Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Lancement du Conseil National du Numérique, Palais de l'Elysée - 27 avril 2011

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Trying to understand game mechanics

Last time I really played video games was as a teenager: games on Apple II (Loadrunner comes to mind), and early versions of IBM PCs (CGA, then VGA...) with games such as Moctezuma's revenge, digger, Asteroid, Zork...

In the past 25 years, I've occasionally played some Tetris, Deminer, Solitaire, Poker, Sudoku, but nothing serious. I did try the Wii a few years ago, but must have played less than 10 times.

Earlier this year, I thought it was time to start looking into this segment of the digital economy I had no clue about, the video game market estimated at about $80 billion, more or less the size of the movie industry. (see this Ibis Capital presentation, slide 7).

 

My first move was to decide which platform to go for :

• computer (Mac has no real games, PC: I have an old machine, linux) ?
• mobile device (phone, smartphone, tablet)
• console (Wii, XBox, PS3) ?

I'll maybe write a post about that first decision, because it's absolutely not obvious for a non-gamer. I eventually got a PS3 after asking a few friends and checking a few titles, exclusive to the PS3 (such as Heavy Rain).

In the past 6 months, I've played (or tried to ;) a number of games, including :

• bought: Unchartered, Unchartered 2, Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed 2, Prince Of Persia (sands), Modern Warfare 2 Call of Duty 4, A crack in Time, Little Big Planet 2, Red Dead Redemption, Heavy Rain, GTA IV, etc.
• demos : Skate 3, Dante's Inferno, etc.

My main interest after spending a few hundred hours playing all these games is actually not the game, but the game mechanics used in these games, and try to understand :

1. what makes a game sticky, making people spend so much time on them
2. how these mechanics can be applied to other environments.

Of all the games so far, I've enjoyed most Assassin's Creed 2, and Red Dead Redemption and they seem to share the same mechanics. Below I'll discuss a top-level hierarchy, and some elements that make these games stand out (that's for another post).

1) in all games, there's a simple task to achieve. With that you either finish the task, or get rewards such as points, get experience points, or unlock new features. This is where most casual games fall into.

2) more complicated games use a more complex reward system (character improvement) : the more points you get, or money, or enemies killes, etc. the more your character gets experience points : you can then get a better weapon, better armour, more speed, more wealth, etc. It is not necessary to have a story line just to max out all potential rewards in the game.

3) In terms of contineous interest, it seems there's a continuum of techniques to make the player stick to a game : Firstly of course, there's a story line. It has to be powerful enough to last many hours. After playing all these games, it feels like an interactive movie, as most of the games have long narratives (video segments of several minutes), giving control back to the player for fight or investigation scenes. Sometimes I also got the impression of watching a comic book with video segments. Most titles take their names, theme and universe from the story line. Which along with the game type (shoot 'em up, first person shooter, sport simulator, etc.), this is one of the main reasons making you buy a game ...

Once you've completed the game's story line, it would be a shame to stop the interaction with the player, not re-use the world and universe built, nor add extra features. Most games have added indeed mechanics beyond the storyline that make the game last longer

4) side quests. In Red Dead Redemption (RDR) for example, there are 18 stranger missions to complete, that are not necessary to complete the game;in Assassin's Creed 2 (AC2) there are for example Runs around town, Codex quests, feather quests, paintings, weapons...

5) mini-games : in RDR, there's the possibility to play casino games (poker, dice games, backjack...).

6) in-game awards : in RDR, there are a number of awards you can start collecting involving side-quests: outfits, challenges...This is exactly what Foursquare is doing with the badges mechanisms.

7) game publisher awards related to the game: in RDR, you can sign up for the Rockstar Games Social Club where you are  presented with new challenges, usually associated with a leaderboard, where your performance (timing, etc.) is compared to all users. This makes it the first mechanism to really enhance the game with social features : a mission (a segment of the game) you've already completed now has to be replayed with performance in mind. These Awards usually unlock new features in the game. In AC2, after a number of Uplay points, you get an exclusive access to a maze beneath the Assassin's house.

8) game publisher awards : in addition to the mechanics in 5), the game publisher can create cross-game awards. Rockstar games is going that way, Ubisoft as well with Uplay. For example, you can unlock an Ezio di Firenze (AC2) attire to play for your character in Prince of Persia (same publisher for both games). But most publishers are currently just allowing players to add points from different games to their accounts and spend it on any game.

