Darth Hater

GDC Online 2011: Day 1 Live Blog Coverage

• Blake Rebouche, Wynne McLaughlin and Hall Hood - Building a Bridge Between Design and Writing Tuesday 9:30 - 10:30


• Erik Olsen (with Cody Bye of ZAM, Gordon Walton of Playdom, Mark Kern of Red 5 Studios and Donovan Duncan of Curse) - Full Immersion: Taking Your Game Everywhere Tuesday 11:00 - 12:00


• Damion Schubert - Double-Coding: Making Online Games for Both the Casual and the Hardcore Tuesday 4:30 - 5:30

• 4:30 - Damion Schubert: I'm not going to be talking about SWTOR today. What I am talking about today is a rambling stream of conciousness about general game design. Double-Coding is the simple idea of making content for two audiences. It is a populater term for people making children's television. Perhaps the best example of this is Blizzard. Almost all heavy hitters are deeply double coded. However, even though it is successful, I think we need to move beyond this concept.


• 4:37 - Hardcore gamers actually run the gamut of players being hardcore in some games and not in others. On the other side, casual gamers aren't always casual. Roughly 2% of Facebook gamers spend over $25 a month on their game of choice. These gamers are actually hardcore.


• 4:41 - Gamers tend to be fans of genres as opposed to gaming in general. Even more so, players tend to be hardcore for only a single title as opposed to gaming as a whole. Hardcore gamers are the nucleus of your game. They are evangelist for your game, drawing in more players. The problem is that no one is a hardcore fan of your game on day one. Even if they buy into the hype, reality my different from expectations. You always have to work on earning their hardcore trust. Our goal as designers should be to convert casual gamers into hardcore gamers.


• 4:47 - The important part is casual and hardcore is not a binary option. It is a continuum with multiple waypoints on the way from one to another. This continuum is a measure of emotional investment in our title. You shouldn't expect to move every player from one end to the other, but even on waypoint closer to hardcore is good. Games that are initially compelling but fail to hold long-term interest are fine for single player games, but it is a trap for MMOs.


• 4:51 - Fun is the investment game designers have most control over. The problem is that fun is based largely based on novelty; new features and surprises.
• 4:59 - Buying a box copy of a game increases investment because of the sunken cost fallacy. This means simply spending money on a game to play it will increase the time some players will spend giving a game a chance.


• 5:04 - The definition of hardcore will change as your game lives. What is hardcore the day you launch a year later as you add content an your players gain experience.


• 5:06 - Conclusions 1) Figure out what hardcore means for you game and who they are. 2) Don't think of hardcore/casual is a binary choice, view it as a scale. 3) Find your steps between each part of the scale. 4) Figure out ways to move you players between these steps. 5) Find the pain points that inhibit advancement and find ways to move past them.


• Open to Questions


• Question: You mentioned spacing out fun. As a game designer, management is constantly trying to get us to put all the fun up front...
  
  Answer: They are right in a sense. If you are working with a free to play game you need to get people invested quickly, but you need to find something you can hold onto to suprise gamers with later. Staging in the novelty is very important to holding your audience long term.


• Talk Over

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