Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Some Casual Games notes from GDC

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Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Some Casual Games notes from GDC

by Ian Bogost March 26, 2004

categories: Casual Games , Game Design , Women and Games

Mia Consalvo has been blogging from GDC, including this post on the Casual Games Summit.

I was surprised by a few points raised at the summit (although I did not attend the entire day). First, even though the conversion rate for casual game purchases remains at direct mail levels -- perhaps 1 - 2% -- casual game publishers still insist that US$20-25 is a reasonable price for a casual game. I remain convinced that near-micropayment games in the $5 range would offer a brighter future for the segment.

Second, I thought it was telling that no women appeared on the design and business panels of the summit, despite the fact that women remain a primary audience for casual games. Stephan Smith from Fresh Games (makers of the fantastic game Cubis) spoke frequently during his talk about how their design decisions were motivated by what women would like or dislike. But when I asked him if they included any women in strategy, development, marketing, testing, or focus group capacities, Smith just invoked his "many years in the industry" as intuition enough. The women in the room I spoke to afterward heard this the same way I did -- "You women don't worry your pretty little heads about it. We know what you really want in a game."

Aside: why are so many of the Java games on Yahoo! Games "not compatible with Unix or Macintosh computers?" Is this another case of the Java "Write Once Run Nowhere" blues, or is there some strategic rationale behind it?

Third, no one really discussed the most interesting question about casual games -- why people play them. We've explored this question here on WCG before (1, 2, 3), and I'll look forward to continuing the discussion.

Finally, I was happy to see puzzlemaster Scott Kim again this year, this time in the Casual Games Summit. Scott really knows his stuff and I always enjoy his presentations.

Comments (14)

Um, I *was* on the Casual Games Summit Panel, and I am a woman. And I've been making games since 1988. I spoke about Casual Games that are embedded in other games. Maybe you missed the morning session. :)

Patricia A. Pizer on March 29, 2004 7:29 AM

Patricia -- thanks for your comment. Yes, I should have been clearer. I didn't mean to imply that there were no women in the summit panels, as there were, and you were :)

I was specifically talking about the afternoon design and business sessions. I found it ironic to see a panel of men talking about how their design decisions were influenced by women's opinions and playstyles, but there was no material evidence for those opinions and playstyles.

BTW, welcome to WCG! I hope you'll stick around and tell us what's what on these and other topics.

Ian Bogost on March 29, 2004 8:54 AM

One last thing: there was a second female panelist scheduled to appear in the business section (I was in Design) but she was stuck in Chicago and was unable to attend. Further misfortune precluded me from attending in the afternoon Design session as I had gotten food poisoning the night before and simply HAD to go rest once my formal section was finished. :)

Just not the day for us gals.

And thanks, I'm sure I'll stick around.

Patricia A. Pizer on March 29, 2004 6:22 PM

"Third, no one really discussed the most interesting question about casual games -- why people play them."

Though not specifically a study into casual game use, Nicole Lazzaro of Xeo Design gave a talk at both GDC and the MUD Dev conference that presented info relevent to this question.

She and her team studied players playing "in context", in their own homes or workplaces, playing their own favorite games. They observed four primary emotion keys which worked across platform or genre:

1) Emotions from Hard Fun (Puzzle solving, meaningful challenges) Anger, Boredom, Fiero (personal triumph over adversity)

2) Emotions from Easy Fun (Ambiguity, Detailed environments) Wonder, Awe, Mystery

3)Emotions from Altered States Excitement, Relief

4) Emotions from the Poeple Factor Amusement, gloating over a rival's misfortune, mentoring.

They found that many people chose to play games as a way to move through these experiences. People also chose games to put themselves in a different mood (stressed to calm, sleepy to alert).

There is a great deal more to her study. I have truncated and hopeful not mangled it. Strongly worth a look when she gets it up onto her site -xeodesign.com

Casual games give quick and usually inexpensive access to these, and, as in the case of mobile devices, can be summoned on command regardless of location.

BridgetAG on March 30, 2004 9:11 PM

Excellent! I need this study. Can we get a copy or a link to it? Pleez?

Ian Bogost on March 30, 2004 9:30 PM

"I'm planning to post the slides and a revised paper to the XEODesign site so it will be available for download. The main reason I spoke at GDC is to raise awareness about great opportunities for new emotions in games. ... Just need to get it all into PDFs."

http://www.xeodesign.com/home.html

Just give her a couple days, Ian. :)

BridgetAG on March 31, 2004 5:24 AM

I was also a presenter on the casual games summit, and agree that it's a problem if we're designing for women, and not -- at minimum -- testing with women.

But I think this is one facet of a bigger problem: the huge number of games that are created for people of all sorts, and that are not tested at all. I had the honor of judging the Mobies (mobile game awards) and was shocked by the portion of games that were strictly unplayable.

For 'casual games', which I suggest are defined primarily by ease of learning & play -- and which includes roughly all mobile games now -- this is particularly distressing.

PS: Many thanks to Bridget for the summary of Lazzaro's talk. I had wondered about that.

Dan Scherlis on March 31, 2004 6:52 PM

Ian:

My apologies if I did not make it more clear that we had 8 out of 10 internal testers woman. I would never assume to know what woman "really" want, I would be fooling myself;)

My correlation of "intuitiveness" from years of experience merely was that I have seen what does and doesn't sell, and what the demographics are who had purchased product.

I welcome any other questions or comments you may have.

Stephan

Stephan Smith on March 31, 2004 9:02 PM

Stephan -- thanks for clarifying; I apologize if I misrepresented you in my original post.

As for other questions, the topic we've been discussing here on WCG that interests me the most is *why* people (women, men, anybody) play casual games. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter.

Ian Bogost on March 31, 2004 10:34 PM

Info available for Nicole's talk:

Here's the URL for the white paper and two upcoming talks: http://www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames/

It is also linked from the big round button on the main page: http://www.xeodesign.com

The slides are available on request: info@xeodesign.com

BridgetAG on April 3, 2004 7:28 AM

Thanks Bridget!

The White Paper for my talk "Why People Play Games: 4 Keys to More Emotion Without Story" is up at our website www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.

Frequently I hear designers complain there's too much of X in games or not enough Y. In my opinion this happens because we know how to do X really well and we'd like to do Y but haven't figured it out. It is my hope that these 4 Keys to Emotion will help designers go after some Y and produce new emotions from their work and create richer Player Expereinces.

So having seen lots of emotion in researching games over the past 12 years we wanted to know more about why adults play games especially when they played their favorites.

For this independent research project we watched 15 hard core and 15 casual players at home, school, and work. From this data (using affinity groupings) we created 4 reasons people liked playing their favorite games that also created unique emotions.

We call these 4 Keys to Emotion Without Story: Hard Fun, Easy Fun, Altered States, and The People Factor. What was surprising was that these reasons to play spanned genres, type of gamer (both hard core and casual), gender, and even varied with player mood.

By closely watching people play games we see brief glimpses of emotion on their faces. Repeating this design and test cycle we should be able to amplify the emotions even more.

Looking forward to any feedback on these ideas!

Nicole

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