I ran across a great comment about the difficulties of running an ARG inside World of Warcraft (WoW). The blog entry connected to it was Raph Koster (designer of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and now Metaplace) noticing Christy Dena's amazing collection of ARG stats. Raph pointed to the stats and then wondered why ARGs and MMOs aren't partnering more.

The comment itself talks about the difficulties the author had running an ARG in WoW. Some of the criticisms are about the structure of WoW and could be helped by using a more free-form structure like that offered by Second Life. What struck me was that server size was a real problem for them. Since the game world is broken up across servers (and in any case is a subset of Internet users), it can be difficult to get enough people playing the ARG.

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Super Mario Galaxy (SMG) isn’t a casual game, but it uses a lot of casual game strategies to make it addictive. While the basic mechanics are more involved than your average casual game, they’re surrounding by a host of tricks that casual games use to keep people coming back: level selection, variety, a mixture of short- and long-term goals, high scores, and visceral rewards.

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Ian and I recently watched Helvetica, a documentary on the eponymous font (if you have Netflix, you can watch it on demand). There are a lot of great interviews with designers talking about the impact of Helvetica, both when it was introduced and now. Despite the fact that they're talking about something inherently boring (a font), the interviews manage to be indredibly interesting. How? They're all overstated and passionate.

There's the "old guard" type designer who evaluates Helvetica in terms of carving letters into metal, the pair of designers who think that Helvetica is poopular because it says everything, and even the woman who talks about how Helvetica was behind the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.

My takeaway from the movie is that anything can be interesting if it's presented well. Most of the designers interviewed say something similar, but it never becomes repetitive. The film itself is also filled with long sequences of just uses of the font in public and music, yet they never become tiresome.

We've been passing Make to Stick around the office for quite a while now. It's a great look at an important question: why is it easier to remember things like urban legends than things like mission statements?

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Our latest game has just been released! San·go, which means 3·5 in Japanese, is a challenging word-creation puzzler. If you're looking for something a little more cerebral than Entropic Space, this is just the thing. It's generally pretty easy to get 20 points on any puzzle. For a bigger challenge, try to beat the high scores shown. Some of them are pretty impressive!

Play San·go!

When I look back at the board games I played in my childhood, Monopoly stands out. Compared to games like Mouse Trap, Scattergories, and even Scrabble, Monopoly is much more complicated, takes longer, and requires more thinking (at least in terms of math and strategy). European board games are often similarly complicated, but in the US, family games tend to be simple and fast. So how did Monopoly get to be such a popular game?

The title of Philip Orbanes' Monopoly: the World's Most Famous Game—and how it got that way indicated that it would hold the answer. And there's definitely a lot of interesting material there, especially about the early days of the game. Unfortunately, most of the history of Monopoly had to be pieced together from patent filings, court cases, and the memories of early Parker Brothers' employees, so there's a lot of detail missing.

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Fun (and funny) is usually a spontaneous event. Nobody talks about "having fun at 6pm" the way we talk about eating or going to work. How do game designers (and comedians) take a randomly occurring thing like fun and make it a consistent experience?

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How do you keep people from getting bored with your game?

From Donald Norman's Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things:

First, the object must be rich and complex, one that gives rise to a never-ending interplay among the elements. Second, the viewer must be able to take the time to study, analyze, and consider such rich interplay; otherwise the scene becomes commonplace. If something is to give lifelong pleasure, two components are required: the skill of the designer in providing a powerful, rich experience, and the skill of the perceiver.

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It really bugs me when I see glaring flaws in a product. Usually you can understand how those problems were left in, perhaps by mistake or under time pressure. Every once in a while, though, you run across something and can't help but wonder if they actually tested with real people or even just used it themselves.

My latest brush with this type of abysmal failure came from an unlikely source: leftover Halloween candy. For those unfamiliar with it, Jolly Ranchers are hard candies about the size of a quarter but much thicker. Recently, I came across a new version that's more like a stick of gum, although still a hard candy. Take a look at the picture and see if you can recognize the problem here. I'll give you a hint by telling you that the first two people who got a piece of the candy complained about the exact same thing.

The company took something that worked really well, a hard candy that you can pop into your mouth and suck on, and changed it so that you can no longer do that. That size is great for a stick of gum because you can fold it. With a hard candy, it becomes impossible to keep in your mouth. And if you pull it out occasionally, your hands get all sticky. What were you thinking, Jolly Rancher?

A little more than a year ago, we started working with Nogginaut and Chicago's Field Museum to create a series of games to embed in the Ancient Americas exhibit. To see any of them, you'd have to travel to Chicago, which is a little far for many of you.

