It was inevitable, data crunching has reached the lofty art of screenwriting. For a mere $20,000 you can have World Wide Motion Picture Group analyze a script; giving you the chances it’s a hit and advice on how to increase those chances. Of course screenwriters are no fans of the new service, many in Hollywood ashamed to admit they might use the service.

Script analysis is new enough to remain a bit of a Hollywood taboo. Major film financiers and advisers like Houlihan Lokey confirmed that they had used the service, but declined to speak on the record about it. The six major Hollywood movie studios declined to comment.

Being an aspiring screenwriter myself and having spent the last few years of my career working in the games industry I can certainly understand the conflict between art and data analysis. It’s something I still see the social games industry struggle with even though data crunching is what separated it from console games – gather live data from millions of users, analyze, and quickly make adjustments. Though being thought of as an artist is way more appealing, if you’re going to make decisions based on data you might as well be a “Product Manager”. Additionally data analysis is work. Mostly though we got into entertainment because we’re dreamers and data has a way of crushing dreams. But what happened to, “you’ve got to kill your darlings”?

Nobody knows anything

As William Goldman‘s famous line goes, ”Nobody knows anything”. He was referring to how no one in Hollywood actually knows if a movie is going to be a hit or not until it opens. But is that really true anymore? Goldman’s line gained popularity in the 1980′s when the only hard data was box-office receipts. Then came focus groups and now cold hard data analysis, soon big data.

Screenwriters, artists must adapt

Data analysis is just another tool in an artists toolbox. Like any tool you must learn how and when to use it. Sure data can be used to give a producer false confidence in their opinion and completely wreck your script. Screenwriters will just have to fight back, which is something they’re not known for. I once saw Shane Black go on a tirade about how when producers and executives meet to discuss a script it’s the screenwriter who’s in the corner not saying a word. But afterwards the screenwriter will complain incessantly about how they wrecked their script. Screenwriters are going to have to learn how to argue, fight, convince others.

Increasingly art is becoming collaborative, or has always been – just look at the group that wrote Casablanca. That was writing by comity – a group of staff writers. If you can’t work with a team and/or argue your point of view you’re going to lose out. If World Wide Motion Picture Group evaluate a script and say it will bomb, the screenwriter should be able to dig up some data or present a convincing argument that casts some doubt. If they can’t, the screenwriter might be wrong and the producer, analyst, etc. might be right. This is how it’s been in the tech industry for years. Granted the tech industry didn’t have the cloud of “Art” hanging over it, but both industries are trying to do the same thing in the end – figure out what the audience wants.

I’m all for data crunching to come to screenwriting and would love to get a hold of the data the World Wide Motion Picture Group has gathered. I don’t kid myself, I’m trying to write a screenplay that audiences will love. The more data I can get and earlier the better. It can’t rely on the data alone, but that’s a balance I’ve developed over the years working in the tech industry.

Dan Lyons called it, what was on the tip of many a tongue in Silicon Valley – Has Facebook’s reign come and gone already? I’ve never been very bullish on Facebook and have been proven wrong over and over again as its growth accelerated over 2010-2012. I thought the bloom would come off the rose sooner than it did, clinging to the argument that it’s just a communication platform and communication platforms are notoriously difficult to monetize – ask Yahoo! or Google how much they make off email. Now it seems like I’m in good company being down on Facebook, however now I question Dan Lyons on just how dominate Facebook ever was.

So: first came IBM, which ruled for 25 to 30 years, then Microsoft, which ruled for 12 to 15, then Google for six to eight years, and now Facebook, whose reign arguably began in 2010, when its traffic surged past Google’s and it bullied Zynga, its biggest partner, into accepting Facebook Credits.

Was Facebook ever as dominate as IBM or Microsoft? Maybe in the games space for a fleeting moment. If Facebook ever had such dominance I would say that came in the form of expectations – hype. It actually reminds me much of GeoCities rise to “dominance”. It completely dominated the personal homepage space on the web, but soon after Yahoo! paid $3.57 billion in stock for it the bloom came off that rose. The question then became, how much was it worth to dominate the personal homepage space? Apparently not much as Yahoo! shut it down years later.

