It’s now been about a year and a half since I joined the indie game development community and began seriously working on my own games. I’ve learned a lot, since then, and also undergone several minor revolutions in terms of my ideas about how I fit into the community. It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve finally started to feel like I have a long-term plan. That being the case, I think it’s a useful exercise to create a mission statement for myself (or, rather, for the organization that is Bene Factum, on the off chance that it ever consists of more people than just me).
Here’s a first draft. Feedback welcome, not so much in terms of the mission itself, as that’s personal, but in terms of anything that needs clarification or greater precision.
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Bene Factum is an organization dedicated to promoting independently-developed games - digital and otherwise - and to encouraging positive approaches to game design and development. The eventual goal is to encourage independent game developers to focus on craftsmanship and simplicity, to present themselves as an ethical, community-focused alternative to large game studios, and to emphasize their differences from the large studios, rather than attempting imitate them.
Bene Factum’s role within the game development community is twofold. First and foremost, Bene Factum is a commercial entity, providing consulting and freelance services to independent game developers, including art, graphic design, writing and game design consulting. Secondly, Bene Factum is itself an independent game development studio, though its emphasis in that area is not commercial profit, but rather experimentation and an effort to change the attitudes of both game developers and consumers.
The attitudes and policies Bene Factum would like to encourage within the indie community are as follows:
Anyone with any sort of creative or artistic talent has probably been approached at some time or another by a friend, family member, or random person on the Internet, asking them if they’d like to contribute to a project in some way. Usually, the people making these solicitations are looking for something to be done for free. Of course, it’s normal to want to help friends out, and especially when one is starting out, pro bono work seems like a good idea in theory. Among other things, it’s a way to get exposure, a portfolio piece, and some experience contributing to a larger endeavor instead of doing individual, personal pieces without any of the constraints present when working for a client.
However, every creative professional I’ve spoken to, in pretty much every field, has the same thing to say, which is that pro bono “clients” are by far the most troublesome. Usually, they’re more trouble than they’re worth. This is counter-intuitive, as you’d expect that most people would understand that beggars can’t be choosers, and that they’d be grateful to get anything at all from you, since they aren’t offering anything in return. I’ve often wondered why they’re almost universally so difficult to please, and I think, after my latest such experience, I’ve realized why it is.
I used to think it was because there’s something inherently selfish in asking for something for free; that the very act of asking someone to work for free implies a certain disrespect for the value of their time. A client who is paying by the hour has a vested interest in not wasting the freelancer’s time, since they’re paying for it. Also, they will tend to value the finished piece more, as they can associate a dollar value to it.
That argument makes some sense, but I don’t think that’s it. If that were the case, the nature of the problem would be that pro bono clients tend to nitpick over the details of the work, asking for endless little tweaks and changes. That isn’t my experience, however. The problem I’ve run into again and again (four out of the last four times I’ve grudgingly agreed to do something for free, in fact), is that the work is actually rejected entirely - I’ve either been asked to try something completely different, make so many changes it would be easier to go back to the drawing board, or else the client has decided that they didn’t need the work, or didn’t like what I did, and that they would do it themselves, or ask someone else.
Of course, you could try to put the blame on the artist in cases like that, but the fact is that in five years of working as an artist/designer, I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve had a paying client express dissatisfaction with my work. Nor is it that I’m not putting as much effort into free pieces - I’ve put many hours into a pro bono piece only to see it discarded, unsued, and I’ve likewise taken on low-budget, quick-and-dirty paid work and received great praise and a happy client.
Rather, the conclusion I’ve reached is this:
Paying clients are going to pay for the work whoever they choose, so they seek you out because they like your work. They’ve checked out lots of portfolios, and they sought you out because your work has the look that they have in mind. Pro bono clients, on the other hand, seek you out because they think they can get something for free. Either they know you personally, or they know you’re interested in their cause, or for whatever other reason, they believe that you’re likely to agree to do something for them unpaid. They might not even have seen your portfolio, they just know that you’re in the business. The odds are therefore very slim that you also happen to be the person they would have chosen to do the work if they’d been choosing based on style. A mismatch between the artist’s style and the client’s vision never ends well.