9) console awards: these are more commonly known as Achievements (Xbox) or Trophies (PS3). When I got my console, I had no clue what these were, nor why they would pop up. I actually had to google the words to figure it out. And google online guides for how to get them some of the time (but that's for another post). I've found getting trophies is a very addictive mechanism, asking the player to do a number of things including storyline (1), side quests (2), mini-games (3), in-game awards (4), game-related awards (5) such as performance. I haven't seen the Xbox implementation, but it's pretty well implemented on the PS3 : you can compare trophies with ohter players, trophies between games; there's a mechanism to add up all trophies and put the player on a global leaderboard, putting the player on a quest for even more trophies to reach the next "player" level on the console platform.

10) add-ons:  AC2 sells 2 add-ons as chapter 12 and 13 of the 14 chapter story. They are not indispensable for the storyline, hence fell into (2); they allow to make the experience longer; in RDR, you can buy additional packs such as the Liars and Cheat pack, or the Zombie pack to use the same environment with new features, quests, etc. Not only does the player extend his time playing the game, but pays additional money (up-selling).

11) multiplayer mode : this is the 3rd and extremely powerful way to enhance the gaming experience. You basically either start the game all over (doubling the playing time) in multi-player mode (although limited usually to about a dozen players), or go into mini-games (free for all, team 1 vs team 2, 2 player mode...). This makes the game much more interesting, because you are testing yourself against real people.

12) real-life mode : this is an extension of the game's universe into real-life, with events such as fan encounters, exhibitions, etc. The excellent marketing used by game publishers (podcasts, mini-sites, ads, billboards, figurines, magazines, contests, etc.) owuld fall into this category. I might explore this in another post.

13) sequels : one a character finds its universe, it can be reused for sequels, becoming a franchise. Mario for example is a well known character franchise. Castlevania seems to have the world record though.

 

My final comment is that a game costs between 15 euros (used) to 60 euros (new), sometimes more for a special edition. In terms of entertainment value, it lasts much longer (between 50 to 100 hours) that a hardcover book (several hours, ~20 euros), a movie theater screening (2 hours, ~10 euros). Hence it makes sense to enhance the intrinsic value of a game to justify the higher cost of it, versus of other forms of entertainment.

Game mechanics are being explored by a number of sectors (foursquare et al., magazines, social shopping...), but unless we understand the whole range of game mechanics in play, these implementations might just not work. I'll come back in a future post on other aspects developed by modern console games.

 

Review of "Gourmet Live", an iPad-only magazine

Lately, I've been reviewing many magazines for the iPad. Today I spent 2 hours reading 'Gourmet Live", a free app for the iPad, based on the historic Gourmet print magazine. I had first heard about it here, and was interested in knowing more about the game mechanics of the magazine. There was some praise in the press that I don't share by now.

How does it work ?

- the app is free, and so far new weekly issues are also free (I have editions #3 and #4. I couldn't find a way to get older editions #1 and #2).

- the content offered is rather limited, only 10 articles of 2-3 pages, with pictures; I am a bit disappointed at the quality of the writing, and choice of subjects (although I should be a perfect target for a gastronomy magazine)

- whenever you finish reading an article (almost every article), you unlock new content (a set of recipes, more stories, that appear on the shelves on the same level as your magazine).

 

What I did not like :

I originally thought it would be great to adapt game mechanics to reading a magazine, but the implementation is rather poor : 

1) after unlocking 3 new contents after reading 3 articles, it gets annoying : there is no real game mechanic involved, you always get new content, very predictable, just by reading a piece. They should at least get inspired by foursquare's game mechanics : after reading 5 articles, after reading 3 issues, after reading 5 articles on wine, after reading articles on the 7 continents, after sharing with 10 friends, etc. As it is, the only interest seems to be for Gourmet, in that they don't pay the distribution cost (bandwidth) for people not reading the whole of the magazine.

2) In addition, the notification for new content is annoying, as it occurs a few seconds into the reading of a new article usually. They should just add the content automatically with no notification, or make it as a scrolling text at the bottom. Multitasking on iOS should also enable background downloading.

3) You can connect the app with either Facebook *or* twitter. Not both. That's just plain stupid. And it's only for sharing notifications of rewards on your facebook well or twitter stream, nothing else. The link sends back to a landing page on Gourmet's site, for you to download the app. This is just too heavy. I'd much rather prefer an option to share content with Facebook, Twitter, gmail, etc. (just like Foursquare's iPhone app does) on an article by article basis (this option is not present), and on notification by notification basis. After 7 notifications on my facebook wall, I deleted 5 of them, and deactivated the notifications on the app.

