Asian Insanity.

GDC has been really interesting so far; I’m working in social games, and while some experience in MMOGs and music games have been useful, it is a whole new set of design challenges and play patterns; new business goals; new audiences. It feels like there’s a huge opportunity to learn new things (or variations on existing design and development themes), and I find that I’m getting a huge amount out of sessions.

Or, some sessions anyway. Playdom put on a talk yesterday, the Anatomy of a Social Gamer. I confess, I didn’t read the talk description very carefully. I had assumed that given the fact that these companies have social games down to a science – at least, the current design model, which is fairly unsophisticated in mechanic complexity – that we’d be treated to an insight on archetypes of player behavior we could use. Instead, we were treated to 4 seemingly random players, imported from various parts of California, to talk about their personal experiences. Now, I’m a coastal elite type, but I recognize that many of our players come from parts of the country in between LAX and JFK. Did Playdom think these 4 players were representative of their player base? 1 person of color; 1 woman. 2 white men. Already, the gender balance was off.

They had some interesting tidbits, but the only one I actually wrote down was that they preferred to purchase bundles of currency. Anecdotal data isn’t actionable data! And perhaps I suffered from some cognitive bias because one or two panelists answered vociferously in support of buying currency bunches rather than individual items. But nothing was offered that I couldn’t get from polling my non-game dev friends who play these games. Playdom, you should work way harder when presenting at GDC. When I and my friends give GDC talks, we bust our ass in trying to present relevant takeaways. Like Facebook’s talk, Playdom didn’t seem to recognize they were talking to an audience who probably had their hands in everything from WoW to Rock Band. We know a bunch already. And we know better, those of us who work in online games, to trust 4 people’s feedback as to what the general audience wants.

Contrast Nicole Lazzaro’s talk on emotion and social game design. She really broke down a taxonomy of design aesthetics (to borrow Marc Leblanc’s MDA framework) that drove key emotional goals for player engagement in social games. This applies to Facebook games and MMOGs; some of it was familiar but she framed it in a way that allows me to review our design concepts and focus in where gameplay is lacking. Her four main concepts were Amusement, Amici (friendlieness), Amidar (admiration) and Amiero (reciprocity and feedback). I feel now guilty for spending more words on Playdom’s talk than Nicole’s; you should just go to her site and read her materials on this. Score one for academic/independents – again – over corporate sponsored talks – for providing real, useful information. Really great – it made me feel like GDC was teaching me big chunks of new, conceptual information again. Also thumbs up to the Why Do People Buy Virtual Goods? talk yesterday.