1007: Battle of the Cards

I’ve made my distaste for the growing trend for Japanese “card-battling” mobile-social games well-known on these pages a number of times in the past, but I’ve been growing increasingly conscious of the fact that I must be missing something. After all, these titles consistently show up in the Top Grossing charts on both Android and iOS, so there must be something to them that keeps people playing and, indeed, spending.

The other day, I reviewed a new mobile game from Zynga called Ayakashi: Ghost Guild. Before I go any further, let me explain something about the way Zynga does business for those who have always given their titles a wide berth for whatever reason.

Zynga behave very much like Apple do, in that they’re not trendsetters — or perhaps more accurately, they’re rarely the first to try something, as they’re both often the ones to make something popular. What both companies are inclined to do is hang back, watch and wait to see what early adopters of new technology and systems are doing. What is proving popular? What are users ignoring? What are the potential pitfalls in doing something new, and can they be avoided?

Once they’ve done this, they’ll swoop in with something fundamentally very similar to that which has come before, but polished to a fine sheen. Zynga’s games are rarely, if ever, original, but it’s hard to deny that they often have a significantly higher degree of polish than many other games that may have gotten there first. Similarly, Apple’s work on iOS frequently lags behind Android in terms of features — a frequent criticism in the interminably tedious fanboy wars — but when said features hit, they tend to be implemented very well. (Of course, there are exceptions in both cases, but these patterns are noticeable enough to be worth commenting on.)

Anyway, I digress; Ayakashi: Ghost Guild is a card-battling title from Zynga, and it follows the outline above to the letter. It’s clear that the specific developers behind it have examined what makes early trailblazers tick — many of which, like the inexplicably popular Rage of Bahamut, are very rough around the edges — and then given the whole set of proceedings a pleasing coat of paint. Where Rage of Bahamut is silent throughout, Ayakashi: Ghost Guild has an atmospheric, context-sensitive soundtrack; where Rage of Bahamut’s story is completely throwaway and irrelevant, delivered via blocks of text that most players will ignore completely, Ayakashi: Ghost Guild makes an effort to introduce characters and an unfolding narrative with first-person visual novel-style scenes; where Rage of Bahamut’s interface resembles a Geocities website from the late ’90s… Ayakashi: Ghost Guild’s interface resembles a Geocities website from the late ’90s designed by someone who owns a copy of Photoshop. (You can’t have everything.)

The thing that I’ve found most obnoxious about these games in the past is their seeming total lack of gameplay. But have I been giving them a fair shot? I have delved into Ayakashi in some detail over the past few days in an attempt to try and understand the appeal a little better, and I’m still not quite sure that I’ve made my mind up.

For those who haven’t played one of these games before, allow me to give you a rundown of how play works, with specific regard to Ayakashi. You start by picking a card, usually from one of three different types that have particular strengths and weaknesses. Cards have an attack rating, a defense rating and a “spirit” value. They also generally have some lovely (and usually rather boob-heavy) Japanese-style artwork on them. Ayakashi: Ghost Guild does not disappoint in any of these regards.

Following this, there are two main components to gameplay — the single-player component, referred to in Ayakashi as the “Story” mode; and the multiplayer component, described simply as “Battle” mode.

In Story mode, you’re presented with a series of linear chapters to work through. To work through a chapter in Ayakashi (and, indeed, in all other games of this type) you simply press a button. At this point, several things happen: an animation plays, you lose some health, you gain some experience and you gain some progress in the chapter. Occasionally you will discover an item or a card — each chapter usually has a set number of hidden items which are clearly marked and discovered completely by chance — or run into another player, at which point you can add them to your “crew” if you have enough slots left. If you fill up the chapter’s progress bar, you’re given a story scene and can then move on — or stay behind if you want to try and collect the remaining items — and if you fill up the experience bar, you gain a level, gain some points to spend on your basic stats and refill your health to full. Your first few levels give you more health than is needed to level up a single time; after you reach about level 8 or 9, however, you’ll either have to wait for health to regenerate (at the rate of 1 point per minute) or purchase restorative items using “Gold”, a currency which may only be acquired through in-app purchases. Generally speaking, health is exchanged for experience at a 1:1 ratio; as the story progresses, the health cost and related experience gain for a single press of the “Investigate” button increases.

