facebook, continuity & persistence
So about a month and a half into my first facebook project when I suddenly have a startling realization concerning something I’d never really thought much about before.
I’m talking with one of the other designers about session length problems and it dawns on me that the Facebook experience is almost exclusively continuity driven. Sure a lot of games on a lot of platforms are like that, but not like facebook; For facebook we almost exclusively create games that you tune into like a TV show and get you fill every Tuesday (only our Tuesday is the coffee break). There’s no natural stopping point to the vast majority of games and it feels.. off.
Whether it’s the energy mechanic a la Ravenwood or DA Legends, or the appointment mechanic of farmville, endless continuity is pervasive in every world and avatar.
Sure, we’ve been making the kind of steady character driven progression I’m ranting about the center piece of our games since rpg’ing first took off (after all how else do we get 60 – 90 hours of playtime and a reliable revenue stream that isn’t front-loaded for a cash register?).
Somehow though, this seems a different. A kind of natural cash grab that people go with because it just works. If the game doesn’t end, you don’t leave. Is this all there is to facebook? Am I crazy in thinking that there has to be a viable alternative to the soap opera model ?
Anyways, back on topic. So basically the project has a legacy design that I was had gone along with without a ton of questioning or deep consideration because of the IP that it’s based on.
This game consists of many sessions each of which is self-contained, eventually (and very frequently) ends and you (in theory) opt to start another one with a slightly improved canvas and palette if you did alright+ the last time.
So here’s the issue. There are two real downsides to this modus operandi that didn’t really stand out and noone had brought up until we had a playable build (I’m still floored that our dev team managed that after only ~9 weeks after production began):
1: We’re more or less guaranteeing people who didn’t absolutely love the first session, aren’t going to start another one.
I suppose that’s not so different from walking away from a management sim after 10 minutes, except in the fact that the sim didn’t say “hey, alright! you’re done now, oh, and while you’re at it, why not try again!” Nope, what we’re doing is putting a period at the end of the sentence and hoping that everything we’ve done so far makes you want to turn the page.
2: Even if we dole out xp, tell you you’ve unlocked stuff, etc. that isn’t necessarily obvious unless you start another session. The sense of permanence that most facebook players have been groomed for is almost entirely absent.
There’s also no guarantee that the stuff we give the player to take with them to their next game is going to be sticky enough for them to find it valuable – after all, it’s not in their face all the time like an XP bar or a timer telling them how long they’ve got till their melons ripen.
So as far as I can tell, there are two main ways to address this without restructuring the session:
1: make sure your session is so much fun, and that you want to do it again (that’s the easy bit right?)
2: Make sure that there’s something meaningful and important for you to take with you into the next session and that the way we give it to you, and the way you bring it is both meaningful and makes you care about doing it all again.
So we’ve got some heavy tweaking to do on #1 and there are a lot of other considerations that come into play since it’s not IP; however, on the other hand #2 lends itself to a lot of creative direction and just maybe that’s where we can shine.
We’ll see how it goes…
