A lot of people have been getting excited about social games.  Apparently there’s a lot of money in them.  But are these games really “social”?

First, Some Basics

By “social games” I refer, really, to Facebook games.  Farmville would be the archetypal example.  I’m sure there are similar games on Myspace, maybe other networks, but I’m not personally familiar with them.

Every creative work is influenced by its medium.  Some take advantage of the unique features of that medium, and that often leads to success.  I believe the most successful Facebook games are highly suited to Facebook as a platform.

What is Facebook like, really?

I believe the most important feature of Facebook is one that does not get mentioned very often.  Put simply:

Facebook is a website that people check multiple times a day.

It’s this factor, more than any other, that influences the design of Facebook games.

• Facebook games often give you “energy to play”.  You don’t have much energy, so you can’t do very much at once.  So you have to come back on a regular basis.
• Energy recovers over time.  If you come back in an hour or two, you’ll have the opportunity to do more stuff.
• Some games have “appointment mechanics”.  You set something up, then you have a certain window in the future where you have to return to get a benefit; not too early and not too late.  You can fit this into your schedule of website visits (8-10 hours, 12-14 hours or several days in the future).

So, the whole point of Facebook games is to be played in short bursts throughout the day.  This is why Adrian Chan tore apart the SCVNGR Playdeck for not featuring social mechanics; the mechanics weren’t social, they were focused on the style of play I’ve just described.  (There were other reasons he didn’t like the deck, but I believe that was the main one.)

Okay, Maybe a LITTLE Social

Of course, Facebook games have features that use the Facebook social network.  Key among those is the ability to invite other users to play the game.

But then, if the invitees don’t have any function in the game, the invites become merely a form of advertising for other single players.

Many games do have features that allow players to interact with their friends’ game states; however, I don’t feel like summarizing them here.  I haven’t yet seen any that, to my estimation, truly tap into the potential of social networking (beyond advertising).

But hey, if you think I’m wrong and you have a good counterexample, leave a comment and we’ll talk about it!

The basic idea is that one person starts writing the story (or writing and drawing, as most often these stories can be described as comics).  After one or two panels, the author solicits ideas from the audience.  After suggestions are provided, the author picks however many he or she likes, then draws another set of panels.  Repeat.

I believe these stories are meant to emulate computer games.  That’s why they’re so often written in second person, as in “You open the door”; e.g. “What Do You Do?“.

MS Paint Adventures is not a game. Except that it is a game, absolutely.

—Greg Costikyan

Of course, there are also obvious parallels to various forms of role-playing (cf. Parsely).

What are the characteristics of this “thing”?

By providing suggestions, the readers have a sense of being more involved in the story.  The process of suggesting courses of action naturally leads to an engaged community of readers.  Some choices generate enough suggestions to be put to a vote by the readers.  (Ruby Quest notably did this several times.)  Obviously, this form of storytelling is well suited to online forums; readers can discuss and have input on the story even if they only check the forum once a day.  (It depends on the speed of the story, of course.)

Another thing to note is that the readers don’t need to do much work to interact with the story.  This allows for even casual readers to participate, even if they don’t actually affect the story.  (See also 42 Entertainment’s inverted pyramid player model.)

In this form of storytelling, the author can pick and choose whichever suggestions he or she desires to take.  The characters in the story can even reject suggestions judged to be absurd.  (“That would be a stupid idea!”)  Cynical readers will say that the author is “forcing” certain actions into the story (or “railroading”, a term that I suspect is from roleplaying game fandom).  I think this is actually an intriguing criticism, because it comes from the viewpoint that interactivity is expected.  In other words, because the net-native nature of the story allows readers to influence the plot, they should be able to.

As for myself, I think the balance between “order” and “chaos” has to be worked out with each individual author and audience; in fact, with each individual story.  However, I will say that the potential of net-native literature has, at this point, barely been tapped.  If you want to create something entirely new, you’ll need to let the audience influence the story.

What do we call this “thing”?

