Tag: Draw Something

#oneaday Day 804: Watch Your Mouth… Uh… Fingers

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Today saw another shitstorm online. There seem to have been rather a lot of them recently, and this one wasn’t helped by all the people feeling crabby about the inevitable fake news stories that April Fools’ Day normally generates.

In this case, it was the turn of Draw Something creator OMGPOP to be in the spotlight, and not, for once, in a positive way. The phenomenally popular app is the new hotness in asynchronous gameplay, and it seemed like everyone and their dog was playing it.

Then Zynga bought OMGPOP for a frankly astonishing $180 million. Warning bells sounded for a lot of people as they became concerned that Zynga’s corporate culture would come to the fore. The publisher is known for forsaking innovation — and sometimes outright stealing ideas — in favour of turning a quick profit. And to be fair, they’re good at what they do. It’s not as if OMGPOP was the innocent little virginal maiden about to be deflowered by the multi-phallused tentacle monster that was Zynga, either — Draw Something is monetised out of the ass, with even primary colours being unavailable to players unless they either play a whole lot of matches, fork over some money for an in-app purchase or buy the paid version of the game.

Even so, there was concern that the things that made OMGPOP an overnight sensation with Draw Something would be quickly lost as Zynga started to assert its influence. One employee known as Shay Pierce — who did not work on Draw Something — wrote a guest editorial for Gamasutra explaining exactly why he was going to be the only one not coming along for the ride on the Zynga train. The crux of his decision was to do with an iOS game called Connectrode which he had created. Signing up with Zynga may have meant signing away the rights to his creation, and he didn’t want to do that. He was not directly asked to give up control over his game, but when he worked with an attorney to draft an addendum to his proposed job contract with Zynga, it was rejected outright.

Alongside this, Pierce also felt that his values conflicted strongly with those of Zynga.

“I believe that developers are at the front lines of game development and deserve to be treated well,” he wrote. “I didn’t trust Zynga to do so. It’s not easy to pass up a lucrative salary and solid benefits, of course. But I realized that ultimately I was letting myself be guided by simple inertia. I was part of a herd, and that herd was all going in one direction (and doing so with great urgency). I would really only be doing it for the sake of going with the flow, and responding to pressure to either conform to corporate expectations, or be left behind. These are not good reasons to join a company whose values are the opposite of your own, or to compromise your ideals, or to give up control of something you rightfully own.”

Pierce also noted that the word “evil” had been bandied about by industry pundits and former employees when discussing Zynga — a claim which he believed to be accurate.

“An evil company is trying to get rich quick,” he wrote. “It’s not making things of value, it’s chasing a gold rush. An evil game company isn’t really interested in making games, it’s too busy playing a game — a game with the stock market, usually. It views players as weak-minded cash cows; and it views its developers as expendable, replaceable tools to create the machines that milk those cows. Zynga is not the only one of these, but yes, they fit my definition.”

In short, his reasons for joining Zynga were genuine, heartfelt and well justified. He noted that he harboured no resentment towards his former colleagues and accepted that not everyone was in a position to be able to pick and choose the job offers they took. It simply wasn’t for him, however, and since he was in a position to be able to choose supporting his ideals over a stable salary and benefit package, he did so.

That looked to be the end of the story, until a couple of days ago when OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter decided to shoot his mouth off on Twitter:

This followed another piece on Business Insider where an anonymous OMGPOP source claimed that Pierce was about to fired at the time Zynga took over. Pierce claimed that an offer of employment was extended to him, however, and his discussion of contract negotiations certainly make it seem as though the anonymous source’s claims were somewhat spurious.

Predictably, Twitter blew up with this news — and with good reason. Public behaviour of the sort displayed by Dan Porter is simply unacceptable and bad form. Pierce’s piece on Gamasutra was both passionate and respectful and he made it abundantly clear that he did not think any less of his former colleagues who chose to go with Zynga. While referring to Zynga as “evil” is arguably a little strong, Pierce did at least go to the trouble of defining what the term “evil” meant to him — by his definition, it’s certainly hard to argue with his view on the social gaming giant.

Two things happened as a result of this spat: a lot of people stopped playing Draw Something, and a lot of people downloaded Pierce’s game Connectrode. It was a potent example of the power of social media to affect one’s reputation. One careless tweet can have far-reaching repercussions — and deleting it won’t help, since someone somewhere will have screen-captured it.

Porter has since apologised for his harsh words, noting that “the struggle to build and support Draw Something has been an emotionally draining and hard one” and that both he and the OMGPOP team found Pierce’s comments hurtful. He attempted to justify his words by noting that “the 41 other people who made [Draw Something] happen… are the people I would throw myself in front of the train for and those are the people I want to celebrate.”

