Memorial weekend has slipped by. My folks were visiting from out of town. They asked the usual questions about what I do, and only time will tell if my answers were more satisfying than usual. (I’m think that analogies to retail businesses help.)

We did not play video games.

Given my occupation, why is that the case? Because I don’t currently own any video games that would do a better job of bringing us together (and creating time/space to chat) than old-fashioned, non-digital Scrabble or Blokus. So we played Blokus.

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This is a partial transcript of the “Casual Games and Community” session. I’ve only included the quotes I considered interesting and/or amusing.

Moderator: Adeo Ressi, Founder and CEO for Game Trust
Panelists: Greg Mills, Director of Premium Games for AOL; Chris Early, Studio Manager for Microsoft Casual Games Group; Andrew Pedersen, Vice President and Executive Producer for Pogo (EA)

On knowing what the customer wants:

Andrew: Customers often don’t actually know what they really want when first exposed to a new experience. Pogo badges didn’t focus test well at all. Now, badges are so popular that we rolled out “premium badge albums” that you can purchase. Users are snapping them up like crazy. We’ve sold over 750K premium badge albums.

Chris: Everybody thought that the “gamer score” in Xbox Live would be a good thing, but nobody thought it would be a strong driver. But we’ve seen that people live by that score — they look to buy games that will significantly increase it.

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Todd Kerpelman is Creative Director for EA’s Pogo division, as well as one of Pogo’s most talented game designers. I’ve spent way too many hours playing his brainchild, Phlinx. Anyway, on to the interview:

In your experience, what are the most important elements of a fun *and* popular casual game?

Well, obviously, I think one the most important aspects to having a popular game _is_ that it’s fun. Honestly, if you’ve got a game that’s fun enough, a lot of the conventional wisdom around what players want and what kinds of games they like tend to go out the window.

But with that being said, I think accessibility is certainly one of the keys towards making a casual game successful. This is especially true in the downloadable space, where you only have an hour to get people to like your game, and there’s dozens of other games just waiting to be downloaded if the user gets frustrated with yours. In general, you want people to be able to pick up and play your game and feel like they’re doing something correct within the first minute. This doesn’t mean that games have to be simplistic, though. There’s a lot of really complex games out there, but the successful ones do a good job of easing the player into it.

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Nintendo has announced the successor to Brain Age, Common Sense Training for Adults. I’m not going to mince words — this could be pure genius. Not just because it will (like Brain Age) be accessible to consumers of all stripes, but because it takes Nintendo one step closer to dominating a lucrative and untapped market: self-help games.

Most of you are probably aware (or could guess) that self-help is a multi-billion dollar industry. You can find a book (or ten) for every problem you can imagine, not to mention audio tapes, TV shows, etc. But not much in the way of mainstream games, with few exceptions.

So Nintendo is going to teach us “common sense”. If the game proves to be enjoyable and popular, maybe they’ll teach people how to stay in shape, next. (With the Wii, that would be incredibly easy.) Or maybe the next game will be a “romance trainer”, complete with built-in, network-enabled social networking functions at later levels of the game. (”Don’t just train to flirt, put your training into practice!”) Or maybe a negotiation game, with levels like “negotiate a purchase”, “negotiate a sale”, “negotiate a hire”, etc. The list of fun and useful possibilities just boggles the mind.

The Common Sense titles could include a “common sense in other countries” component. I bet people would get a huge kick out of experiencing these cultural differences in the context of a game. And it makes localization of the game much more interesting.  :)

This topic really deserves more attention, but it’s 3am and I want to go to sleep. More in the future!

I had to get up at 5:30am this morning in order to have time to write something for Game Tycoon. This is really testing my newfound infatuation with blogging.  ;-)

Slipped into the Casual Games Summit for a bit yesterday. Thankfully, there was little of the (formerly common) griping about “we don’t get no respect” — a definite sign that the market is maturing. Other signs that the market is maturing (as noted by Dave Rohrl, GM of Popcap’s San Francisco studio):

• Team size is now 3-5 (as opposed to 1-3 in the very recent past).
• Development schedules are now 6-12 months (as opposed to 3).
• Development costs are $100K-$250K or more (as opposed to $25K-$100K).
• The market has become extremely crowded, and consumers are learning to expect more from casual games. Dave hypothesized that the games which defined this genre several years ago would no longer make the cut in today’s environment.

In a subsequent panel, James Gwertzman (Director of Biz Dev for Popcap) made the following pronouncements:

• Casual games need to be modified on a partner-by-partner basis to help the major game portals differentiate their offerings. Not core modifications, but things like better integration with a partner’s DRM solution, leaderboards, etc. James said it was affordable to do this for five or six companies: an unsurprising assessment, and bad news for portals below tier 1 (tier 2 and below represent just 10% of Popcap’s audience).
• New customers are always flowing into the market, so you can’t ever stop making really simple, accessible games that suck people in.
• No matter how powerful portals gets, Popcap can make must-have games that preserve its power in the chain. (My opinion: this is probably true, if Popcap succeeds at brand-building.)

