作者：Brandon Sheffield

去年，深资游戏开发者、人称”不列颠之王”的Richard Garriott创办了他的新社交游戏开发公司——Portalarium。就像许多长期开发PC游戏的开发者一样，他渐渐看清了社交空间作为游戏平台的自然演变过程，并最终决定热情接纳这场演变。最近，该公司成功融资360万美元。

在最近的媒体采方中，Garriott谈论了将“《网络创世纪》（Ultima Online）式的体验”带给社交游戏玩家的计划，解释了他对这类游戏为何不受限于特定平台，并且具有易获取用户，兼具深度和意义的看法，他认为让Zynga培养出的玩家接受更深刻更丰富的游戏体验的时机已成熟。

他表示，自己大多游戏时间反而是在玩iPhone游戏。在他看来，真正的游戏变革应该来自于他和其他同僚所能设计的那种富有深度，并且适用于大众玩家的游戏。以下是游戏邦编译的访谈内容：

Portalarium现在的情况怎么样？

我们一年多以前创立了这家公司。这里都是我的老朋友，David Swofford负责PR（公关）和营销工作；Fred Schmidt掌握业务运营，Dallas Snell监管产品开发工作。

我们这伙人都曾一起在Origin和NCsof（原Destination Games）共事，我们是从Origin、艺电、Destination Games、NCsoft到现在的Portalarium一路走来的老搭档。

第一年，我们的工作主要是创建基础设备和技术。我们不仅相信自己可以做出卓越的社交游戏，而且还要通过免费试玩，付费游戏，点击邮件链接即玩游戏等方式对其进行创新。

另外我们还相信……我们在某些方面做得更好，并且希望成为这一领域的佼佼者——如果看看大部分休闲或者社交游戏公司的产品主会发现，就算你玩的是同一家公司出品的游戏，玩家之间其实也是彼此孤立的状态。

假设现在你在玩一款Ville风格的游戏，我也在玩另一款Ville游戏，我们都不知道我们各自在玩什么，除非我退出系统并查看自己的涂鸦墙才知道：“啊，原来我玩这个游戏时，我朋友在玩另一个游戏。要是我早知道就好了。”

所以，我们就开发了一个游戏间共通的标准化信息系统。有了这个系统，当你在玩一款游戏时，我可以获得你的游戏行动信息。我可以选择忽略，也可以和你打声招呼等，或者，我点击一下链接，直接切换到你的游戏里。我们正通过这种方法，尝试加深不同游戏的玩家及其好友之间的联系。

这就是目前为止我们一直在构建的系统。我们已经发布两款轻量级游戏，也就是用来测试标准化信息系统主干网的博彩类游戏。我们正要发行首款真正的原创游戏，就社交媒介类型的游戏而言，它仍将是一款轻量级游戏，但至少不是农场游戏、不是模拟经营咖啡馆游戏、也不是饲养宠物游戏，而是一款真正的原创游戏。以玩家对不列颠之王的期待标准来看，它仍然是一款相当简单的游戏。

这款游戏就叫《Ultimate Collector》。之后我们打算把它与下一个大不列颠之王的虚拟世界游戏（《不列颠的不列颠尼亚》）合二为一。

可以详细说说吗？

《Ultimate Collector》的游戏背景是当代世界（主题），估计今夏出炉。这是一款独特的社交游戏，当然也会有游戏的惯例设置（异步体验、好友共享成就和信息交流等），当下成功的社交游戏基本上都带有这些特征。

我之后很快就会着手开发适用于手机和社交平台的不列颠之王风格的RPG游戏。《不列颠的新不颠尼亚》（Lord British’s New Britannia）是这个游戏的暂定名称。

听起来你们似乎有意突破Facebook的局限性？

这就是我所说的不局限于特定平台的计划。到目前为止，我们已经在Facebook、Hi5上发布游戏，并将推出自己的独立运营网站，不过还没做出来。我们的iPad版本已经在测试了，iPhone版本也已投入制作。所以我们基本上会涉足此类所有平台。