The thing is, though, there’s a marked difference between the things Porter said and the things Pierce said. Pierce was speaking his mind and standing up for his principles in a world increasingly dominated by big business. He didn’t stoop to personal insults and he remained respectful throughout. Porter, meanwhile, spoke without thinking, quickly descending into personalised attacks without even stopping off for a bit of passive-aggressiveness on the way. No amount of backpedalling, apologising or making it sound as if he was actually doing it for his employees can change the fact he acted unprofessionally and inappropriately towards a former employee. Speaking to VentureBeat, he claimed that he felt Pierce’s moment in the spotlight on Gamasutra was unfair, while the Draw Something team toiled in what he seemed to think was relative obscurity.

The thing is, Draw Something is hardly an unknown niche title. According to AppData, 31 million people have signed up for the game using their Facebook accounts, and there are doubtless many more who are playing using an email-only account. People already know about Draw Something, they already know about the outrageous amount of money Zynga paid for OMGPOP and are starting to get to the stage now where they’re a bit sick of the whole thing. Pierce’s piece, conversely, provided an interesting insight into the mind of a developer having to make a tough decision about his future career path. Given a choice between that and “Draw Something Continues to Sell Millions of Copies”, I know what I’d rather read — in these business-dominated days when carefully-orchestrated PR plans regularly gag developers from speaking their minds and being honest with the press and public, I’d much rather take a rare opportunity to hear the truth straight from the horse’s mouth.

Draw Something and OMGPOP generally will not be getting any further support from me. The industry can do without toxic attitudes like those displayed by Porter, and as far as I’m concerned, an apology doesn’t make up for the regrettable fact that this whole situation arose in the first place.

You should, however, download Connectrode, because it’s a rather nifty, original little puzzle game.

#oneaday Day 792: When Play Feels Like Work, It’s Time to Stop Playing

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Asynchronous games are a great idea. At the time of writing, everyone is jizzing all over Draw Something (and quietly hoping that Zynga doesn’t acquire the developer in order to monetize the game out of the arse even more than it is already) — the latest in a long line of successful mobile asynchronous games that include Hero Academy, the With Friends series and, on a smaller scale, various board and card game adaptations.

Now, in theory, the fact that you can play a turn-based game with someone on the other side of the world at a pace which suits both of your busy lifestyles is a great one. And sure enough, it most certainly is a great thing. Games which previously proved impractical to organise when players span various different timezones are suddenly accessible to all and sundry, and your mobile device becomes a portal to a wide variety of social, multiplayer experiences that you can share with your friends.

Trouble is, everyone wants to get in on this action, meaning that whatever flavour of the month asynchronous hit there is will promptly bombard you with notifications and game requests as absolutely everyone on your Facebook friends list suddenly wants to play. And God help you if you post your username for such a game on Twitter.

Now, having a bunch of people to play against should be a great thing, particularly in a game that occasionally offers such a fascinating glimpse into people’s minds as Draw Something does. But, you know, it all gets a bit too much sometimes. When you have twenty people taking their turns in Draw Something, twenty more begging you to play Words With Friends, twenty more wanting you to play Hero Academy, it’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed with notifications and game requests, and find yourself spending hours at a time just catching up with games — and meanwhile your opponents are also taking their turns, meaning sometimes it’s almost impossible to catch up. You can always exercise self-control, of course, and only accept the number of games you know you can handle — even going so far as to uninstall the games you know you don’t want to play, perhaps — but there’s always that element of peer pressure going on.

I can’t help feeling that developers of these games could do a bit to help out here. The simple addition of a “privacy” button that automatically blocks all new game requests but allows current games to continue would be a good one, for example, or perhaps a hard (and reasonable — perhaps user-customizable) limit on how many games can be running concurrently. At the moment, I often find myself letting games expire accidentally due to the fact that a bajillion notifications come in at once, I have no time to deal with them at the time, and they form a backlog which would require a considerable number of minutes to clear. It’s at that point that play starts to feel like work, and that’s a situation you shouldn’t find yourself in.

When something becomes an effort to play and there’s no discernible payoff for doing so, that’s when you have to question why you’re playing in the first place. The thing with all these asynchronous games is that victory is a very hollow experience — win or lose, after a brief “You Win!”/”You Lose!” message, the first thing most players will do is immediately hit the “Rematch” button. Most don’t even do any particularly detailed stat-tracking, meaning you can’t even gloat over your winning streak against your friend. Some, like Draw Something, don’t even make it clear whether or not you’re supposed to be competing against or cooperating with your friend, and then patronise you with primary school-esque “Good Try!”s when you get one wrong. (Notable exceptions: the adaptations of card and board games such as Carcassonne and Ascension do a good job of both stat-tracking and providing a good victory screen for winners to gloat over and losers to quickly skip past.)

These games have their markets, though. They let people connect with one another in new ways, and they open up the medium of gaming — specifically, multiplayer gaming — to massive new audiences. That’s a great thing for the industry as a whole, but there’s only so many “It’s your turn!” notifications I can take before I go completely mental.