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4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people

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Found on YouTube: Mario and Luigi’s insightful commentary on MySpace top friends

Cultural differences are always interesting!
I got interested in the games world first as a consumer of video games, but after I worked on an unsuccessful project to monetize MySpace using ads, I got interested in the monetization potential of virtual items in social products. For the last 2 years, I’ve been wandering around on the edges of the games industry to try to cross-pollinate some of the best ideas with what I knew from the web world.

Early on, after attending the Game Developer Conference and speaking with folks from many of the top publishers and studios, it became clear that there were lots of interesting cultural differences between web folks and games folks. I wrote some of these points down a while back and I thought I’d share them.

I want to caveat that these are purely anecdotal and my own experiences, and I’m sure that I’m overgeneralizing ;-) I also think that people that come from the casual games world (and in particular flash games) are much more similar to web entrepreneurs - the aliens I talk about are mostly big packaged games people. So please share your opinions in the comments if you disagree or have another perspective.

But here are the major ones:

  1. Eyeball worship vs. Game genre worship
  2. Distribution vs. Content
  3. Utility vs. Experience
  4. Open vs. Content gating

Let’s drill into each of these…

Eyeball worship vs. Game genre worship
First off, one of the big surprises for me was that many of the folks working at big games companies like EA have a very specific type of game they want to work on. Many of the folks I talked to wanted to make so-called “hardcore games” - very rich, deep, FPS/RTS/RPG/etc packaged games that sell at Walmart, and were completely uninterested in anything else.

While I excited about building simple Web-distributed games that could be played by millions of people, for many of these folks, if it didn’t look like a game, didn’t have monsters and guns, it was uninteresting. In fact, there was a pretty derisive view of folks who make so-called casual games as lower in the food chain.

This reminds me of a project I worked on a long time ago in the video space, pre-YouTube. I had interviewed a bunch of art students at Unviersity of Washington to talk to them about publishing their videos online, and they were very uninterested. For these art students, they had such a romantic sense of what it would be like to show your work in a theater, at Cannes, that the idea of millions of people watching a 400×415 pixel player seemed completely uninteresting. Perhaps the hardcore games folks I talked to felt the same way about their work.

The analogous concept in the web world is probably that a lot of entrepreneurs only want to work on “cool” startups involving fancy technology. They are less likely to think along the edges for products targeted at different (possibly more mainstream demographics). I also think that web folks get more excited about the eyeballs factor than anything else. The more simple, stupid, and widely used something is, the better!

Distribution vs. Content
Another interesting difference was the perspectives around content. For many of the games people I met, the content is everything. How good your game is perceived to dictate its ultimate success. I think this makes sense in an industry where distribution is essentially commoditized! The big publishers have many of the same relationships, and games developers in general have been outsourcing their distribution expertise out to the publishers for the past couple decades. As a result, it seems clear that the only place to compete is in the content of the game, rather than in the distribution.

Compare this to the web entrepreneurs who have to deal with the constantly changing landscape of distribution. Many of the top Facebook apps were simpler, dumber, and better distributed than their competition, and distribution in itself can be a competitive advantage. Eric Ries recently wrote about the distribution techniques that have recently been found for the iPhone App Store - these techniques include a primitive version of SEO via the App Store search function, as well as folks who constantly release updates to their app to try to get on the New and Hot list.

And of course, ad networks, affiliates, and leadgen companies represent the logical extreme in the distribution equation. Because they are selling other peoples’ products, they focus exclusively on distribution and differentitation via novel techniques and analytics.

It’s clear that both communities have a lot to learn from each other on this one, but because of the fact that distribution is extraordinarily important in the new social network ecosystem, I think this is why we’ve seen the top games coming from Web teams rather than Games teams. (With the possible exception of Playfish!)

Utility vs. Storytelling experience
One of my favorite cultural differences is the way web folks think about the role of their products in peoples’ lives. There’s often talk about making your product as “useful” as possible, or “social utility.” In the world of utility, oftentimes the main factors that are discussed involve terms like:

  • pain points
  • efficiency
  • productivity
  • ROI
  • maximizing
  • etc

These terms are great, and the world is better off for having products that make us all better worker bees!

Compare this to many games discussions, like the ones I sat through at GDC, which involved concepts like:

  • characters
  • plots and storytelling
  • mood
  • music
  • fun
  • etc

Now, I think that the productivity-inclined have their claim to the world, as does the fun/entertainment games people. But the intersection of this, in web media, is where the fun happens. For example, is the fact that Facebook has such an efficient newsfeed system a good thing, or a bad thing? I think it depends on whether or not you feel like the process of exploring peoples’ profiles and clicking through things as a good thing or not? In the MySpace world, given the degree of customization, you might argue that it’s more game-like in the way that it encourages people to click around and explore, whereas Facebook is clearly more efficiency-oriented.