你不是可以把基础设施安进Facebook吗？iPhone也有相应的基础设施系统可用。为什么你们还要大费周章地构建系统基础？

我现在几乎都是在iPhone平台上游戏，但它的基础设施只适用于iPhone……我现在说的不是支持用户向涂鸦墙发布OpenFeint中的游戏成就，而是指可让用户获知好友当前动态，立即找到对方的实时数据流。

我打个对方，在注册Facebook之前，我在LinkedIn上有一个好友列表，我在Facebook上又有另一个好友列表，我在Twitter上也有一个好友列表。

在我看来，我真正关心的是我的朋友是谁。我和Facebook、Twitter和LinkedIn都没有个人联系，我只和好友有个人联系。

所以，我们要做的就是模糊化平台限界。因为我们大家所关心的是朋友，而不是平台。所以，我们有一套工具组可以帮你把所有朋友整合进一个好友列表，无论你玩哪个游戏，这份好友列表都会一直伴你左右。

你总不希遇到陌生人的信息轰炸，你的真正想法是，至少得让你自主选择是否了解真实好友的动态。

那么你们怎样针对这种功能设计用户界面？

无论你打开的是游戏、网页浏览器或者已安装的插件，界面上只会弹出一个小窗口，上面写着：“你的朋友某某某刚战胜了三个坏家伙，你因此得到三袋金子。”这个弹出的小窗口之后会自动关闭。

不过在那个小公告上，还会显示“忽略”、“回复”和“参与”选项。“忽略”的意思是你不再看任何来自特定数据流的信息；“回复”是指你可以说：“嗨，祝贺你啊”，仅此而已；“参与”则意味着马上启动并进入朋友所在的游戏。

不少游戏都有发送通告的设置，而且数量太多了，也许你可以做一个断续器……

我也是这么想的，通告什么的确实是太泛滥。但这些通告的大小和出现频率都还在我们的承受范围内吧，所以我不认为玩家已经招架不住了。另外，这基本上是一种恒定的媒体流，所以到目前为止，“断续器”还是一个不错的选择。但目前为止，我们并不认为这种信息出现的频率真有那么高。

不过，令我产生受挫感的一个地方就是，在社交游戏中无论我执行了哪些微不足道的操作，都有一个对话框跳出来：“你确定不想在Facebook上发贴告诉好友吗？”我一般都要点击：“确实，真的不想。”

Xbox Live与此类似，事实上我确实对“某某某在线”这类弹出窗口挺不痛快，而且这些消息常会引起一些网络连接问题……

弹出窗口反复不断地出现吗？

是啊，时时刻刻啊。就好像我一直在看“嘿~~~~！”这种东西。

“嘿！嘿！”是啊，那就是为什么我们善解人意的小“忽略”键会移除所有媒体流。一旦你显示出今天你对某人的关注级别并不高，那么，这个通告就不会再出现了。

谈到更深层次的东西，去年我们有一个简要的对话，是关于社交游戏中的定向叙事方式及其实现的可能性。现在你已经针对这些平台开发一阵子的游戏了，你有何看法？

我认为这一点是个有趣的话题。当前大多数人气社交游戏并非我所谓的“大型多人”游戏，因为这些游戏的玩家并不处在同一个游戏时空。玩家在游戏世界的活动会留下一连串可被他人拾取的痕迹，或者是影响虚拟世界中其他玩家的痕迹或者活动。你明白我的意思吧。

事实上，我认为线性叙事方式尤其简单。因为你可以在《创世纪》里玩单人游戏，而无论什么时候，我在你的游戏世界取得什么成就，或者留下什么东西（痕迹），下次你上线时就能收到。所以，实际上你很容易就能完成定向叙事方式，这也是目前大多数流行社交游戏所采用的方式。

我的个人目标之一是，创造出更接近所谓的“《网络创世纪》式体验”的游戏，这也是我所希望做出的游戏大作。这多多少少又会对线性叙事方式的游戏制作提出挑战，这对《网络创世纪》也是一个挑战。

作为对当下一系列社交游戏没有多大兴趣的人，我可能会对这类东西有点兴趣吧，我也不太确定。

正是如此。我对当下的社交游戏也没有多大兴趣。不过你也说了，你也是一名iPhone游戏玩家。在玩iPhone游戏之前，我会说自己是PC游戏玩家，但我可能每年只玩一款PC游戏。不过实际上我看了非常多，而真正投入体验的游戏一年也就一款。