Making lowball bids to win contracts has the same problem - if you bid slightly higher than the competition, you may get fewer contracts, but the clients who choose you will have done so because they want you, specifically. Bid too low, however, and not only will you fail to be compensated adequately for your work, you will also end up with clients who are secretly hoping that you’ll do something similar to what some other artist would have done, just more cheaply than him or her.
And so, while working cheaply or for free may seem like a nice thing to do, it may actually be a recipe for frustration and disappointment, both on your part and that of the person you’re working for. It’s important to examine the motivations of those who approach you to do work - the primary reason should always be that they like your work, and believe that your style will give them the product they’re looking for. If you believe their motivation might be anything else, think twice before accepting the job.
A recent thread on IndieGamer brought up the subject of addiction in games. The original poster linked to several articles on the subject, which discussed both how to create addictive gameplay by using constant small rewards, and also the ethical issues that have been raised, now that the very most addictive games, such as MMORPGs have begun to have increasingly documented detrimental effects - including death - in their heaviest users.
For some reason all these articles focus on the idea of achievements and item collecting, but neglect what I consider to be an equally-important aspect to making a game addictive: granularity/stopping points.
When stepping away from something, we naturally want to stop at a convenient lull in the experience. If I’m working on a piece of art, I’ll usually stop after finishing some object or area of the canvas. If I’m reading a book, it’ll preferably be at the end of a chapter, but if the chapters are too long, I’ll instinctively try to find a place where the end of a paragraph and the end of a page coincide, so I can start at the top of the next page when I come back to it. If I need to pause a rented movie for whatever reason, I’ll wait until right after a particularly important scene.
I think most, if not all, people play video games the same way. The easiest games to put down are ones divided into levels (or larger levels, divided into smaller waypoints), which take maybe 10 or 20 minutes to play. The decision whether or not to continue playing is thus broken into finite, significant, but manageable chunks. If there’s something else we need to do, eventually we will decide that we don’t want to commit to another 10-20 minutes, and it’s easy to put it down because we feel we’ve reached the end of a chapter in the story, and the game is giving us permission to stop there and come back later.
If you want people to stay glued to your game, rather than playing in such increments, there are two things you can do. One is to make the “chapters” longer, but this is a questionable strategy, as people will be less likely to come back to your game at all if they know they’re committing to an hour or more before they reach a good stopping point.
A much better, and more common strategy, is to make the gameplay either continuous, or make the bites so small that it’s always possible to play “just one more round.” This can be likened to the potato chip/candy phenomenon - no matter how full, guilty or nauseated the eater is feeling, they always find themselves reaching for just one more chip or gummi bear, since the commitment each time is so small. You can observe that the phenomenon decreases with something slightly larger, like a cookie, and disappears almost entirely with something on the scale of a cupcake.
Many Flash games take this model. I played a beta version (no public release yet) of an addictive little shooter called Bullet Time the other day; instead of featuring levels and a win condition, the game was merely about surviving as long as possible. Of course, it offered degrees of achievement for surviving 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, and so on… With games rarely lasting more than a minute, the temptation to give it one more try is very hard to resist, no matter how many “one more tries” you’ve already given it.
You can combine the two versions of the strategy, of course. The Civilization series is a good example. Games of Civilization (or its sequels) generally take so long that few gamers will play all the way through in a single session - thus, the primary stopping point is rarely reached. However, the game is broken into a series of turns, which usually do not take very long to play. Thus, the player is constantly tempted to play “one more turn” before saving and quitting. This is compounded later in the game by the fact that with so many cities and units present, there is almost always one that is on the verge of something exciting - one turn away from capturing an enemy city, one turn away from finishing a World Wonder, one turn away from a scientific discovery, one turn away from finishing the last unit needed to fill a transport ship and send it off to war…
I’m not an MMORPG player myself, but from what I’ve heard, they also employ a mixed strategy in this way; the everyday grinding of monsters is a continuous experience, with the time commitment to seek out and kill one more foe being very small, and thus difficult to escape from. Meanwhile, raids are apparently a very large time commitment, and impossible to put down partway through - especially since there are other real human beings counting on you.