Both approaches have their advantages, of course - and there are times where I use Facebook as a utility and times when I’m using it for time-wasting. The tradeoff between the two approaches are definitely interested to think about as your product is being constructed.

Open vs. Content gating
Related to the efficiency versus experience distinction, web products are very likely to make things very open and give the users all the features upfront. It’s very rare that you constrain what the user can do, and as a result, there’s no concept of leveling or grinding. As a result, oftentimes the experience that you get at the beginning is the same as the experience you have later on.

Games, on the other hand, have a clear concept of advancement and otherwise “content gating” their users. By withholding levels, powerups, weapons, trophies, etc., it creates motivation from the user to keep on playing. They say, “just… one… more… game…!!”

The Wikipedia article on this is instructive:

The most common form of level treadmill is the practice of killing monsters for experience points. The player constantly chases after the next level in order to be able to defeat the next slightly stronger monster. The outcome of MMORPG combat tends to depend more on the character’s numerical statistics than the player’s skill. Thus there is usually little for a player to do beyond clicking an attack button until he or she wins, or is forced to flee when nearing death. So whether fighting small rats or large demons, the player is performing essentially the same actions, the only difference being the larger numbers in his or her character and the monster’s attributes. In the eyes of players, the player is essentially running forward while going nowhere, as on an exercise treadmill.

As a result of this treadmill, there is a constant pressure for players to stay engaged and retained as customers. But the flipside of this is that it’s not enough to build one product - instead you build 70 product variations, and call each one a level!

Other observations?
I’d love to hear other thoughts on this issue, and any places where I’m overgeneralizing :) Comment away!

If you liked this article, check out my other essays here.

UPDATE: Adam Martin (formerly of NCsoft) writes up his views here, from the perspective of a games guy.

Written by Andrew Chen

October 21st, 2008 at 8:00 am

Posted in Uncategorized

« Go-to-market strategies for vertical social products
Virtual items design: Build it yourself or use UGC? »

Viewing 15 Comments

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    Thanks for this post! We (SnipClip) just had a pitch at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin and another yesterday at the Facebook Developer Garage. There were two kinds of people: web people and game people (just a few of course). Game people immediately understood what I were talking about. Web people mostly didn't understand it - I had to explain it over and over.
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    hm, I'm surprised by that - snipclip looks much more like a web product? Are there game-y features that I'm not understanding?
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    Hey Andrew insightful article as always.
    I totally agree with your assessment of the differences between game and web guys. Having worked on both the web and game sides of the fence I can testify to the binary mindsets of each industry’s creative and management minds.
    The real progress that is happening today as your blog documents is the emerging trend for people with both game and web skills and backgrounds forming extremely exciting new companies and developing projects that bend aspects and strengths of both industries.
    If I was going to be honest I think the web guys are picking up the games stuff much faster than the game guys are adapting to the web. The faster cycles of technological, business, and product development iteration and their grasp of user experience and metrics means web guys are just getting there faster and faster and understanding the feedback loop in the marketing, business and product development cycles in a much more sophisticated way. The games guys and yes this includes even the online games guys are just not adapting fast enough to the web as a distribution, marketing, metrics, and sales channel.
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    Alan, what do you think it'll take for the traditional games guys to catch up? Or maybe they never will?
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    I think more developers getting to market and operating their own games is what it will take. The web benefits; metrics, user feedback and of course monetisation are simply funnels to refine in market and the more MMO and online game developers that manage get to that stage and not have a publisher do it for them the quicker they will start learning from their market and making web a core part of their operations, development and management capabilities.
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    As far as Utility vs. Storytelling goes, I wrote up a similar thought on the difference between web apps and games in terms of their overarching goals.

    http://mikegowen.com/2008/08/01/learning-game-d...

    Sorry for the self-promo, but it'll save me a rather lengthy comment :)
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    Excellent breakdown. I spent most of my life on the core game dev side, but always had strong web ties outside of work. Now I consult in both the web world (f2p online games, mostly) and the retail game world. It's extremely interesting to note the differences you've summed up above.
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    A lot of what you have to say reminds me of EMPIRE, the biography of William Paley, CEO of CBS in the early days of television. His problems were not unlike those of today's web 2.0 gaming enterprise. Paley had no choice but to recruit creative staff from the world of feature films, many of whom had severe culture shock trying to ply their craft through what occurred to them as the horrid constraints of early network television. Telling a story in three 8 minute acts, where each act ended in a cliffhanger in order to motivate the viewer to sit through the commercial breaks was a truly painful learning process. Many of the writers just couldn't deal with the constraints, and returned to the 'long form' of feature films from whence they came. And those who toughed it out, and figured out how to use the new medium of television, went on to pioneer the television industry, introducing new formats like the sitcom, the game show, the soap opera, etc.

