Interview with Nicole Lazzaro: Social Forces Impact Online Gaming
Nicole Lazzaro, President of XEODesign, examines the powerful new forms of Web 2.0, emotion and social play interaction redefining the way many of us see online games in a preview of her 2008 ION Game Conference lecture, WOW vs. Facebook: Is Social Networking the New Casual Game?.
 PAUL PHILLEO: Thank you for taking the time to share your experience through an interview with us, Nicole. Tell us how about what you do at XEODesign and how much your line of work overlaps with game development?
 NICOLE LAZZARO: I make games more fun. As the leading expert on emotion and the fun of games I help clients deliver more of the emotions that players like the most. As we all know, great gameplay produces strong player emotions, something that traditional marketing and usability methods cannot measure. XEODesign’s methods can, and developers who can access a player’s emotional responses early in the development cycle can innovate with much less risk. For the past 16 years we’ve improved over 40 Million player experiences for everything from Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing to 3 in the Myst Series, to the Matrix Online, to several Diner Dash titles, to GoPets, and some creativity coaching for the Sims 2 team.
XEODesign was the first to measure specific emotions by watching people’s facial expressions during play. XEODesign helps our clients make better games by offering design consulting services as well as player testing. Because we have created a model of how game mechanics create these emotions we can actually improve gameplay as early as the concept stage.
At my talk WOW vs. Facebook: Are Social Networks the New Casual Game? I’ll be sharing new research on social media and MMO’s such as WOW focusing on the emotions that drive the social interaction.
When you consider superior user accessibility, interaction and satisfaction in interactive entertainment experiences, what Web 2.0 experiences stand out in your mind? Why?
First of all what makes great software experiences is more than accessibility. Players want the experiences that games create. They don’t just want a game to be accessible and satisfying, they want to have fun! Our research finds that what players want most are game experiences that deliver the Hard Fun from challenge and mastery, the Easy Fun from experimentation and role play, the Serious Fun that delivers something they value, and the People Fun from the excuse to hang out with their friends. Each type of fun has its own mechanics that produce a different set of emotions. And the emotions that drive Web 2.0 are the emotions between people, or People Fun.
Social Media sites are helped by being accessible, but it is how they connect people that drives them. The killer feature for Social Media sites like Facebook is the ability to import your address book and send and accept friend invitations.
One of my favorite examples of Social Media is Flickr, which started as an MMO. The developers found the screen sharing feature so powerful that they changed the direction of the company. Sharing photos with friends and family no matter where they live is a clear value proposition, and most photos are about people and social events. Commenting on other people’s photos in Facebook and Myspace is also one of the most popular activities.
deviantART has one of the best communities where people share, collaborate, and comment on each other’s art. They have mastered many features that develop emotions between people.
Looking ahead I see Social Networking and Social Media as really just a feature of something yet to come. The next generation of operating systems will include a networked address book right out of the box. Social Networks will be as common to software applications as cut and paste is today. The next generation of online games will also connect players in this way.
Extending the question, which traditional online gaming experiences stand out to you from your unique perspective, and why?
WOW’s modding allows players to create new UI which can change the experience of online play. This is very similar to Facebook’s support of applications. However, this stops short of adding new actions to the game and has only limited ability to change the game’s emotion profile. The Blizzard-designed holidays such as snowball fights at Christmas and changing other people’s characters into toads on Halloween are examples of how adding new actions to a game can change the emotions players feel.
In GoPets the pets are more social than the players. They visit friends’ desktops on their own and deliver gifts. There’s even a pictogram chat system that lets people connect even if they don’t speak the same language. Pogo supports parallel play of single player games. Social interaction around the outside of the game is key to it’s success.
What emotions does immersion within social networks elicit from their users, and how do they vary from the emotional connection an online gamer might experience with an MMO game?
We’ve seen in our research the importance of emotions in creating player experiences (PX.) Without player emotions there is no game.
