…I’d like to lay down two rules everyone should try and follow:

#1: TCGs are for fun, not pain. Throw elbows at will and play to win, but remember this is a community. This is not the place to make yourself feel better at someone else’s expense.

#2: If someone falls down, you pick them back up. Is there a new guy at your local hobby store who came with a starter deck, quietly sitting by himself, and he doesn’t know anyone? Introduce yourself, and make him feel welcome. Did you just beat an inexperienced player with a bad deck? Shake his hand, and be friendly. Offer up some deck tips, or even strike up a conversation unrelated to Marvel Superstars. Let’s make sure every player has a great experience, even if they don’t win a game all day.

There are other games where you can be out for yourself, crush everyone in your path without regard, and get rewarded for it. And for some people, this is what they’re looking for: a stressful, hypercompetitive environment.

But Marvel Superstars will be different. It’s about putting down the mouse or console controller, and getting out of the house to make new friends at your local hobby store. It’s about having fun playing a game with people face-to-face, in a positive environment, and encouraging as many people as you can to join in the experience. It’s about building the kind of community that picks people up when they fall, instead of stomping on their bodies until they learn the hard way or leave.

That’s what this is about, and that’s what we’re going to build together.

via Marvel Trading Card Game News Archive.

Magic is no doubt the granddaddy of trading card games, and many of the other trading card games are designed and developed by Magic Pro Tour alums.  Trading card game mechanics are hopelessly wide open (probably Turing Complete but I need to do some homework there), so each game is built on a few key assumptions.  This article from the Marvel Superstars site describes what’s great about its gameplay in contrast to some things people don’t like about Magic.  It’s worth reading the whole article (and all of the Marvel news) if you’re interested in trading card game design.

We know that people love a whole slew of different things about trading card games. You might enjoy creating original decks the most, while your buddy digs TCGs for the community. One of the things that I find the most appealing is the simple fun of playing the cards. I mean, actually playing the cards. Not saying “Draw, go,” not having my cards fizzle, and not watching my opponent drag out a combo that requires him to search his deck four times while I wonder if I’ll get to play my first turn. I like to make plays, and see what tactic my opponent will come back with.For all the people out there that came to play, take a look at how Marvel Superstars brings more action to your tabletop than your typical TCG experience.

via Marvel Trading Card Game News Archive.

1. Zynga might copy other games, but it doesn’t matter
2. Zynga’s games might be simple, but it doesn’t matter
3. Zynga might dominate your category, but it doesn’t matter

Zynga might copy other games, but it doesn’t matter

Many (all?) of Zynga’s games are clones or spinoffs of other games that have been successful.  Zynga has the money and talent to develop games quickly (a couple weeks to a couple months) and the money and audience to promote their games into rapid popularity.  So what has happened several times is that another game company will make a game that starts to spread and become popular, then Zynga releases a similar game that blows past the first game in all the important metrics.  Where other games gradually build their way to millions of users, Zynga’s games have hit millions of users in the first few days and tens of millions in the first few weeks.  This has led to many accusations and finger pointing about Zynga ripping off any idea that shows potential.

Does Zynga actually copy other ideas?  I’m not so sure.  Well, I think they probably do but that’s an unsubstantiated opinion, so let’s play devil’s advocate.  First, let’s review the Zynga Minimum Viable Product testing method:

Mark Pincus:  We do something at Zynga that I call “ghetto testing.” I like to take someone who has a gigantic idea, usually a game designer, and they have some gigantic idea that this would just be great…  Maybe they really want a hospital simulation game…

We want to ghetto test it.  Again, we have so many bullets (engineering hours) we can fire, and we’ve got to just treasure and honor our engineers.  If we do our job right, they don’t get burned out.  They have a great life and we have successful products, so that’s what we want.

So I say to the marketing person or the product manager, “Describe it in five words.  It’s built.  If six months from now we built every dream you have, how are you going to market it?  Give me the five words.”

We’ll put that up.  We’ll put up a link for five minutes saying, “Hey!  Do you ever fantasize about running your own hospital?” … We’ll put that up for five minutes, and the link will maybe take you to a survey, where you give us your email and we say when this comes out we’ll contact you. If you’re really doing ghetto, it says ’404 not found’.  That’s bad.

