The four secrets of social games design
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Paul Woodbridge
Design Director
"There’s more to Buzz! than a question and four answers, but we wouldn’t want our players to notice…"
9 November 2009
Mies van der Rohe’s much-quoted maxim ‘Less is more’ is not the games industry’s mantra. Games must traditionally have more levels, more graphics, more weapons, and more buttons. ‘More is more’ would be closer.
That’s fine for gamers already in the know, but it’s hardly going to encourage the mass-market. Since our first Buzz!™ game in 2005, we’ve instead kept things simple, from the Buzz! controller to the quiz show format. We’ve taken things out where a game designer’s instinct might be to put extra ‘features’ in.
Half-a-dozen follow-ups and millions of sales later, we now know a lot about what makes Buzz! tick, and a little bit about applying those findings to social games in general. We’ve taken what we’ve learned from Buzz! and applied it to Blue Toad Murder Files™ and also other titles we’re working on.
Some of our learning won’t be relevant unless you’re making the next Buzz! In our obsession with pacing, for example, we’ve discovered rounds work best if eight questions long and three minutes in length, and a game shouldn’t be more than 30 minutes in total. But other discoveries are more broad-brush strokes that we think others might appreciate.
Here then are four secrets of social game design:
Rule 1: Keep it simple
If you can’t explain in one sentence what the player has to do, it’s too complicated. All our design decisions – from the gameplay mechanics to the interface to the buzzer – put simplicity first. Sounds easy, but in fact it’s enormously difficult and involves plenty of trial-and-error.
“I don’t think most developers would appreciate how ‘simple’ we mean,” says Paul Woodbridge, the Design Director who’s worked on Buzz! since day one. “In the first Buzz! we had a round called ‘Look before you leap’. It involved pushing the buzzer before selecting the correct answer with the coloured buttons, and just that two-stage process caused problems. It surprises even us how simple ‘simple’ means.”
For the PlayStation 3 version of Buzz!, we’ve ditched the rule screens that previously preceded the rounds. Nobody ever reads them, and if we’ve done our job right they won’t miss them.
Rule 2: Make it fun
“Because we’re making simple games, there’s no difficult questions about whether we’re doing the right thing or not,” says Paul. “Either it’s fun, or it’s not fun – and if it’s not fun we throw it away. We can find that out in a week.”
While we do storyboard new ideas and sometimes commission prototypes in Flash, this focus on simplicity and fun – plus our experience – means we usually know whether something will work in Buzz! as soon as we hear the idea. The hard part is coming up with fun concepts that are also simple.
“It sounds like we’re selling ourselves short here, but it’s a game design philosophy that works for the kind of games we make,” says Paul, who name checks Nintendo and Blizzard as two companies who get it right.
“I don’t think many people crave layers and layers of menus or infinite customisation,” he continues. “Recently I played a game – which I won’t name – and half an hour in I had to open up what felt like 20 menus to install ammo into my gun! What were these designers doing? They’ve got a genuinely damn good game, which they’ve – not ruined, but hindered – by putting in this extra rubbish.”
Rule 3: Promote off-screen interaction
The real fun in Buzz! and other social games happens off-screen. We want to create entertaining tensions, rivalries and arguments between players, because that’s when they’re having fun. We don’t want players staring at the game and not really caring what their friends are doing.
We want to keep people engaged and entertained, but really we’re almost a facilitator. People can play Buzz! studiously if they want, but it’s more about me stealing points from the person already in last place, and us then having a fight on the couch.
Rule 4: Know your audience!
One of our biggest challenges as designers is to keep making the Buzz! our players want.
“We did a focus test recently, where we asked players to rate what they thought were the most fun rounds in Buzz!,” reveals Paul. “Almost depressingly, the rounds they liked best were the most simple.”
Our task then is to try and find new and interesting ways to present questions and answers, while keeping our own egos out of the picture. As games designers we love innovative darlings of the specialist press like Psychonauts, but we’ve got to remember it’s Buzz! that sells millions.
“In the focus tests someone said they liked Buzz! because you can have a drink while you’re playing,” says Paul. “But you can’t have a sip of your beer in FIFA without losing a goal.”
“Do the FIFA team ever consider making their game first-person?” he continues. “Of course not – they’ve got a formula, and they know it works for the right reasons. It’s very tempting as developers to ask ‘Hey, what can we do with this to really change the game?’, but it’s not usually what the market wants.”
“It’s a cliché, but Buzz! is absolutely the only game I’ve ever been able to put my mum in front of,” concludes Paul. “I do think that speaks volumes.”