The emotions coming from Social Networks are the ones associated with what we call People Fun in games, and the emotions from social exchanges are remarkably similar. There is a lot of amusement and schadenfreude, generosity, and gratitude. Interacting with people they know increases the intensity of these emotions, especially amusement. However, there are a lot more emotions that we don’t see in games, yet. Players tell us that playing games with friends is a great way to work out aggression and get over grudges. By focusing on friendships, social networks deliver more ways to create emotions between friends than MMOs.
Features that enhance friendships, messages, and actions drive the success of social online interaction. The three most important from our research are the ability to connect friends, create feedback loops, and support personalized exchanges. Websites like Facebook and Myspace offer new tools to connect a person to everyone they know by dumping in their address book. Users can customize their interaction not just their profile pages by adding applications like Super Poke to toss sheep and beer at each other. Users can also comment on each other’s photos and exchange YouTube videos. The Facebook applications that succeed the best are the ones that enhance the interaction between friends.
How do you think a game like World of Warcraft, which has already achieved great success on its own merits, could benefit from the design of social spaces like Facebook and Myspace?
The most important advantages that open social platforms like Facebook and Myspace have over online games is that all my friends are already there. In games like WOW or online services like XBOX Live people have to connect in real life first one at a time to find them on the service. In WOW it is quite common to have several characters on different servers or to move a character between servers in order to play with your friends. In WOW you also choose sides (Hoard or Alliance) and that also separates you from your friends. On Facebook your friends are already there.
Compared to other computer games MMOs by nature are more social, however compared to Social Media there are several opportunities to create what we at XEODesign call MSOs (Massively Social Online games). A traditional MMO tacks on social features outside of gameplay by adding a chat window, a player profile page, avatar customization, group quests, and the ability for players to attack the same target. Our research into what drives participation in social media reveals opportunities for a large number of new features that more tightly integrate social experiences into gameplay, even for the hard core gamer.
Players tell us that playing with friends is more fun. In fact, the more friends the better. To its credit, WOW’s class system, group quests, sharing quests, bonuses for working together, and guild features encourage people playing together. And like most MMO’s the high number of social interactions built into WOW’s mechanics are a huge factor in its success and cross gender appeal. However, WOW prevents friends who know each other from playing together. Surprisingly WOW has no tools to connect players with others that they know in real life. Because a player must know their friend’s name inside the game before typing it into a friend request, it is hard to discover who in a player’s network of friends and acquaintances also plays WOW. WOW’s 10 hour free trial CD that they give to a friend is a brilliant step in the right direction, but won’t connect players whom already play.
Another aspect that drives social media is personalized actions. Creation and exchange of social tokens that reference hidden meaning or social context allows players to personalize and enrich their online exchanges. This is more than being able to paint armor or personalize a player profile page. WOW has some ability to personalize the game experience through chat and emotes. Players have a great time typing inside jokes and making machinma to share with their friends. The only actions in WOW that are open enough to be modified is the chat system. Outside of WOW players use videos to express themselves from being silly to heroic as well as to share their secrets on how to slay a specific dragon.
However, the game falls short of creating experiences inside the game that the players can modify to create their own meaning. WOW provides phenomenal backgrounds yet, the abilities and emotes are fixed and support little modification. Where as on Facebook a person can toss sheep, fight for parking spaces, or share a YouTube video. All of these can be modified by players and can have friends rolling on the floor laughing.
Compared to real life social interaction or people playing in the same room there is a huge open playing field for new game mechanics. Hosting a game on a social network makes finding people you already know phenomenally easier than building a social network of people you know from inside an individual game. I am looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Beyond comparing MMO games to social networking portals, could developers of online interactive entertainment experiences gain anything from studying the hardware and interface design philosophies of Nintendo and Apple?
Absolutely. I’d sum it up in two words: accessibility and wonder.
It goes without saying that Nintendo and Apple products are highly accessible. Many players tell us that the Wii or anything Nintendo is their favorite because all their friends can play (not just their gamer friends), and THAT makes games more fun. Apple and Nintendo also incorporate a lot of curiosity and wonder into their designs. For more on the emotions in Apple’s design approach see the a chapter I wrote called “Why We Play: Affect and the Fun of Games Designing Emotions for Games, Entertainment Interfaces and Interactive Products” in the second edition of The Human Computer Interaction Handbook (editors: Jacko and Sears). In addition to more detail on the 4 Fun keys I compare how the iPod and the XBOX 360 create unique emotion profiles from interaction.