So first you try to get the heat around it, you see how much do people like it, then…

Once we get to the point of actually building a game, or building a new feature, which we love Bing [Gordon's] idea of golden mechanics.  You should take away and steal it from us, the idea of not a game, but a feature that you can deconstruct and see that this interactive feature – a way to do a gift will drive virality or retention or revenues. So we put it in a feature we can build in a week – it’s a ghetto build we AB test it, we flow test it, we put it out to one percent.

We built a data warehouse with a testing platform so we’re running several hundred tests at any given time for every one of our games.  And no single user has more than one test.

What does this have to do with copying?  Each time they evaluate the idea’s performance, they prune the underperforming ideas.  This means that to get a feel for the number of ideas they test out, you have to take the number of games they publish and back out their pruning rate for each evaluation step.  So let’s say they evaluate at the Google Ad phase, the landing page phase, the two-week prototype phase, and the two month development phase before they put a game into wide release.  Let’s also say they take the top 10% of ideas at each phase.  This means that for every game they release using this funnel, they’ve tested 10,000 ideas, and since they have 20 or so games released right now, they might have tested hundreds of thousands of ideas.  I completely made these numbers up, but if you think they sound unrealistic, remember that over 200,000,000 people play one of their games every month.  That’s Japan + Germany.

So looking at games from a demand perspective rather than a supply perspective, maybe there are only a few dozen game ideas that are fresh, creative, and intriguing enough to have millions of players, and Zynga is likely to find them independently of what the rest of the market does by virtue of their sheer numbers.  Before you tell me how there’s an unlimited range of creative possibilities for games, blah, blah, blah, think about the types of games that are for sale right now.  Running around with a gun, running around with a sword, fighting, abstract puzzles, flying around with guns, social simulations, pretending to play music, what else?  Did I miss any?  This isn’t a knock on game designers, just an argument that whether of not Zynga copies other game companies, they would probably find the hit game themes on their own.

Zynga’s games might be simple, but it doesn’t matter

The next knock against Zynga is that their games are simplistic and the people that play them are dumb (NOTE: I don’t buy this but I’ve heard it a million times).  Texas Hold ‘Em is an exception to this entire point, so don’t bring it up.  But all of the ‘Villes share one common trait:  the only way to lose is to not play as much as possible.  You can get ahead by playing more and paying more.  And what do you get for your time and money?  A pretty fake farm, or a bustling fake restaurant, or a <adjective> fake <fill in the blank>.  You know what’s funny about that?  This criticism comes from people that play “hardcore” video games!  Which reward you with … a cutscene?  An ending animation?  A sense of accomplishment for finishing some arbitrary set of challenges given to you by someone you paid $50 to?  Wow kettle, you are SO black!

Let’s face it, games are about creating emotional experiences.  Hardcore gamers do it for fiero for overcoming some challenge but there are lots of different emotions people get from games (pdf).  While Zynga’s games don’t challenge your cognitive capacity, or reaction times, or teamwork, or much else besides your ability to commit to something and put in the time, those are not the way that the business of games are measured.  Games as a business are measured by how many people keep playing and keep paying.  Video game designers have known for generations that people like accomplishing something and if they feel like there’s more to accomplish, they’ll keep coming back.  This is why the role-playing aspect shows up in so many of social games – it’s easy to add new levels, new items, etc that keep people coming back.  So games like World of Warcraft that provide an almost endless range of items, accomplishments, and experiences make so much more money than shrink-wrapped role playing games that end when you beat the final boss.  Emotional experiences sell.

What does this have to do with Zynga?  Right now, there are hundreds of millions of players that will pay (with attention or money) for simple, satisfying simulations of things they could be doing in real life.  Lots of people like the idea of gardening but fewer want to deal with bugs, dirty fingernails, time commitments in the hours instead of minutes, weeding, etc.  Becoming a farmer is a ridiculously huge commitment to make, but playing one on Facebook gives you a fraction of the satisfaction but without any of the drawbacks.  Ditto for running a restaurant, tending an aquarium, etc.

