The art of game design cannot be measured by anything

Fan Art for Discworld Noir

If game design is an art, then what happens to it when a developer is guided only by financial metrics when creating a game? Is there then a place for creativity? Or are games turning into traps that lure and monetize unsuspecting victims?

A little more than ten years ago, when my friend and colleague Richard Boon and I were writing the book 21st Century Game Design, I predicted that a feature of this century’s games would be the desire to understand the player through the study of their behavior patterns. From the height of my experience, I believe that my statement was correct, and that the time when game design [projects] was mainly based on unsubstantiated statements and presumptuous practices was left behind (however, neither the first nor the second was ever eradicated). The time has come when it has become extremely important for the gaming industry to understand how players relate to games.

But we made one big mistake. My assumption was that modeling user behavior implies understanding how to satisfy gaming needs, which boil down to providing positive, inclusive, moral and practical interaction with users. But the main modern types of modeling absolutely do not need to take into account the wishes of the players, because the main model is currently analytical indicators. And these indicators absolutely do not affect any aspects of the psychology of the players. Our idea of twenty-first century game design was that the industry had to make money by creating games that would satisfy the wishes of the players. But what we are seeing now is an industry that gets its main income simply by detecting leaks in its cash flow, and acts as a digital predator, sucking money out of digital wallets of players.

It will be useful to take a look at the key indicators to understand what I’m talking about. Firstly, there are the following dimensions of activity: daily active users (DAU), sessions, engagement (DAU/MAU), retention and reverse churn (Churn). Next are the monetization indicators – conversion (percentage of players who made orders), ARPDAU (average income from a daily active user) and ARPPU (average income from a paying user). There are also measures of the game economy in order to monitor sources, funnels and in-game currencies. All this is aimed at stimulating payments. This is all to the fact that squeezing money, built on the impulses, impulses of players (although there are no players in analytics, there are only users), resembles a drug business.

“Successful free-play games create long-term relationships with users. Users who are satisfied with their experience want to pay for superiority over other players. The game needs to hold the user firmly so that there is time to create such a relationship,” Game Analytics said.

Nicholas Lovell is one of the ardent adherents of the shareware business model, just based on such modeling. He is the author of the book The Curve and is a regular at conferences like me. We first met at a game developers conference in Liverpool many years ago, and our paths still sometimes cross. He studies the problems of the market not so much from the monetization side (and he does not like the fact that his position is called “monetization consultant”), but rather from the retention side, which was described in the quote above. I haven’t read much of his work, and his last lecture was full of terms like “acquisition, retention, monetization,” which give the impression of stripped-down Rules for Acquiring Ferengi from the Star Trek series. Nicholas does not stop insisting that the gaming industry can avoid the abuse of excessive monetization by self-regulation, but I do not see any evidence of this yet, however, as I do not see any interest in this.

Close attention in game design to these indicators has shifted the gaming industry closer to its less respected, but more profitable relative – gambling. And at the same time, we are faced with a number of ethical issues, which we are not yet able to discuss. It is necessary to discuss the practice of monetization as soon as possible in order to understand what ethical indicators it includes, but the industry does not want to start this conversation. I offered to discuss this topic at a conference of video game developers, but it was immediately eliminated. The industry is afraid of this conversation, but until we are ready to ask what indicators should still be used in relation to game design as art, we have serious problems affecting the integrity of the gaming industry. Of course, from the point of view of capitalism exclusively, there is no conscientiousness, only money. But money is just one of our imaginary games. The one that we began to take very, very seriously ever since we can’t feed ourselves without it.

Laralyn McWilliams, the former creative leader of the Free Realms project, had her own opinion on the ethics of monetization, and she left her position out of disgust at the problems that I drew attention to above. In her 2014 interview, under the heading “Problems with the best examples of Frituplay”, Laralin told how designing a design that causes inconvenience to players, which, so to speak, would contribute to monetization, turned into something she did not approve of:

A designer came up to me and said that it should be a location where it would be very difficult to play. There should be very few tasks and a terrifying grind. He wanted to add only five or ten tasks to smooth out the negative impression. But when I looked at the numbers, I realized that this location has the best indicator of monetization. The terrible feeling of long boring and monotonous actions encourages players to spend money. In this case, I had to say “no” to the things that the players would like, because it could cut our income. So I said, “Well, no!” and left the development of social games.

But game design can also be an art, a creator with sufficient knowledge can satisfy the desires of different types of players. This happens even where no indicators are used. And developers who want to go this way can build themselves a dedicated fanbase that will support them and help attract new players. But, you can be sure, this way is more difficult, because you will have to create worthy works of art, and not just sculpt “cutlets” from minced meat of processed ideas scrolled in a meat grinder. Nothing good will come out without effort. But if you decide to go this way, then it will entail more than abandoning the concept of commercial games that are fixated solely on indicators.

Unfortunately, those developers who have not stooped to the path of predatory monetization, as a rule, begin to create games that they themselves would like, playing with fate in search of their audience. I think this is a very dangerous way to make a career in game design. I have seen dozens (even hundreds) of developers who have gone this way and failed. It’s just not a very good plan – to hope that your gaming preferences will purely coincidentally coincide with the preferences of other players and you won’t magically burn out. As suggested by Rami Ismail from Vlambeer Studio (when I accused him of this very proposal):

…I’ve been telling developers to do what they want, [but] not in this vacuum. My entire existence as a public person is due to the fact that I am one of the few from the indie generation of 2010 who shouted that business should be taken seriously, working with publishers, studying market conditions and making efforts to get your game noticed.

The 21st Century Game Design book will soon cease to be printed, because the multinational publisher has completely refused to publish books about creating games, which is saying something. The main idea of our first book was that there are many game design techniques, but there is not one perfect one, and this idea remains true to this day. The development of our thought took place through the fusion of game psychology and the history of video games, which, I believe, remains an extremely fruitful way to understand the art of game design. Alas, the gaming industry decided to go the other way and treacherously separated dogmatic indie design from each other, on the one hand, and pragmatic monetization design on the other. Personally, I think that the works of art that we call games deserve a different fate, but, apparently, my opinion is in the minority. The gaming industry is divided into original, but stubborn and unable to confidently stay afloat companies, and money-pumping farms. So it seems that there is too little room in the industry to develop art that is designed to please players.

Source: Gamasutra