When levelling up, you have three stats to power up: health, which upgrades the amount in your health pool, allowing you to play Story mode for longer; Attack Spirit, which determines the cards you can hold in your “attack deck” for Battle mode; and Defense Spirit, which determines the cards you can hold in your “defense deck” to protect yourself against attacks from other players when you’re not there.

Battle mode consists of you picking an opponent and then letting your attack deck compete against your opponent’s defense deck. Some cards have special abilities which boost their base attack and/or defense power, and these are triggered at the start of battle. Following this, the winner is automatically determined with no interaction required from the players. This allows battles to unfold without both players having to be present. After a battle, your available Attack Spirit is depleted by the spirit value of the cards you used, meaning at least initially you can only do one battle at most in a single session if you use your most powerful cards — and why wouldn’t you?

There’s a reason to play Battle mode in Ayakashi — the collection of Sealstones. If you collect all of the colours of a particular Sealstone set, you’ll get a rare card that is usually significantly more powerful than the ones you just find naturally in Story mode. Beat another player in Battle mode and you get to steal one of the Sealstones they have — but naturally, others will be trying to do the same thing to you, meaning you’ll have to leave a strong defense deck behind in order to ensure they don’t get nicked while you’re not playing. You can also, you guessed it, buy special items with that in-app purchase currency Gold to protect your Sealstones against being half-inched by randoms.

Despite being a massively-multiplayer game, direct interaction between players in Ayakashi is, like most other games of its type, very limited. You can add a limited number of other players to your “crew”, with the limit increasing as you level up. When you add a new crew member, you get more ability points — more than when you level up, in fact. You then have the option of “poking” or commenting at them once per day, and are rewarded with “Summon Points” for doing so. Collect ten Summon Points and you can get a free, usually shit, card. You can also get two additional free, usually shit, cards per day — one at any time, the other only at lunchtime.

Those free, usually shit, cards have a use, though — fusion. By picking a card to enhance and then choosing up to ten “material” cards to fuse with it, you can level it up, which increases both its attack and defense power and often makes any special abilities it has more effective, too. Some free, usually shit, cards are specifically designed purely for fusion purposes as they are otherwise terrible but provide massive experience point boosts; in other cases, ensuring you fuse cards of the same “type” (ideally identical ones) together nets you the biggest bonuses. Fusion costs in-game money to perform, though it’s the type of money you can earn in the game very easily without having to spend real cash — the game bombards you with it throughout Story mode and you can sell those free, usually shit, cards you’ve been building up over time.

That’s about it. You grind through Story mode, stopping when you run out of health (or until you purchase more if you just can’t wait); you twat another player or two in the face to nick something, then you set the game down for a few hours and come back later. Then you repeat the process.

Is that fun? I’m honestly not sure. There is a certain degree of satisfaction to gradually levelling things up and making them more powerful — progress bars are, as we all know, a powerful motivational tool. The fact that Ayakashi has actually made an effort with its story makes it considerably more interesting than most games in this oversaturated genre, too. But the lack of interaction bugs me somewhat; if I’m supposed to be “investigating” a location, I’d like to be actually doing that investigating, not just tapping an “Investigate” button over and over again. If I’m fighting an opponent, I’d like to do more than simply sit back and let the battle resolve itself.

On the other hand, there’s an argument that all Ayakashi and its numerous competitors are providing is the same experience you’d get from a “proper” MMO, albeit stripped down to its most bare essentials. What do people like to do in MMOs? Level up, so make that easy. What else do people like to do in MMOs? Compete against other players, so make that easy too. What these games are in effect doing is stripping down the conventions of MMOs into something that is a lot more friendly to mobile gamers’ lifestyles — you can pick up Ayakashi for five minutes and “accomplish” something, whereas to do the same in, say, World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2 takes a lot longer. But in that longer amount of time, you actually get to do stuff.

As I say, after having spent a bit of time with Ayakashi in particular, I find myself a little conflicted. With Rage of Bahamut, I felt justified in my dislike; it’s a poorly put-together, amateurish effort that actually felt quite insulting to play. With Ayakashi, meanwhile, Zynga has taken the time to do its usual spit-and-polish routine to make something that isn’t outright embarrassing to play from a presentation perspective. I’m just not entirely sure there’s a game worth playing — much less paying for — beneath the glitz.

I will feel even more conflicted when the Persona 4 card-battling game eventually makes it to Western app stores.