但是在iPhone上，我一星期就玩一款新游戏了，通常还是玩到通关完毕。现在我的iPhone上已经安装50款游戏了，我都玩透了。我现在比以前更称得上是一名玩家，但我是这么想的：这些游戏无疑是休闲游戏。虽然未必见得是社交游戏，但仍然符合我对今后游戏发展的设想。

我经常举出的一个例子是，我发现有人担心“休闲游戏到底能成为他们想玩的游戏吗”，我的回答是：“当然，它们会的。”

设想一下有这么两款游戏，比如说是采用不同获取方式的《网络创世纪》。第一种获取方式是，你先去商店花50美元买下来、带回家、安装，以后每个月支付10美元，这样就可以玩这个游戏了。

这里还有另一种获取方式。还是同一款游戏，但是朋友给你发了一封邮件，你只要点击一下链接就可以进入游戏了。链接后马上就可以玩了，因为这是流媒体下载，所以你可以节省繁琐的安装流程。只有当你闯过第五关时，我才会想方设法向你收费——它收取的费用与第一种方式相同。

你最有可能玩哪款游戏？假设你同样喜欢这两个版本（本来就是同一款游戏），你觉得哪个更容易流行起来？显然是那个只要点击链接就能玩的游戏吧。

所以我说，别担心目前的游戏内容如何。还是先考虑一下游戏销售及其运行平台获取用户的方式。为什么我在这个平台上玩这么多的游戏，因为进入游戏容易啊，冲动的代价也只是2到5块钱。我甚至没想过我玩这些游戏花了多少钱，虽然在iPhone游戏的每月开销超过PC游戏，但那是因为我买了太多iPhone游戏了。所以，我觉得蛮好的。

游戏领域的跨平台互动看起来比以前更多了。

也许还有人仍是怀疑论者，我先来举个例子，现在有三款Zynga游戏：《FarmVille》、《FrontierVille》和《CityVille》。当我看到《FarmVille》时，它已经大红大紫了。你去玩这款游戏时会发现：“哇，这个用户界面也太粗陋了吧。”事实上那个用户界面蛮不好用的，很令人困惑。如果我是一个新手，一个轻量级玩家（游戏邦注：只会玩简单游戏的玩家），我会说：“噢，它只是不修边幅罢了。“

我的意思是，我有点惊讶，居然有人可以无视这个拙劣用户界面，然后进入游戏体验。直接了当地说，这个游戏还是相当地简单，至少对我来说是有点太简单了，没有什么深度，尽管我很震惊，但它仍然就是这么火。

再看看《FrontierVille》的情况吧。这款游戏的设计就好多了。用户界面更是一大进步，事实上在设计上还是没变，只是更靠谱了。这款游戏更有深度了，动画效果做得也更好了。我可以这么说：“哇，现在我真的可以欣赏一番了，算得上真正的游戏。”不过，这游戏还不是我想玩的，虽然它算得上一款真正的游戏。

最后再看下《CityVille》。这款游戏的设计和人气都超过了《FarmVille》，现在它是世界上最流行的游戏了。但我要说的是：“内容太多了。”说实话，屏幕上充斥着各种各样的游戏元素，我看得眼花缭乱。整个屏幕上的星星四处弹跳，我要点击的东西实在太多了。

所以这款游戏超过了我的个人操作能力范围。那些以前从来没碰过游戏的小白玩家，现在却成群结队地涌进这款游戏——现在他们已经能够操作比我所无法接受的复杂游戏。

所以，当有人说：“噢，这些游戏会越来越简单，因为新玩家从来就不能接受深度和复杂性。”我回应：“胡说。他们早就得心应手了！”所以，只要给点时间，玩家的经验和期望值都将进一步成长，同时也能理解游戏的多样性。这批新玩家的数量还将以惊人的速度发展。就像电影产业一样，这种聚合现象必然还会发生。

