The Best-Get-Better Reward Scheme
Let's start by thinking about reward schemes. I'm currently working on a casual game which is supposed to reach the same market as Bejeweled or Luxor. The recent market survey from Popcap.com has some great information in it. As you read it, you get a mental picture of the stereotypical casual game player.
These gamers are more often female than male. They tend to be older. Most of them play casual games to relieve stress and to stimulate their mind. In other words, casual games are filling the same niche that crossword puzzles filled a generation before. However, casual games are deemed a lot more important to these people than, say, watching television, reading a book, or even spending time with their family. These games are important to them! "Casual" might even be a bit of an oxymoron here.
I'll be thinking about various aspects of the casual game market demographics for a while. I particulary want to talk about how traditional game design approaches mesh with this data. First up, let's talk about reward schemes.
On XBox 360, casual games and old retro arcade classics are lumped together as "Live Arcade." There's no distinction made between the different types of games on there, and you may be tempted to assume that most of these games are in fact "casual games." Well, if we use popcap.com's demographic data as the target "casual game player audience", then most of the games on XBox Arcade are not all casual games. This makes sense, if you think about it -- naturally the audience for Popcap.com's Web-based PC games is going to be pretty different than for XBox 360 owners. In fact, it's fairly surprising that people lump them together at all.
So what makes the Arcade game Astropop more of a casual game than, say, the Arcade version of Galaga? Both are space games where you pilot a little ship; in one, you move blocks around, in the other, you shoot aliens and dodge bullets. Is Galaga less "casual" because of the violence?
No! That's not it at all. There's no data to suggest that the very mild violence shown in Galaga would be inherently unappealing to casual gamers. There are many differences, including initial difficulty levels, but one very important difference is the reward scheme that Galaga uses: I call it the Best-Get-Better reward scheme. It was incredibly popular with old coin-op games, and is still popular with many game designers today. It fits some markets, but it doesn't fit the casual market.
What I mean by the Best-Get-Better scheme is that the game rewards "good" players far more than it rewards average players. Let's look at Galaga. You remember this old classic -- it's the Space-Invaders-esque shooter where you can let your ship get captured by the aliens, and then shoot the alien captor and have two of your ships on screen at the same time. If you can manage to do this by level 3, and keep both ships alive, you'll have a very easy time with the first Challenging Stage -- with enough button mashing, you'll get a perfect score on the challenge, which will give you a huge point boost. These points will usually be enough to get you an extra ship, which makes you all the more likely to be alive for the next Challenging Stage.
The game is designed to reward the good players much more than the average player, to let them really stand apart from the average players. The difference between a good Galaga player and an average Galaga player is pretty dramatic. Casual games tend to use a less sudden reward curve.
Let's look at some other games which reward this way. The incredibly fun Arcade game Geometry Wars uses this reward scheme as well. If you play well without ever dying, your point multiplier goes up. If you can avoid getting hit for, say, five minutes of play, your score will be huge. If you get hit halfway through, the score multiplier resets and your score will be mediocre. Once again, the difference between a good Geometry Wars player and an average player is huge -- stupendous, in fact. The difference here is much more pronounced than in Galaga. If I had to pick one of the two games to be "more casual-friendly", Galaga would win hands down.
Of course, you can't avoid this stratification completely. The best players are inevitably going to be orders of magnitude better than the average player. But a casual game should have a smooth advancement curve, not a steep one like Geometry Wars has.
Why do I dislike the Best-Get-Better reward curve for casual games? It doesn't fit well with the target audience's play time. Even though you might play a casual game for only a few minutes at a time, you still need to feel like you're making progress. For games with scoring, that means you need to keep getting higher scores each time you play! In Geometry Wars, you quickly hit a score plateau, and you won't get past it until you've played the game for many hours.
I guess this is a nice rule of thumb for any game, actually: after each play session, the player should feel like you are getting better or making progress at the game. You shouldn't hit a plateau in a game -- that's what makes people give up on otherwise-fun games. This problem is especially sensitive with casual gamers because they don't play for very long at a time, so you have to be extra sensitive with the reward curve.
Contrast this to a coin-op game, where you want the average play experience to be a fixed length. It might make sense to have a steep advancement-skill curve here. Or compare it to a game aimed at teenage boys, boys who tend to play the same game for three or four hours at a setting. They don't need to get better every few minutes. As long as they can reach a new milestone with every play session or two, they'll be fine.
Now, having a linear progression curve doesn't mean the game has to be easy. I dislike when people assume casual games have to be "dumbed down" compared to other game types. Now, there are certain things your casual game should do to better hit that market, but that doesn't mean you should just make ultra-easy versions of other games.