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

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 737: Attack of the Clones

So it seems that Zynga, lords of the social gaming space, are cloning Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower. This isn’t the first time Zynga has ripped off someone else’s game and removed all trace of personality from its visuals, and it certainly won’t be the last. The different this time is that people are actually taking notice, because Tiny Tower, for all its faults — and it has many, that not even its glorious retro pixel art aesthetic can counter — was extremely popular, made Nimblebit a fair amount of money and was even chosen by Apple as its iPhone game of the year.

Zynga’s new game is called Dream Heights and one of the guys from Nimblebit conveniently compared it to his game here. As you can see, it has pretty much all the gameplay of Tiny Tower with none of the visual appeal.

Now, in the mainstream games market, this sort of thing is generally frowned upon quite a bit. For all of the complaining that the big shooter franchises all look very similar, they at least try to differentiate themselves with how they play, the modes they offer and the like. Battlefield 3 offers a very different experience to Call of Duty. I don’t care for either of them, but I can appreciate that each appeals to a different subsection of the audience,

In mobile and social gaming, however, developers and publishers seem to have no such scruples. In my current position writing game reviews for Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, I regularly see games that are almost identical to each other. Most of them follow the FarmVille model to one degree or another — you click on things, there’s a countdown timer before you can click on them again to get a reward, there’s a list of insultingly simple “quests” on the left side of the screen, you get experience points every time you exhale and, generally speaking, the game is designed to be a series of not very well disguised Skinner boxes.

Other popular genres include the growing hidden object genre, where you’re sent into a cluttered room/street/train carriage and tasked with locating lists of completely arbitrary items, with scenes tied together by an often flimsy excuse for a plot. Just in the last couple of weeks, Zynga released Hidden Chronicles on Facebook, only to be followed this week by the almost identical World Mysteries from Brazilian developer Vostu. See, it’s not just Zynga doing it — it goes both ways, too.

Fans of Spry Fox’s fun puzzle game Triple Town on Facebook and Google+ may also want to check out Yeti Town on iOS by the obnoxiously-named 6waves Lolapps. This game has drawn criticism for ripping off Triple Town completely and releasing on iOS before Spry Fox were ready to release their own iOS version of their game. You may argue that Spry Fox should have been quicker off the mark in getting their iOS version to market, but it’s hard to believe that 6waves Lolapps came up with an identical concept (not almost-identical, identical) completely independently of Triple Town.

Independent developer Vlambeer ran into this issue last year when, like Spry Fox, they were beaten to the punch on an iOS game. Gamenauts’ Ninja Fishing hit the App Store shortly before Vlambeer was ready to release its own title Ridiculous Fishing, itself a reimagining-cum-sequel of its earlier Web-based title Radical Fishing. I’m very pleased to see that Vlambeer will be speaking publicly about this debacle at GDC this year.

Where does it end, though? Games are a creative art form and for all these clones to hit the market is to do the medium a disservice. You don’t get books hitting store shelves where an author has simply done a Find and Replace on all the characters’ names from someone else’s work, nor do you get movies which are simply shot-by-shot reconstructions of another movie. We get remakes, sure, but at least those are usually reimagined for a contemporary audience — and they’re being honest about their source material rather than attempting to pass themselves off as a completely new product.

This practice needs to stop. Unfortunately, cloning, it seems, is already an established part of mobile and social game development. In the long term it will only hurt everyone’s business.

So devs? Be bold. Come up with an original idea. Don’t call your game “innovative” if it’s the same as something someone released last week, and the week before, and the week before. Try something new. Break out of established conventions. The most memorable games in the mainstream are the ones which tried something new. The moment we see a successful social game break out of the market’s conventions is the same moment we’ll see people willing to be a bit less cynical and a bit more enthusiastic to see what this burgeoning industry has to offer.

#oneaday, Day 84: Eternally Questing

Giant Bomb recently launched a quest system on their site. It rewards participants with experience points, badges and a sense of “yay” for exploring the site, looking at different pages and taking part in various activities. Some of the quests are as simple as setting up your profile. Others are more complex “puzzly” ones that require one to solve some cryptic clues about games and game culture. It’s a lot of fun, and it actually convinced me to sign up to the site and make greater use of it.