你知道的，电影大作谁都看。但有许多浪漫喜剧的观众是女孩子加上被她们拖来的男友；而不少冒险电影的观众主力军则是小伙子加上被拉来看的女孩子。

游戏也是这么回事。游戏的辐射范围是相当稳定的，几乎包括所有人种、全地球、全年龄和各行各业群体。这是一个极好的现象，我们这些传统游戏玩家不应该对此心存恐惧，也不应该鄙视它。我们要做的是通过新媒介创造人们想玩的游戏。

从网页游戏发展的角度来看，因为人们现在欣赏的是：简单就是美；且玩家已经想出如何从根本上更好地交流信息，所以用户界面的不断改进也是很值得关注的事。我觉得那才是最大的难题所在。

我认为所有游戏都要从社交媒介中吸取的另一个重大教训就是用户界面的经常性教学。

比如，在社交媒体游戏中，拖拉滑块几乎不存在。翻页的左右箭头是有的，但看大片信息的滑块这种东西是没有的，因为游戏开发者发现许多人根本没搞明白滑块有什么用。

这是一个用户界面的复杂级别，但用户界面只要有这个复杂度级别，就会流失玩家。如果真有那种滑块存在的话，玩家要买游戏物品时，都只会买陈列在第一页上的，而不会考虑第二、第三页，因为实际上他们从来没有拉滑块的习惯。

所以，确保游戏的用户界面的简洁明了（我们说的是必须）。就拿洗衣机或者洗碗机来说吧，每个人都知道怎么使用，因为每台机子的用的都是标准化的控制设置。这没什么好疑问的，这就是事实。如果你打算一次性解决所有玩家的界面操作问题的话，那就尽可能确保你通过游戏操作设置标准化手把手地教会玩家怎么玩，尽可能保证只有一个级别的概念性复杂程度。

也不是说玩家在虚拟世界里就不欣赏好的游戏内容，丰富细致的NPC。游戏开发者就是不要在这上面做过头就好。就算是作为铁杆玩家的我，下载了许多现在已经过气的免费MMO游戏。这些游戏当中不少作品的画面很精美、用户界面很细致、NPC设置也相当丰富。就虚拟形象的细节来说，凡是我称为“功能齐全”的东西都有了，其他各个方面也做得很到位。

但我觉得他们“好”过头了。玩家置身于庞大的游戏世界之间却不知所措，不知何去何从。所以玩家的反应是：“啊天呐， 我喜不喜欢这款游戏都要花这么长的时间来确定，我哪敢玩啊！”如果是我的话，那我会说：“呀，真漂亮！我完了。”我也没玩这些游戏。就算你认为我可能去做那种游戏，我一般也是不玩的，因为要上手太困难了。所以吧，恰到好处地向玩家展示游戏深度是一门必修课。

是的。能看到玩家到底在做什么，而不必瞎猜，这就是用户反馈参数的优势。

对。我们制作MMO游戏时也考虑了这种用户反馈参数。所以MMO游戏开发者如果不知道怎么解决这些问题，那就不可原谅了，因为我们那时候就已经采用这种方法了。

我想那时候的游戏开发者应该是谨慎使用这种方法，因为大家共存的观念就是，这是一种欺骗或不地道的手段。但用户反馈参数其实非常管用。

我可以告诉你，我们之前就已经不断根据这些反馈参数来重新设计《网络创世纪》。例如，我在《网络创世纪》中最喜欢的一个情节是，游戏开始后，玩家可以在船上使用一根钓鱼杆，有50%的把握可以钓到鱼。从模拟钓鱼的开始到结束，使用钓鱼杆、在水面上、50%、鱼，就是这样一步步照做。许多人都这么干。

玩家开始相信一些可疑的钓鱼信息，他们认为在河里钓到鱼的可能性比在海里钓鱼更大。这当然不是真的。我只让你使用鱼杆在水面上以50%的概率钓到鱼。就是这样！

但是看到如此之多的人在这么做，如此之多的人抱有这样的虚假信仰，所以我们就想：“哇，我们应该多花些时间来把钓鱼业搞得更好！”然后我们就这么做了。很长时间以来，我们确实把模拟钓鱼这个剧情改良了一番，如给玩家不同品种的鱼、不同的地点有不同的得分，所以钓鱼业更加红火了。