People on the MSPA Forum call them “Forum Adventures”, which is fine for their community, but I don’t think it would work as a true umbrella term.  (After all, there are other possible game and roleplaying forms that could occur on a forum.)

1d4chan calls them “Quests”, because so many started popping up that they had to call them something.  (Enough to warrant an entirely new forum!)  However, I don’t think this term is descriptive enough.  (What doesn’t “quest” mean at this point?)

I’ve come up with a number of possible terms:

• Improvisational storytelling—This art form does appear to have a lot in common with improv comedy.
• Many-to-one storytelling—Descriptive, but academic.
• Many-to-one roleplaying—”Roleplaying” seems more in line with Parsely than this particular narrative form.  But this does make me curious as to what many-to-one roleplaying would really be like.  (I suspect there have been one or two games that tried it, but I can’t recall at the moment.)
• Crowd-sourced storytelling—Actually, this sounds like it might be something different.  It seems to imply that there is no one author/moderator.  Once again, it makes me wonder what “crowd-sourced storytelling” would really be like.
• Audience-prompted storytelling—This is my favorite of the terms (as you can probably tell from the title of this entry).  I think this term well captures the idea of the author creating stuff prompted by the audience.

Where can we take this in the future?

Most of the current audience-prompted stories take the forum of webcomics, with a few completely text-based ones.  There’s the whole universe of graphic design to draw on (acrylics? pencil sketches on notepaper?), but let’s go farther.  It’s easy to imagine other media forms involved, like video.  (Anyone else get a shiver imagining Joss Whedon and Neil Patrick Harris with a video camera and a web forum?)

This can lead us to think of audience-prompted storytelling as a process:

1. Author provides content.
2. Audience discusses content.
3. Audience provides suggestions.
4. Author considers suggestions for inspiration of new content.
5. Repeat.

This definition is broad enough that many existing works fit into it.  In theory, a massively multiplayer game that pushes sets of new content has probably let player comments influence the creation of that content.  Legend of the Five Rings and its “deep, evolving story” are a better example.

While many experiences could fit into this mold, I think the real strength of this particular narrative form is h0w easy it is to participate.  Anyone can sign up to a forum and plop an idea down in the correct thread…and they might have a powerful influence on the story.  And even if they don’t, they may spark a discussion about their idea.

That’s the kind of thing that just might make people feel welcome in a new community…

Play “Improvised Story #0 – Release 0, First Draft” now!

What Went Right

• The “call to action” was on Twitter, but I have my accounts set up so that most things I post on Twitter also show up on my Facebook page.  All the ideas came from Facebook.  Nobody on Twitter seemed interested.
• Reusing old code from previous projects.  I’ve built up quite the repertoire of IF objects to play with.
• Evocative suggestions.  A couple of these were great for sparking the imagination.
• Creating a framework to fit everything together.  I’m starting to think that what I’m really best at is creating systems to help things (or people) work together.
• Hacking at Parchment, the tool I’m using to let people play the game over the web.  Now that I’ve gained some experience with it, I can do even more cool things.

What Went Wrong

• Overly ambitious ideas.  Seriously, a time machine?  Not in the “First Draft”, I’m afraid.  (I made sure, however, to include at least one idea from each contributor in the first draft.)
• Characters.  They’re the most complicated IF objects to create.  (I only created one; another will come in a later release.)
• A dearth of puzzles.  Puzzles are hard to think up; I had to brainstorm some based on the contributed objects and characters.  That was the part of the project where I just kind of sat there grimacing; testing and debugging is annoying, but at least I felt like I was doing something.

What’s Next

More ideas can be implemented.  Of course, the project will be even more interesting if more people contribute…

After reading that article, I found myself thinking about some of the challenges inherent in transmedia stories.  There’s one problem that suggests itself immediately.

What happens when someone reading one segment realizes that other segments also have elements important to the story?

Some people may feel betrayal.  They may have the impression that the thing they just bought is really just an advertisement for some other thing.  The best defense against this, as far as I can tell, is to make sure each product provides value on its own—for a story, that would mean that it feels like a complete story on its own.

