Powerball lottery - Tweaks

The jackpot fatigue theory

The Powerball mechanics have been tweaked several times since it started in 1992. Starting in January 2012, the game had 59 white balls and 35 red balls so that a billion-dollar jackpot would happen every 10 years. No such jackpot happened until the rules changed again in 2015, but as the table below shows, the jackpot reached half a billion several times.

Jackpots above $300M, 2012-2015

Date	Jackpot ($M)	Tickets (M)
2/11/2012	336	89
8/15/2012	337	86
11/28/2012	588	286
3/23/2013	338	80
5/18/2013	591	243
9/18/2013	399	93
2/19/2014	425	86
2/11/2015	564	191
9/30/2015	310	51

Powerball sales dropped 19% nationally in 2014. Lottery officials suggested two explanations: the lack of a huge jackpot in 2014, and jackpot fatigue: lotteries need increasingly bigger jackpots to attract the casual players who only buy tickets when the jackpot is huge.

The table above confirms that there was only one jackpot above $300M in 2014, but it rejects the fatigue theory. For jackpots between $300M and $350M, the number of tickets sold decreased from 89M in 2012 to 51M in 2015. And for the three jackpots between $550M and $600M, the number of tickets sold went from 286M in 2012 to 191M in 2015. Sales from the biggest jackpots lost 35% in three years.

Yet, the fatigue theory made New York state lottery officials shift their focus from jackpot-driven games, where jackpots get very big too rarely, to instant scratch-off games with more frequent prizes. New York state is a major actor in the Powerball lottery: it ranks third in ticket sales, after California and Florida. So it's likely that the tweaks of October 2015 were an attempt to address jackpot fatigue.

October 2015 tweaks

In October 2015, white balls increased from 59 to 69, and red balls decreased from 35 to 26. Thus the odds of winning a prize increased from 1:32 to 1:25, but the odds of winning the jackpot decreased from 1:175M to 1:292M. Lower jackpot odds means longer streaks until the jackpot is won, ie bigger jackpots. Projections made in 2012 suggested that a billion-dollar jackpot would happen every 10 years. Data from November 2015 to January 2016 suggests that billion-dollar jackpots should now happen every year or so, and there is a 63% chance for one to show up within 5 years. This tweak is similar to the British National Lottery tweak of June 2015: 5 balls used to be picked among 49, which was raised to 59, resulting in the £58M jackpot of January 2016, the largest in the National Lottery's history.

Decreasing the odds of winning the jackpot decreases the expected value of a ticket. This expected value is plotted in the graph below, against the jackpot value. Before the rule change, the jackpot had to reach $200M for a ticket to be worth $1. Based on drawings data from 2015, $200M jackpots were expected to occur every 24 weeks. Now, after the rule change, a ticket is worth $1 when the jackpot reaches $450M, which is expected to happen every 34 weeks.

Long story short, the October 2015 tweaks increased the chance of winning a consolation prize, but decreased the chance of winning the jackpot and the expected value of a ticket. Since the expected value of a ticket estimates how much each lottery ticket costs to the organizers, their profits must have increased!

Habits

Notes from a French magazine called Ca m'interesse from January 2014. One article talked about choices, habits, and routines. Some findings are applicable to game design.

Richard Weiseman, a psychologist, followed 3000 people taking New Year resolutions. Half say they will hold their resolution on day 1. 12% manage it after one year. Weiseman gives tips on how to keep your resolutions, such as telling others about your resolution (to put peer pressure on yourself), avoiding previous (failed) resolutions (to prevent frustration), breaking it in smaller achievable steps (to prevent hopelessness), and giving yourself rewards for achieving these steps (positive reinforcement). It's been covered elsewhere too.

Based on previous research, Philippa Lally, another psychologist, suggests that it takes around two months working effortfully on new behavior to turn it into a habit.

Future hypothetical rewards (e.g. slim body in a month) are higher to accept than instant gratification (e.g. eat tasty food right now) because they require an effort of imagination. Solution: make future rewards more visible.

Baba Shiv, professor of marketing, asked 165 undergrads to pick either a chocolate cake or a fruit salad. The chocolate cake has a positive affect and negative cognition, ie it's emotionally appealing but you know you should not take it. The fruit salad is the opposite: negative affect and positive cognition, ie it's the rational healthy choice. In both groups, participants were asked to remember a number throughout the experiment. One group was given a 2-digit number (low cognitive load, ie high processing resources) and the other a 7-digit number (high cognitive load, ie low processing resources). 41% of the 2-digit group picked the tasty cake vs 63% in the 7-digit group. Under heavy cognitive load, people are more likely to choose options that are immediately pleasing. As a side note, when the presentation of the choice was through photos rather than the actual items, the difference between the two groups disappeared.

If I perceive a task as more difficult, I will expect a higher reward. It is not just about being strong-minded, but also about my perception of the task's difficulty.

Game of War

Game of War is a mobile game currently making $1.2M/day and having 2.2M daily active users. Its developer, Machine Zone, is valued at $3 billion (while Zynga is valued at $2.7 billion and Supercell at $5.5 billion.).

The game is quite high up the charts of the App Store, only surpassed by Clash of Clans' $1.7M/day and 4M daily active users and probably Candy Crush as well. CoC and GoW are similar in that they are both free-to-play empire-builder war games for mobile. Whereas I find CoC to be a polished game with elegant mechanics, Game of War is said to be everything wrong with mobile monetization. Let's have a look!

