2024-11-22 22:03:00
What’s it for?
Making something fun is a good place to start if you’re building a casual word game like Bongo.
But it’s not enough. Lots of things are fun, for a while, but that doesn’t meant that they’re worth the investment of time and money it takes to build them.
From the user’s perspective, a casual word game works when it offers a combination of:
And from a business perspective, online casual games need:
Often, when we set out to design something, we skip most of this, and rely on intuition instead. “I’ll know it when I see it.” If this is working for you (as it does for jazz musicians and clothing designers I know), I’m hardly going to argue against it. But for most professionals, most of the time, saying it out loud is an effective way to not only measure the quality of the work, but to engage and coordinate with a team.
I wrote This is Strategy to remind myself and the people I care about that there’s an iterative process that can make our work more effective. In the case of Bongo, I spent months coming back, again and again, to “what’s it for?” Andrew Daines and the team at Puzzmo worked with me to stay clear about this as the game developed.
You can’t answer that question without also asking, “who’s it for?” Because nothing is for everyone, and identifying the dreams, desires and expectations of the audience is essential to discovering if you’ve actually solved a problem.
Tic Tac Toe isn’t much of a game, because the winning algorithm is too obvious and there’s very little tension, and so, little reward once the tension is released.
And Tic Tac Toe might become accidentally viral, but it’s not likely to happen.
In Bongo, I began with assertions about who it was for. Not hard core videogamers, certainly, nor for the people who can solve a crossword puzzle in 2 minutes. I don’t mind if either group plays, but the core group would be people who aren’t quite that competitive, and who might not have a vocabulary in the top 1%. Beyond that, though, was the nature of the network effect.
Almost all crossword-type games have a single correct answer. The constructor thinks of a puzzle, and every game, the players have to guess the answer.
I find this personally frustrating (because what if my answer is good too!) and it also diminishes the power of sharing. If I’ve solved the puzzle, then sharing it with you is simply bragging. Bragging goes a long way, but I was searching for something more generative.
Part of the breakthrough of Bongo is that there isn’t a right answer. There’s simply a better answer, until, finally, no one can find a way to improve it. This means the creator of the game doesn’t have to know the highest scoring play, and probably doesn’t.
Since the game is constantly iterating, there’s a really good reason to share your score. Just as Wikipedia gets better when others edit an article, you can work with your friends and improve while you’re playing.
Note that this isn’t tacked on at the end. It’s part of the “what’s it for” at the very beginning.
The next challenge was the rise of AI and the destruction of the status of winning because some folks are solving word games in six seconds now. I wanted the game to be resistant (if not immune) to this sort of shortcut, so everyone playing felt like they had a chance to do well. And so the scoring of each tile changes daily, and the bonus word and the blank increase the number of permutations dramatically.
A key tactic that supported the point of the game came from Zach Gage. Instead of rewarding the last 1% of obscure vocabulary (as Scrabble and crosswords do), we give a bonus for common words instead. There are dozens of other methods we used to continually reinforce the delight of the game. I’ll let you discover them as you play.
If you’ve made it this far on this long post, here’s a punchline: A key part of bringing strategy to creativity is that it removes, “because I feel like it/said so” from the conversation. Once you have a clear strategy of who and what it’s for, anyone can chime in and make it better.
And my best word so far for today’s Bongo is CRUX (406) – 1074.
2024-11-22 18:27:00
Sprints and marathons are both foot races, but they have very little in common. The training is different, and so is the technique.
Which one are you signing up for? What about the thing you sell?
Are we trying to get there faster, or do we promise to go further?
2024-11-21 22:03:00
Media isn’t a magazine or a website. It’s a system. We can learn to see the system and contribute to it with leverage.
There are three elements to consider in a media system that’s worth a professional creator’s time:
Systems are changed by technology. When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, it changed elements of the system of book publishing. It was now possible to create complex designs, detailed reference books and illustrated books with more impact and less expense.