Some people might feel confusion or frustration.  They may feel there are things in the story that they don’t understand, and these things are keeping them from enjoying the story.  However, I believe there are techniques to help prevent this reaction.

Transmedia Grounding

Many stories (I might even say “most”) make use of a viewpoint character.  This is a character that the reader (/viewer/player) understands and sympathizes with.  Whatever strange events happen in the story, the viewpoint character is surprised by them.  This lets the reader know that it’s okay to be confused or startled by odd things happening in the story.  It’s especially important for stories featuring elements of science fiction, fantasy or horror, because those elements are far removed from the reader’s daily life.  The reactions of an “everyday” character makes sure the story is grounded.

This device can be useful in transmedia stories.  If someone is reading one story, and elements of another story are introduced, those elements are foreign to the reader.  Therefore, the viewpoint character should react to them with surprise.  This will help the reader accept the new story elements as part of the fictional continuity.

A quick example should illustrate the point better.

Spirit Cards

Let’s say we have a television series called “Urban Mage”.  A twentysomething named Josiah and some of his friends discover that they each have a talent for sorcery, and they fall in with various urban mages and get drawn in to their conflicts.  The mages fight by manipulating electricity, starting fires, divining information and occasionally warping matter.  (I promise I made this all up for the purpose of this blog post, although I did recently reread Mage: the Ascension…)  So, in this case Josiah is our male lead and viewpoint character.  He knows next-to-nothing about magery, but he has to learn quickly.

Now let’s say there’s a web game where players learn about “Spirit Cards”, a form of magic that uses enchanted cards to call in favors from spirits.  Players of the game learn about another new mage named Acacia, and along with her they learn the rules by which Spirit Cards work (incidentally forming a nifty strategy game).  Acacia’s story is told through quests and updates on the website, and while the Spirit Cards are obviously built on the Urban Mage conception of magic, specific references to the television show are rare and far between.

Finally, let’s say that there’s an episode of Urban Mage where Acacia appears and consults with Josiah.  This is the first time that Spirit Cards are even mentioned on the show, but Josiah knows all about them and is able to use his mastery of Spirit Card rule nuances to do whatever it is that needs to be done in this episode…

That will probably upset some people.  People watching the television show without playing the game will be completely confused by the Spirit Card stuff.  People who started out playing the game will be upset that everyone in the main Urban Mage universe seems to know about the cards and rules they spent so much time mastering.

A much better way to handle the situation would be to have Josiah surprised by Acacia and her cards.  He has the opportunity to be taught about this new form of magic, and through sympathizing with him, the TV audience is able to understand it as well.  Also, the web game players are shown that their card game has an important role to play in the larger Urban Mage universe.  (It’s also a great opportunity for subtle in-jokes.)

Of course, it’s possible to go too far with this example.  If Acacia’s magic is played up too highly, she can seem like a Deus Ex Machina (or a Mary Sue!).  The ideal resolution would show that each character has something to offer the other.

Ultimately, I believe that when people read (/watch/play) media, and they really enjoy that media, they will pursue mastery of it.  If you respect your audience’s mastery of your content—if you show them that you’re proud they care about your stories so much—they’ll love you for it.

A lot of times in games you work with sets of data.  Data is just information, 1s and 0s, the contents of variables; it doesn’t have any meaning in itself.  For data to mean something, it has to have context.  You “view” the model in a certain context.

When I talk about “leveraging” content, all I’m really talking about is switching the context.  A classic example (one example where software actually does leverage user-created content) is Streets of SimCity.  This was a racing/combat game published by Electronic Arts; the player went on missions involving driving around a city.  The really interesting thing was that the player could import city maps from SimCity 2000, and these cities would be rendered in full 3D to create custom driving environments for the player.  (SimCopter had a similar feature; the player could fly a helicopter around an imported city.)

The point here is the context switching.  In the context of SimCity 2000, a city is (roughly speaking) an arrangement of buildings and zones that have economic effects on each other.  However, in Streets of SimCity, the city is an arrangement of buildings and zones that define 3D geography.  The underlying data has not changed, it’s just that the games view it in different contexts.

