GDC10: Sporadic Play

Liveblog of talk on Sporadic Play, Bryan Cash & Jeremy Gibson

Sporadic play describes a game where mechanics intentionally limit how often a player interacts with a persistent game world. We’ll talk about history with it, why it is a good thing, design concepts, and a bit about the future.

HISTORY… IN REVERSE

Most obvious place to start — Facebook. Look at the top 20 games here. Farmville is #1 and uses sporadic play. Mafia Wars, Petville, YoVille, 16 of the top 20 are sporadic play games. If you add up the MAU, you get 332m people, which is kinda BS, but just in the top 20.

It has also been around in console and traditional PC games. Animal Crossing, a game where as time went on in real life, events like Christmas happened in the game too. Seasons, real time, limiting what you can do based on the real time of the real. Another one was Kingdom of Loathing in 2002, a web game, limited number of things you can do based on action points.

Another recent example is play by email or play by forums. You may be familiar with Gaia Online — a game in the form of a forum. There are also RPG forums and PBEM RPGs.

And Tradewars 2002 — which came out in 1984, when 2002 was THE FUTURE. You flew around to different planets, traded, had fights. And at the end of your actions for the day, you had to leave your spaceship online while you had your day, vulnerable. So you would park your ship in the deepest darkest corner of space.

29.9m players of fantasy sports in 2007… pick rosters, teams, and then you get delayed results and watch what happens. Has been around since 1960. You are playing a game as a metagame around another game.

Going further back… play by mail. Peaked in the 1980s, but started as mail rules for Diplomacy by John Boardman in the 1960s. There were three magazines devoted to playing games by mail.

And then there is chess, by correspondence. Since you had so muh time you could do research, look up moves in books, and pick the optimal period. On this sheet people would mail back and forth there were choices for “I can’t read your handwriting” — a 2 month delay in a move! This goes back to the middle ages, kings sending moves back and forth.

The conference game this year is BackChannel, which is betting on keywords that will be tweeted during the show… a high tech sporadic version of Buzzword Bingo.

The stock market is also premised on sporadic play. Limited interaction, persistent world… been going on since 1602 in Amsterdam and 1309 in Antwerp.

And evolution: from a species point of view it is a sporadic play game. You get limited interaction, then 9 months later, a result… slow feedback… but hey after billions of years, we think we won.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN

It does not mean casual. People lump them together, and there is overlap, but consider Bejeweled Blitz. You can keep playing it as much as you want.

Key differences…

* depth of gameplay — stock market is a deep game.

* Variability of learning curve. Casual games have smooth ones… sporadic games vary a lot.

* Potential time commitment. Bejeweled Blitz can eat 4 hours… but a sporadic play game intentionally CAP you, so the potential for time commitment is lower.

* Persistence… the world persists in some way, and does not reset.

* Sporadic does not necessarily mean asynch multiplayer. It focuses on the relationship between the player and the game. It frequently USES asynch multiplayer of course.

WHY CARE?

Millions of people play sporadic games on social networks. People tend to talk about these in terms of viral tricks and we wanted to talk about it differently.

Also, reaching broad audiences. We were traditional gamers who didn’t have time anymore but still want to play.

Then there is the multitasking gamer. It is more common now to find gamers who are playing multiple games at once.

Then there are non-traditional gamers. They are looking for “something to do” with low time commitment and barrier to entry.

All of these audiences can be served by the same sporadic game.

This is also a new lens for designers — lens in the sense of Jesse Schell’s lenses in ART OF GAME DESIGN. Many games now are sporadic but we don’t think of them that way.

We believe sporadic play can be added to existing games and allow them to reach broader audiences.

SKYRATES

We made this back in 2006 at ETC at CMU. In 2008 it won an award at the IGF, and also some awards from JayIsGames.

You play a character, build up skills, you have a plane. Buy weapons, etc. You fly places, you click on the combat icon, and fight some pirates in real time action. But mostly, you just fly. A screen with the plane bobbing up and down. Flight in the game is in real time. You trasport goods like fish from one town to another. But the entire time for this trade route is 11 hours and 32 minutes… you can see a timeline of a traderoute with multiple stops stretching into the future.

The game used to SMS players when an attack happened, interrupt you while you were doing your taxes or whatever. Fights with pirates accumulate, so you can catch up whenever you come back.

So it is a game where you spend the majority of your time not playing it. But there’s a persistent world, with brief interaction. My avatar in the game keeps doing my action queue while I go on with my life.

Now, Skyrates is not perfect. But it taught us a lot about these sort of games.

WHAT IS SPORADIC PLAY GOOD FOR?

Respecting player’s time. (WoW screenshot… two guys who have played for 3 weeks… one an hour a day, and one 20 hours a day… “I HATE this latter guy”). But in sporadic play, even if you have 20 minutes a day you feel competitive. Also, it isn’t about player position, but about velocity — how well are you using your time every day, how efficiently you are using your time.

We did some analytics, showing players the other players using the same plane they had, comparing yourself that way, on efficiency.

Managing obsession. Everyone loves cake, but it can be too awesome. Players often play to the point of oversaturation… they get exhausted, who burn out beause the game allows them to play as much as they want. They play until they are sick of it. Remember the old showbiz rule: always leave them wanting more.

Developer benefits: it extends the life of your content. With 20 minutes of time, they run through content at a metered rate. It gives you more time to develop. And you an develop more based on consumption trends — watch where they go and what they consume and develop in response to that. You can “prune” your procedural content towards what players want.

