New Playaholics

It’s been about a year in development, and it is finally here.

A casual games portal with over 150 games (all with integrated high scores), a free membership service, a subscription service, an avatar system, a forum, competitions, and more is a big project. The first thing I need to do is thank the team. They have done an awesome job. Playaholics is now an incredible casual games portal.

Proibably the best thing to do is to have a play. www.playaholics.com

By all means tell us what you think.

The Little Gamer

Let the people play!

More and more companies are blocking access to game sites like Playaholics, but we say: “Let the people play!”

Maybe these organisations are worried about “time wasting”. Or maybe they just invested in a web filtering product to block gambling or pornography but then they found that game sites were blocked by default too. Either way, their thinking is wrong. In reality, taking the occasional quick break is one of the keys to sustaining productivity in the workplace.

Besides, the old 9-to-5 regime is dead, so employees are entitled to a breather. People are spending an ever greater part of their day behind their desk and as a result, they simply must take short intervals away from multitasking in order to organise their personal life, pay their bills or take a break.

On one level, this is just common sense. We know that playing a casual game is quick pick-me-up. The adrenaline flows. You get excited. You punch the air. You recharge your batteries.

But still we look for science to support our suspicions.

For example, scientists at the University of Hull and University of Oklahoma believe that games can have positive effects on a player’s mood. They are monitoring the physiological and psychological response to games, testing for increased alertness and heart rate as well as examining cognitive function and hormone levels — a process that is called “mood profiling”. They propose that positive feelings are experienced when playing games and that there can also be increased adrenalin and alertness.

The science is fine by me, but I also believe it is mostly confirming what we already know: that whether we’re talking about a quick walk, a cup of coffee or a few minutes of Wolf N’ Swine, short diversions provide workers with a mental break, an uplifting experience and renewed energy.

Success in the workplace should be measured by a final product and not the process of getting there, which may include periods of rest. So if employees are more productive and happy after indulging in a casual game, then I say: “Let the people play!”

Quick links 25-August-06

Appletiser game - http://www.appletiser.co.uk/obsession/obsession.html
Toyota Aygo game - http://www.aygodriving.co.uk/interface01_content.htm
*Pick of the week* - Nortel Networks game - http://www44.nortel.com/

10 moments in time

The last 20 years have been a hectic ride in the world of casual games. We’ve tried to distill the milestones into a top 10 list, presented here in chronological order:

1. The development of Authorware (1987), Shockwave (1990s) and Flash (1996), which dramatically increased our ability to create complex games that load quickly.

2. The Nintendo deal in 1989 to include Tetris with the Gameboy. The deal cost between $5 and 10 million, and followed the gaming license squabble of the century between Mirrorsoft, Atari, BPS and other players.

3. Nokia’s inclusion of the original monochromatic version of Snake on its Nokia 6100 phone in 1997. Many a thumb was jarred and mobile casual gaming became a reality.

4. Microsoft’s inclusion of Solitaire with Windows 95 in May 1997.

5. The creation of J2ME in 15 June 1999. The inclusion of a Java Virtual Machine on mobile phones made it easier for developers to create and emulate mobile games on a PC before uploading them to phones.

6. Electronic Arts’ purcase of Pogo.com in March 2001 for a whopping $50 million, after the site was left in the lurch by Excite. In this move, one of the world’s most succesful hardcore game developers recognised the value of, and invested in, casual games.

7. PopCap’s launch of Bejeweled in August 2001, originally as a browser-based game named Diamond Mine. The original has inspired countless casual games in this format.

8. RealNetworks’ purchase of Gamehouse in January 2004, turning this leading distributor of digital content (including games) into a casual game publisher in its own right. This trend towards vertical integration will continue.

9. Microsoft’s launch of Xbox Live Arcade in late 2004. Since then, 3 million Xbox Live Arcade games have been downloaded and at least 600,000 have been purchased.

10. The first casual games conference: Casuality, in Seattle, US, in July 2005.

The Little Gamer

Rubik’s Cube revisited

When researching my recent post calling for a new puzzle game format, I took a fresh look at dozens of famous games from Tetris to Zuma — but I think the Rubik’s Cube may still be the king of all puzzles.

One minute I was examining Rubik’s Cube from the casual game developer’s point of view, and the next I was carried back to my school days, when this remarkable puzzle was launched and more than 100 million copies sold in just two years.

Back then, I was a teenage student in Britain, not running a company in Australia. I had only been on this planet a decade and a half and had so much to learn. Yet somehow I managed to get my personal best time for the Rubik’s Cube under 25 seconds.

The secret to the success of Rubik’s Cube is that it was the ultimate challenge. It seemed almost impossible, but it wasn’t. People talked about the millions of permutations — the endless variety of patterns that could be formed on the six sides simultaneously. But one of the secrets to solving the Rubik’s Cube is to focus on the fact that it’s built from just 27 pieces. Sometimes it’s the simplest concept that creates the most complex and challenging casual games, but that sort of magic is very hard to recreate.

