Courtesy of Flickr's LivingOS

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know that we try to provide a steady stream of insightful information about the business side of social games. In our last post, we started to examine understanding micro-transactions and virtual goods. In particular, we focused on how game design could motivate players to interact with these features. So in today’s post, I thought it would be valuable to offer my perspective (as a newbie gamer) to playing social games and the different features that appealed to me. Why? I think it’s something that game designers, businesses and hopefully others (new Facebook gamers) can appreciate: a fresh look into what makes games “fun” to play. What are certain game design features that (even new) players can feel excited about? Here’s my list of Facebook games that I found interesting to play, let me know what you think.

Need For Speed Nitro

Although I’m not a big fan of racing games, this popular car racing game is really fun to play. If you like collecting, sharing, and racing cars and want to challenge your friends to races, this game is a must-try.  Admittedly, I do have a competitive spirit and love winning my races, so I like the option (feature) of being able to select the cities and race courses (that I want to use in the races). It’s probably all just part of engaging game mechanics (I’ve been doing a lot of research on this topic lately), but I feel like each course offers me a unique advantage for my experience level and my car’s abilities. It seems to me (not sure if this has any validity), as if I’m more successful at winning my races on the Rio course, as opposed to the ones in Madrid. Nevertheless, having that feature option is really nice. What really got me hooked though was the free customization feature in the game (kind of like Pimp My Ride, but a do-it-yourself version).  For me, designing my car is comparable to the experience of getting dressed every morning. It’s my way to express myself and add my personal stamp on something, to show-off a part of my personality. Secretly, I like the fact that my hot pink 1960 Volkswagen Westphalia might grab some attention.

Pet Pupz

In Pet Pupz, taking care of your puppy (the purpose of the game) feels like you are really nurturing a real-life animal. I feel like I have to visit my puppy every day and take care of it: it’s the ultimate responsibility for me, and it’s only available in this virtual setting. As far as specific features go, I really like the fact that I can take care of my friend’s puppy as well as mine. I feel like I am extending a helpful hand, showing that I care about her when I do that. It’s a nice social gesture and I feel as if through this process, I am actually strengthening my real-life relationships. Another feature that I really like in the game is the Scene Builder, because it allows me to (like in the previous game), customize and build my own product. As the name suggests, you can build a customized photo or scene and place your puppy in it. The reason I like the feature (and I feel that it’s worth my time investment) is because I can show it off to people when the product is finished (you can download the scene, print it out or post it to your wall). Bragging never hurt anybody…

Mob Wars

Mob Wars is interesting to me, because it’s a role playing game that I actually didn’t think it’d enjoy playing… that is until I started advancing in the game.  The fact that you can recruit your friends and therefore finish jobs quicker or level up faster made me feel like I really accomplished something and there was a real incentive for me to keep going on. I even thought that I could possibly start an all-girl mob (I’m not sure why I would’ve wanted to do that, but I did) however after realizing that I needed all the help I could get, I abandoned that idea. I also really like seeing my progress in the game, being able to buy my weapons (guns and crowbars) and seeing how it helps me to complete jobs etc.

I realize that this list is only a start. There are many other games that could be engaging to try and I promise to do it in time. In the meantime, if you have any recommendations, don’t hesitate to leave us a comment or contact us.

Courtesy of Flickr's tao zhyn

To start, thanks so much for joining our Facebook Page and contributing your thoughts and comments to our blog discussions – we really appreciate it! Since your feedback helps us craft this blog series, we wanted to address a particular topic that there has been a lot of buzz around: understanding micro-transactions (the sale of virtual goods) in social games. You might (or not) be surprised to learn that just like understanding how game design and game mechanics can help motivate and engage people in gameplay, the same principles can be applied to understanding why people buy virtual goods in the first place. This is important as virtual goods revenues are expected to hit almost $2 billion in the U.S alone this year.

While we’re planning to address the more complex issues surrounding the monetary ecosystem of social games in future posts, we thought we’d start here: How can game design and game mechanics create demand for virtual goods, essentially leading to player purchases?