4) In addition, there should be a web version of the article available somewhere so that the link you share (facebook, twitter, email...) sends back to the article (with a download app button - that's ok) so that your contacts can read it. As it is, there's no social implementation on this app. The option should be available on each article, and bonus content.

5) There's also no interaction with a social graph : there's no way to know which of your contacts and friends is reading the content, liking it (like Facebook's Like button - not present here), etc.

6) I couldn't find a leaderboard and stats, typical of a massively multiplayer game, as claimed by the folks behind the app.

7) there's no forum / comments section on the app, as you would on a blog, enabling discussions around each article.

8) you don't find all of the almost standard navigation mechanisms from other magazines : left-right swipes to change articles for example, thumbnail of article pages, etc.

9) all contents appear on the same page, mixed between recipes and articles. I suppose we need a way to organize this content : hierarchy by country / regions, by date, by type + a search box.

10) finally, my iPad crashes as a whole after downloading 2 "unlocked" contents sequentially. Only way out is to reboot the iPad...

 

There are a few things I liked though :

1) the topic of the magazine : food and wine, but Food+Wine seems a contender here

2) lots of pics, recipes. nice. Eye candy.

3) There's a "favourite" button on each article, that puts all articles together. At some point I guess I'll need a way to rate (1-5) each article for faster retrieval ?

4) no ads so far. I wouldn't mind them if they are targeted right

5) one of the additional content had video embedded in the page. That would be great if expanded to chefs cooking the recipes presented.

 

All in all, it's a first attempt at game interactivity in a magazine app, but I think that by focusing on the "unlocking" content mechanism, they totally missed the point.  I've met Mike Wolf a couple of times, and he's a great person : I hope these comments will help him and his team improve the magazine. I look forward to a greatly enhanced issue soon.

iPad, my new magazine reader

I took me a long while until I finally went to buy an iPad last week. I spent the first few days trying to find proper iPad apps, and organize them into something useful. As I only got the wifi version, I don't really use it as a portable computer, but as a content reader, and I update the content when I get a wifi signal.

There are a few thoughts, in addition to the current comments on the iPad magazines being wall gardened and the new form of interactive CDROMs. I tested the device in various environments, including a couple of hours outdoors in the park, in my bed (20% of the time spent it seems), sitting in a couch at my club, etc.

• the iPad (with the Apple cover folded) is rather comfortable to read, at least for 2 hours. I lay it on my lap while reading, so I'm not holding it up high
• battery life is a non issue, it just lasts for the day no problem
• the screen is bright enough for reading outside, and colors are crisp; the size is slightly too small for a magazine, but the zooming is OK. However when you display 2 pages (as when you open a magazine), then the screen is too small.
• donwloading of a new issue of a magazine does take a while (300MB to 2GB !!!), and connecting it to iTunes should only be done at night as the backup takes forever; prices of magazines is about what you'd pay at a newstand, so I guess it's a non issue. However there seems to be subscription services to magazines that offer a whole year subscription price (and you get a PDF) for less than the single issue price for a magazine).

A few comments on the apps:

1. yes, it's a bore to have so many different apps, which means you have to learn how to use each app; actually each one of them has a tutorial at the beginning; there should be some standardization on movements such as
   
