January 2001

DESIGNING FOR THE MAINSTREAM
by François Dominic Laramée

Once upon a time, way back in the Dark Ages, a peculiar little cable set-top box called Videoway fancied itself an interactive entertainment platform.

Even by 1992 standards, poor old Videoway was a truly sad piece of crud. Saddled with an operating system which could only have been designed by COBOL worshippers, its heroic programmers, exhausted 8-bit processor and grossly underfed 20K of application memory stumbled through the digital wasteland, barely managing to drag enough data along to support a passable 13-color, 256 by 200 version of Q-Bert. Competition for Sega Genesis, it wasn’t.

However, Videoway had a cable modem tucked in under its little brown plastic riding hood. Just like today’s high-end PCs.

Better yet: it was sold via flat-rate monthly subscription. In fact, Videoway was very similar to a proprietary, low-tech internet portal, offering a variety of information and entertainment services in the hope that the overall package would be appealing enough to keep people coming back.

And lo and behold: Videoway games were a hit across demographic lines. Five year olds played; so did teens, young adults and retirees. All in roughly equal numbers. And for years and years.

This success, and that of other games which have broken out of the core gaming market to reach stratospheric sales figures, can teach us a number of valuable lessons when it comes to designing for the "casual player" and "mass market" audiences.

Here, for example, are some attributes of games which have reached a significant non-core audience or which have stood the test of time:

One of the keys to mass-market entertainment is to hook the player fast. The way to do this is to keep the basic rules of the game simple enough to let the fun begin almost immediately. Consider the time it takes to learn a new card game; many popular ones have about five rules.

We as interactive entertainment designers need this kind of simplicity because of the sheer number of competitors we have to deal with. A Videoway subscriber or a net user who tries out a new game invests nothing in it except 20 seconds of download time; if the game fails to draw his interest in 2 minutes or less, he’ll move on to the next. (Pathological cases, myself included, will lose patience before the game even starts if the download drags on too long.)

Of course, a casual player who has bought retail software will be willing to spend a little time learning how to use it. But only a little. Frogger has sold a trillion copies because grasping its basic techniques takes about 20 seconds. Monopoly is about the most complicated mass-market board game there is, and reading through the rules doesn’t take a 10-year old much more than 15 minutes. Bottom line: if a casual gamer can’t play anything in the first half-hour, he’ll grow annoyed and won’t buy your next offering.

Note that "simple rules" do not preclude complex gameplay. Learning to play poker takes minutes. Learning to play it well can take a lifetime.

Metagaming is "the game beyond the game", entertainment which derives not from the rules of the game itself, but from surrounding factors.

The most basic form of interactive metagaming is the embedded chat line. Years ago, I spent many an evening playing a mediocre trivia game on GEnie (at $3 an hour, no less) more because of the interesting people who hung out there than because of the game itself. Today, the most active online-gaming group in America is homemakers, who spend ungodly numbers of hours absentmindedly playing Hearts and Bridge while devoting most of their attention to chatting with friends. Other examples include tournaments, rankings, trading (as in Magic: The Gathering cards), fan web sites, etc.

Metagaming can drastically increase a game’s life span. I remember an online adventure game where players stayed on for months after solving the mystery, serving as "elders" and giving clues to newbies. And, of course, would anyone remember Magic without the trading card scheme?

Mass-market games tend to be slow, for many reasons. First, a controlled pace, like simple rules, eases learning of the game. Second, in-game metagaming requires it; try type-chatting in the middle of a Quake fragfest and see how much fun it is. Finally, most people just don’t like being rushed; an overworked accountant who is under pressure at the office or a retiree with poor eyesight aren’t likely to enjoy a game which requires 20-30 decisions per minute.

Successful mass-market games scale well in time. You can play Monopoly, chess and cards at your own pace, while Roller Coaster Tycoon won’t come crashing down on you if you ignore one of your rides for a few minutes.

Many casual gamers have limited time available for play. Therefore, games which can provide a satisfying experience within a short playing session will be more effective than longer ones.

Look at how you spend your TV time, for example. If you come across a Frasier rerun while zapping, you may decide to watch it on the spot, without giving it much more consideration; it’s only half an hour, after all. A 2-hour feature movie, however, demands a conscious decision, because that’s your evening right there. Same thing with games: it’s easier to decide to solve a puzzle of The Incredible Machine than to get into a long Age of Empires scenario, while scheduling enough people for an online game of Civilization may require more time and effort than the Middle East peace talks.

Being able to play within minutes is one thing; being able to accomplish something worthwhile is another. For casual gamers, one is just as important as the other.

The Incredible Machine had a lot of appeal to non-gamers because each of its puzzles could be solved in a few minutes, not just played. Short bursts of activity, followed by a small reward. Same thing for levels in Frogger or Pac Man.

Try to give the casual player a clear picture of what he should be accomplishing at all times, and split your game into bite-sized chunks which he can win fast.

When designing for the mass market, ease of use is more important than technical excellence. Casual gamers won’t be willing to tweak special effects menus to obtain the best image quality possible at a decent frame rate; what they want is something that works out of the box with no hassles.

Mass-market games should work on 5-year old machines and probably won’t be able to take advantage of any advanced DirectX feature. In fact, in some cases, Flash may not be a bad platform even for boxed software!

Casual gamers may not have the time or the willingness to study your game in depth and compare it to its competitors before making a purchase decision. People feel comfortable with things they know and understand, so if you offer an element of familiarity which they can hook on to, they are more likely to nod your way.

The most blatant form of this strategy is to adopt a classic game wholesale, but it isn’t the only one. Alternatives include:

• Licensing a character with mass-market appeal, like Spider-Man or the Teletubbies.
• Using settings and themes which pervade the collective consciousness. Everyone has some sort of internal image of the Roman Empire, of Chicago in the 1920s, and of the archetype American high school; these ring truer to the casual fan’s ears than an obfuscated dystopian setting. (Anyone want to do a Revenge of the Nerds real-time strategy game?)
• Bringing in brand-name creators to work on the project. Just make sure that they know how to use the medium; many high-profile internet entertainment portals have collapsed when their big-name authors brought them big-name budgets without additional traffic.

This is the tricky one: make sure that the game won’t cost too much to the consumer. Online, this means "free". In a store, it usually means $15-20; no more, because then it leaves the "impulse buy" range, but no less, because a price tag of $10 would project an image of mediocrity.

Of course, to be profitable at that price, the game will have to be cheap to make. Luckily, simple rules and tech-neutrality will help in that area.

We may never hear about them in the gaming press, but more and more games and companies break out of the core gaming audience and reach a growing mass market. With PalmOS and other burgeoning wireless platforms joining the fray, the tendency will only increase. There are fortunes to be made there. Fortunes!

I always knew that, someday, the time I wasted working on a machine with less than 1% of the processing power of a Furby would be good for something.

Bio
François Dominic Laramée has plagued the game industry for almost a decade, during which he finagled his way into a variety of short-lived jobs as studio head, producer, designer and programmer until he ran out of luck and had to become a freelancer.  He is responsible for single-handedly wrecking over 20 titles released on half a dozen platforms, has waylaid thousands of readers with his articles, and somehow managed to con two different universities into granting him graduate degrees.  (Well, one he's still working on.)  Visit his mediocre web site, http://pages.infinit.net/idjy, at your own risk.

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