@andrewchen - Latest Comments in 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Alan O'Dea — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:45:46 -0000

I think more developers getting to market and operating their own games is what it will take. The web benefits; metrics, user feedback and of course monetisation are simply funnels to refine in market and the more MMO and online game developers that manage get to that stage and not have a publisher do it for them the quicker they will start learning from their market and making web a core part of their operations, development and management capabilities.

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Tom Armitage — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 05:51:11 -0000

I think you need to be careful to distinguish between "narrative" and "story".

To use the analogy given previously: yes, the website/app is a "place"; I think that's a reasonable construction. However, there is still a story attached to it: the story of a user's interaction with the site.

There's a beginning, when they first arrive; there's the tricky hump of the sign-up process (or not), the first interaction, the first encounter with other users, the slow gaining of expertise. All of this forms a journey for the individual user, and how a site caters to them at each stage is important. Some sites focus on the early stages, knowing that "power users" will cope fine in the end; others try to offer a steadier curve, but perhaps at the expense of the first two hours.

Some sites aren't even open-ended. Think about filling out your taxes online: you come, you perform the task, you (ideally) complete the task, and the story of you using that site is over for another year. It's important to consider what "win states" are for your site - is it a happy user, staying forever, or is there a victory condition that's met by somebody leaving? Too many sites want to be everything to all users; a focused, finite lifepsan might actually turn out more productive for them.

There's also a halfway house: repeat usage. A product-site, like Moo or Photobox, has a repeat-usage story: I go to the site to buy a thing, and whilst my order might be complete, you hope I'll come back. It's not a consistent use, but a sporadic one, driven by demand, and it requires high-maintenance during the purchase procedure, and a lower form of maintenance between visits.

Stories are a useful way to frame interactions, even if the story isn't happening on your own site.

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

robfulop — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:22:59 -0000

I spent over 25 years in the traditional games industry, and have been involved with social gaming for less than six months now. Social gaming occurs to me as indeed a fundamentally different medium than that ot traditional gaming. Creative mediums such as film, pop music, and interactive entertainment all share a similar evolutionary path .. the format of the creative product evolves to fit the constraints of the technologies and subsequent business models that enable the medium to exist in the first place. This sort of evolution is going on as we speak in the social gaming space .. the creative product is being shaped primarily by the emerging biz models .. this is how it should be I think.

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Andrew Chen — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:23:11 -0000

Alan, what do you think it'll take for the traditional games guys to catch up? Or maybe they never will?

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Andrew Chen — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:22:36 -0000

I'll link you with an update!

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Andrew Chen — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:21:19 -0000

ah, yes - I totally agree with this. Having a "start" and an "end" is a mixed blessing - while it makes the immersion more complete while you're in the middle of it, after you're done you're also unlikely to return. One of the positives of building utilities is that people have a need for them over and over again - another nuanced tradeoff that occurs.

Also, you get some street cred for beating Diablo. That game takes months to play. WeeWorld might grind to a halt when the new game gets released! ;-)

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Andrew Chen — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:14:22 -0000

Wow, great comment. This really points out the analogy that social gaming is really a fundamentally different medium than the traditional games industry. Perhaps, social gaming is to hardcore games what TV is to movies!

It also makes me think that the best way to deal with these new constraints is to get a bunch of smart new kids to make the rules from scratch, and maybe that works better than trying to reprogram people who already are set in their ways.

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

adam — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:16:43 -0000

Nice article.

I paused before reading it to right down my own thoughts off the top of my head, and it turns out they're quite different (just shows a different professional background / interest-set I think - the broad conclusions seem to be the same) - http://t-machine.org/index....

Only one thing I took issue with in your list:

"But the flipside of this is that it’s not enough to build one product - instead you build 70 product variations, and call each one a level!"

I'm pretty sure that the levelling treadmill was carried over (and extended and strengthened) to MMORPGs mostly for the opposite reason: that you were building that much content anyway, but most users were only experiencing 1/100th of it, and you needed a way to force them to experience more of it, because it was a sunk cost.