   1. double tap for zoom / unzoom
   2. swipe left or right to navigate between articles
   3. swipe up or down to navigate between pages of the article
   4. double swipe up for menu (not standard)
   5. pinch for zoom
   6. navigation between thumbnails at the bottom of the page
   7. smart apps even display an arrow on each page to tell you which way to swipe. it should be subtle but present.
2. nevertheless many of the apps bring different interactive experiences to the reader, and I'd hate a standardized app for all magazines; that would hinder innovation. I'd rather have standardized navigation with a few extras on other apps. Besides I like having an icon for each title; with folders coming up, I can even bundle them together. Or they could just go on the shelves of iBooks (or iMagazines ;)
3. I like the idea to get either a free issue or a preview with several pages for each magazine ; then in-app purchase is indeed the way to go. The smart apps even use notifications to tell you there's a new issue out. That might wear me off if I start tracking several titles. There should be a unification for that (iMagazines ?)
4. I really like the double layout (horizontal and vertical) for most magazines. Nevertheless it's a bit annoying when you get more content (larger picture) on oen direction without warning. I just don't want to be moving my iPad sideways all the time. There should be a notification somewhere.
5. Apps that are mere PDFs on the iPad represent little interest (OK, it's great to have them), but addition of interactive stuff makes them great: videos, choices, etc. Wired does a good job at that with multiple selections on one page (yes it feels a bit like interactive CD-ROMs). The New Yorker for example has a section called "this just in" that updates automatically like a twitter feed. Smart.
6. I couldn't find a way to annotate articles ; it should be synced with something else that unifies all magazines and books ? (maybe evernote ?)
7. social media: I have yet to see an app that adds a twitter / facebook / addthis button to EACH article, or even to Instapaper. This should not only make the app as social as a website today, but also drive sales up for people not reading that app.
8. web sites use technology to speak articles aloud. I have yet to see this on the iPad. Wired has some voice interviews (dull).
9. I don't like videos that open up separately and not in context within the page. Magazines that add video to their pages (excerpts of theatre, examples) are real winners. kudos. The Javier Bardem mini video intro is fun on Esquire
10. Gourmet is testing a reather interesting idea : you can unlock content (just like in games) by gaining "experience points" (just like in games) by reading more articles, and interacting with it. I like the idea, but I'm not sure it will hold, unless the issues is free or very cheap. Ad supported b-model is fine for this (watch an add, grab XP...).
11. Many of the ads I read, have little interactivity (a few extra pictures, a video). Some don't even include a link to their own website. There's a huge opportunity here to create "ad mini-sites", with videos, 3D models, a configurators (for cars), links to local retailers (based on GPS), best prices (in the neighborhood), etc. The iPad is a really very high engagement device, and advertisers are just plain dumb not to use it. Any product advertised or displayed should have a link to a whole range of ecommerce options such as what gdgt.com is trying to do for tech (price comparison, forums, reviews), including secondary transactions. For example, Food & Wine talk about recipes : it's a great way to sell a whole shopping basket in one go (a bit like what macperformanceguide.com does over and over again for spare parts on Mac).
12. I don't see any forum like interaction on articles. it should be a great way to discuss with readers, add new information on the article, create a community (like a blog post)
13. There's also an issue with DRM : when I buy a print magazine, I can share it with my family and friends at home, as it sits on the coffee table. Eventually my family will probably have several iPads. I need to be able to declare a group of "iPads" (up to 5 is probably fine) so that I can share an issue with a member of the family (OK if only one of us can read it at a time), and a mechanism to give the digital copy to someone as I would with a paper magazine.
14. finally, there's an issue with the file sizes of magazines : after a while, they'll fill up my iPad, so I'll have to start deleting them. At a minimum, I need to be able to redownload them for free if I ever want to read them again (since I've already paid for them). Maybe however the future is an HTML5 version that offers full interactivity in a browser (for online viewing) instead of downloading it (offline)
15. In terms of opportunities : it seems to me that most magazines are outsourced to creative agencies so far; why not. But with the advent of connected TVs (and the existance of web and mobile sites), there is definitively a need for a full suite of authoring tools including touch devices that will make an iPad just one of the screens of a digital strategy, from the same original content. I don't believe there's such a tool available yet, but it would definitively help keep the skills required for digital magazines inhouse.

Opportunities for e-commerce : buy a whole basket of products

 

Turning magazine reading into a game : the more you read, the more content you unlock and experience points you gain

Updating content after an issue has been published (just like the web ;)

 

More intuitive navigation between articles

interactive pages

Multimedia ads:

Opportunities for ecommerce (on this watch for example)

Thinking out of the box with social media and internet marketing

Last december (2009), I was fortunate enough to attend a small conference in London, Noah Conference, focused on Internet-related growth companies. It was a real breeze of air, with companies in "boring" sectors, doing fantastically well, with clear business models and execution. Many of them really impressed me, reinventing how to sell tires online, gold online, downloads, etc.

In these days of the World Cup, I'll just mention Kentara / Perform's campaign to bring online the 1st and largest pay per view live streaming of a UK football match. All major TVs refused it (although they felt it could target 8-10m unique viewers), so they went themselved and marketed it as www.UkraineVEngland.com.

They brought a fantastic 360 marketing approach including :

• buy-in (free advertising and promotion) from all top UK newspapers (with rev-share)
• deals with betting companies (a UK specialty until now), including bet365
• press conference, interviews on press, radio, TV
• online emailing
• online affiliation
• distribution with cinema theaters
• deals with ISPs (Orange, Virgin Media)
• 11th hour deal with the BBC for highlights, etc.

Watch the presentation below:

Link:

They did not give financials onstage, but with prices at £4.99, £9.99 and £11.99 pounds, including free streaming to armed forces and bet365 new sign-ups, we can guesstimate a 6-8 pounds average income per user ?