When I think of a company dominating the technology world like IBM or Google, it is more than just hype. And to say Google has already faded is quite premature. Sure they aren’t the darling of Silicon Valley, that briefly went to Facebook however they’re making great strides in the cloud and mobile.

FarmVille 2 seems to be performing well, passing 8 million daily active users. Heights Zynga hasn’t seen since releasing CastleVille a year ago and naturally that makes them bullish for CityVille 2. But the Wall Street Journal post points out – the ‘FarmVille’ era is stalling.

But here’s the thing — while 8.5 million daily players is impressive compared with most games, it’s nothing compared with the numbers early Zynga games like FarmVille and CityVille, which had more than 10 million daily users, used to have. And FarmVille 2 was much costlier to make than its predecessor: While FarmVille took only five weeks and about 10 people to make, no. 2 took about a year to develop by more than 50 people.

People have speculated that the era of social games is coming to an end. Others are convinced Zynga’s pain stems from a lack of creativity. I think Zynga’s been caught by the rapid transition to mobile. It’s not like the mobile transition hasn’t caught other companies off guard either, the problem is Zynga’s response - analyze the situation and place strategic bets. However in an environment where everything is changing and almost nothing is known, Zynga is bound to apply the knowledge gained from the last battle. Zynga is investing more and more to polish established game mechanics, growing what was a team of 10 to 50.FarmVille 2 was a big bet. Buying OMGPOP now looks like an act of despriation but I’m guessing they did their due dilligence. It was a big bet and you don’t bet big unless your confident. But you only gain confidence from experience, experience Zynga gained winning the social games battle on Facebook. Instead of big bets, Zynga needs to make ’little bets’. As Peter Sims, author of “Little Bets” explains:

We’re taught from an early age to use certain procedures and rules to analyze and solve problems, such as for math or chemistry. There’s an emphasis on minimizing errors and avoiding failure. These skills serve us extremely well when we have enough information to put into a formula or plan. But what happens when we don’t even know what problems we’re trying to solve? In those kinds of situations, engaging in a process of discovery and making little bets complements more linear, procedural thinking.

Big bets are safe; they’re about looking back. Little bets are about learning. With an upheaval like we’re undergoing with the transition to mobile, it’s all about learning. It’s the old saying, fail fast to succeed faster.

Some might say Zynga is just waiting for smaller companies to make the little bets to see what works and then pounce. But as Peter Sim’s outlined in his book, the same strategy is what brought down HP after decades of unparalleled success. When a big business you need to move the needle and that naturally lends to big bets.

Barnholt recalls, “Around that time, people said, ‘We don’t even want to look at opportunities unless it was going to be a billion dollar business.’ A billion dollars kind of became a mantra.” They then researched and analyzed the markets, segmented them, and developed products. As Barnholt recalls, “It was very much a deductive, analytical process to identify a grand set of opportunities. We had all these ideas. And they were big,” Barnholt recalls, “but they all failed!”

As Barnholt goes on to explain, they all failed because someone was already there. They needed that guinea pig to justify the market but unlike the guinea pig they never picked up the learnings.

HP’s assumptions turned out to be wrong because of what Barnholt calls intangible factors, the realities beneath the surface: the underlying customer problems, needs, preferences, and supporting market dynamics.

Simply put, HP wasn’t learning. They felt forced to make big bets and in therefore never in a position to learn. Zynga should look more like Google and make hundreds of little bets. FarmVille in 3D is just a stopgap and will distract them from the real battle – the battle for knowledge.

I stole the title for this post from Andrew Chen’s “How mobile startups can iterate better, faster, stronger“. Andrew’s advice for how lean startups can innovate faster reminded me just how far the games industry still needs to go. As an industry we talk big about innovation but it pales in comparison to what’s going on at lean startups.