I certainly couldn’t beat 25 seconds at the moment, but I’m tempted to dust off my old Rubik’s Cube and start practicing again. There’s a whole community that never forgot the Rubik’s Cube, and I feel like it’s time for a revival.

The Little Gamer

The real puzzle

Every now and again, someone comes up with a new puzzle format — or an excellent new version of an existing puzzle format — and in an instant, they capture the imagination of half the world.

The Rubik’s Cube did that in the early 80s. Everyone got into it. More than 100 million were sold in just two years.

Tetris had a similar impact when Nintendo included it with the Gameboy. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was rotating and nudging falling blocks.

In their time, Bejeweled and Text Twist were big land-grabbers in the online casual game space. But Text twist wasn’t a new puzzle format — for years, newspapers have been publishing strings of letters and asking their readers to find a word.

In recent years, Zuma has come the closest to generating a similar level of interest to the previous greats. As far as I’m aware, Zuma’s format had never been used before.

Although it’s a three-or-more-in-a-row game, which is not new, the idea of shooting the balls while they’re rolling around a track had never been done before. This fresh approach, backed by sensational artwork and production, created a truly addictive game — a unique combination of strategy and playing against the clock.

Today, it seems the market is saturated with decent, playable games. Sometimes it feels like all the good ideas have already been taken. Sure, Suduko created hype — but it had the backing of major newspapers. However, it’s time to remind ourselves: the real problem is not market saturation, it’s that as an industry we have resigned ourselves to this saturation by producing more of the same. I want something new: an entirely new puzzle format.

Great ideas for entirely new formats can come from anywhere. Sometimes it’s late nights, sometimes it’s coffee and sometimes they materialise over a beer. I don’t doubt that Rubik’s Cube, Bejeweled, Text Twist and Zuma are history-making puzzles, but I think they’ve monopolised their space for a little too long. The race is on for the next big thing.
The Little Gamer

Two types of marketing

Marketing is changing, again, with a long-overdue move away from what is now called the interruption approach.

What do I mean by this? The traditional model for advertising is to find an activity that your customers enjoy and then to interrupt it with a message. Whether we’re watching television, listening to radio, sitting in the cinema or just walking down the street, we’re interrupted continuously. When it happens, we must choose whether to act on that message — but if we’re not interested in the interruption, we’re more likely to use that time to fetch another beer from the fridge.

The interruption model is finally starting to retreat - giving way to permission-based marketing (most famously written about by Seth Godin).
The internet in a way had the opportunity to change advertising for the better, but for the last 10 years online advertisers have relied on interrupting the user. In fact, the interruption model has probably been pursued more aggressively online than in other forms of media. Pop-ups, interstitials — it’s all about getting in the user’s way, and these sort of things haven’t helped the market.

But now, at last, we’re starting to recognise the opportunity to create engaging content that we can integrate with commercial messages — content like advergames. Consumers don’t avoid rich engaging content precisely because it’s not an interruption. In fact, they pull this content in to their world, rather than just filtering it as it’s shoved their way.

Advergaming is not a broadcast medium — it’s one where every audience member chooses the content and experiences they want, creating their own package of entertainment. And it’s within that environment that we are best able to deliver a valuable message.

The interruption model is still going strong, but it faces a huge challenge: the limited amount of consumer attention available for capture. The problem is this: no one gives you their attention just because you ask for it. After all, why should they? They’ve got better things to do.

If you can’t force feed them, you have to give something in exchange for connecting with you, and that often means engaging content. This is how we structure long-term relationships with game players on behalf of brands.

Casual community

Let’s start with the obvious: people enjoy playing casual games because they are, well, casual. They require no commitment. They offer instant gratification. There is no need to read manuals and no need to buy the latest hardware.

It’s no surprise then that casual gamers seem to steer clear of community — all that human/online interaction can be a bit too much like hard work, a bit too much commitment. Most casual game sites have no community features whatsoever. There are notable exceptions, like Pogo’s Club Pogo and Puzzle Pirates — you could even argue that Habbo Hotel represents the merging of social software with casual gaming. But on the whole, casual game sites keep it casual.

Here at 3RD sense, two of our sites — Playaholics and Chickstop — have optional community features, but of their million or so� players per month,� less than 10%� them are registered members.

So, why then have we spent the last nine months creating new versions of these sites that, when they are launched, will focus on providing new community features? Would it have made more sense to just plough the money into writing more games?

Soon, these sites will offer:

• An integrated high-score system that is consistent for all games, so you can measure your performance against others
• Personal stats so you can see how well you do on each game and how you improve
• User created mini-leagues so you and a small group of people can play against each other for a highest score over a 24-hour period
• Avatars that can be personalised with millions of different combinations and options
• Public profiles so that players’ performances will be on display
• Forums so you can discuss games, locate cheats and talk about how to get a higher score

Of course, both sites will still be open to ‘casual’ visitors, who don’t want to join a community in order to play some casual games. However, at 3RD sense we think that social competition can be one of the most attractive aspects of a game. Rightly or wrongly, we have faith that with the right community features, more and more players will be prompted to become members over time, which would be tremendously beneficial to our business.

The Little Gamer