Mystic Expansions

With SOPA-palooza going on around here the past couple weeks, I completely neglected my shameless self-promotion duties. Now Marketing Darrell is upset with Blogging Darrell, and won’t talk to him, which frustrates Gamer Darrell since he needs those two guys to help playtest the new game designs. Sigh. Such is the life of a multi-tasking freelancer.

So yes, if the American government’s commitment to Hollywood hadn’t hijacked the blog for a week, I surely would have mentioned that the new expansion for The Big Bang Theory: Mystic Warlords of Ka’a has just come out.

For the uninitiated, Mystic Warlords is a Facebook card game. It’s based on the card game played by the characters in the Big Bang Theory television show. It’s a fantasy game, with elves and dragons and magic swords and such, but it’s got a wide vein of humor running through it, in the Big Bang Theory style.

The game is developed by those stalwart champions of online card games, Dire Wolf Digital, who I’ve been helping out with game design duties. The expansion features a ton of new cards, the deliciously eeevil Twilight Elf faction, and some cool new mechanics. If you’re (a) on Facebook, (b) like card games, or (c) like The Big Bang Theory, you should take the game for a spin and see what it takes to be mystic warlord.

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A Tale of Two Viralities

I think your blindness algorithm is off about 17 percentTadg Kelly recently talked about “The Two Viralities” on his site. He pointed out that true virality, evangelism, comes from players loving a game enough to talk about. The other, a “false virality,” is just obligation — if you want to play the game, you have to drag your friends into it too.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been on the receiving end of both types of virality in social games.

For about a week straight, my Twitter feed was hopping with people singing the praises of Panda Poet. They called it clever, fiendish, and addictive. (When did “addictive” turn into a virtue?) They didn’t need to do this. Panda Poet lets you invite your friends to play, but doesn’t require you to do so in order to progress. So when a link to the game floated across my desk, I took a risk and hit it, if only to see what the buzz was about. (Turns out the Twitter-folks knew what they were talking about. This game is good.)

Meanwhile, in Facebook land, the all-seeing ticker next to my page started telling me that my social-gaming friends were being pulled into a new game. I cringed, just a little bit, because I knew what was coming. Sure enough, I started getting invites from those friends for that game. Not because it was a great game that they thought I would like to play, but because they’d hit the limit of how much they could play without be forced to go viral.

I think there’s a couple lessons here: one obvious and one not-so obvious.

The Lesson Which is Obvious: Obligatory virality wears out its welcome. Back in the day, I’d click any invitation to any Facebook game. “Cool! My old high school buddy wants me to join his mafia! I like mafias! I vaguely remember this guy! Let’s play!” Today? I gaze suspiciously upon all such invites, and am not above asking the sender, “Is this game any good?”

The Not So Obvious Lesson: Good games that don’t require virality should still make it easy for a fan to go viral. I like Panda Poet. I want to spread it to my friends. (I’m doing so now.) But there’s no Facebook connect button, no Google+ “+1″ button, no easy way for me to shout to my various social networks, “Hey, this is a cool game!” Yes, you can invite friends via e-mail (and I have) but without the ability to broadcast your evangelism, the message might get lost.

Are there other lessons? Probably. And I’d love to have you share them with us below.

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Evil Games?

Famed game designer Jonathan Blow, the brains behind Braid and the upcoming The Witness, raised a few eyebrows this week when he vehemently decried social games as “evil.”

Specifically, he says the games are “exploiting” their players. These games are “trying to take the maximum amount while trying to give the minimum amount” (emphasis added).

Well. Isn’t that the basic nature of any sort of capitalistic endeavor? You want to get back more than you put in; that’s called making a profit, and it’s very popular amongst people who like to both eat and pay their mortgages.

But I don’t think he’s opposed to these basic principles. (He’s not giving Braid away for free, for example.) Rather, I think he’s talking about the the attitude of the games and — more importantly — their designers.

  • Evil attitude: What can get I get from the players? Then, how much to do I have to give them in order to get it?
  • Good attitude: What can I give to the players? Then, how much do I have to charge in order to give it to them and still come out ahead?

Motivation is what determines the “morality” of a game. If you make a game to fill your players with joy, fun, and illumination — oh, and to get rich if you can — I think Mr. Blow would stick your game in the “good” bin. But if the profit motive comes first — and it shows in the gameplay — then your masterpiece will end up on “evil” pile.

The key phrase here is, “it shows in the gameplay.”

We cannot tell a game designer’s motivation except by his product.

Hey, designer. What’s your game saying about your motivations?

As a closing side note, I wonder how Mr. Blow feels about traditional coin-op video games? If FarmVille is evil, then Space Invaders must be the devil.

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