Why Virtual Goods Matter

Virtual goods are digital items with contextual meaning. They are non-physical objects like avatars, bling or coins that are purchased for use in online games or communities. These objects are nothing more than icons or pixels, so why do we spend real cash on obtaining them? As we’ve explained before, games and play are basic survival adaptation and so are the way we perceive virtual goods. What the end user perceives as a virtual good is always part of a user experience–the gameplay–and it is usually delivered by the game design. From a game design (and business) point of view, it’s beneficial to understand this. Virtual goods hold meaning to the player, because they enable players to perform meaningful tasks within a game, like influencing game statistics or allowing for self-expression. They become metaphors for packaging up behaviours that people are already engaging in, offering real value.

Implications for Game Design

If it’s not about the virtual goods themselves, but it’s about the underlying human emotion or desire that is displayed by them that really matters (as some would argue it does) then we can see its significance for game design. Game designers can essentially create an environment that incorporates engaging ways to display, obtain and share these virtual goods. Researcher Vili Lehdonvirta suggests a few ways game designers can achieve this level of engagement. He explains that game designers can try to mimic conditions that are similar to environments that existed in our hunter-gatherer days, so to drive players to make virtual goods purchases. (We’ll see in future posts why this is important to understanding micro-transactions.) He suggests placing items in a game that provide functional attributes that players can relate to, like adding an element of performance advantage or new functionality. as he explains, other than just having desirable attributes, functional commodities also have a strong emotional and social meaning. As an example, in Need for Speed Nitro on Facebook, performance upgrades for cars generally have to be earned through gameplay instead of cash purchases, but cash purchases (sale of virtual goods) can help to reach these gameplay goals faster. What other features influence users’ purchase decisions? He suggests designing goods that can be customized or personalized, as this adds an element of social hierarchy for the player. Scarcity is another way game designers can create demand. Humans are hardwired to compete for scarce resources, so by making digital goods artificially scarce, designers are raising their perceived value.

As you can see, using game mechanics that make virtual goods seem more valuable and meaningful, we can incentivize players to action. We should note that we’ve hardly scratched the surface of this complex topic. There are many elements to building successful monetary ecosystems and how each one relates to gameplay. However, we felt that for game designers (or businesses) understanding how game design can create demand for virtual goods was an interesting implication to consider. What are your thoughts? Leave us a comment or contact us.

Courtesy of Flickr's ericgjerde

As we promised, here is our second installment of our Q&A blog post  with an Ayogo team member. This time we’re featuring Paul Prescod to give us his insight about our industry. Paul is a rock star in the land of start-ups, the computer sciences and technological innovation. (He is too modest to approve of the preceding  sentence.) Paul is one of the founders and the Chief Technology Officer of Ayogo Games. Prior to Ayogo, he was Director of Application Development at Kinzin, a social network for families. Paul is well-known for the following: as the popularizer of the “REST” approach to web service design, acting as a long-time contributor to the Python programming language interpreter, and contributing to the original XML specification. Oh yes, he also co-authored (with Charles Goldfarb) one of the most popular books on XML, “The XML Handbook.”

1. What excited you about social games and why did you see an opportunity in this field?

In 2007, Michael and I lead the team that launched a fun little Facebook application called Are You Normal. We were astonished at how quickly it grew, accumulating tens of thousands of users per day. That alerted us to the potential of social networks for rapid growth. The problem was that we had built Are You Normal as an experiment in virality, and hadn’t baked in a monetization model. It was a promo for a social network rather than directly monetizing itself. When Michael and I decided to start our own company, we wanted to build something with less friction: we wanted to build hugely popular apps that would make money directly. As the business has evolved, it turns out that we still do both kinds of apps. Some are directly monetized like our City of Ash for iPhone and Hockey Pool Pro. Other games market products like Need for Speed Nitro for Facebook. In that case, it was a huge opportunity to work with a major brand. And a third category has emerged. We’re also doing educational games which help people to improve their lives, and that provides yet another form of compensation.

2. How has your professional background helped you in your role as CTO of Ayogo?

I’ve had quite a varied career. The two major phases were my work with enterprises and my work in social media.

Developing software for enterprises like Cisco, EMC and Daimler Chrysler, I learned about scalability and the software development lifecycle. Issue triage, release planning, development methodologies etc. We work very hard to make reusable software modules that allow us to assemble social and mobile games quickly, and port them between platforms (social networks, websites, smartphone devices) easily.