Some examples… in Kingdom of Loathing or FB games they use metrics to decide on content. And in WoW they added daily quests, adding ways to block the rate of consumption. Indirectly turning it into more of a sporadic game. These are elements allowing you to play it sporadically of you need to.

It lets you internalize a game… a constant drip feed of interaction reminding you to re-engage. Email, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, “I should check in.”

EVE Online demonstrates that sporadic play does not need to be casual. Skill learning in EVE is sporadic — from a few minutes to a month to learn something. There are players who just research, and don’t play the game in any other way.

When a game is internalized, it becomes a regular activity… like checking your email, but it takes less time. Check in between classes, or at work. Keeps it in the back of your mind all day. It makes your life a little more exciting.

Sporadic play gives us new revenue models. Time is the most valuable resource, and we let people pay for the fourth dimension! Time is worth way more than their money. Having a more lucrative use of the time you have is really powerful. I might pay for a 50% luck bonus or 10% boost to Xp for a day.

Also paying to avoid the parts of a game you don’t like. Buy a mining robot to avoid the dull mining. So people pay you to play your game less, which also frees up server load.

DESIGN CONCEPTS FOR SPORADIC PLAY

* Time currency. Some sort of point that is gained over time. Action points, moves, health. You can play with the rate it accumulates. Mafia Wars gives you a point every five minutes. Others like Legends of Zork gives you 30 once a day.

Can you go past a maximum? Save them up? Can you adjust the rate with variation (more on weekends?)

Basically, this is about managing the obsession, you decide how often you want them playing with this mechanic, and how long an experience is.

* Scheduling things. Groups of actions that occur as time passes. You can sequential — queued movement. Parallel actions — like cultivation in farming games.

A question is who is doing the scheduling. You can make it directed and tell the player, or give them the option to pick different schedules.

And when is the player notified of rewards? As soon as you finish the action, and then you have to wait for action points to accumulate? Then there’s no suspense. On the other hand, if you hold off the feedback on success, whether the action worked, that means two hours of wondering what the outcome will be.

Then there is the question of how many items can be scheduled. How many fields do you have, how long a queue?

* Uncertainty.

Weighing the chances on whether an action may happen. Predicting the state of the game in the future… since this is a persistent world, the state can change over time. So if I send things in a direction which will take 5 hours, there’s the possibility that stuff changes in the 5 hour interim.

A question to ask is how much do you want players to look ahead. You have to ask yourself how much complexity you want. And how powerful do you want to make prediction? In Skyrates everyone was moving goods… so you tried to move goods to somewhere that was a good place to sell, but other players could see it too…

There is also real life uncertainty, whether real life obligations can interfere.

* Punctuality.

Player attention to the schedule. It ties into how players make choices. You plant crops, if you set up the game so that they get double crops if they show up on time, or spoil if they take too long. If it takes a ouple of days to spoil, that is a lot easier for players.

These elements add risk and analysis to the game for players.

The design question is do I want to reward punctuality, punish for being late? Determines how hardcore the game feels, how risky decisions are.

And is there insurance? You could make a really bad deal in Skyrates where your guy did stuff poorly because you set it up in advance and things changed… so they added an insurance mechanic to prevent a bad decision by the bot.

* Multiplayer.

How do player affect one another? Competition via leaderboard is one way. Trading in Skyrates was indirect comptition, or Mafia wars attacks when you are not looking.

Cooperation is possible too — ways to help people via asynchronous play. The funny thing about the current games is that some of them do this via asynchronous synchronous play, as in Mouse Hunt. Tournaments happen on a schedule, people who are on at the same time do make a difference. It forms some player relationships.

Roleplaying is another form… an event that triggers synchronous activity as a periodic or optional thing.

THE FUTURE

Engagement customization… a game that understands when I have time to dig in, or when I don’t. Most games just split this up. Games that adapt to how much YOU want to play. This goes beyond single player and into multiplayer. You see some games where there is a core that is there for every fifteen minute timer, and others who play at longer intervals. Is there a way to trade time, loan things, or otherwise play together within limits and be important to one another?

Elegantly handling the desire to quit. Netflix lets you put an account on hold, but lets you set a reminder to come back in the future. A way to maintain a bit of a connection to them. Let’s say you are going to drop out for three mnonths, can the game play itself for you in that time so you come back thinking that it has still been there for you?

Shared time currencies is the notion that action points could be shared between games or gamers. Ways to use the points you earn across multiple titles from one developer.

Or you can’t play again until your whole group finishes?

Or real life metrics — you play the weight loss game, lose one real life pound, that gives extra action points?

Community consensus. You can join a faction in wow, but so? Identity as part of a larger gorup isn’t that important. But think of voting… it is sporadic in real life, and based on that our community arrives at consensus. Can there be a sense of working together in this sporadic sense to shape the notion of what a group is?

Multi-engagement gaming. The idea that the same player can play differently on different devices is not new. “Keyhole interaction” — complex game, like stock market, but simple interactions, buy and sell.  But multi-engagement means adding a companion to existing IPs. Casual players supporting hardcore players, for example. Think about a Call of Duty World Conquest strategic game on Facebook that ties into the CoD FPS? Add a Yellow Ribbon mobile app — add my gamertag to your yellow ribbon on your phone. If you launchy the app daily, it means you are thinking about me, it boosts my character.

IN CONCLUSION

Sporadic play has been around for hundreds of years. It can be integrated into many types of games. It can be used to create companion experiences for existing games. It can help small developers extend their content, and it respects the players’ time.

Some links:

http://www.skyrates.net
http://postmortem.skyrates.net

From the questions segment… adding chat helped with frustration when you wanted to play but were out of points because it gave something to do.