Copycats

In an interview in 2012, Gabriel Leydon, Machine Zone's CEO, said they are making games that are very, very special and unique in the market. But in the same interview, he also said If you want to scale fast and you have the ability to do it cheaply, you just clone. With GoW, they did not go the special/unique route: they cloned 99.9% of their gameplay and UI from Kabam's The Hobbit (which launched for mobile in October 2012). Shameless cloning is a common practice among mobile games, and The Hobbit itself had cloned a lot of its gameplay and UI from Evony (a Flash game from 2009), which itself had cloned most of its gameplay from Civilization.

Going back to GoW, the trailer features a battle in real time scene that actually never happens in the game. In the game, the player can see their armies move in real time, but when battles happen, the player only sees a report of the troops expended and resources gained. No visual battling actually happens. So the game launched with a lot of hype and exaggeration. Since it's a clone of The Hobbit, the marketing team had to exaggerate to compete.

Translation vs innovation

When GoW launched in July 2013, Venturebeat wrote they were using advanced technology, including a real-time translation engine, a sophisticated communications platform where players can send threaded emails, text chat, make comments, and share their feats on social forums. There really is nothing new or sophisticated with in-game emails. The translator, however, is GoW's unique attribute, what the game is known for. How good and useful is that famous translator?

When typing on the miniature keyboard of their iPhone, people use slang and make spelling mistakes. So the translator has to crowd-source a lot of sentences to players. For example, let's say a French player says "lu, a va bi1?". To translate this for American players, I think the sentence is first automatically-translated into English, leaving non-translatable words untouched: "read, have go bi1?". This gibberish is then given without context to 4 players who are told they'll receive in-game currency if they can fix the sentence. The first player fixes the sentence into "I read you, I have to go", the second suggests "Read (what I wrote above), I have to go and buy one", and so on. A fifth player receives the four tweaked sentences and is awarded some in-game currency for picking the sentence he thinks makes most sense. The player who wrote the chosen sentence receives coins, whereas the other three receive a thank you message with no reward.

This sounds like a good idea, but there's a reason why after all these years Google Translate still sucks, and why translator is still a job. "lu, a va bi1?" in proper French is "Salut, ça va bien?", which Google can translate easily to "Hi, how are you doing?". But most French players can write "hello" by themselves. In Kings of the Realm, a game very similar to GoW, I've seen many American players write to Russian players in Russian. In Hearthstone, the game has 6 emotes (for "hello", "well played", and so on), and needs no translation system whatsoever. Did GoW focus on and boast its (mediocre) chat translator at launch because it was the only thing that differentiated it from The Hobbit?

Cash grab

MachineZone was actually called Addmired when it started. They were developing dating apps. Maybe the name made sense at the time, but even for a dating app, it's a terrible name: are users going to get mired in ads? That no founder flagged the name as inappropriate tells a lot about the company's business model.

GoW reminds players that they can spend money every time they login. The first screen showed when logging in is the one below. The font is inelegant, reminiscent of Asian mobile games like Puzzle and Dragons. The fireworks at the bottom obstruct one of the products offered in the bundle. The bundle name is "Summer MEGA GOLD Sale!!!". And a timer of 30 minutes pretends that the sale will end within 30 minutes. In fact, the player only needs to log back in to get spammed by the sale again...

In Clash of Clans, no upgrade takes longer than 14 days. The game provides 5 builders, so the most intense players have something to upgrade roughly twice a week. In GoW, the longest upgrade times is 23 years. Nobody would wait 23 years for an upgrade to finish! The designers do not expect players to wait 23 years. Everybody understands that year-long waiting times are here only to make players skip them with money. No surprise that some players report having spent $9,000 in the game. A kid in Belgium even spent $46,000.

Sexy advertising

GoW spent $40M to run an ad where model Kate Upton shows her cleavage during the Superbowl. Some people were outraged, but this advertising strategy was already used heavily in 2009 by Evony. Using sex in ads is not new, but that does not excuse it. It's interesting that a company valued at $3 billion has only one product, and the content of and advertising for that product were both 99.9%-copied from another company's product. In contrast, Clash of Clans' core gameplay may not be original but the ad they ran during the Superbowl was funny, silly, and just more elegant.

In fact, GoW's ads could be worse. For example, Evony's advertising strategy was much more questionable than GoW's. Through iEvony, they rewarded players with game coins when they referred a friend or when a friend they referred purchased game coins with real money. In order to bootstrap the pyramid scheme, iEvony was invite-only. Evony also used any search-engine optimization trick they could, stole ad photos and game art, and showed soft-porn images that have nothing to do with the game. So GoW still has some way to go!

Why do GoW (and CoC) use ads? After all, they have so many players already that word-of-mouth should bring them more. In practice, only a small percentage of new players will keep playing the game past the one-week mark. An even smaller number will spend money. Thus these games aim at attracting as many players as possible, so as to increase the number of spenders. But there will come a time when there will be no more new players to draw to the game. But since 2013, the cost for attracting new players outweighs the average amount spent by players ($2.73 vs $1.96). Since players get tired of games eventually, these greedy business models are unsustainable.

Conclusion

GoW is an over-the-top cash grab using sex [ads] to fuel a game where sex really isn’t a factor. The game has a terrible UI plagiarized from another game, and a horrible gameplay also plagiarized from others. This is the kind of game that gives a bad name to free-to-play mobile gaming. I'm disappointed that millions of players follow the ads and don't see that it is so crappy.

