Play the game of life

April 21st, 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti

For our ancestors, farming and violence were a big part of life. In order to survive, the only thing more important than finding dinner was avoiding becoming someone else’s. Happily today, life is much easier. Despite what the media says, society is considerably safer than ever before. And at least in rich countries, only a tiny fraction of the population is needed to toil in the fields to produce our food.

Soldiers of fortune
But this trend, it seems, only applies to the real world. In the virtual world – perhaps to satisfy our primordial urges – warfare and farming are booming. According to Geekologie, with 11m subscribers, there are more people playing the MMOG (massively multi-player online game) World of Warcraft than there are living in New York City. Together the 4.5m European and North American subscribers generate over $800m in revenue each year. The North Americans manage to spend on average 22 hours a week playing the game, only 13 hours short of the typical working week.

But just as in the history of the real world, the number of people involved in virtual war pales in comparison with the number of virtual farmers. Farmville, a Facebook application where people grow crops and sell them at market, has a staggering 82m users, equivalent to more than 1% of the world’s population. If last year’s trends continued, one day soon there would be more virtual farmers in the world than real farmers.

While there are many different theories for the phenomenal success of Farmville, most relate to the social aspects of the game. A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz argues “the secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because it entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies.” This social aspect is encouraged by the fees: unless you want to pay for the pleasure of growing imaginary crops, to play you must have at least other eight friends helping you out.

Making hay while the sun shines
Despite the huge popularity of these games, the gaming industry as a whole has fallen on hard times. For every incredible success story, there are a many more failures or only marginally profitable games. For a developer, creating a game as financially successful and popular as World of Warcraft is incredibly difficult and expensive: the 1,400 locations, 30,000 items, 5,300 non-playing characters and 7,600 quests in the World of Warcraft were built over the years by a team of only 150 developers, requiring significant investment with statistically little probability of success.

With declining profitability, game designers have had to think of creative ways to make money. In Farmville if you want to buy virtual goods, you can either spend hours tilling the fields like an 18th century peasant, or you can use real money to bypass this deliberately repetitive labor. Rather than subscription fees, it is the sale of virtual goods that are the main source of its creator Zynga’s estimated $250m income. These micropayments can be made via PayPal, credit card, Pay by Mobile, Boku, Spare Change or by completing a reward offer (such as taking part in a survey).

Reward offers, which are usually created for advertising or focus testing purposes, are conflicting with the game developer’s interest because of the way they detract from the main experience.

Getting the farmers back to work
In a previous post I described how a little bit of game design could make even a repetitive job more interesting. Let’s now consider the opposite case: how can we integrate tasks into games and create a win-win situation both for players and the company running the game?

It seems to me that many players who are unable or unwilling to pay a subscription, or sustain the ongoing expenses required to run a virtual farm would be willing to carry out tasks in exchange for virtual (or real) currency. The challenge for designers is to “mask” the little work snippets, integrating them with the rest of the game. If this were possible, lucrative tasks related to tagging, recognition and association could quite easily be integrated into mini-games, even when they come from fields traditionally unrelated to gaming.

Along with boosting profits, such tasks could also reduce costs by contributing to the content of the game. Imagine, for example, if players of a game like World of Warcraft could help plan locations, design items or create quests: 150 developers created the game in its entirety, what if they could efficiently mobilize the 11m users?

Survival of the fittest
Getting it right, of course, is very tricky. In-game advertising, for example, struggled for years to find a working formula, and has only recently started to gain acceptance and importance, as discussed in an earlier post. Nonetheless, figuring out innovative business models which will encourage contributions from players who are reluctant to open their wallets is something that companies developing multiplayer or social games should consider as soon as they sit around a table to discuss a new project.

Charles Darwin reputedly said that “it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” As anyone who has ever toiled in the rather dull Farmville fields will tell you, this applies to the creators of virtual world just as it does to the real. Only gaming companies who adapt to the new world will survive.

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