The challenge that MMO’s face is that by nature they need to support a wide variety of playstyles, and play that lasts over months and years, that’s something they do very well. We see a number of husbands and wives playing together. To do this MMO’s often have 20 or 30 buttons. MMO games are some of the most complex electronic games there are. WOW has 40 icons on the screen several of these bring up tabbed dialog boxes with even more buttons. WOW does an excellent job of introducing players to these features one at a time. However no MMO has designed a UI where the relationship between these buttons and dialogs are clear and easy to understand.
If players can’t pick up the controls or don’t know what the goal is they can’t have fun. A player in one MMO study we ran patiently waited for something to happen. He did not realize that he had to move his character to play. Another player walked the perimeter of the world trying to “get out.”
User Interfaces (UIs) for most MMO’s are heavy stone boxed windowed affairs. They are full of colored icons for interest, but unlike the Apple UI they are not a joy to use. Understandably most of the processing power goes into rendering the scene. But the use of the UI could still delight players, or tell a story. If the UI is a joy to use and adds thrill to the game, players have more reasons to play it again. If you look at, MMO’s today have yet to shake off their card and dice playing roots like a horseless carriage the form eventually evolves from the metaphor of the previous generation to a shape that merges form and function. I think that casual MMO’s such as Puzzle Pirates and Go Pets are the first to take on the challenge of becoming more accessible.
What Nintendo and Apple products are also known and loved for is the delight and wonder they create when used. Looking at the emotions that come from choices people make both platforms create a lot of Easy Fun. Waving the Wiimote and scrolling through icons on Apple Doc are a sheer joy and create curiosity and wonder. These emotions counter balance the frustration that comes from trying to achieve a goal whether it’s reaching level forty three or writing a report.
A more concrete example of how Apple’s design philosophy translates to online games is the iPhone’s first accelerometer game which I designed called Tilt (www.xeodesign.com/tilt). A free webgame that runs on the Safari browser, Tilt’s phenomenal viral success was due largely to understanding what about Apple’s design for the iPhone created the most emotions. I designed the game mechanic to create these same emotions while Joe Hewitt did the brilliant hacking to make the game work in Java Script. Tilt’s had over 250,000 visits because we created a unique player experience that was more iPhone than the iPhone itself. We also made sure that the game mechanic was highly accessible, players rotate the phone to play. Not bad for a weekend at the iPhone Dev Camp. I’m looking forward to designing similar experiments in Facebook.
Could you explain the meaning behind the title of your lecture at the ION Game Conference – “WOW vs. Facebook: Is Social Networking the New Casual Game?”? What information do you hope people will take away from your session?
MMO’s are the most social of the traditional games and yet comparing them to Social Networks there are huge untapped veins of social interaction just begging to become game mechanics. We see proto-games offering just a hint of what’s possible on Social Networks in games such as Parking Wars, Friends for Sale, and Super Poke. These casual interactions create social experiences pairing these with more robust game mechanics promises to launch a whole new genre of Massively Social Online games (MSOs.) These more casual games run on Social Networks could attract bigger audiences than even WOW does today.
I am hoping that attendees will walk away inspired with ideas for new mechanics and business models that are already generating emotions in social media for the games they are working on right now. And I hope that a few roll up their sleeves and make totally new MSOs.
Lastly, as an alumnus of the conference, what aspects of the 2008 ION Game Conference are you most looking forward to this year?
Looking forward to the food! Ok, seriously I’m looking forward to meeting with other developers and being inspired. The ION conference attracts a number of truly brilliant people working in online games. I’m looking forward to the collaboration that will take games to the next level of play!
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With a week to go before the 2008 ION Game Conference gets underway, we’ve arrived at the end of the list of the ten reasons why attending the conference is a must-attend event for any serious, experienced game industry professional. 