With this in mind, we revisit the question: In what situations would it be appropriate and/or easy to leverage user-created content?  Now the answer is more apparent.  To leverage content in a new situation, you must view it in a different context so it has a different meaning.

When you start up Zoo Tycoon you can play a “Freeform” game, a complete tabula rasa which you can develop in any fashion you see fit.  There is a losing condition–your zoo loses so much money that it goes out of business.  However, there is no true win condition and no restrictions (other than initial conditions like zoo size and starting money).  Instead of playing a Freeform game, you can instead play through “Scenarios”, each of which gives you a very specific set of constraints.  Often the zoo is partially built when you get there, and often your construction options are limited.  There is always a set of objectives that must be completed, within a set time limit, for you to win the scenario.

Of course, Zoo Tycoon isn’t the first game to implement scenarios; they’re a pretty common tool in strategy games.  SimCity Societies encourages you to attain Achievements, each of which is basically a scenario in itself.  Galactic Civilizations 2 has a number of scenarios that form a history of the war against the Dreadlords…and some that are completely different, just for a change of pace.

So, what is a scenario exactly?  I’ll go ahead and advance a definition:

A scenario is a set of objectives and constraints within a game.  It is possible to play the game in a completely unrestricted way, but while playing the scenario the player attempts to fulfill the objectives while working within the constraints.  There is an initial condition, the situation in which the player starts, and a win condition, which the player is working toward.

The interesting part of this definition is the second sentence, which implies that a scenario places unusual constraints on the player, thereby creating an experience that is somehow outside the norm.  Without this caveat, the definition could apply to anything.  It could apply to Super Mario Bros., for example; the player attempts to defeat Bowser while working within the constraints of the level designs and gravity.  This reductionist viewpoint could be useful, so we’ll keep it in mind.

So, to have a scenario you need gameplay that is restricted in a special case.  A good example of this is the web-based game Billy vs. Snakeman, specifically the Wasteland missions.  During Wasteland missions, ordinary Strength bonuses don’t count; Range, therefore, becomes much more important.  The usual bonuses of allies do not take effect; only special Wasteland allies can be used.  Similarly, Chakra costs are multiplied by 10 (and even, eventually, 100), meaning that only special Wasteland Jutsu can be used.  The player must scramble to find items, allies and bonuses that will allow him or her to solve these special missions.

The Wasteland missions are basically a “side quest”; there is nothing that forces you to complete them.  When you start out, you have no Wasteland gear, so your initial condition is fairly weak.  There is a win condition–one final Wasteland quest that provides a permanent reward.  (There is no “losing condition”, in that the only way you can lose is by giving up and turning your attention to some other part of the game!)  So, in my view, this is a good example of a scenario.

The interesting thing here is that most people might not think of Billy vs. Snakeman as a “strategy game” in the same vein as SimCity Societies or Galactic Civilizations 2.  However, it does allow the player to develop a situation (your character) over time, and it does allow a certain amount of freedom as to which actions to perform.  And if you don’t like your situation, you can start over…by creating a new character, if nothing else!

Another valuable example is Kingdom of Loathing.  Another web-based character development game, KoL focuses on humor, but it does have a lot of content and some elaborate strategy.  To summarize: Once you have completed the main quest in KoL, you may “ascend“.  When you ascend, your character’s status is reduced to starting levels and you do the whole thing over again–with a couple of differences, of course.  You may change your class, which results in a very different experience.  You may also choose a few sets of constraints to make your new playthrough more exciting–in other words, scenarios.  “Casual” allows you to use items from your previous ascension(s); “Hardcore” does not.  “Teetotaler” disallows consumption of alcoholic drinks (a good source of extra turns and stats) in exchange for the promise of a special bonus item upon completion of the run.  “Moon signs” unlock different special areas, each of which provides their own unique items and bonuses to assist you in your new life.  Not only that, players have created their own scenarios to play through to provide even more interesting experiences.