But no longer! Now you can view video of the games from the comfort of your own homes by visiting our Ancient Americas page and following the links to the videos for each region.

Of course, for the full experience you'll still need to visit the Field Museum, which is well worth the trip!

Currently, I see ARGs (and games in generally) designed for three categories: education, marketing, and entertainment. Educational games tend to be relatively local and small, so they get less attention than the other types. Nevertheless, they're out there. When people talk about games, they sound as if they believe there's a vast gulf between these categories. I often hear comments like "I looked into GAME, but it's really just there to sell PRODUCT," "what's the point of GAME?" and "GAME sounds interesting, but it's educational." From a game designer's view, though, they're all much more alike than they are different.

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From Bill Moyer's interview with Jane Hirshfield in Fooling with Words:

[Teahouse Buddhist] refers to leading your life as if you were an old woman who has a teahouse on the side of the road. Nobody knows why they like to go there, they just feel good drinking her tea. She's not known as a Buddhist teacher... all she does is simply serve tea - but still, her decades of attentiveness are part of the way she does it. No one knows about her faithful attentiveness to her practice, it's just there, in the serving of her tea and the way she cleans the counters and washes the cups.

I've been thinking recently about balancing work and the rest of life, so this passage really struck me. In this view, balance is a matter of integration. Instead of working in her teahouse 9-5 and then practicing Buddhism in the evenings, the old woman makes it so that she practices Buddhism in her work. Even though I'm not a Buddhist, I think a similar concept applies. The things that I do are best when they extend naturally from who I am and what I believe. Doing things just to pay the bills or to please others, I'm less happy and my work just isn't as good.

I'm lucky that I'm at a place where I can do things like work on a casual game when that's what really drives me. I think that shines through in what I do.

I'd be interested in hearing how other people integrate their work with themselves. How do you make sure that what you're doing reflects what you believe?

Kathy Sierra has a great post about how to subvert a company from within: basically, continuously ask "how does this help our customers kick tail?" As rarely as you might hear that in the halls of Microsoft, I think you're only slightly more likely to hear it at a game design company. Really, though, it's even more important here.

The entire point of a game (or, really, any form of entertainment) is to make you feel good. That might be because it gets you thinking or it might be because it gets your blood pumping. Either way, the game needs to be focused on making that work and making you feel great.

In that vein, give Entropic Space a try and let us know how well it makes you feel awesome!

As you can see from our fancy new sidebar, our first Flash game is available! Entropic Space was prototyped in-house in about two weeks and then tweaked and given graphics (courtesy of Rory Starks) and sound for another two weeks. We've got a screencast up if you're interested in the prototyping process.

We're very happy with the resulting game, which has been entered into the fourth Jay is Games competition. The theme was "ball physics," which I think is pretty evident in the gameplay.

In Entropic Space, you control Astrocrash, the last of the Planetkillers. His job is to travel as far as possible into Entropic Space by gathering energy. The only way to get energy is to knock planets into each other. But watch out for the black holes (and the white holes they turn into)!

Have fun and let us know what you think! You can read other people's comments at the Jay is Games competition page for Entropic Space.

There's been a lot of discussion online recently about moral choice in Bioshock. Or, really, the one moral choice in Bioshock and how it's disappointing. In the same breathe as they speak their disappointment, many people cry out that Bioshock could have done better. I actually think they couldn't have without making the game unrecognizable.

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As you've may have noticed, the Studio Cypher site has had a complete overhaul. We like the new design a lot and hope that you do as well. However, any site redesign can introduce problems. I did my best to connect these new pages to the old URLs, but I might have missed some. If you try to get to a page and find that it no longer exists, leave me a comment and I'll hook it up once again.

Thanks for your patience as we transition!

Why a game?

If we want to argue that games can have serious outcomes, at least some of our conferences should also be games. The first Ludium was a hybrid of sorts, with several mini-games only loosely connected to the main thrust of the conference. This Ludium was designed from the ground up as a play experience that would also have a serious outcome: a vision of how video games and policy should mesh.

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The second Ludium is over and done with, although hopefully the final platform will live on. The wiki has more details. There are also interesting notes/discussions on Terra Nova and the Virtual Cultures blog. Several other attendees (including ARGNet’s own Michelle Senderhauf) have written about their experience as well.

Look for thoughts about the game itself in the near future.

The second Ludium begins today, so that’s where you’ll find us bright and early this morning setting up.

It should be a lot of fun and hopefully we’ll get a good list of statements about video games and policy (watch this space for details).

For those of you who can’t be here today, you can follow along with the Ludium Flickr group and Twitter page!