还有些东西我们自认为放进游戏一定很不赖，但实际上并没什么人注意或者关心，这真是悲催加悲剧。但我们修改和处理这些问题了，甚至直接从游戏中移除这些内容。

所以，打一开始我就不认为以用户反馈参数改良游戏的做法有什么新意可言，我的看法主是“是啊，这就是你要做的。”反馈参数确实起了些新作用，正如我们从来不会在文本颜色上做的A/B测试（游戏邦主：A/B测试的核心就是：确定两个元素或版本，即A和B哪个版本更好）。但知道如何优化价值流确实很有趣也很有用，只不过那是我们在10年前就已经在做的事情罢了。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Right Amount Of Depth: Lord British Goes Social

by Brandon Sheffield

Last year, veteran developer Richard Garriott — aka Lord British — founded his latest developer, Portalarium, to create social games. Like many long-term PC developers, he’s come to see the social space as the natural evolution of the platform, and has chosen to embrace it. Recently, the company secured $3.6 million in funding.

In this extensive interview, Garriott speaks about his plans to bring an “Ultima Online-like experience” to social gamers, and how he sees a need for this to be platform-agnostic and accessible as well as deep and meaningful — and how he thinks social gaming audiences have been trained up by Zynga to be ready for deeper, richer experiences.

“Even the kinds of games that you might think I would make, I don’t generally play, because they’re often just too much of a hassle to get into them,” says Garriott, of the current crop of MMOs.

Instead, he says, he spends his gaming time with the iPhone, and believes that the true evolution of games will be one that allows mainstream gamers to touch the depth of design that he and his compatriots are capable of.

What’s the state of Portalarium now?

Richard Garriott: So we started the company just over a year ago. It’s what I’ll call my “usual suspects”, it’s you know… Got my friend David [Swofford] who you just saw, who’s our PR/marketing guy, Fred Schmidt who’s kind of our business side, and Dallas Snell is running product development.

And a bunch of the developers, all of us who have worked together at Origin and NCsoft — or Destination Games, which became NCsoft — Origin, EA, Destination Games, NCsoft, now Portalarium.

You know, our first year has been largely building infrastructure and technology. Our belief about social media games is that not only do we believe we can create great games, but delivered through free-to-play, pay as you go, and, you know, click on an email link to start playing, which we think is the kind of critical aspect of the new delivery.

But also we believe that… one of the key aspects of what is not being done well now that we believe can and should be done much better — and hopefully we’ll lead the charge in this area — is that if you look at most of the companies making casual or social games right now they… even if you’re playing the same companies’ games, you’re largely siloed from each other.

Now if you’re playing one Ville-like game and I’m playing a different Ville-like game, we don’t know about each other’s activities during those games until after I log out and look at my posts on my wall and I go, “Oh, at the same that I was playing, my friend was playing this other game; kind of wish I knew that.”

And so we’ve created an infrastructure — a standardized messaging system between all games — so that while you’re playing a game, I can get notifications of what you’ve done that I can either ignore, tell you congratulations or whatever else, or click on a link that lets me change games and jump right in and play right alongside you. So we believe that we’re trying to deepen the connections between you and your friends across all the games that you play.

And so that’s what we’ve been building so far. We’ve shipped two very light games — just a couple of casino games that we used to test that backbone. We’re just about to release our first truly original game, which is still a very light game in a sense of social media type game, but not a farming game, not a café operation game, not a pet management game, but a truly original game; it’s still quite light by what people might expect from Lord British standards.

That game is called Ultimate Collector. And then we’re going to roll into what I call the next, you know, big Lord British virtual world game (Lord British’s New Britannia).

Can you tell us a little more about these?

RG: Ultimate Collector, set in a contemporary world/theme, will be out sometime this summer and is a unique social media style game which will have some of the same conventions (asynchronous play, sharing accomplishments and information with your friends, etc.) that are part of successful social media games today.

I will soon begin development of my new Lord British-style RPG for social media and mobile platforms in the very near future. Lord British’s New Britannia, which was mentioned in our SXSW Accelerator presentation in March, is a working title for that product.

It sounds like you’re doing this outside the confines of Facebook a bit?