But what happens when these players wise up and start demanding better gameplay?  Will they leave Zynga games in droves and crash a potential IPO?  That question misses the point – people aren’t demanding gameplay, they’re demanding emotional experiences.  I’d bet my teeth that Pincus and company, in their hundreds of ideas they test, include experiments about experiences that aren’t the current prevailing mood.  For instance, I bet that some users are trying out negative impacts on their farms (pests, cold snaps, etc), some are seeing variable prices for their crops based on a market, etc.  Some things with more challenge, some with more realism, etc.  If any of these starts to take off because of a shift in cultural mood, gaming experience, or whatever, Zynga will be the first to know it and the first to react to it.

To those who think Zynga only makes dumb simulation games, I say they make the games that the largest number of people engage with.  I heard Mark Pincus speak at Startup School and I have no doubt that they’re attacking the simple simulation games because there’s money to be made there, and as gaming tastes and moods shift over time, Zynga will be on top of those trends faster than anyone else.  They’ve got the cash, the talent, the audience, the experience and the drive to ride whatever the biggest wave in consumer gaming.

Zynga might dominate your category, but it doesn’t matter

So Zynga is probably copying successful ideas, and they monitor the best way to monetize current gaming moods.  So if you’re a game developer, there’s a fear that Zynga will steal whatever thunder you have.  If you’re a big publisher like Playfish, yeah, this might be a problem.  Just like being the second biggest publisher of word processing software only worked for a while, being the second biggest social game publisher could end up being a big drag.  So I don’t have any great news for those people.

But for smaller game publishers, you have the opportunity to make a much more personal connection to your players.  If you’re aiming for ultra broad general appeal, you’re vulnerable to getting Zynga’d.  But if you have some niche that not everyone buys into, you can own it and your users will love you.  For instance, instead of a pet simulator, you make the best snake pet simulator.  Most people won’t want to raise a snake, but the snake lovers won’t be able to get enough.  Or hopefully, rather than the 129th swords and wizards themed game, I’m counting on people loving a game that captures the power and creativity of science and technology.  Science might not be the biggest mainstream theme, but I suspect there’s enough interest to build a comfortable business on.  This is all typical Long Tail and Seth Godin stuff that should sound familiar to lots of people.  Do something unique and do an outstanding job at it.  This will protect you from the big bad behemoth who profits from the general interest but is also bound by it.  No matter how big or rich Zynga gets, there will always be new game ideas, old ideas executed in new ways, and too much diversity of interest for one company to monopolize.

This leads to annoyance #2. Each game is simulated in real-time. Sounds cool on paper, but there isn’t much to really see except some pictures moving about a soccer ball and scrolling text. And, guess what… you can’t skip it! Yes, you have to sit there for five minutes, or however long it takes, before you can see the results and move on.

via Hive7 Releases New Facebook Soccer RPG: Kick Off.

The problem isn’t that you can’t speed through the simluation – the problem is that it’s simulated!  This is the same thing in Challenge’s games, the Zynga and Playfish games, etc.  It seems like focus is on making games social completely overshadows the need to make games fun.

Maybe challenging or strategic gameplay limits the market.  These social games aren’t challenging; there’s a straightforward reward to engagement, not performance.  And there are more people that want to be entertained than challenged.  Still, gaming should be an experience, and these companies that are whose “games” are really just simulations or dominoes are leaving something on the table and are vulnerable to up and coming companies that offer social features and quality games.

The essence of intelligence is the perception and manipulation of patterns. Tetris excels in letting us exercise this ability. In fact it was the observation of game designer Brian Moriarty (designer of Beyond Zork and Loom) that people love to find patterns in things which led me to this realization. Other games that excel at this range from video games like Bejeweled, through various toys and pastimes like crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, or physical puzzles like Rubic’s Cube. Even appreciating music is a form of mental fun, since music is patterned sound just as poetry and song are patterned words. The Natural Funativity theory suggests that these mental games should teach us something that was useful for survival to our cave-dwelling ancestors. Although the literal action of Tetris is at best a severe stretch to link to survival activities, the more abstract function of quickly recognizing – and acting – on patterns is quite useful.

via Gamasutra – Features – “Natural Funativity” – printer friendly.

Great article recommended in the Game Design Concepts course.  That’s one of my goals with GeekStack – make it fun by rewarding what people are already driven to do, while teaching them how to do new things they want to do.