    Such reminds me a lot of the state of many web 2.0 interactive entertainment companies. Often, such are populated with immigrants from the gaming world proper, who struggle with a lot of the constraints created by a business model totally unlike that of the companies they came from. Nor is the management of many of these companies, often from the web world, prepared to deal with the 'product first' mindset of the creative people they bring on board. Obviously it's the few groups who merge minds the best who will end up winning in the marketplace.

    I'd recommend EMPIRE to anybody who is interested in these issues ... there are a lot of lessons to be learned from how smart people dealt with a very similar situation in a closely related industry, just a few short decades ago.
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    Wow, great comment. This really points out the analogy that social gaming is really a fundamentally different medium than the traditional games industry. Perhaps, social gaming is to hardcore games what TV is to movies!

    It also makes me think that the best way to deal with these new constraints is to get a bunch of smart new kids to make the rules from scratch, and maybe that works better than trying to reprogram people who already are set in their ways.
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    I spent over 25 years in the traditional games industry, and have been involved with social gaming for less than six months now. Social gaming occurs to me as indeed a fundamentally different medium than that ot traditional gaming. Creative mediums such as film, pop music, and interactive entertainment all share a similar evolutionary path .. the format of the creative product evolves to fit the constraints of the technologies and subsequent business models that enable the medium to exist in the first place. This sort of evolution is going on as we speak in the social gaming space .. the creative product is being shaped primarily by the emerging biz models .. this is how it should be I think.
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    Andrew I share many of your same observations having come from the Web world and recently attending the game developer's convention. I like the summary.

    I would also add one... in addition to utility vs. storytelling there is place vs. story ... on a social media web site you have a richer environment to make the social play into a game, and make your web site a place, not a story. This is fundamentally a different construct than playing a single player videogame.

    I remember after weeks of devoting ridiculous quantities of my life to Diablo at the end of the game I defeated the monster and it spewed blood and died... the end. No word from the village people I had spent time "getting to know", like hey thanks for taking the time to save my world... don't get me wrong I got lots of satisfaction from the gameplay or I wouldn't have made it to that point, but it's just a very different experience from a social media site.

    With all of this I agree with you that when you combine the best of both it gets much more interesting.
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    ah, yes - I totally agree with this. Having a "start" and an "end" is a mixed blessing - while it makes the immersion more complete while you're in the middle of it, after you're done you're also unlikely to return. One of the positives of building utilities is that people have a need for them over and over again - another nuanced tradeoff that occurs.

    Also, you get some street cred for beating Diablo. That game takes months to play. WeeWorld might grind to a halt when the new game gets released! ;-)
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    I think you need to be careful to distinguish between "narrative" and "story".

    To use the analogy given previously: yes, the website/app is a "place"; I think that's a reasonable construction. However, there is still a story attached to it: the story of a user's interaction with the site.

    There's a beginning, when they first arrive; there's the tricky hump of the sign-up process (or not), the first interaction, the first encounter with other users, the slow gaining of expertise. All of this forms a journey for the individual user, and how a site caters to them at each stage is important. Some sites focus on the early stages, knowing that "power users" will cope fine in the end; others try to offer a steadier curve, but perhaps at the expense of the first two hours.

    Some sites aren't even open-ended. Think about filling out your taxes online: you come, you perform the task, you (ideally) complete the task, and the story of you using that site is over for another year. It's important to consider what "win states" are for your site - is it a happy user, staying forever, or is there a victory condition that's met by somebody leaving? Too many sites want to be everything to all users; a focused, finite lifepsan might actually turn out more productive for them.

    There's also a halfway house: repeat usage. A product-site, like Moo or Photobox, has a repeat-usage story: I go to the site to buy a thing, and whilst my order might be complete, you hope I'll come back. It's not a consistent use, but a sporadic one, driven by demand, and it requires high-maintenance during the purchase procedure, and a lower form of maintenance between visits.

    Stories are a useful way to frame interactions, even if the story isn't happening on your own site.
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    Nice article.

    I paused before reading it to right down my own thoughts off the top of my head, and it turns out they're quite different (just shows a different professional background / interest-set I think - the broad conclusions seem to be the same) - http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/10/22/cultu...

    Only one thing I took issue with in your list:

    "But the flipside of this is that it’s not enough to build one product - instead you build 70 product variations, and call each one a level!"

    I'm pretty sure that the levelling treadmill was carried over (and extended and strengthened) to MMORPGs mostly for the opposite reason: that you were building that much content anyway, but most users were only experiencing 1/100th of it, and you needed a way to force them to experience more of it, because it was a sunk cost.
    • ^
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    I'll link you with an update!
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