[casual_games] Community Functionality

[James C. Smith]

I would be very curious to hear if there were any features in Mahjong Towers
Eternity (MTE) that were removed due to concerns from retailers (a.k.a.
portals/distributors).  I believe some of the features are disabled in
special build made for specific retailers.  I was speaking to one retailer
about features I planned to add to my next game and I mentioned one feature
would be similar to the same feature in MTE.  They told me to be sure I
player THEIR version of MTE because the features may not work the same there
as it does in the version that I played direct from Big Fish.  They said
they made Big Fish disable some feature in the version in their site.  It
downloaded their version and didn't find any differences so I don't have a
concrete example of a feature that was disabled for one retailer, but it
made me realize that it is possible. Just because XYZ.com is selling MTE
does not mean that they allowed all the MTE community features to be
distributed.

One unnamed source who worked at a big .COM casual games retailer said this
about MTE.  "I can't believe XYZ.com launched MTE. Now Big Fish knows more
about the XYZ customers than XYZ does."

There is an amazing amount of paranoia about games that communicate with the
outside world.  MTE doesn't even collect any personal information. Not even
an e-mail address.  

The players LOVE community features.  High scores are nice, but there is
MUCH more that is possible that players would love to have access to if we
could just figure out how to keep the retailers happy.


In your "state of the art" list one thing you didn't mention is public
messages (or the lack of public messages.)  In a game like MTE, you can send
private message to other players, but there is no way to post a public
message for all to see.  A logical feature would be public messages to
review or comment on content created by other players.  Of course, it would
have all kinds of problems to solve with moderating the content.  But this
is one of the most basic forms of "community" communications that is
currently not present in any downloadable casual game.

Another point is that MTE player profiles are not tied to a person or e-mail
address. They are just a file on the player's hard drive. If the player
moved to a new computer she can't connect to her server based profile unless
she copies the file from her old computer.  If that file is ever lost, the
player's identity is no longer usable.  Even if the player is willing to
start from scratch with 0 experience points, they are not allowed to re-use
the name that the community knew them as because that name is already in use
but no longer accessible.  Without allowing the server based character
profile to be linked to an e-mail address to recover lost passwords, it is
very hard to make a character profile that can service the realities of
everyday computer upgrades and failures.  And it is hard to get a player to
invest time in building a profile that can't be preserved for long.




FYI: My own experience is with Ricochet Lost Worlds which has no community
features built in. But it does have a level editor you can use to make your
own content and exchange it with friends using your own communications
channels.  The game itself does not upload or download content nor does it
link to web sites with content.  But Reflexive has setup
www.RicochetLostWorlds.com to provide a place for players to share their
creations, download other player's levels, and post comments and reviews of
levels they have played. The community members also help each other out a
lot with level editor tips and tricks.  This is a very strong community
where many players "hang out" every day (many times per day). If there are
no new levels to play they just chat about other stuff.  This community has
created, tested, and rated 13,279 levels for Ricochet. And this is with no
community support in the game itself.  Nearly two years after the games
release, we still post 900 new levels per month.  Before a level is posted,
volunteers test it to screen out inappropriate contents and fix many minor
technical errors that make some levels imposable to finish in rare cases. It
is amazing how may volunteers spent lots of free time testing and fixing
other peoples levels.

Big Kahuna Reef and Big Kahuna Words have similar level editors web based
communities with player created content that are not linked to from the
games.

Obviously it would be desirable to build these community features into the
game so that all players would have easy access to them. There are some
technical challenges in getting some of these features to work in the game
rather than just using an off the shelf forum solution on a web server. But
the bigger challenge I see is the limits from the Retailers placed on what
can go in the game.  It is hard to build a strong community when you are not
allowed to link the players profile to an e-mail address and you can't let
them post public messages to each other.  

I could add level downloading and uploading to the Ricochet game, and that
would give many more people access to the user created content, but I fear
it would completely kill the community that has grown up around this
content. Without the ability for the community to communicate with each
other it really isn't a community.  And people don't like to invest in
building a character when they aren't able to preserve it for long periods
of time.  Many of the Ricochet community members have been hanging out there
for almost 2 years and have thousands of posts.  Some of them have gone
though 2 computers in that time and/or many reinstalls of Windows. I won't
think I would be able to keep them connected to the community for this long
though all of that if I wasn't allowed to send them an e-mail.

The interesting twist is that on the Ricochet forum I posted a link to MTE
saying that if you like all the player created content for Ricochet then you
may like MTE.  Many of the regulars from the Ricochet community liked MTE,
but missed having a forum, so they setup the unofficial MTE fan site with a
forum and a way to exchange player created tile sets.
http://mahjongtowers.proboards56.com/index.cgi is created by a bunch of
Ricochet Lost Worlds community members who also liked MTE and now all new
MTE players get a private message when they start the game that links them
to this "unofficial" fan site.  So in the end, MTE does link to a web site
the allows public posting and e-mail address collection. But it is not run
by the developers of the game so I guess that makes it okay. Or maybe the
private message with the link to the forum is the thing that is disables in
the builds made for protective retailers. I wonder. 

I can't figure out what I can and can't do in my game.  

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Allan Simonsen
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2006 6:49 PM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: [casual_games] Community Functionality


What community functionality are people looking at implementing?

I'm quite curious at where this is going, and how
we're essentially duplicating work provided by other
systems (IM, Mail, Web). However, since our target
audience isn't very tech-savy, they might be quite
happy to do everything inside the same context.

As an aside; are anyone using the SDK's provided (by
Skype, GMAIL, MSN, etc) to build IM or VoiP into their
titles?

At what point does your community functions threaten distributors?

We're seeing that a lot of distributors are cautious
about adopting community functions; anything that
connects to an outside website is viewed as a
potential leak out of their closed system.

Looking at what the current state of the art in
community systems are :
- Uploading and tracking highscores (seems generally
accepted)
- Uploading and tracking content (as long as it's
seemless)
- Tracking user information and ID (across single
title is okay, leveraging it across multi-title seems
a no-no)
- in-game IM/user mail services (similar to what
Mahjong Towers Eternity is doing.. seems to make some
distros edgy).

Anything I'm missing?

Enough 5c's will eventually make a whole dollar.

Allan

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