True to his point about offending people, I took offense and learned a lesson about my own view of games when I read this paragraph near the end:

But on a more zoomed out level, what is Magic really about? Is it about delivering the most fun gameplay experience possible to its players? Or selling collectible items that have artificial scarcity? One gets in the way of the other, as it stands. I propose that the essence of customizable card games is the gameplay, and that collectability is purely a barrier between players and the game. But making such a statement naturally creates a firestorm of argument because it forces us define what the essence of a game is. That can be uncomfortable to do.

I agree that he has a point, but I think he missed something else.  The essence of a card game is gameplay, but collecting is essential to a collectible card game.  Yes, beyond a certain level of investment in the game (hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of packs) to get all the best cards, it is only about gameplay.  But for everyone below that bar, collectability and scarcity add a whole new game of resource management, involving real money and relationships to get the cards you think are best.  You can use skill and understanding to be competitive with less money, or use money to make up for lack of experience.  None of this matters at the highest level of gaming where Sirlin plays, but for the millions of everyday players around the world, it’s an integral part of the experience.

Also, for some people the deck customization is more fun than playing.  Again, this doesn’t apply to high level competitive players like Sirlin, but if you love the themes and art, use it as a springboard for imagination, or don’t have access to other players, deckbuilding is fulfilling in its own right.  If it was easy to have every card, then deckbuilding would have no tension and lose a lot of its fun.  With his Yomi game, the decks are premade and fixed so it’s a card game, not collectible card game.

Finally, the business model of CCGs creates a different business experience.  The artificial scarcity creates a lot of value, and the money paid for that value goes into creating a great product.  Magic makes $100M/year, so they can spend a lot on design, development, art, promotion, events, and outreach.  I imagine that Yomi will sell for $10-$20 a deck, so it can’t make Magic-sized money.  Its self-contained nature means it might be around long after Magic stops being made.  Magic makes a lot of money but costs a lot to produce, so if the money stops rolling on, the game will stop being made.  Yomi might have more longevity than Magic, but it can’t compete in depth and breadth of the experience.  On a continuum between D&D and chess, Magic is closer to D&D and Yomi is closer to chess.  They’re not really competitors and the world could use more games like both of them.

I have nothing but respect for David Sirlin, but he missed the point of CCGs.

I tried all of the obvious ones but they all had either thematic or gameplay problems.  Killing your opponent is a tried and true gameplay goal, but with a theme as positive and constructive as science and discovery, it didn’t make sense.  Achieving some goal before your opponent worked thematically but didn’t provide enough interaction to be a compelling game.  It was just two-man solitaire.  In all the other games, your overall goal is to affect your opponent’s resource (life or damage).  Focusing on your own resource seemed to inward facing.

But today I had a eureka moment.  (Aside: for everyone who thinks that eureka moments are a shortcut to discovery, quit kidding yourself.  You can only have them if you’ve filled your head to overflowing with the problem you’re working on.  For a long time.  Just so you know, this endgame problem has been haunting me for a week.  I’ve dreamed about cardgames 5 times in the last 5 days.  I skipped a day but had two separate dreames one night after my baby woke me up.  Eureka is the prize for dogged perserverance.)  You’re competing for fame, public attention, public awareness, or something like that.  Your achievements earn you points and the first one to a total (probably 20) wins.

But how’s that different from the solitaire I described earlier?  Since the point of the game is to promote science literacy, it’s operating in a world where there’s a limited public attention span for science! You need 20 points to win, but there are only 30 points available in the world at the start of the game and you and your opponent draw from the same pool.  Genius!

For those who don’t read 50-100 pages of game design theory and history a day, let me explain some of the reasons why this will make for a great game:

• No game that I know of does this, so it should lead to interesting new strategies.
• You have to make steady progress.  You can go for big wins but a quick opponent can beat you despite the limited resource if you’re too slow.
• This resource can be affected like a player’s resource can.  So media or government actions could increase the total fame pool, or anti-science measures could reduce it, making it easier or harder for both players to be close to winning.
• Since the public pool can run out of points, the game can switch to zero sum play, where you have to take something away from your opponent to win, rather than just improve yourself (if a new discovery is made but everyone is watching American Idol, should there be any reward?)
• Cards could have an “exactly X points” vs “up to X points”, preventing big effects if there’s not enough public interest for them (think of the scuttled Superconducting Super Collider) while limiting the bang of others.