In a way, this form of addictive gameplay is more insidious than the achievement/reward system, though of course the two effects are hardly mutually exclusive. The latter, at least, gives the players something they enjoy - what’s good for the developer is also good for the players, at least in moderation. However, decisions about stopping points are a bit trickier, ethically. As a player, I appreciate games that give me a convenient way of sitting down for what I know will be a finite and predictable amount of time. As a developer, on the other hand, I would love nothing more than to suck a player in, and have them spend much more time playing my game than they had intended. Even disregarding the problems associated with real addiction, there’s something a little bit shady about giving people something that’s less good for them as a consumer because there’s an advantage to you as the provider.
Of course, in talking about games, players usually use “addictive” as a positive descriptor. At least on the surface, it appears that game addiction is a consensual relationship. The armchair psychologist in me wonders if this is really the case though, or whether it’s actually a perfect example of post hoc rationalization: “I sat down to play this game for 15 minutes and ended up spending two hours instead. Therefore, the game must be really fun.” Is fun something that is determined by the player’s emotional state while engaged in the game, or by their tendency to play for long periods of time and/or come back for more? The two don’t necessarily go together, especially when coupled with a personality type that is prone to procrastination and feelings of guilt for doing so.
Those especially interested in the whole issue of game addiction may be interested to know that there is a 122-page thesis on the subject. I don’t know if I’ll have time to read the whole thing, but I’m definitely tempted to try.
Recently, on the IndieGamer Forums, someone started a thread about a phenomenon familiar to many independent business owners. Small business is forever caught up in a series of gold rushes, and that’s especially true for technology-based businesses, such as computer game development.
The thread in question was mostly just a rant about how your patience can wear thin the umpteenth time a well-meaning but clueless friend seeks to persuade you that you have to get in on whatever trend the media is currently hyping. At the moment, it’s iPhone apps. The thread brought up the question of how to explain to such people that by the time you hear about it, it’s probably too late.
I came up with the following graph, which got a much stronger positive response from my fellow forum members than I’d anticipated:
Of course, this graph is not based on any statistics or factual information whatsoever, only my own feelings about the way these trends progress. I had my tongue in my cheek when I drew it, but the general consensus on IndieGamer is that it’s qualitatively accurate. The trouble is with the way developer activity, customer base and media attention interrelate, and it results in the often-quoted cycle of “Innovators, Imitators and Idiots.”
At the beginning, developer activity and customer base increase together - a new technology appears on the scene, and the desire of people to use it is limited by the amount of content available, while the development of content is limited by the perceived commercial potential… which of course, depends on the number of users. The developers in this phase are the innovators, who have the foresight to guess at the future popularity of the technology.
However, developer activity has a snowball-like nature. Smart businesspeople spend a lot of time looking sideways, watching what the competition is doing. They see this burgeoning market and get on the bandwagon. This first generation of imitators is often the one to make the most money, more even than the innovators (though not always). Unfortunately, once some people start making a lot of money, the number of others trying to pile on the bandwagon increases exponentially, quickly outpacing the customer base, which tends to level out after a while.
Finally, the mainstream media’s attention is attracted. Although certain independent publications may have had their eye on the technology for a while, the general public’s attention is only drawn to the phenomenon long after it’s common knowledge to people in the business. By that point, of course, the market is oversaturated and it’s the time for the smart businesspeople to be moving on to the next big thing. Some people may still be getting rich, but getting on board at that point is more like buying lottery tickets than a reasonable business decision. The people who buy into the hype and try to get involved in a market they don’t understand at this point are, unfortunately, the “idiots” referred to before. It’s perhaps too harsh a term, since it’s a natural mistake to make, but nonetheless, these people tend to lose money more often than they make any.
