If console games are Hollywood blockbusters, social games are soap operas

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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!

Can a social game make you cry?

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I got into the game industry and joined Playdom to experiment with interactive drama. I dream of a future where we play or interact with games for the drama more than the game aspect. It’s a lofty goal but very similar to Bing Gordon’s dream at EA to see if a computer can make you cry.

“We see farther”, we crowed. We predicted the games business would develop to stand side by side with the $20 billion annual revenues of movies and recorded music. We foresaw a day when a New Hollywood would be created by “software artists” who harnessed Moore’s Law into a new category of art. We believed that their digital games would one day deliver the kind of emotional experiences we all enjoy in movies, what Stephen Spielberg describes as “sitting back and being washed over with emotion.”

Sadly though EA failed.

But we fell short of the lofty creative goal of “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” because we didn’t develop new models of character and narrative. Floyd, the robot friend in Steve Meretsky’s Planetfall, was a heart-warming sidekick but, no matter what words we typed into the Infocom parser, he died a sacrificial, text-only, death for us.

Bing has since had an epiphany and replaced his dream with a strange amalgamation. Instead of eliciting emotion through story he thinks the answer is allowing people to relive their gaming moments socially, to reinforce and create social connections.

But while we were looking for movies powered by millions of transistors, we ignored the emotions we were creating in games as a new kind of playground. Instead of creating emotion-laden, but passive stories, we elicited emotional moments off the screen, between friends, in the retelling, in the trash-talking. The emotional moments turned out NOT to have correlation with processing power, visual effects, and 3d graphics. The emotion came from who we played with, not what machine we played on. Games help us create richer photo albums of our lives.

So rather than trying to create stories and characters that “wash over” our audience, rather than trying to prove that a computer can make you cry, let’s create play spaces that help us make more and better friends. We are the characters, the heroes, the actors. And we are making stories together.

In that light Bing sees social games as the perfect beast but I completely disagree. I agree that social games help us connect but we aren’t building stories here. We aren’t the character, the heroes, the actors. I think their original goal to have computers make us cry is still attainable even if they failed. When EA started it was a much different environment, but as Bing mentions the playing field has changed with social games. And where Bing now sees social games as a place to make connections I see them as the perfect opportunity to try and make a computer, a game, an interactive experience make us cry.

It’s not a technology problem

Bing starts his post by describing Moore’s Law and how at EA they thought it would do the same for the video game industry. As processors got more powerful so would the game engines and graphics.

For 25 years, the videogame business has counted on Moore’s Law to deliver the promised land of the New Hollywood. We thought more powerful chipsets driving higher resolution pictures, more lifelike animations and bigger production budgets would almost automatically deliver the emotion of movies. We thought that amazing hardware would spontaneously generate resonant characters and heart-wrenching stories, but the highest points turned out to be a robot, a polygonal babe, and a horny swinger wearing a gold medallion.

Though good story has never needed technology to be. Even as movies became a popular medium for story books and comic books remained, even thrived. Story isn’t a technology problem, it’s a problem of creativity. They were led astray by the visual, Bing even admits to it.

They went after the wrong audience

We’re all familiar with the video game industry and its struggle to attract women. Most games are built for men and why not, they’re the ones lining up outside the stores. Listening to Bing talk of the early days at EA I would think them ecstatic if EA could deliver Star Wars in interactive form, with graphics equal to the movie. I would have loved playing that as a kid – fly the X-wing fighter, practice with the lightsaber, all that. But in reality if you handed me the controls I would just wreck shop. I would cut Obi-Wan’s arm off just to see what he’d do. A controller in my hand I could care less about the story.

However if you could create an interactive version of Gone with the Wind I would expect women to treat it very differently. Taken in by the story elements I would expect them to play the parts. Men, boys are the wrong audience to start experimenting with story.

Social games are a new opportunity

Where as Bing thinks the promise of social games is making connections I think they’re ripe for attaining his original goal at EA.

For one, a large percentage of the social game audience is female and they’re looking for story.

They also tended to prefer games that emphasized narrative and character development over combat and preferred solo to group gameplay.

Secondly, social games are easily accessible so if there is a hit the audience can grow overnight. And thirdly, the technology isn’t complex and is already in the hands of artists.

The dream to have computers make us cry was never a technology problem as Bing thought, it was a creative problem. What we need is artists and narrative designers to experiment with story. Social games seem to be the perfect opportunity to try and achieve the dream to have computers make us cry.