I think these and other reasons make the “public interest pool” a rich design resource that opens up a lot of possibilities, both in gameplay mechanics and theme.  And all this time I was just shooting for “good enough”.

First, let me share an experience from the Rebooting Computing conference I attended a couple weeks ago.  Many of the attendees were in CS education (both University and K-12) and the rest were people who loved computig, so it was no surprise that they wanted CS to be taught in high school and possible younger.  The main problem that even the starry eyed dreamers admitted was that school time is a finite resource and to make computing a required class would mean displacing something else.  Similarly, if I start out with 5 (or 10, or whatever) fields, then adding another one means restructuring the game completely, something that would be impossible after it has been released.  I wouldn’t want to exclude nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, or whatever just because I didn’t think of it in the beginning.

Second, since I’m taking a 21st century, post-industrial approach to education (creating intrinsic motivation rather than harnessing extrinsic motivation), I might as well take a 21st century approach to science.  Each field has advanced so deeply and specialized so much that the real eye-catching advances in science are in interdisciplinary fields.  I don’t even know the names of all of them – maybe they don’t even have names.  But knowledge and experience from every field is expanding the vision of others, and computing is a prime example.  There’s not a field of science out there that isn’t benefiting from computing changing the speed and nature of how they work.  Just as Magic has put out dozens of expansion sets that probe the design space of the game, the interactions in the color theme, and the mythology of the worlds they create, GeekStack has the potential to have an expasion for each new field, sub-field, cross-field, or whatever I can find.

Science is the depth I’d like to explore, not the structure with which to explore.  I’m trying to build a framework that can support the endless torrent of innovation that mankind is producing.

An important part of the theme and balance is the role each player takes.

Here’s the obligatory comparison to Magic and WoW.  In Magic, all the players are identical; it’s only the deck construction that’s differnet.  Same life, same restrictions on cards, etc.  Choosing how to balance the five colors creates the different deck personalities.  In WoW, you’re playing a hero, and different heroes have different strengths and weaknesses.  They have different life totals and can equip/ally different cards.

My first stab at player roles was to let them have widely different options.  They could play a novice scientist, a veteran scientist, a university, a company, a lab, a city/region, a country, etc.  Each of these would have different strengths and weaknesses and different goals.  While I really liked the idea (I think it was the first thing I actually starred in my notebook), I think it would be difficult to balance, time consuming to learn, and take some of the competitiveness out of the game if you and your opponent were doing different things.  I could make it so you can only play against someone of the same type, but with a TCG, that either ups the expense or limits the number of people you can play this.  Maybe this concept will see the light in a video game someday, where it’s shortcomings could be handled better.

My current take on the idea (which amazes me that I didn’t think of this first) is to let the players play different kinds of scientists.  You could have a physicist character, an applied mathematician character, a microbiologist, etc.  This way, more fields of science can be added later, and the player heroes can be included in sets that have cards that play to them.  For instance, if there was a geologist role, it would come in a set that included things like oil companies, bridge building, earthquake reinforcement, etc.  As new sets were released, they could introduce new character roles with accompanying cards, as well as include some fresh cards for existing character roles.  This way, rather than being stuck with five colors or eight classes, the breadth of options can increase, in addition to the depth.

I’ll post more tomorrow about my view of the role of fields of science on the game.  What I won’t post about (because I’m frustrated about being unable to answer) is what the goal of the gameplay is.  But when I figure that out, it will be a happy day!

The two overarching categories would be Science and Context.  Every card would be in one of these, and then have a subcategory.  I’d like to match them up so they’re the same in both Science and Context, like how the character classes are the same across factions in WoW, so you have two ways to include a card in your deck.  They don’t match up now but it looks like a promising design so I’ll keep working on it.  These are the categories as I have them right now:

• Science (other possible names: Innovation, ?)
  • People
  • Ideas/concepts
  • Experiments
  • Discoveries
  • Places
  • Events
• Context (other possible names: History, Support, ?)
  • History
  • Legal
  • Funding
  • Organizations
  • Business
  • Economy

This seems more sensible than yesterday’s idea so I think I will run with it and see where it goes.  It works pretty well with the player roles I sketched out as well, but I’ll save that for tomorrow.