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Lauren_Bigelow — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:43:05 -0000

Andrew I share many of your same observations having come from the Web world and recently attending the game developer's convention. I like the summary.

I would also add one... in addition to utility vs. storytelling there is place vs. story ... on a social media web site you have a richer environment to make the social play into a game, and make your web site a place, not a story. This is fundamentally a different construct than playing a single player videogame.

I remember after weeks of devoting ridiculous quantities of my life to Diablo at the end of the game I defeated the monster and it spewed blood and died... the end. No word from the village people I had spent time "getting to know", like hey thanks for taking the time to save my world... don't get me wrong I got lots of satisfaction from the gameplay or I wouldn't have made it to that point, but it's just a very different experience from a social media site.

With all of this I agree with you that when you combine the best of both it gets much more interesting.

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

robfulop — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:50:35 -0000

A lot of what you have to say reminds me of EMPIRE, the biography of William Paley, CEO of CBS in the early days of television. His problems were not unlike those of today's web 2.0 gaming enterprise. Paley had no choice but to recruit creative staff from the world of feature films, many of whom had severe culture shock trying to ply their craft through what occurred to them as the horrid constraints of early network television. Telling a story in three 8 minute acts, where each act ended in a cliffhanger in order to motivate the viewer to sit through the commercial breaks was a truly painful learning process. Many of the writers just couldn't deal with the constraints, and returned to the 'long form' of feature films from whence they came. And those who toughed it out, and figured out how to use the new medium of television, went on to pioneer the television industry, introducing new formats like the sitcom, the game show, the soap opera, etc.

Such reminds me a lot of the state of many web 2.0 interactive entertainment companies. Often, such are populated with immigrants from the gaming world proper, who struggle with a lot of the constraints created by a business model totally unlike that of the companies they came from. Nor is the management of many of these companies, often from the web world, prepared to deal with the 'product first' mindset of the creative people they bring on board. Obviously it's the few groups who merge minds the best who will end up winning in the marketplace.

I'd recommend EMPIRE to anybody who is interested in these issues ... there are a lot of lessons to be learned from how smart people dealt with a very similar situation in a closely related industry, just a few short decades ago.

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Adrian Crook — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:20:21 -0000

Excellent breakdown. I spent most of my life on the core game dev side, but always had strong web ties outside of work. Now I consult in both the web world (f2p online games, mostly) and the retail game world. It's extremely interesting to note the differences you've summed up above.

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Mike Gowen — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:21:20 -0000

As far as Utility vs. Storytelling goes, I wrote up a similar thought on the difference between web apps and games in terms of their overarching goals.

http://mikegowen.com/2008/0...

Sorry for the self-promo, but it'll save me a rather lengthy comment :)

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Andrew Chen — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:53:09 -0000

hm, I'm surprised by that - snipclip looks much more like a web product? Are there game-y features that I'm not understanding?

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Alan O'Dea — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:50:33 -0000

Hey Andrew insightful article as always.
I totally agree with your assessment of the differences between game and web guys. Having worked on both the web and game sides of the fence I can testify to the binary mindsets of each industry’s creative and management minds.
The real progress that is happening today as your blog documents is the emerging trend for people with both game and web skills and backgrounds forming extremely exciting new companies and developing projects that bend aspects and strengths of both industries.
If I was going to be honest I think the web guys are picking up the games stuff much faster than the game guys are adapting to the web. The faster cycles of technological, business, and product development iteration and their grasp of user experience and metrics means web guys are just getting there faster and faster and understanding the feedback loop in the marketing, business and product development cycles in a much more sophisticated way. The games guys and yes this includes even the online games guys are just not adapting fast enough to the web as a distribution, marketing, metrics, and sales channel.

Re: 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

Martin Szugat — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:39:57 -0000

Thanks for this post! We (SnipClip) just had a pitch at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin and another yesterday at the Facebook Developer Garage. There were two kinds of people: web people and game people (just a few of course). Game people immediately understood what I were talking about. Web people mostly didn't understand it - I had to explain it over and over.