Kingdom of Loathing has enough variety in the player actions that these scenarios can be interesting; the constraints can really create new experiences.  But let’s go further, let’s try to hybridize these two kinds of scenarios.

What if, in Kingdom of Loathing, there was an accessory that provided a stat cap; each stat could not be more than 50 while you were wearing it.  And there was an area that you could only visit if you were wearing that accessory.  And there was a quest that required adventuring in this area to receive a special reward, with monsters that were difficult.  Players would have to find skills or items that provided effects other than stat bonuses to defeat the monsters guarding the treasure.  This would provide an experience outside the norm, and that is the point of scenarios.  This is a tool that could be applied to many games, opening up the range of experiences they can provide.

Recently I’ve been playing a web-based game called Billy vs. Snakeman.  It’s a parody of various anime series, but it’s also a fun game in its own right, with some clever features.  In its most basic elements, BvS deals with developing your character over time.  You increase “your” stats and collect items; these stats and items allow you to pass challenges within the game.  The interesting point here is that you’re not just experience the game, you’re also creating a piece of content–your character.  That character exists within the database whether you’re logged in or not.

BvS has a feature called the Arena where you can “fight” other characters.  In truth, this isn’t really like a player vs. player (PvP) thing; whether you win or lose, you don’t affect the other character at all.  (There are more PvP-oriented aspects of BvS, if you’re into that.)  When you perform the “Fight in the Arena” action, a character is randomly chosen from the database to be your opponent.  That character and your character are compared to see how they perform against a random challenge; ties go to your character.  If you win, you get “Arena Reputation”, a currency that can be spent on certain items (items that can only be purchased with Arena Reputation).

The interesting thing here is that the second character is simply a piece of content that exists in the database.  The other player is not notified and is not affected in any way.  However, that player has spent time building up the character’s stats and items, as well as creating a customized name and possibly an avatar image to represent that character.  So each character is an interesting piece of content, and the characters are leveraged to create an interesting experience for this particular feature in the game.

Now for the more complex example–Spore.  Spore consists of five phases, but in terms of this post they each have the same game flow.  When you play Spore, you are creating something–a cell, a creature, a building, a spaceship.  Usually these bits of content have restrictions on them having to do with gameplay; for example, creatures need legs and feet to move around, so all created creatures have legs and feet (unless the player specifically tried for a pathologically strange one).  With that in mind, and the social and technical design of the “creator” subprograms, most of the content looks appropriate; that is to say, creatures look like creatures that can walk around, buildings look like dwellings where creatures could live and work.  (Whether the content is socially appropriate is another question entirely!)

Once content is created, it usually gets shared to the Spore servers (user settings can change this).  What this means is that your creature gets uploaded to the server, then it can be downloaded into someone else’s game.  Then when they wander their galaxy and explore alien worlds, they might find your creatures living on those worlds.  Similarly, when you wander your galaxy, you find it populated with creatures created by other players the world over.

As we can see by now, Spore was built around the idea of leveraging content created by users.  User-created content is shared to make other users’ games more interesting.  The content is used in a “faux-multiplayer” way.  You meet other users’ creations as if they were other players playing the same game that you’re playing.  They answer the challenges of the game in their own ways, and you get to see the result and compare it to your own strategy.

The faux-multiplayer idea has one big advantage–it’s easy to design.  You can take one user’s data and treat it as if it existed in another user’s game world.  You can have both sets of data following the same game rules.  This is fun because it can inject more interesting variety into the games; the assumption is that the process of play guides the players to create interesting content.  One pitfall is that players might arrive at the same answers to the game’s challenges, resulting in everyone’s data looking the same.  This is an issue worthy of its own post, but let me say that Magic: the Gathering has addressed this problem better than anything else I’ve seen.  Magic is solely a multiplayer game where each player plays with a customized deck of cards; there are well-nigh unlimited combinations of cards that would stand a chance of winning, each with their own strategies.  Therefore creating a deck is itself a piece of creative expression that gets pitted against an opponent.