Multiply that by the close to 600K users who watched it eventually, the operation brought in £3.6m-£4.8m  on this operation. Not bad for one operation, that could be repeated regularly.

That said, I'm going back to Noah this year for inspiring speeches by successful entrepreneurs.

thoughts on the cloud : part I - history

When the first commercial computers came out in the 60s, they were so expensive that time-sharing was invented: people had to queue to get time on them (read accounts of those days: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution or Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire). In the 70s, minicomputers allowed for a larger distribution on computing power, opening the era of client-server computing. The 80s were then ready for the Personal Computer era, where most semi-basic work (spreadsheet, accounting, word processing, desktop publishing, etc.) could be done locally.

That paradigm lasted until the mid-90s when the world-wide-web arrived on the consumer scene; and we all started putting back processing power in a central computer, the web server associated with a site. Local computers tended to behave again like a dumb terminal (à la VT100) with a browser. But users still did lots of stuff locally (email, photography, video editing, etc.). 

10-15 years later (around 2004 with Flickr's API launch), the paradigm changed again. Browsers got intelligent (with AJAX and HTML5 soon), enabling local processing power and more importantly, mashups (Wired magazine had a very interesting article covering this trend very early on - maybe I'll find it), allowing (either on client-side or server-side) mixing of several sites/services, to create a new service. The central computer (company) is not one anymore, but a number of them. Hence the term cloud-computing was minted to described this new "central computer" consisting of many "central computers" (actually in the tens of thousands now, to compensate for scalability. Check slideshare for horror stories).

There's an interesting way to look at all this, analogous to the MVC model in software engineering:

1. the presentation layer : what you see. Basically it's now your browser and may of your "web 2.0" applications. But with HTML5, it's soon going to be your operating system as well (Jolicloud is doing this for example). It's like a super-charged VT100, capable of rich user interfaces. Processing power there should be limited to displaying intelligently whatever information you're looing. It's already "cloud" enabled with native Internet protocol
   
2. the processing layer : see the history above. We started with mainframes, moved down to computers, moving up to "cloud" servers on the web. There's no real reason now to buy computing power for your desktop or laptop, since MOST of your processing is done on the web now. So unless you have to do video rendering or serious gaming (but Bigpoint could prove you wrong), get a cheap computer (on the CPU side, ultra-fast on disk and memory - but that's another post)
   
3. so we're left with the data layer. If we assume that computers have lost their value, then there's a whole new space here in moving the value to the data:

• you might want your data all the time with you, WHATEVER the computer you are using, which means you need access or a copy of your data + your environment (settings) + your apps (bookmarks, passwords, or even installable apps) to read the data. Many computers are somehow addressing this : Dropbox, Allmyapps, exoplatform, AgileWeb... It's a complicated market, as most apps are not setup to host their settings, and data on a remote drive. And it's complicated to do for each app. So either you set up all locally, or all remotely... in terms of simplicity #fail
  
• In addition, a lot of your experience is done online with no local copy, nor backup (think blogs, facebook, twitter...). Since you're relying more and more on this, companies such as Backupify or LaCie are helping you access but also secure this data. The problem is that users don't understand the value of backups, unless they experience a disaster once. #fail
  
• since the world has gone quadruple-play (mobile, web, TV, connected device), you want to have access to your data with an appropriate "presentation layer" on each screen, wherever you are. Folks are attempting this: Dropbox is doing a great job, twitter and gmail are available almost anywhere, Pogoplug has a solution, but we're not quite there yet... #fail ;)

Hence, to me, the real challenge of cloud computing now is not the processing layer: that was solved with the evolution of the web. It's still the presentation layer for many devices (but many folks are working on that now). It's all about the data layer. It's how do I get a seamless computing experience, whatever my device (even if it's not mine), wherever I am, today and tomorrow ?

(Pix from Flickr)

My pix from DLD'10, Munich

Uploading contineously, so please refresh :)

Pierre-Etienne Pommier tells us more

 

Creator of the political show iPol and of the new web show "Le Zapping du Web"

Quand l'Internet fait des bulles (1ère partie)

 

Un film de Benjamin Rassat - Une coproduction 13ème RUE - La Générale de Production source: http://www.13emerue.fr/13emerue/cache/nouveautes/quand-linternet-fait-des-bulles.htm

On French TV tonight. Amusing! this movie (2x52min) traces the history of the French Internet economy. And it starts (spoiler: and ends) with an interview first published on this blog !

A must see.

24 hours on the web

Details here