Games which can be both easy and difficult are obviously going to be in a better position, but I'll ponder on that in a later post.
These gamers are more often female than male. They tend to be older. Most of them play casual games to relieve stress and to stimulate their mind. In other words, casual games are filling the same niche that crossword puzzles filled a generation before. However, casual games are deemed a lot more important to these people than, say, watching television, reading a book, or even spending time with their family. These games are important to them! "Casual" might even be a bit of an oxymoron here.
I'll be thinking about various aspects of the casual game market demographics for a while. I particulary want to talk about how traditional game design approaches mesh with this data. First up, let's talk about reward schemes.
On XBox 360, casual games and old retro arcade classics are lumped together as "Live Arcade." There's no distinction made between the different types of games on there, and you may be tempted to assume that most of these games are in fact "casual games." Well, if we use popcap.com's demographic data as the target "casual game player audience", then most of the games on XBox Arcade are not all casual games. This makes sense, if you think about it -- naturally the audience for Popcap.com's Web-based PC games is going to be pretty different than for XBox 360 owners. In fact, it's fairly surprising that people lump them together at all.
So what makes the Arcade game Astropop more of a casual game than, say, the Arcade version of Galaga? Both are space games where you pilot a little ship; in one, you move blocks around, in the other, you shoot aliens and dodge bullets. Is Galaga less "casual" because of the violence?
No! That's not it at all. There's no data to suggest that the very mild violence shown in Galaga would be inherently unappealing to casual gamers. There are many differences, including initial difficulty levels, but one very important difference is the reward scheme that Galaga uses: I call it the Best-Get-Better reward scheme. It was incredibly popular with old coin-op games, and is still popular with many game designers today. It fits some markets, but it doesn't fit the casual market.
What I mean by the Best-Get-Better scheme is that the game rewards "good" players far more than it rewards average players. Let's look at Galaga. You remember this old classic -- it's the Space-Invaders-esque shooter where you can let your ship get captured by the aliens, and then shoot the alien captor and have two of your ships on screen at the same time. If you can manage to do this by level 3, and keep both ships alive, you'll have a very easy time with the first Challenging Stage -- with enough button mashing, you'll get a perfect score on the challenge, which will give you a huge point boost. These points will usually be enough to get you an extra ship, which makes you all the more likely to be alive for the next Challenging Stage.
The game is designed to reward the good players much more than the average player, to let them really stand apart from the average players. The difference between a good Galaga player and an average Galaga player is pretty dramatic. Casual games tend to use a less sudden reward curve.
Let's look at some other games which reward this way. The incredibly fun Arcade game Geometry Wars uses this reward scheme as well. If you play well without ever dying, your point multiplier goes up. If you can avoid getting hit for, say, five minutes of play, your score will be huge. If you get hit halfway through, the score multiplier resets and your score will be mediocre. Once again, the difference between a good Geometry Wars player and an average player is huge -- stupendous, in fact. The difference here is much more pronounced than in Galaga. If I had to pick one of the two games to be "more casual-friendly", Galaga would win hands down.
Of course, you can't avoid this stratification completely. The best players are inevitably going to be orders of magnitude better than the average player. But a casual game should have a smooth advancement curve, not a steep one like Geometry Wars has.
Why do I dislike the Best-Get-Better reward curve for casual games? It doesn't fit well with the target audience's play time. Even though you might play a casual game for only a few minutes at a time, you still need to feel like you're making progress. For games with scoring, that means you need to keep getting higher scores each time you play! In Geometry Wars, you quickly hit a score plateau, and you won't get past it until you've played the game for many hours.
I guess this is a nice rule of thumb for any game, actually: after each play session, the player should feel like you are getting better or making progress at the game. You shouldn't hit a plateau in a game -- that's what makes people give up on otherwise-fun games. This problem is especially sensitive with casual gamers because they don't play for very long at a time, so you have to be extra sensitive with the reward curve.
Contrast this to a coin-op game, where you want the average play experience to be a fixed length. It might make sense to have a steep advancement-skill curve here. Or compare it to a game aimed at teenage boys, boys who tend to play the same game for three or four hours at a setting. They don't need to get better every few minutes. As long as they can reach a new milestone with every play session or two, they'll be fine.
Now, having a linear progression curve doesn't mean the game has to be easy. I dislike when people assume casual games have to be "dumbed down" compared to other game types. Now, there are certain things your casual game should do to better hit that market, but that doesn't mean you should just make ultra-easy versions of other games.
Games which can be both easy and difficult are obviously going to be in a better position, but I'll ponder on that in a later post.
posted by Eric Heimburg | 5:08 PM
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