The minimum viable product

Andrew kicks off his post with advice on how to pick the right minimum product. I would bet most in the games industry are unfamiliar with the concept of a Minimum Viable Product.

A Minimum Viable Product has just those features that allow the product to be deployed, and no more.

The idea is to get something up as quickly as possible so you can begin learning. Everything else is just guessing, even if you’re doing play tests. What quantifies as an MVP is hotly debated in lean startups across Silicon Valley, however I have yet to hear a similar discussion in the games industry. That isn’t to say that we in the games industry are throwing every little thing we can think of into a build, just the debate is never framed in the same way as an MVP.

Though aren’t games works of art?

Most likely we in the games industry don’t discuss MVPs because we don’t think of games as products. Games start with vision and are works of art. Where as a lean startup begins with a vision they will ruthlessly search for the MVP to test that vision. They treat their vision for what it is, a wild guess. Believing games are a works of art we easily fall into the trap build it quickly. Once a concept is pieced together it becomes a matter of execution. We launch and then hope it all works. For lean startups it’s not about execution but how quickly they can test their vision, how quickly they can start learning.

With the console game business dropping off a cliff (sales plummeting 20% in December and 8% for the year) many developers are fleeing to the social games space. Seems like a logical move however most freely admit to not liking social games. Some even go so far as to explain their move as a chance to “make them real games” such as Philip Holt, co-founder of social gaming startup Row Sham Bow.

“What we want to focus on are things that have frustrated us as gamers on social games, one of which is that they’re highly compulsive, but not very compelling. They’re just not the kinds of experiences that we long to play on that platform,” he said.

What Holt and others should understand is that social games are the equivalent of soap operas. It’s like packing up the car and driving out to Hollywood with the dream of making movies but only finding jobs making soap operas.

If soap opera jobs are the only ones available what is one to do? Well make soap operas more, make them movies. How long do you think you would last in the soap opera business doing this? The soap opera audience might really enjoy movies too but Monday afternoon they’re looking for something different – they’re looking for the unbelievable twists and turns, the cheesy relationships, the bad acting. Introduce aspects that are more akin to movies and the audience might rise up in revolt or just find something else to watch.

What happens when Holt and his brethren introduce aspects of “real games” into social games?

“We want to innovate in gameplay, and one of the key areas we tried to do this in Woodland Heroes is we wanted the result of a player’s decision to matter in the game. There should be a loss state. You should feel that the stakes are high, so you take it more seriously. There’s a level of engagement you have when you go, ‘Oh crap, what do I do here?’ That, I think, is a fundamental tenet of what makes a good game,” said Holt. “A lot of games on the platform, in the pursuit of the broad public, have sometimes not delivered those essential elements for us.”

How many FarmVille players want to fail? How many players return after a long weekend to see their crops withered? If players wanted loss states why do they complain about them so much? Most new games today, like CastelVille have moved away from the spoilage mechanic.

But there is a “hardcore audience”

Developers Kixeye and Kabam have found luck with a “hardcore audience” and others like U4iA would like to join them.

U4iA (pronounced “euphoria”) believes that there is a new segment of players emerging: the hardcore social gamer. Facebook game creators Kixeye and Kabam have already discovered this. But Welch said in an interview that his company aims to shoot even higher on the quality bar, creating AAA-quality games along the lines of what Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, has done for web-based combat games.

There does seem to be a hardcore audience but how big is it and more importantly – do they pay? Seems like to me most payers are older woman.

Social games are soap operas like it or not

I understand how many of the people who enter the social game space hope for more, but that’s like saying you want to revolutionize the soap opera business. It’s great to see all these different perspectives in the industry but eventually people are going to have to come to grips with what we’re building. If all these experiments to create “real games” fail (I’m guessing most will have limited success) we of the social games industry should come to grips with what we’re building. And that isn’t all a bad thing; soap operas pioneered early television, more importantly how to make money. They entertained millions for decades, that is until social games came along!