The Dropbox Space Race

The Dropbox Space Race program ended on March 4 2015. This was a marketing event to get as many students as possible to install and use Dropbox. The more students of your university sign up, the more space Dropbox will give you. It was quite effective: the National University of Singapore had more than 20k students enroll, TU Delft 13k, MIT 11k, and so on. While the help page currently says that the extra space goes away after 2 years, it was not as clear at the time. So Dropbox sent an email early March 2015, titled Your Dropbox Space Race promotion has now expired, get Dropbox Pro.

I think the Space Race was a great marketing idea when it launched. It promoted school spirit as students united for a common cause. It was framed as a challenge. And it was free and fun. But Dropbox is pulling the space away, and I think it is a terrible move for several reasons. First, Dropbox gave a toy to the kids, and is taking it back just to make money. Students are realizing that the whole Space Race was a marketing scam. It was too free to be true. Second, I expect that most people were not even filling half of their Dropbox. What is the point of taking away something people are not even using? Third, the Space Race only involves cheap and broke students. How many are actually going to pay, rather than grudgingly shrink their Dropbox to fit 4 GB? And last, what does 8 GB of space cost Dropbox? Google offers 15GB for free, so if space really mattered to me, nothing prevents me from switching from Dropbox to Google Drive. I am giving a try to Copy, Barracuda Network's version of Dropbox, offering 20 GB for free. I don't need 20 GB, but Dropbox's move made me try others. My research lab switched to BTSync, with our own servers backing up our data.

So the Dropbox Space Race is like cheap wine: exciting at first, but bitter at the end.

Mobile crap - ads

This series of articles is a rant about mobile game design. It may extend to console and PC gaming, but I only talk about what I experienced through most games featured on the iPad app store in the past year or so.

A game does not need in-game ads to be profitable. Real-money transactions can do the job if the game is polished and the business model solid. See Clash of Clans for example.

But even if we ignore the games with traditional ads, there are still many with some sort of advertising. For example, Puzzle and Dragons has no in-game ads per se, but they do frequently collaborate with third-parties to advertise their games. Among these collabs, PAD introduced a dungeon themed after Angry Birds, and Angry Birds placed a banner or introduced a temporary content themed after PAD. These collaborations may have been profitable for the marketing of both PAD and Angry Birds, but 1) the theme of PAD has now become an inconsistent mess: I would much rather have new content themed after dragons or gods than dragons plus Angry Birds plus Batman plus ... 2) in a collecting game like PAD, the players who start after a collab has ended will never be able to collect the monsters from that collab, and 3) it reminds the player that if she did not pay to play, then she is the product. As a player, I dislike collabs.

There are also many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean games on the app store. One of them is Mother of Myth. In-between levels, they frequently display an in-game ad for ... their own paid content! These ads may increase the number of payers, but 1) they disrupt the play experience, 2) why use an old-fashioned ad when a well-designed game mechanic could do it? If you have to use an ad, then either your game design sucks, or you are not selling the right thing.

And then, of course, there are tons of ad-like messages that my brain ignores automatically. One such message is login through Facebook to play with your friends. PAD remains discreet about it - you can play decently without friends. But Birzzle was much heavier and splashed a bring-your-friends ad after every level.

The deck-building card game genre

Dominion ripoffs or deck-building card games?

Here is a quick list of games that resemble Dominion in some ways.

Year	Name	Theme	Description
2007	Race for the Galaxy	Space and planet exploration	Deck-building, but does not rely as much on engines as Dominion or Magic do. There are no interactions between players (no stealing cards or throwing dead cards in the deck of others).
2008	Dominion	medieval	Some interactions between players. Solid engine/combo mechanics.
2009	Thunderstone	dungeon-exploration, medieval fantasy	Cards include medieval fantasy heroes, items, locations, or monsters. With the adequate items, heroes can kill monsters and level up (ie card upgrade), making it easier to progress through the dungeon. For some, This is like Dominion, only even more fun.
2009	Tanto Cuore	cutesy Japanese maids	The art borders on ecchi and may offend prude people. Design-wise, each player can place maids in their private quarter to trim their deck, but in doing so, they expose themselves to attacks from other players. The game also features private maids giving special powers every turn. Some Dominion players consider the game refreshingly different, but compared to Dominion, not as much effort was put into balancing [and] playtesting.
2010	Puzzle Strike	relatively abstract: breaking gems	Seems less inspired by Dominion than Tanto Cuore or Thunderstone are. Tokens have replaced cards: tokens can be bought and sent in an opaque bag to draw from, rather than an actual card deck. Heavily PvP-oriented: players throw gems in front of each other, and when 10 gems have been placed in front of a player, s/he loses.
2010	Ascension	dark fantasy	System of two currencies (rune and power). Victory points are kept visible on the mat. Some players have reported that synergy is more a mater of luck than anything.
2011	Quarriors	medieval fantasy	Inspired by Dominion and maybe by Puzzle Strike as well. Instead of cards, players buy dices, and instead of a deck, players use an opaque bag to draw dices from. The base game seems to have been popular enough to be followed by 4 expansions and a bunch of promo cards.
2011	Nightfall	vampires and werewolves	Cards can be chained by color and between players, not just during a player's turn. Players throw wounds at each other, the equivalent of Dominion curses in that they clog the victim's deck, but they also determine the winner (the player with fewer wounds win).
2011	Battle of Gundabad	Orc warriors, suitable for 12 year-olds?	A $2 iPhone game considered a blatant ripoff of Dominion because the cards are exactly the same, just named differently (e.g. BoG's Paralyze is Dominion's Cutpurse, Warmongering is Laboratory, etc.). Each level of the campaign mode features a particular set of cards to teach a particular combo to the player. Yet the game does not feel very polished. The lack of deck-building card game for iOS made some realize that BoG stepped in to fill the void and could maybe persuade someone to pick up the Dominion license and put out a licensed, polished product. And indeed, the current official Dominion iPhone app features a campaign mode. Thanks BoG?