RG: Well, we’re what I call platform agnostic. So far we deliver on Facebook, Hi5, we will do independent web, but it’s not out yet. We have the iPad version already in test about to release, iPhone version’s underway. So we’re going to deliver on all of these kinds of platforms.

Why build a lot of infrastructure when you could actually sort of build that into Facebook? The iPhone has infrastructure for gaming as well.

RG: By the way, I almost do all of my gaming now on iPhone. But the infrastructure that’s on there… I’m not talking about the infrastructure that allows people to post on the Wall with OpenFeint-type results. I’m talking about real time data streams to where, in real time, we’re aware of each other’s activity so that we can find each other more ad hoc, and interact on a real time basis.

Well, in fact, let me give you this analogy. I was on LinkedIn before I was on Facebook, so I have a whole friends list on LinkedIn, I have a different set of friends on Facebook, and I have another set of followers and followees on Twitter.

Well, in my mind, all I really care about is who my friends are. And I have no personal tie to Facebook, I have no personal tie to Twitter, I have no personal tie to LinkedIn — I only have a personal tie to my friends.

And so what we’re trying to do is obfuscate the platform, because I don’t think you care about that platform; what you care about is your friends. And so we, part of our tool suite people will actually help you integrate all of your friends into one friends list, and as you move around in life, your friends list is for you.

And you don’t want to be spammed by all the crap that comes from people who aren’t actually your friends, and you do want to, at least, have the choice to follow in on the activities of the people you have elected to be your true friends.

And how do you do that from a UI perspective?

RG: If you have any game open, or the web browser open, or a plugin installed, there’s just a little window that pops up that just says, “Hey, your friend so-and-so just conquered three bad guys and you got three sacks of gold.” And that’ll just be a little briefly popped up window that will close on its own.

But also what’s on that little placard, it could say “ignore”, which means you won’t see anymore from that particular data stream. Or reply, which you could say, “Hey, congratulations”, but that’s the end of it; you’d still have a real time interaction. Or “play”, and that means it will immediately launch that game and drop you in the world right next to that person.

A lot of these games send too many notifications already. You could maybe do a ticker…

RG: Well, way too many, I think. But these are small enough and frequent enough in our minds that I don’t think it’ll become overwhelming. But, by the way, if it was basically a constant stream, a ticker would by far be the better choice. But at this point, we don’t anticipate that the frequency will be that high.

But yeah, one of my frustrations with social media games is how basically everything I do, a placard pops up that says, “Sure you don’t want to post it to Facebook to every one of your friends?”, and I’m going, “No, I really don’t.”

Xbox Live is kind of analogous, and actually I do get annoyed by the popups like, “So and so is online”, and they’re having some network connectivity problems so like every few seconds…

RG: It starts up over and over again?

Yeah, every minute. It’s like I’m trying to look at something and it’s like, “Heeey!”

RG: “Hey, hey!” Yep, yep. Well, that’s why our little ignore button will kind of remove that whole stream. And once you’ve kind of indicated your interest level of following along with that person today or not, that’ll be the end of it.

Talking of like the deeper level stuff, last year we had a brief conversation about directed narrative in social games and whether it was possible. Now that you’ve been working with these platforms a little more, what do you think about that now?

RG: That’s one of the things I think that’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out in this new era. If you think about it right now, most of the games that have proven to be popular on social media are not actually what I call massively multiplayer; they’re not people concurrently playing in the same world. There are people whose activities in a world can leave a trail which can be adopted, or impact someone else’s trail or activity in that virtual world, if you follow my meaning.

And actually in that particular, I think linear narrative is actually pretty easy. Because frankly that you can do a solo player Ultima that [notifies] whenever I’ve achieved something, or left something in your world for you to pick up next time you were in there. So you can actually do directive narrative pretty easily in the way that most social media games are currently popular.

Now that being said, one of my personal goals is to create a more what I call an Ultima Online-like experience with the game that I’m hoping to do — the big game coming up. And that will again go back to making linear narrative somewhat of a challenge, just like it was a challenge in Ultima Online.

As a person who does not have very much interest in the current crop of social games, maybe I would be interested in something like that; I’m not sure.