Now that I’ve gone over the basics, I’d like to speculate about new directions.  The way I see it, content leveraging can be divided into two segments; you encourage users to create interesting content, then you adapt that content in such a way as to improve the experience for someone else.

At this point I’d like to talk about a couple of web-based games I’ve created.  First is Phantasma; in this game, players portray wizards inhabiting a magical castle.  The emphasis is on developing your stats through “research”, learning spells and creating enchanted items.  Next is Chaostorm, a more abstract sort of game focused on creating items with procedurally-generated “recipes”.  Players can ultimately create “Scopes”, which assist them in finding items they need, and “Battle Items”, which boost their stats for PvP-ish contests.  Of course, because I’ve created both these games, I have access to all the content for both of them.  In Phantasma is a location entitled the “Kipatsu Shop”, known for selling items from “other worlds”.  In this case, the shop sells items from Chaostorm!  Randomly selected Chaostorm items are used as templates to create Phantasma items with appropriate power levels and prices.  Chaostorm Scopes are sold in Phantasma as “Elemental Scrutinizers” that assist a wizard’s research into the magical discipline of Elementalism, and Chaostorm Battle Items are sold as “Elemental Projectors” that increase a wizard’s spellcasting ability in that same realm.  The name and description of the item are imported directly from Chaostorm (with “Elemental Scrutinizer/Projector” prepended to the item’s name).  In this way, the content from Chaostorm is used to create interesting new items for Phantasma, in a carefully controlled process.

Chaostorm is a game designed to encourage users to create interesting content.  However, even less “experimental” games can yield intriguing bits of content.  As we saw with BvS, a player character itself is the sum of the player’s choices, their answers to the game’s challenges.  A long-time player of BvS has created an elaborately customized piece of data that represents a personality within that world.  This would hold for all sorts of games classified as “RPGs”, whether multiplayer or not.  Other games yield different types of content; SimCity is an obvious example.  (Will Wright came up with the idea for SimCity while designing maps for the background of a helicopter game; he liked designing cities so much he made a game out of it.)  With SimCity the player is tasked with creating a city.  There are a slew of city-building games that imitate this design; Caesar, Cleopatra, Stronghold, et al..  However, strategy games such as StarCraft have city-building elements as well, even if they’d be more likely to call it base-building.  There are any number of space-trading games that feature customizing one’s starships.  Oblivion allows one to purchase dwellings and fill them with furniture, although there isn’t much in-game encouragement to customize your home exactly how you wish.  As I see it, there are two ingredients for interesting content creation; there must be restrictions to guide your users into creating content that makes sense, and there should be enough possibilities that not all content is identical.

The second part of the process is adapting the content for new purposes.  I believe this is the part where there are still great possibilities for advancement.  Once you have a city, for example, you can have the character walk through it–but that’s easy.  What if there was a game where the player bought a city in a bottle?  SimCity Societies allows the player to create cities that have different “stats”, such as Spirituality or Industry.  Perhaps the city in a bottle is an item–the character could wear it around their neck in the “necklace slot”.  And cities with high Spirituality would provide bonuses to MP or Magic stats, while cities with high Industry could increase Strength.  Or, you could have an item that represented another character–made into a voodoo doll, or maybe an item that provides a link to their strength.  And that would provide some customized bonuses depending on the other character’s stats.  The point is that there are many different types of content that games require, and many of them can be “filled” with data provided by other games.

(EDIT: I wrote a little more on this subject for Part 2 of this article.)

In other news…I’ve been getting a huge number of spam comments on this blog.  Fortunately, the WordPress software makes it easy to deal with them, so you guys never see them…But it still greatly puzzles me. O_o

Speaking of web-based games, I had an idea for another little project for the TIGSource Commonplace Book Competition.  I’m calling it “NecroFodder”.  We’ll see if anything comes of it.

Today I had a thought. Dwarf Fortress is kind of a roguelike, isn’t it? I like its emphasis on construction. And Nethack is basically open source. Hmmm…