Lessons learned about innovative mechanics:
Given this small list of deck-building games, Dominion clearly pioneered the deck-building card game genre. Even though it seems difficult to draw the line between a ripoff and an original game of this new genre, each game brought something new to the table. I only wish designers tried to explore this vast and uncharted design space more aggressively, rather than keeping 80% of Dominion and branching from there.

Lessons learned about the themes:
As Tom Vasel says, apparently most deck-building games [...] have to be fantasy-themed. While the deck-building mechanics are great, the medieval/medieval-fantasy theme is dull and lifeless. It may be that deck-building designers go for a medieval theme to avoid frustrating MtG/geek players, their target audience. Some hardcore nerds may still be in love with medieval/medieval-fantasy themes, but I think a lot of non-gamers find the medieval theme trite and/or associate it with nerds. Thus some non-gamers may be more reluctant to try Dominion, Thunderstone, or Ascension than, say, Bang!. Deck-building card games need more original themes like Tanto Cuore's maids, or they will remain like MtG, an amazing game stuck in a nerd niche.

Copyrights and publishers

In June 2011, Dominion's designer, Vaccarino, reported that Rio Grande Games (RGG), the publisher of Dominion, had asked a contractor, Goko, to develop and run an online version of the game for mobile phones and web browsers. And of course, Goko wants the free isotropic Dominion server to shut its doors before they launch their product.

Goko's Dominion launched in August 2012, but technical problems caused the Goko game platform to close its doors and go back to beta. As of December 2012, Goko is back online, out of beta. The Goko version has a nicer UI than isotropic, but does not seem to provide the expert features isotropic offers (e.g. game logs). Also, one can play Dominion on Goko for free using the basic set, but expansions must be purchased with real money. Isotropic is still up and running.

Lessons learned: an online version of Dominion should have been released as soon as possible. Ideally, RGG could have determined Dominion was a hit before or around the release of the first expansion, by mid 2009. But RGG had other priorities (non-digital board games!), and as they kept waiting, people 1) bought an unpolished iPhone clone (BoG), and/or 2) felt more and more entitled to play Dominion for free. Board game publishers really need to start considering digital publishing up front and more seriously. There is a demand for it!

Agile game dev (1/5) - Keith 2010

Agile game development with Scrum, Clinton Keith, 2010

Part I - Problem and solution

Read the series: 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, and 5/5.

Problems

In the 70s, arcade hardware was expensive, so developers iterated on the software and shipped when high quality. In the 80s, hardware became cheaper, so everyone could ship games without too much investment. Quality consequently decreased. But as games increased in complexity, teams started to require specialists (artists, composers, network engineers), and the software costs exploded. This led to the hit-or-miss strategy: invest only a few man-years in developing a game, ship, and hope for success. Hopefully, one hit would pay for many failures.
Problem #1: the number of man-years (and costs) to make AAA games doubles every 5 years, but the market isn't growing as fast. Moreover, only 25% of the revenues will go to the developer; the rest goes in distribution, marketing, publishing, and licensing fees.
Problem #2: only 20% of games released generate profits, so risk-averse publishers prefer sequels of existing IPs than risky innovation. Yet it is innovation that drives the game industry.

You can only know if your game is fun by play-testing it. Since design, art, and tech requirements emerge as the game is developed and play-tested, waterfall is not appropriate, and maintaining a detailed documentation too time-consuming.
Problem #3: how do stakeholders (developers, publisher, IP owner, studio management, etc.) communicate?

Traditional game development is made of 4 steps: concept, pre-production (aka pre-prod), production, and post-production. Of particular interest are pre-prod and prod. Pre-prod is exploratory, and aims at figuring out the basic mechanics for the game to be fun. Pre-prod can follow a kill-gate model, where several prototypes are started to explore ideas in parallel, and the least promising are "killed" every few months. In production, levels and assets are mass-produced.
Problem #4: how to predict the schedule, budget, and amount of new content to produce from the basics found in pre-prod? Moreover, milestones defined in contracts with publishers prevent developers from adding good features at the last moment, and prevent publishers to ask for new features too. How to accommodate everyone?

Introducing agile game development

Agile is not a silver bullet. It only makes the development process transparent: problems will become obvious, but they still have to be solved. Agile aims at improving communication between the stakeholders: publisher, developers, IP owner, studio management, and so on.

Sprints: Agile game development is iterative. At the lowest level of granularity, an inter-disciplinary team of developers designs, implements, and polishes features during iterations of 2-4 weeks called sprints.

User stories are the agile way to present features so that they communicate value/fun to the stakeholders. For example: "As a player, I want to see enemies react when shot."

Releases: At the highest level of granularity, releases of the game are delivered every 4-8 sprints (2-4 months). Releases focus on major goals such as "online gameplay".