Building a social network at Kinzin, I learned a lot about how social media is changing lives and habits. Historically, everything was communicated socially from friend to friend. Then there was the “mass media” phase where media powers had incredible power in determining what is cool or interesting. Now we live in a hybrid world where they still have huge megaphones, but everyone else has a little megaphone too. Everyone who uses Facebook is a micro-publisher. Hundreds of millions of people are publishers now. So in the old days, you had to find a way to make a deal with some kind of media or distribution channel. Now you just need to make something compelling and get a critical mass of users to try it. Building Kinzin also gave me quite a bit of insight into the convection of messages, users and notifications through a social network. As Facebook has broadened its focus beyond college students, we’ve seen them re-invent some features similar to those we had in Kinzin.

3. What is the focus of Ayogo’s technical team?

Within the technology group, our focus is on acceleration. We always want the second time we implement any particular game feature easier than the first, and the third time it should be virtually free. We hate re-inventing wheels or cutting and pasting code, instead of reusing software components. We are also responsible for making sure that things scale up smoothly from hundreds through hundreds of thousands of users. Acceleration is different than velocity. The first time we do something, we are not necessarily faster than anyone else. It’s when we take that component and reuse it that we see the benefit. Many companies in this space just slap junk together and the second game takes as long to build as the first. We’re a small company, so everyone on the development team ends up contributing to game design. We all have our favorite social games (and board games, console games, etc.) and try to extract the underlying psychological principles so that we can apply them in our own games.

4. Tell us about some innovative software platforms that Ayogo has developed (will develop?)

Ayogo has a lot of cool technologies that we hope to one day describe on the technology blog. We call the complete set “the Ayogo Framework.” Individual parts have more interesting names like CashCache (for currency management), the Shed (for item ownership), Job Board (for incentivized user actions), PhoneKit (for portable mobile user interfaces) and UserSpace (for profile management). Admittedly, a couple of those names are terrible computer geek puns. All together, these technologies allow us to assemble social games from parts, like a Mechano set, and port them between social networks or smartphone platforms.

5. Which games do you play and why?

I go through spurts of addiction to Facebook and iPhone poker games. Poker’s thrills are well-documented and playing it in Facebook keeps the stakes low and the game casual. I am looking forward to Sid Meier’s Civilization Network Facebook game. Civilization games have been a weakness of mine for more than a decade now. Last year I lost a couple of weeks of my life with Civilization for iPhone. When you combine dopamine-producing platforms like the iPhone and Facebook with the carefully constructed Skinner Box of the Civilization game model…the potential is frightening.

On console, I actually love Need for Speed NITRO quite apart from our business interest in it. I usually do not like racing games, but they did a great job making that one fun for casual race-gamers. I also love Rock Band and Guitar Hero. I do most of my console gaming in front of my kids so that excludes many of the most interesting console games. My daughter likes to watch me play Super Monkey Ball though. When she was two, she noticed that I had it on my iPhone and the Wii. One day when she was two, she pointed to the MacBook: “Got Super Monkey Ball on that?” I’ll have to talk to Sega about that.

Thanks Paul! We’ll continue the Q&A series next week…until then, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us. Better yet, why not join our Facebook Page? Also, make sure to check back to read more about Paul’s insights about the industry on this blog and our technology blog.

Courtesy of Flickr's janusz l

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “social games with a purpose,” since I went to a gaming event last month in Vancouver. That’s where the idea of was first introduced to me, and I thought it’d be interesting to explore this topic further. Why? Because games are typically seen as entertainment, however it seems they can they also be used as tools for changing behaviours, learning new skills and even saving the planet.

Games With A Purpose

What does it mean when we call something a game with a purpose and how is it different from just a game? A game with a purpose is defined as a game played on the computer in an entertaining setting that serves some purpose for the person setting up the game. The player usually does something that she would otherwise not willingly do just because she can do it. The idea is that when you’re playing these games it’s not just about having fun, but it’s also about doing something in the game that has meaning in a real-world context. An early example of a game with a purpose or GWAP, is the ESP game. In that game, players had to identify images and label them because image recognition was something computers couldn’t do back then. The game made humans willingly perform a task that they otherwise might not have wanted to do (identify images) because it was part of a game.