The best explanation for the economic meltdown

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The best explanation I’ve seen for the economic meltdown came from George Soros:

It is important to realize that the crisis in which we find ourselves is not just a market failure but also a regulatory failure, and even more importantly, a failure of the prevailing dogma about financial markets. I have in mind the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Rational Expectation Theory. These economic theories guided, or more exactly misguided, both the regulators and the financial engineers who designed the derivatives and other synthetic financial instruments and quantitative risk management systems which have played such an important part in the collapse.

Soros is laying much of the blame for the collapse at the feet of economist. I agree wholeheartedly. The more I study about economics the less impressed I become. My biggest complaint is why it isn’t treated more of a science. Some say it is too complex to study in that way, but wouldn’t have people said the same thing when doctors began studying the body? Where medical science has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last century, economics has spent that same time arguing a handful of concepts over and over again. Science is the history of disproven theories. Economics is still arguing as they have disproved nothing. It’s embarrassing.

Economists are basically witch doctors

In many ways economist aren’t much different from witch doctors. Most of their act is playing to our emotions rather than applying direct medicine. They spend their days trying to manipulate, working on their act and spectacle rather than trying to advance their knowledge of healing. No wonder they were such stooges for the banks and investment banks.

Their dogma starts early

As Soros said, it’s all about dogma. And interestingly enough Brit Marling, the Sundance breakout, can attest to that as well. Before turning to film she was an intern at Goldman Sachs and studied economics at Georgetown.

After three years of college, Marling spent her junior summer at Goldman Sachs in New York. “The experience there was deeply upsetting,” she confided. Her economic education she felt was more about indoctrination than exploration.

Their dogma never ends

As Dean Baker (an economist himself) points out over and over, most of the economists and nearly everyone we hear from about the economy completely missed the housing bubble. The biggest asset bubble in history and they missed it. Worse they seem to have learned nothing.

Nearly all economics reporters missed the housing bubble on the way up. They still seem determined to ignore it even after its collapse wrecked the economy.

Google Plus is the beginning of the end for social networks

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Google Plus has everyone talking. People asking for invites suggesting how it can beat Facebook, while others wonder if it ever could. As TechCrunch says, the war is on between Google Plus and Facebook. But is it really the beginning of the end for social networks?

Social networks are all about the newsfeed

Essentially the social network has become the newsfeed. Social networks provide the captive audience – your friends. You post because these people care and are more likely to respond with a comment. Prior to social networks blogs were all the rage and if you ever started one you probably know how lonely it could be. It’s like talking to an empty room, a dark empty room. And that was after you figured out what to write about in the first place. Social networks changed all that. You have a captive audience and you know exactly what to write about – yourself.

Which newsfeed, where do I post?

For most people today there are only two newsfeeds – Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn is also making a good showing. Though essentially they have carved out their own niche. And now there is Google Plus. Where does it fit in? No need to answer, the fact that you have to ask is already changing the landscape. The next question is where do I post? Well when in doubt why not all of them? Posting to them all isn’t that difficult actually, many already support automatically posting from other feeds. You can post on Tumblr and have that automatically feed into Facebook. And now the social networks are getting more aggressive with transitioning your social graph. With Google Plus it certainly is a different landscape, almost as if the social networks are being marginalized.

Reminds me of instant messenger and its “end”

I use to work on Yahoo! Messenger and remember well the instant messenger wars. In Silicon Valley that war is ancient history. It started with ICQ, then came AOL Messenger. Friends would fight over which one to join. Then came Yahoo! Messenger and soon people would just join all of them. Then the natural thing was to start demanding interoperability.

Then came MSN Messenger and new clients that logged you into all of them – Meebo, Trillian, etc. The talk of interoperability died down and actually so did much of the hype around the whole instant messenger space. By the time GTalk entered the market much of the commotion had all but died down.

Instant messenger went from being all the rage to being something I got when I checked my email whether I needed it or not. The excitement I use to feel working on the Yahoo! Messenger team dissipated. I moved on, everyone moved on and that’s what I mean by “end”. I mean “end” in the way we say tech companies are dead. Granted there is still a lot of excitement in social networks – Facebook will set records with its IPO as Google Plus will likely set records for user growth. But I think we’ll look back to the Google Plus launch as the beginning of the end.