Backlogs: Communication within the team happens through a sprint backlog, and between the team and the stakeholders through a product backlog. User stories are moved up or down the backlogs by the product owner, representing the stakeholders in the studio.

Gold buying patterns

Picks from a paper I wrote about gold buying patterns for FDG 2012. The data comes from an online questionnaire completed from March to May 2010 by 2800+ WoW players from around the world. Unless mentioned, all results are significant with a p-value below 0.01.

• Overall, 14% of people have ever bought gold.
• Men are twice more likely to buy gold than women (17% vs 8%), but there is no difference between Asians and Westerners.
• Achievement increases the likelihood to buy gold, while immersion decreases it. The effect of achievement is stronger on men.

• 12% of people who only play with people they know IRL have bought gold. This ratio increases to 15% for people who play with both RL relatives and friends made IG, and to 21% for people who play only with friends they made IG.
• Overall, people who have taken longer breaks from the game are more likely to buy gold.

• But really, it's a big mess to know which variables influence gold buying: in the correlation graph below, vertices represent variables, and edges bearing positive/negative values indicate positive/negative correlations between two variables. Values closer to 1 in absolute value indicate higher correlations.

• That's where GLM come in handy: they account for interactions between variables in regressions from multiple variables.
• Controlling for all other variables, the odds of buying gold increase when playing on a private server, being a man, having frozen one's subscription, having made friends IG, playing for achievement, and having played the game for a long time. On the other hand, the odds
• Controlling for all other variables, the odds of buying gold decrease when having had a college education, playing for immersion or socializing, and playing with cousins, siblings, or spouse.

21st Century Game Design - Part I

21st Century Game Design, by Chris Bateman and Richard Boon, 2005.

Part I - Games exist primarily to satisfy the needs of an audience

ch1 - Zen game design

Zen Buddhism can not be learned, it can only be experienced. There is no objective perspective on anything. Hence zen game design's tenets: game design reflects needs + there's no single method to design + there exist methods to game design. These methods are:

• first principles: what you want to do -> game world abstraction -> design -> implementation
• clone and tweak: most common method. existing design -> tweak -> implementation
• meta-rules: goal = provoking debate. meta-rules -> design -> implementation
• expressing technology: in teams without actual game designers. technology -> game implementation
• Frankenstein: art or technical materials -> design -> implementation
• story-driven: narrative -> design -> implementation

Participants in the game project: audience, publisher, producer, programmers, artists, marketing/PR, license holder. Example: saving for causal audience is vital; for hardcore audience, it should not break gameplay; for programmers, it's a technical detail; for producer, it's looking at how other games do it.

ch2 - Designing for the market

The commercial success for a medium clears the way for artistic expression, not the way around

A game design is successful when the target audience is satisfied. This justifies the need for an audience model. Existing models: simple distinction hardcore/casual, distinction by genre (but genres are too vague), EA's model, and ihobo's model.

Simple hardcore/casual distinction

hardcore	casual
plays lots of games	plays few games
game literate	game illiterate
plays for the challenge	plays to relax, kill time, and just for fun
segment can be polarized: many can buy the same title	hard to polarize, diverse and disparate

EA's model:

EA's model take-away: do not ignore hardcores because they are the ones pushing a game to broader segments. Corollary: no TV ads are needed if the game is not made for casuals.

iHobo's model:

Evangelist clusters = gaming press, mainstream press, and the 3 million of hardcores in the world. Target clusters = Testosterone (9M players worldwide), lifestyle (30M), and family (90M) gamers.

Design tools for market penetration (aka demographic game design):

• Looking for good gameplay (ie the game being performance-oriented, with stats, clear goals and victory conditions) vs good toyplay (unorganized). Hardcores are driven by gameplay, but lifestyle and family gamers are driven by both.
• Controls should remain accessible for casuals.
• The minimum play session length is usually expressed in terms of the duration of a level or the time between two save points. For casuals, it should be below 15 minutes, but hardcores do not mind core activities of a game taking at least an hour or two. Ex: a typical DotA match takes 45 to 60 minutes, whereas a (small size) Mine Sweeper can take less than a minute. Nintendo games are also famous for allowing the player to quit at any time and provide core activities of at most a few minutes.
• The average play session length is also lower for casuals: they may complete one level at a time, whereas hardcores can aim at 10 levels per play session.
• Play window: total time spent playing the game. The longer the play window, the longer hardcores will spend evangelizing the game. Therefore, despite most of the players not completing the game, content is crucial! The play window can also be extended by introducing hidden features, higher difficulty levels, variety in characters to play with (to increase replayability), and online PVP (although that only works for Testosterone and hardcore gamers).

Phases of penetration: taking the example of The Sims.

