Kabam, but they end up just having more elaborate reward feedback mechanisms.