RG: But here’s the thing — and by the way, I don’t have very much interest in the current crop of social games — but you know like you said, you’re also an iPhone gamer. Previous to the iPhone I would describe myself as a PC gamer, but I probably played one PC game per year, really, a lot. I mean, I looked at many, but I only really got into one game a year.

On the iPhone I play one new game a week, a lot, to completion usually. And I probably have 50 games installed in this iPhone right now and I’ve played them all to completion. I’m much more of a gamer now than I ever was in the past, but I consider this: these are clearly casual. Not exactly social, but they still fit my definition of the future, [which] is games I can play on this.

And so the analogy I often give is I go to people who are worried about “are casual games ever going to be things they want to play” and I go, “Of course they are going to be.”

Because imagine two games, one of which is Ultima Online the way it was shipped. You go to the store and pay 50 bucks for it — well first of all you have to drive to the store, pay 50 dollars, bring it home, install it, then you have to sign up to pay 10 dollars a month, and then you can play it.

Or here’s version 2: same exact game, but your friend sent you an email, click on this link and you can play. You click on it, you begin playing immediately, it’s streaming download — you don’t have to do the huge install to begin with, and only if you play past level 5 do I then find a way to charge you for it — for hopefully about the same amount of money.

Which of those games are you going to enjoy the most? Presumably, you’re going to enjoy them the same — because it’s the same game — but which one do you think is going to spread more easily? Well, clearly the one that you can just click on an email and play is going to spread more easily.

So that’s what I’m saying — don’t worry about the content of what you see so far. Think of it as a distribution method and a platform of access. The reason why I play so many games on this platform is because it’s so easy, and two to five bucks is an impulse purchase. I don’t even think of a price that I’m paying to play these games, even though in total, in a month, I pay a lot more for iPhone games than I ever did in PC games because I just buy a lot more of them. And so that’s fine.

It seems like there’s potential for more cross platform interactivity than there has been.

RG: Well when people are doubters, here’s another thing I like to point out. Let’s look at three Zynga games: FarmVille, FrontierVille, and CityVille. So when I looked at FarmVille. It’s super popular. You go play it and you go, “Wow, this UI is actually pretty damn clunky.” It’s actually hard to use, it’s confusing to use, so if I was a beginning user, a light user I’m going like, “Wow, it’s just not that elegant.”

I mean, I’m surprised that people can get through the awkward frontend to have an appreciation for this game that, frankly, is still pretty simple — in fact, a little too simple for me. Not enough going on, not enough depth. I’m shocked that it’s so popular but it is.

Then move to FrontierVille — much better designed. User interface works a lot better, it’s actually consistent in its design, much more reliability. The depth of the game is considerably more fleshed out, the animation’s better. I go like, “Wow, now I can really appreciate it; that’s a real game.” Still not exactly what I want to play, but it’s a real game.

Now more recently you look at CityVille. CityVille has surpassed FarmVille, even in popularity — which was the most popular game in the world. But I look at it and go, “It’s actually too much for me.” Literally, there is so much going on the screen concurrently; I can’t keep up. I mean there are stars bouncing around and things to click on and, literally, I find the game overwhelming.

And so it has actually exceeded my personal capacity of being able to manage what’s happening all on the screen at one time. And these are the brand new, beginning players, who’ve never played games before in their life, prior to these other games — who now are pushing out a hundred million users in one game — and they’re already now managing to handle more complexity than, frankly, I want!

And so when people go like, “Oh, these games are gonna be too simple and these new users are never going to be able to handle the depth and sophistication”, I’m going, “That’s bull; they already are!” And so, just give it some time, for people to mature in their experiences and their expectations, and understand this diversity. The pace of their journey through gaming — these new 100 million people — is going at a phenomenal pace. And so the convergence absolutely will happen, just like in the movie industry.

You know, great movies are seen by everybody. But there’s lots of romantic comedies — are mostly seen by the women who are dragging their boyfriends there. There’s lots of adventure movies — all seen by the guys and some girls that get dragged there by the guys.