1. Hardcore penetration: the game needs challenge, progress, and depth.
2. Hardcore evangelism: the game needs to appeal to the Lifestyle gamer, easy to reach fun, strong marketing, and a strong license.
3. Casual penetration: the game needs fun, toys, short minimum play session.
4. Casual evangelism: the game needs to get the attention of the mainstream press.

ch3 - Myers-Briggs typology of gamers

Assumption: nature of games people enjoy and frequency of play vary with player personality and reaction to situations. The Myers-Briggs model was developed in the 1940s and indicates how an individual would prefer to react to situations in general. See the Myers-Briggs type frequencies in the US. Four pairs of traits:

Type	Opposite type	Game design
Introversion (50% of pop) think then act, needs private time, 1-to-1 communication and relationships	Extroversion (50% of pop) act then think, likes people, deprived when alone	Most games are played by introverts. Extraverts can take long breaks from the game, so provide a todo list for them when they come back to play, otherwise they'll forget what they had to do in their previous play session. Extraverts like DDR because of its performance aspect.
Sensing (70% of pop) live in the present, apply common sense, based on prior experience, likes clear and concrete info	iNtuition (30% of pop) live in near future, new and imaginative approaches, based on theory, comfortable with fuzzy information, seek for patterns)	Learning and problem solving are frequent gameplay elements in many genres. Learning: in tutorials, S will accept linear series of lessons, but N would rather guess by themselves. Problem solving: S will use trial and error, while N will like to use their lateral thinking skills. Therefore, make lateral thinking puzzles (at most) secondary objectives, or allow the player to progress without having completed all of them. Ex: Super Mario 64 only requires 30 stars to unlock new levels. S want simple and usual mechanics, while N won't mind having to guess the rules and a steep learning curve.
Thinking (30% of women, 60% of men) decide from facts and logic, objective, focus on task, think that conflicts are sometimes unavoidable	Feeling (70% of women, 40% of men) decide from emotion, subjective, focus on consequences to people, wish to avoid conflicts	Clear goals for T. Personal encouragement for F, but T may feel patronized. Solution: useful AND aesthetic/fun items are rewards that will satisfy both T and F. Gathering collectibles give goals to T, but should not be a grind. F are motivated and rewarded when they see their actions have impact on the world or other characters. T enjoy receiving critical feedback (a game over with tips), but F will take it personally. Ex: Zelda gives clear goals (good for T), falling or getting hit results in losing half a heart (and not instant death) and Link has an impact on the game world (good for F).
Judging (55% of pop) plan then move, single task at a time, ahead of deadlines, targets and routines to manage life	Perceiving (45% of pop) plan as you go, multitask, work better before deadline, avoid routine and commitment	J want to beat the game (get all the secret bonuses) and complete objectives. P want to improve their abilities, and enjoy the process. For P, goals completed = feedback that they're on track. Non-linear structure is good for P because if they don't like a level, they can try another and keep progressing. J needs to know what to do to progress. Ex: in Tony Hawk or GTA, players need to collect points (good for J) but they can collect them the way they want (various kinds of skate figures or driving/killing missions or sandbox play, good for P).

TJ vs FP: TJ want challenges to overcome (what most current games provide), FP want easy fun (cf Sims or casual games).

Study hypothesis: hardcore player is a 14-28 year old tech savvy male who plays up to 8 games per month. Supposedly, he plays on his own (hence I), is methodological, goal-oriented enjoys conflicts (T), plays games until completion and looks for perfect score/overachiever (J). Previous quantitative work from the Bartle test by Andreasen showed the average hardcore MMO player is IST. Therefore, let's suppose hardcores are IT. Overall, 15% of women and 35% of men are of type IT.

ch4 - DGD1

DGD1 is intended as a tool to aid in market-oriented game design.

Methods: between 2002 and 2004, ask 408 participants (incl 122 women) to answer a 32-question Myers-Briggs personality test, as well as questions on purchasing and playing habits, and do you consider yourself hardcore, casual, or no idea?. Only look at people who play at least one game per year. Survey advertised on hardcore and casual websites/game portals + university students.

Results: clustering gave a sketchy and incomplete result, and FE and SI dimensions did not help to cluster, but 4 clusters appeared anyway: conqueror (TJ), manager (TP), Wanderer (FP), and participant (FJ). Hypothesis rejected: hardcores are found in E and S (and not only I and T). Still, I and N are higher for hardcores and MMO players than casuals. For each of the four types, twice more respondents reported they were casuals than hardcores.

The DGD1 demographic model

Type	Hardcores Desc	Casuals Desc	Progress	Story	Social
Conqueror	ITJ. Want meaningful challenges, strategies and puzzles, want to complete the game. Want lots of content, try to beat themselves. The game is too easy if they don't die at least a few times. Anger, frustration, boredom, and fiero.	ISTJ. FPS and racing games, they play to compete and win. Rely on genre conventions and do not like deviations from the genre. Fiero (although it's oblivious to them) and schadenfreude in PVP, or in GTA for rampages	Rapid advancement: stats in RPG, better gear in FPS	Focus on plot twists/events, not on characters	Online: vocal hardcores from forums and blogs. They also like to win discussions
Manager	ITP. Strategy and tactics. Winning is less important than mastering the game systems: process-oriented, not goal oriented. Conquerors consider them rivals and targets. Patient. Look for challenging but not impossible. Don't look for hidden features but rather refine their current knowledge. Fiero. Civ series.	ISTP. Want familiar settings and realism. Like construction and management games like SimCity. Hate being stuck even if they suck. Hate interruptions and like smooth difficulty curves.	Steady. Give up if no reliable strategy is found quickly.	Plot, not characters.	None?
Wanderer	INFP. Easy fun and toyplay, not challenges. Variety keeps the fun going. Complete levels in aesthetically pleasing ways. Cf Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move: simple controls, bright colors, and actions with direct and satisfying changes to the environment. See also Mario Party and Super Monkey Ball. Need to be able to give up the current task for another different task. May turn to Conqueror or Manager relatives for help. Emotions: finesse, aesthetics, wonder, awe and mystery, but no fiero.	ENFP. Want to accomplish something in the game world without the need for challenges. Games = way to relax. Feeling of progression or else boredom. Lack of market vectors to reach them [although nowadays there's Facebook]	New toys, colorful and imaginative environments	Emotions. Empathy to characters or investment in world/immersion.	Talk about what they like but avoid arguments
Participant	FJ. Games as social entertainment. Cf DDR, The Sims. Little survey data about this group.		Narrative of group of players	Characters and emotions, but in control of them, not just spectator.	Multiplayer, but must face other players in person, not just online (no MMO)