This echoes the thoughts of social game designers at GDC a while back, including Brian Reynolds from Zynga. The idea of getting Achievements for things you do in “reality”. It sounded stupid, but given the amount of fun I, and numerous others, have had with Giant Bomb’s metagame, it may not be so dumb after all.

It’s not the first time it’s been tried, either. A very long time ago I posted about a site called PMOG, or the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. This game, actually a Firefox addon that sits atop your normal browser interface and re-christened The Nethernet a while back, allows players to earn experience points, achievements and items for exploring the web. More than that, though, other players can leave stuff on web pages for others to discover. These could be malicious (bombs, which make your browser shake about a bit and cause you to lose some points) or helpful (crates with money in them). They could also be mysterious portals, which lead to random places on the web, the destinations of which are only known to the portal’s creator. It was an interesting concept let down only by the fact that it only worked in Firefox. Since Chrome came to Mac, I haven’t touched Firefox since, the Mac version not being the greatest piece of coding there ever was.

Then there’s Shuffletime, now sadly defunct – although the developers claim to be working on the “Next Big Thing”. Shuffletime was a great idea – it was a collectible card game where the cards were websites. And you only got to collect the card if you correctly answered a question about the site it was showing you against a strict time limit. It was a fantastically addictive game, and a fine way to get people looking around the web at things they wouldn’t normally. I’m sorry to see it go, but I’m sure something interesting will come out of it.

Like them or loathe them, Achievements and Trophies are here to say. And it’s entirely possible that their influence will spread out of the world of core gaming and into the collective awareness of the web at large. Let’s face it, it’s always nice to get some encouragement isn’t it?

Now, how many Gamerscore is hitting 100 One A Day posts worth?

#oneaday, Day 59: Social Mobility

So social games are here to stay. So say the people in the know, particularly the outspoken Brian Reynolds from Zynga who has commented on the subject at great length. Understandable, really, given that his company are behind some of the most successful social games in history.

I have to say, though, that I don’t understand them. And it’s not through lack of trying. I’ve played Mafia Wars. I’ve played Epic Pet Wars. I’ve fired up Farmville a couple of times. But the elephant in the room seems to be that these games are dull, uninspiring and boring. People used to joke that Championship Manager on the PC looked (and played) like a spreadsheet. Mafia Wars looks like an Access database – and plays like one too. I haven’t done much with Farmville but from what I’ve seen (and heard from others) it’s not much better, just a little more “visual”.

These games market themselves on their “social” capabilities. They call themselves “MMORPGs” and they clog up the iTunes App Store RPG section something chronic with their various denominations of microtransaction space dollar bundles. But, from what I’ve seen, there is little to no socialising involved. You add people to your friends list to let them “be in your mafia” or “be your neighbour”, but besides increasing your stats or occasionally sending you an item they can’t use (not one that they don’t want, it’s always one that they can’t use because it’s set aside as a special “gift” item) there is no interaction with others. Sure, in Mafia Wars you can attack another player but there’s no strategy or interaction there, either – whoever has the best stats wins.

Brian Reynolds commented to developers at the GamesBeat summit that “shame” is a powerful motivating factor for players. “No one wants to be caught letting their crops wither and die,” he says. But does it really matter when you have four thousand people on your friends list, none of whom you’ve ever spoken to? That’s not socialising, that’s MySpace-style “friend” collecting. It doesn’t help that anything even vaguely related to these games – iTunes reviews, Facebook reviews, Facebook groups, comment threads, blog posts – always degenerates into a swarm of several hundred people all going “ADD ME! 9932569!” with absolutely no conversation going on whatsoever. I would mind it less if the “social” aspect of these games was something more of a metagame, where people actually talked to each other and then added each other. But the amount of friend-whoring that goes on by people is just ridiculous, and it strikes me as completely against the spirit of what these games are supposedly trying to achieve – bring people together to play.

Maybe I’m missing the point somewhere. Maybe these social games really are the next big thing. It’s true that some games get the whole thing absolutely right – PopCap’s wonderful Bejeweled Blitz is a fine example – but for every little gem (no pun intended) there’s a billion and one identikit Mafia Wars clones. And they’re all devoid of any gameplay whatsoever.

Games for people who don’t like games. I guess that’s something – bringing the medium to the masses and all that. But is someone reared on Mafia Wars and Farmville ever really going to graduate to games that are actually, you know, good? I’m not so sure.