And the same thing’s going to be true now for games. There’s going to be a nice stable of breadth of games, all delivered to now all of humanity, globally, all ages, all walks of life. That’s a great thing, and all of us as traditional gamers should not fear this, should not pooh-pooh it. Life is going to be fine. We’re going to give the games you want to play in the new medium.

It is interesting to see the evolution of these games. I saw a quasi tech side FarmVille postmortem and they really were bolting things on to it as it got more popular. “Oops! We gotta do some more stuff here.”

RG: And it looks, and feels, bolted on.

Right, so that accounts for the strange UI. But it is interesting to see this as it starts to be more and more from a web development side, how the UI improves, because people have appreciated now that simple is better, and have figured out how to actually communicate this information a little better. I think that’s the hardest thing to do.

RG: Well, and I think another big lesson for all games from social media is the constant teaching of the UI.

For example, a drag and slide bar pretty much doesn’t exist in social media games. There’s a right and left arrow to go to the next page, but there’s not like a slide bar to go through a long piece of information, because what people have found is a lot of people just didn’t figure it out, you know what I mean?

It’s a level of user interface sophistication where they lose people. When people have done that, people buy all the stuff that’s on the first page but they never buy the stuff on the second or third page, because they never really drag that slider bar.

And so, making sure your UI is really easy to understand, we’re talking about it has to be, you know, when you walk up to a washing machine or a dishwasher, everybody knows how to operate it, because it’s got a very simple set of standardized controls. And there’s no problem with that, it’s actually just a reality! If you’re going to deal with all of humanity, just make sure that you hand-hold people through the utilization, and make things as standardized, and only one level of conceptual complexity, as possible.

It doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate good literary content, it doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate rich, detailed NPCs in immersive virtual worlds — you just have to don’t overwhelm them with it. Even as a hardcore gamer, I play some things — like I download many of the free-to-play MMOs that are out these days. A lot of them are graphically beautiful, have really nice user interfaces, have NPCs of great diversity, have all the kind of what I call “feature complete” in the sense of avatars with detail, and just all these other kinds of ways that they’re rich.

But I find them overwhelming — you get dropped in the middle of this gigantic world, you have no idea what to do, you have no idea where to start, you’re going like, “Oh my God, it’s going to take me so long to even know whether I like this game, that I’m daunted to start!”, if you know what I mean. I go, “Yep, looks beautiful! Okay, I’m done.” [laughs] And I don’t play ‘em. Even the kinds of games that you might think I would make, I don’t generally play, because they’re often just too much of a hassle to get into them. And so comfortably introducing people into your depth is a lesson all games should learn.

Yeah, and they have the advantage there of metrics. Being able to see what people are actually doing, they’re not just guessing…

RG: Right, and by the way we had that in MMOs also. So no MMO developer should be excused from not knowing the answers to these questions because we had metrics then, too.

I think back then there was more of a reluctance to do it because it felt like cheating or something, as a game developer. But it is quite useful.

RG: Yeah, well, I can tell you in Ultima Online we constantly used those metrics to redesign the game. For example, one of my favorite stories is, in Ultima Online, when the game shipped, you could use a fishing pole on the water and there was a 50/50 chance you’d get a fish. Beginning and end of simulation — literately use a pole, on water, 50/50, fish. Lots of people did it, tons of people did it.

And people began to believe apocryphal information about fishing; they began to believe that if you fished in a river versus in the ocean they were better chances of getting fish, which of course was not true. I told you the simulation use fishing pole, on water, 50/50, fish. That’s it!

But so many people were doing it, and so many people had these fictitious beliefs that we thought, “Wow, we should spend some time to make fishing better!” And we did. Over time we actually made the fishing simulation more improved, gave you different kinds of fish, and there really was a point to using different places, and then it became even more popular.

And there were things that we thought were really cool that we put in the game, that nobody noticed or cared about — very sad and tragic. But we either fixed and adressed those, or often, we just removed them from the game.

And so, even from the beginning — I don’t think of the metrics-driven feedback to me as new at all; I actually look at it as, “Yeah, of course you’re doing it.” And they are doing some things that are new, like we would never do A/B testing on the color of text. But you know that’s interesting and useful to know how to optimize your value stream, but it really is something we were already doing 10 years ago.（source:gamasutra）