Tools for Change

As we’ve explained in previous posts, when we enjoy learning, we retain more because we’re more engaged in something that is meaningful. From a scientific perspective, the goal of game developers is for players to achieve a deep state of focused motivation or something called Flow (the term was coined by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Why? This is where players get “hooked” in the game. It’s also believed that this element of Flow is what makes games such a great candidate for changing behaviours.

So what kinds of Facebook games are we talking about? Some more common casual games with purpose have been used in science-related fields. Researchers at the Children’s Nutrition Centre of Baylor College of Medicine created a successful PC game that helped kids improve their lifestyle. (They used the game as a mechanism for kids to discover and distinguish between fresh fruits and vegetables, and junk foods that just had fruits in them.) The game utilized “fun” and interactive gameplay to motivate the kids to make the right choices. For us, we’re currently working on a motivational and educational Facebook game about how to improve eating and exercise habits. The purpose of the game is to teach players how to estimate the nutritional value of foods in order for them to make the right choices. The game will also encourage players to make concrete positive changes to their nutrition and fitness and activity regimes. (Through a series small actions, completing “missions” and using achievements as a way to encourage particular player behaviour, we hope to encourage actions within the game, which indirectly improves health.)

Besides games that encourage learning skills, there are also Facebook games that use gameplay to address “unsolved” social issues in the real-world, like poverty, education, health and climate change. Lil’Green Patch is one of those games that combines environmentalism and gaming. The more actions that players complete in the game (tend to their and their friends’ land), the better the outcome for a real-world problem (advertisers will donate money to saving the rain forest). Who would’ve thought that nurturing patches of virtual land on Facebook could raise more than $320,000? What are your thoughts about using social games to motivate us to positive action? Leave us a comment or contact us.

What’s a game and why are games important? I tried to address this question in the talk I gave to the International Internet Marketing Association.

One good definition of a game is “an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context.” (Serious Games, Clark C. Abt, 1970) As you may have noted to yourself already, this can describe all of manner of human endeavor from finance (sometimes not in a good way) to education to medicine. Airline pilots are required to practice in simulators that look a lot like big console games, and many of our sports such as biathlon, javelin, archery, are based directly or indirectly on survival skills our ancestors developed from necessity. Today, we use those skills for the fun of it. Why is that?

Games and play are a basic survival adaptation. Think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (basic human needs are represented in the shape of a pyramid, with the largest and lowest levels of needs at the bottom, and the need for self-actualization at the top): at all levels of the pyramid we work within a framework of rules, collaborating with others to reach our goals. Our brain has evolved to encourage our success by rewarding us when we’re successful, beyond the inherent rewards of survival.

Here’s an observation that I hope you will find interesting:  When you call something “a game”, there is generally an implication that you’re talking about something that isn’t (for lack of a better word) important. And in many cases that’s true: the game is not important. But the interesting thing is that our brain doesn’t necessarily know that. Our brain will give the same sort of dopamine reward for a solving a meaningless puzzle game as it does for learning how to properly tie a life saving knot (shout out to all the cub scouts out there).

This is valuable from an evolutionary perspective because most of our games, like hockey for example, are analogs to things in the real world. That’s why they work as games and that’s why we play them. Hockey teaches us about timing and teamwork, and helps us develop useful fine motor skills. These are the same skills and abilities, generally speaking, that we use to navigate our world, so we can survive. Even though we don’t truly require all these skills for survival purposes any longer, these same instincts remain, crying out to be satisfied in other ways. This is why we get a dopamine rush when we do well at a complex pattern-matching game, despite the fact that we’ll likely never use those skills to learn which mushrooms make good soup, and which ones are poisonous.

Implications for design

When you’re designing a game (or even a customer response form for the corporate website), understanding this mechanism of reward lets you recognize the patterns and use them to your advantage. As Eisenhower said: motivation is getting somebody do something because they want to do it. In coming posts,  we’ll talk about how that’s done, by looking at examples from a variety of different games.