ch5 - Player abilities

Flow = subjects believe they can complete their activity. Subjects have clear goals and direct and clear feedback. Effortless involvement. Goals should be short-term for participant and conqueror, but long-term for Wanderer and manager because they like to figure out the short-term goals themselves.

Caillois' table of the four categories of play helps understand how flow is related to toyplay. In the table, there really is a continuum between Paidia and Ludus.

The relation between the four play styles of DGD1 and Caillois' categories of games

Conqueror Agon	Manager Agon (Alea tolerated)
Participant Mimicry	Wanderer Mimicry (Alea tolerated)

Caillois' table of the four categories of play

-	Agon (competition)	Alea (chance)	Mimicry (simulation)	Ilinx (vertigo)
Paidia (spontaneous play)	Spontaneous races	Counting out rhymes, coin flipping	Masks and disguisement	Children whirling, swinging
Ludus (structured play)	Sports	Betting, lotteries	Theatre	Skiing, mountain climbing

People with high Myers-Briggs Feeling scores prefer avoiding conflicts, therefore they don't like Agon. They're also more likely to like Mimicry since they focus on people. For example, Wanderers appreciate finesse, which is a component of Mimicry. Ilinx resembles immersion, it appeals to everyone.

Temperament theory gives patterns of behaviors, while Myers-Briggs gives patterns of perception or judgement.

Temperament theory

Temperament	Core needs	Myers-Briggs traits	Skills	% of pop
Rational	Knowledge, competence	NT	Strategic: Think and plan ahead, identify the means to achieve a goal, coordinate actions strategically	10%
Idealist	Unique identity, search for meaning and significance	NF	Diplomatic: Resolve conflicts while recognizing individuality, empathy, find similarities through abstraction	15%
Artisan	Freedom to act and ability to impact	SP	Tactical: Read the current content and manage the situation, work out the next step and take action, improvise to overcome problems	25%
Guardian	Belonging and sense of responsibility/duty	SJ	Logistical: Organizing and meeting needs, optimizing and standardizing, protect and ensure safety	50%

Temperament, Myers-Briggs and DGD1

Type	Myers-Briggs traits	Hardcore temperament trait	Casual temperament trait	Flow provenance	Examples
Conqueror	TJ	strategic	logistical	Capacity to see in advance how to address problems (strategic) and iterate/repeat to improve/optimize the solution (logistical). Willingness to fail and repeat	Production of units in RTS, monsters or bosses with patterns (cf Doom monsters)
Manager	TP	strategic	tactical	Planning ahead (strategic) and reacting to rapidly changing situations (tactical). Hardcores like to get lost in their thoughts, ideally without time limitations. Casuals have flow in the action, and need short-term goals.	RTS have both spontaneous maneuvers and long-term strategies. Civ, Chess or puzzles for hardcores.
Wanderer	FP	diplomatic	tactical	Immersion, explicit short-term goals (tactical). Completion of goals is not a big thing, it happens almost as a side-effect of exploration. Give them time to explore.	Platformers (goal is obvious and challenges relatively easy)
Participant	FJ	diplomatic	logistical	Feeling of belonging, toyplay, optimize relationships (logistical) with other characters or players, immerse themselves in social situation	The Sims, Animal Crossing

Casual audience is best approached with familiar settings and content, and with gameplay that revolves around optimization or thinking on your feet (tactical). Hardcores prefer original games that give them a sense of identity (diplomatic), and problems to solve (strategic), e.g. Final Fantasy focuses on story and strategic battles.

Sport design

[This article follows an email discussion with Ian Schreiber.]

Sports and video games share a lot. Although video games have implemented new sports, they are usually copies of real-life sports (Madden NFL, FIFA) or variants with more violent creatures or rules (Mutant League Football, Blood Bowl). Even fighting games come from fighting sports - Street Fighter is nothing more than mixed martial arts with fireballs and teleportation. However, video games such as DDR or exergaming (Wii Fit) get really close to actual sports. Several new sports make use of computers (ARGs), some use the geography (Big Urban Games) and some use both (geocaching, Four Square.

Yet there are currently many more board game and video game designers than sport designers. Possible reasons:

• New sports take time to spread and be widely adopted. Rugby was presumably invented by Web Ellis in 1823 (as a variant from normal football), but it took around a century to become popular.
• Sport rules get modified over time to fit people's needs and likes, or to improve players' safety or game balance. Hence, a sport might have been designed and redesigned by many people, and not a single designer.
• There are more constraints in sport design than game design. To spread, a sport has to be fun to play AND fun to watch (that's why ball games have only one ball: it's easier for the audience to focus on it). It also has to be easily played at home or on the street in the neighborhood (like soccer but unlike ice hockey) and it has to be safe for people.
• There might not be a strong demand for new sports.