I saw books from Dorling Kindersley and Workman and realized that readers (and thus the system) needed more of them. It was a good time to become a creator of books.
The technology shift in audiobooks (every phone is a player) transformed the entire system around audiobooks. Buying Audible was a no-brainer for Amazon. Once you had a phone, you needed more audiobooks and a good way to get them.
But it’s easy to miss the signals. When the web showed up, I was one of the first users and was already running an internet company. Yet I was sure that there was no business model and missed a huge opportunity.
A few years before the web, book publishers were excited by DVD ROM, a new storage technology that would let them publish large, data-driven software projects. Other than a project I did with Fisher Price, we mostly wasted our time–I thought the media would develop, but it faded in the face of the web…
YouTube transformed the system of creating and sharing videos as a professional. When Hank and John Green began creating videos, the system was at an inflection point, allowing their effort to pay off.
There have been popular casual games since the newspaper started carrying the crossword in 1913. But limited by the available space in the newspaper, the medium was fairly small. Once again, the smartphone is a game changer, but so was the rise of the attention economy and the growth of development tools.
Lots of games have shown up online, some built with the basics of HTML/CSS/JS. Games which want to keep track of your progress might require adding backend languages, databases, and a cloud platform. More complex interactive games may need game engines (Unity, Phaser), or a front-end framework (React / Redux which is what Puzzmo uses). None of the game creators built all of these from scratch… the system evolves as software enables forward motion.
A challenge in working with media systems is the delay. There’s a moment when the system needs more creators, and then, months or years later, the arrival of new content from those creators. This leads to a cycle of shortage and surplus, and the whipsawing can make it difficult to sustainably create useful content.
Netflix and the streaming wars set off a frenzy in creating a certain kind of content, but as that content came online, the amount of attention (and money) available to support it began to spread ever thinner.
It’s also possible to go too soon, to decide that there’s a business model when there actually isn’t one, and to build a pioneer homestead on the edge of the desert.
Thanks to Wordle, the New York Times is now a casual games company with a small news division. They’ve taken the business model and head start that they had from crosswords and multiplied it. But Puzzmo and others are betting that there’s room for something even better, and their traction is proof that they might be right.
Bongo is an expression of how much I love designing casual games (video games give me a headache) but it’s also possible to do this work because the system was ready to support it.
There’s a new game today. I hope you get a chance to check it out and share it. Here’s my best word of the day.
2024-11-21 17:35:00
Emotions are often tied to events and events feel absolute.
But events are rarely absolute. They’re almost always relative.
How does this compare to what I was expecting?
How does it compare to what others like me are experiencing?
How does it compare to yesterday?
When we change the comparison, the event itself is changed as well.
It’s often difficult to find the relative, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
2024-11-20 21:03:00
And you can be the first on your block to play it. It’s free. Click here to see today’s game.
Over the next week, I’m going to do a few bonus posts to explain how we thought about the creation and game design and marketing of this new project. The last eighteen months of development have been delightful, and I hope you get a chance to try it out.
For today, a little history:
My first game design was on a mainframe in 1977. My first commercial games were at Spinnaker in 1983, working with personal heroes like Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and a brilliant team of game designers and engineers.
In 1989, I developed GUTS for Prodigy and Robert Gehorsam. It had millions of players, making it the most popular online game of its time. And in the 1990s, Yoyodyne used games to make email marketing work.
Bongo, I have no doubt, is the most fun of all the games I’ve been a part of. Zach, Jack, Orta and the team at Puzzmo are the world’s best puzzle collaborators and we’re thrilled to share this with you now.
More on this as we go, but for now, the simple rules of Bongo:
The SHARE button makes it easy to copy your best word to your social media account so friends can join in.
It’s easier to play than it is to explain, give it a try.
Here’s a video if you want to watch me doing my best to solve a Bongo (some people are way better at this than I am…)
Next time: Thoughts on media, systems and business models…