A few other things mentioned by the panelists in general: there needs to be more editorial coverage of casual games, developers need to do a better job of supporting their brands (financially and otherwise) in order to combat clones, and there are too many single-player casual games. The argument was also made that casual game clones are no more “exact copies” than Quake was an “exact copy” of Doom.

Oh, and as a total aside: I heard from a friend that Warren Spector told a group of academics that he’d rather students get a liberal arts degree than a “game design” degree. I appreciate the sentiment. Hopefully universities will always make an effort to channel students towards creative writing, film studies, engineering, psychology, and business courses (etc), not just the game-specific stuff. There’s time for both.

I just sat in on the “Continued Growth of Gaming” panel at the MBA Media and Entertainment Conference in New York. Moderator: Cyrus Beagley (Engagement Manager, McKinsey Entertainment Practice). Speakers on the panel: Greg Costikyan (Founder, Manifesto Games), Chris Di Cesare (Director of Marketing, Xbox), Nique Fajors (VP of Brand Management, Atari), Frederic Markus (President, eRelevant Games), Joseph Varet (Sr. Director of Biz Dev & Strategy, MTV Networks). I managed to catch most of what was said, except in the case of Greg Costikyan, who speaks two to three times faster than most normal human beings.

Topics discussed: What makes a franchise successful, MTV’s role in the video game industry, innovation, the attractiveness of various game markets, and some questions for Microsoft about portables and shortages.

Read the full transcript here.

Thanks to Wonderland, I’ve discovered a cool little game called Fastr which is based on the Flickr image-sharing service. Fastr is a multiplayer game. Every 40 seconds or so, it appears to pick a random (simple) word and then begins downloading images from Flickr that have been tagged with that word. It displays another image every few seconds. Your goal is to guess the tag word as quickly as possible (based on the images). A quicker guess yields more points. I love it!

This game has opened my eyes to a whole new world of potential design uses for open content. The possibilities are endless. For example, how about an FPS or RPG in which the player has the power to look into other people’s minds via ESP and see their thoughts (which would be expressed as images)? When the player uses his power on important characters (especially at key plot moments), he would of course see pre-defined content. But, when using his power to gaze into the minds of normal people on the street, the images he sees could be pulled directly from Flickr. Image selection could be based on a sensible set of random keywords. Or perhaps images could be pulled from a randomly-selected Flickr user’s library (preferably sharing a tag-word, regardless of the word itself), so that a truly meaningful “thought-sequence” would be reconstructed for the player. All of a sudden, “filler” NPCs in a game acquire unique, interesting characteristics. They cease to be filler, and instead truly enrich the player’s experience. :)

Wired just published a good in-depth article on Neopets, a site that enables kids to enjoy virtual pets. Members play simple games to accumulate virtual currency which can then be spent on pet maintenance and upgrades. Neopets was purchased by Viacom in June ‘05 for $160M. Article highlights:

• 25 million users worldwide; 2.2B pageviews per month
• “Second-stickiest site on the Internet” according to Media Metrix
• Now available as stuffed animals, board games, trading cards, console games, and soon a feature film.
• Revenues are primarily ad-driven via deeply-integrated brand/product placement, i.e. McDonald’s: Meal Hunt (you search for lost McNuggets). Members are also exposed to movie previews, market research surveys, etc. In some cases, even the virtual trophies for winning a game are branded (i.e. with the SweeTarts brand).

I dug up another article with some impressive placement examples. Site users, wanting to buy gifts for their pets, actually got worked up over a limited supply of virtual Mattel DivaStarz dolls. Product trials of Heinz EZ Squirt ketchup jumped 18% after inclusion in Neopets.

All of the incentive systems in Neopets can be found in other games that appeal to other market segments. ClubPogo users (the majority of whom are adults) work like mad to win virtual “badges” and currency that have no tangible value. MMORPGs, played primarily by hardcore gamers, also feature much-desired virtual currency and status symbols. At least for now, MMORPG currency is unique in its spontaneous realization of real-world value.

Lastly, there’s some controversy about the scope of the advertising in Neopets.

Ed Allard, Senior Producer for Popcap, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about casual games via email:

How have casual games evolved since the days of Tetris?

In a way, the games haven’t changed that much at all. The best casual games of today have a lot in common with Tetris - they have simple approachable mechanics, relatively low production cost, extremely wide appeal, and are insanely addictive.

Beyond that, there has certainly been some growth in the overall presentation of the core mechanics. Production values are increasing, which means better graphics and sound, longer game play, and on-line features such as high scores or user-contributed content. One key trend along these lines is the movement from abstract presentations of shapes and puzzles to strongly-themed presentations with real-world (or imaginary) characters, objects, and places. Many have simple stories that carry you through the game and provide a sense of progress and achievement.

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