Video games do not suffer from the problems mentioned above (they are at home, they have marketing backup, and people want ot play computer games). Yet game designers do not try to incorporate new sports in their games. Do they simply not think about it? I think there is a lot for video games to gain from sports, especially since many games have very competitive player segments (WoW world firsts, Korean Starcraft league, Street Fighter IV world tournaments, ...).

[Literature] Productivity and play in organizations

In Productivity and play in organizations by Hansen et al. (2009) are described the reactions of executives when asked about using virtual worlds (VW) for their business. Hansen et al. analyzed 25 business executive written reports after they had spent some time evaluating Second Life as a valuable platform for companies. 7 sensible topics have been extracted from the reports by the researchers.

In the context of virtual worlds, productivity can have very broad and different meanings depending on who is producing, who is getting benefits from the production, what is created, and so on. Hence the researchers narrow and explain their definition of productivity: they try to answer the question In what ways can virtual worlds enhance the operation of everyday organizations?. In other terms, they look for productivity as measured through … revenue generation and cost control. Asking executives their opinion was important for this study for two reasons. First, executives are the ones who are effectively in charge of revenue generation and cost control. Second, they are instrumental in the adoption and appropriation of such a technology by the company because they are the ones who decide of using a VW or not.

The methodology followed by Hansen et al. deals with analyzing the reflection papers produced by MBA students and extract the key information from them. The first phase of their analysis was a grounded-theory-oriented comparison of the reports to identify patterns (open-coding). After having had a sense of the overall content, they started to gather the arguments in favor and against the use of VW for business (selective-coding).

Seven tensions, or points of disagreements between respondents, were identified. I replaced some of the cells of table 2 given in the article to illustrate the arguments in favor and against the use of Second Life for business.

Tension	In favor	Against
Popularity	40,000 residents at any given time	Residents not in the business-oriented locations, Web2.0 social websites have 100M+ users
First-mover	Get used to SL now for long-term benefits	The SL phenomenon is slowing down, we wait for more robust VW platforms
Demographic	Young and tech savvy	Geekiness, social awkwardness
Anonymity	Honest and uninhibited information	Trust issues & misinformation
Sociality	VW brings more social presence than other electronic media	Limited social cues
Experience	Immersion & 3D prototyping	Lack of authenticity
Social Benefit	Freedom (virtual tourism, expression) and therapy	Dehumanizing

These tensions have also been cross-tabulated with the business application they affected: marketing and brand awareness, training and distance learning, meetings and collaboration, product innovation and testing, recruitment and interviewing, and virtual tours. Marketing and organizational training were the two domains where VW could bring the most valuable help to businesses. However, respondents recognized that marketing in the context of VW is very recent and requires particular skills the company does not always have. Community marketing, a new skill of the community manager?

In the last decade, the business press has been split in two sides: those who say VW are the future, and the careful, more conservative ones. Based on a CMC approach, Hansen et al. remark that lack of control and depersonalization are the two main concerns with the use of VW for businesses. In the light of previous CMC works, the reluctance to use VW may decrease as familiarity with the medium increases. However, VW provide synchronicity and 3D graphics, affordances unseen in older electronic media such as email or forums. Research has a role to play in determining if previous CMC results still apply to VW.

[Conf] Applying product attachment theory in the practice of experience design

John Zimmerman gave a talk on March 12th about how product-attachment theory could be applied in design. In my comments [in brackets] I explain how all this could be applied to MMOG.

In a nutshell, attachment theory's main focus is on the bounds a child ties with his/her parents. Product-attachment theory describes how people learn to love certain possessions when they use them. For example, a Mum who read books to her child every night may want to keep the books even after the 30-year old child has left the house. This attachment takes too much time (decades) and marketers want to increase sales now, not in a far future. Hence three factors come into play: identification, attachment and influence. Stars can produce on plebes these three factors [example: George Clooney in Nespresso commercials]. But products can generate this effect by themselves. James in 1890 wrote that people are what they possess. Similarly, in order to be a mother, a woman must "have" a child. The diagram nearby is a summary of what Belk suggested in 1988 (p145): being is determined by having and doing.

Product attachment theory has two focuses: role enhancement and role transition. When a high school student goes to college, he/she will buy products to create his/her identity. This is role transition, while role enhancement would be: a mother may feel better if she buys more expensive things to her children. In our consumption society, the key idea is selling appropriate goods to people to help them build their identity. [These two focuses should be very important to RMT-based F2P MMOG marketers... if they can spot when such transitions happen. Here are a few examples of in-game transitions. When a player creates an avatar, the player may not directly spend a lot (of real money) to customize his/her avatar. However, as the avatar transitions to the virtual world, the player starts to see other avatars and wants to create his/her identity. At that moment, the player is very likely to want to buy more trendy clothes, more cool-looking equipment, a mount/vehicle or even a house. The first reaction of level-15 Human WoW avatars reaching Stormwind for the first time when they saw a paladin on his battle steed is very likely to be "OMFG I want to mount horses as well!". Second Life offers themed private islands for their residents. Undoubtedly, some residents feel like they have a social status to assume and buy a virtual house.]

Once one has become what he/she wanted to be, one does not want to be it anymore. [Here I somehow disagree: there must be a phase when one realizes and enjoys having reached one's goal and status.]

From Q&A: there are two main conflicting theories of aesthetics: novelty and familiarity. [this might explain Braid game design success: the very familiar 2-D platform side-scroller contains the novel idea of using the ability to go back in time to solve puzzles and progress.]