Their Ville series – including famous FarmVille, Facebook top-ranking CityVille and their most recent runaway hit CastleVille – have without a discussion changed the face of gaming and dominated the way we think of and define social games today. While they did not invent the mechanics, they refined them and diffused the innovations to the wide masses – in a larger way than most game developers care to consider – making it, in many ways, the new public face of gaming.

A main summary of their game mechanics would probably include:

• “Energy”-based actions, of which the player must wait or buy more energy after running dry in order to continue playing and progressing
• Active player recruiting as part of the game progression and gameplay
• No considerable gameplay challenge besides using resources in the optimal order and fighting your own impatience
• An ability to skip any action and quest through hard currency – primarily acquired through purchase

While many have expressed harsh opinions against these games, calling them unethical and plainly bad, I can understand how some people see entertainment in their rather banal approach, where progression happens within a tightly controlled flow. And even though it makes me rather annoyed that active recruiting of other people to the game can be a necessary gate for progression – unlike the necessity to purchase, which is more of an option and bonus – their games are still free, after all, and provide quite some value for no down payment.

The real question and debate is rather: are they games?

While the debate for what a game really is and how it can be defined has not come to conclusion, I personally view the Ville-model as a pure instance of Gamification, which in short is applying certain game principles to non-game contexts.

Do we jump to the conclusions that gamified services etc. are actually games? No, that is why the term gamification has been coined. So why do we confuse Zynga’s “social games” with games? In reality, they share very precise characteristics with an ideal implementation of gamification:

• Every action is tracked and added to a progression tree, constantly rewarding the user for life-time commitment.
• Few features and possibilities are available initially. Instead, they are unlocked over time through an accumulation of actions and engagement.
• It is rewarded to spread the word and invite more friends to the cause.
• It is possible to achieve all, or at least by far the most features and rewards over time with just standard engagement (which requires commitment and persistence though).
• It is always possible to “jump ahead” and skip any wait by paying.

If you take the Ville-based model and remove these mentioned characteristics, then I would say we end up with nothing more than a pure simulator.

Now, can that not be a game? Surely we have plenty of simulator games on the market, mostly in the racing genres and other real-world imitations. The key difference, though, is that these simulators often contain implicit or explicit goals that a player can complete – and even if not, like the case of Sim City, they at least contain states of failure and success, providing the player a challenge to overcome, if he or she so choose to take on the challenge.

The Ville-based model is instead based on the philosophy of only rewarding the player, taken to the highest extreme, where few things can ever go wrong – and if they do, it’s because you didn’t spend enough time in the game, didn’t recruit enough friends or didn’t pay. Which boils the player type in Ville-games down to three types:

1. The patient, where it is fun to wait
2. The recruiter, where it is fun to get friends to join the cause
3. The spender, where it is fun to buy

If you view either of these three as a fun and challenging context, then I guess Ville-games could be fun. But I doubt many would argue both 1 and 2 is much fun – for 2 it is especially true if the cause is not a passion of your own (such as volunteer work).

And there’s 3; spending money. I guess most people enjoy that. We enjoy it almost no matter what we buy. It feels great to buy. But we see one other area, where spending money is framed as the activity in itself, with a very bad yet attractive value proposition: gambling.

That is why I see most Zynga games, predominantly their Ville-model games, as little more than a gamification of gambling, with an even worse yet maybe even more attractive value proposition: while you can’t win any money, you can almost always get bigger, better and more beautiful in the game – not the least compared to your social circle.

Is that a bad thing? Or even unethical? Not really. But should we be careful in calling it games and let it shape the way the general public perceive gaming?

Yes.

The collective power of the indie game community was also recognized by Microsoft, initially through the release of their somewhat successful XNA Game Studio Express development suite. The easy-to-use tools for creating a relatively complex game quickly garnered traction, while having suffered loses to even more user-friendly development environments like Unity lately. But the ability to compile games for a console for the first time created a strong interest, and with the release of the Xbox Live Community Games service in late 2008, Microsoft hoped to establish an App Store similar for games on the Xbox 360.

More than 2 years have gone by, and it’s hard to say that the service, now called Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG), has created the success that both Microsoft and aspiring indie developers had hoped for. The service can still only be accessed from a limited range of countries, the marketplace is well hidden within the Xbox 360 dashboard and the games are often overshadowed by the bigger, fancier and more promoted Xbox Live Arcade titles. Recently, many developers have begun reconsidering XBLIG as their platform of choice, even despite the well-made toolset XNA offers.

This can really come as little surprise in the light of Microsoft’s efforts on the matter. In reality, Microsoft have shown little enthusiasm for the service on anything but a shallow level. While the intentions might have been good, the actual willingness to push forward an valuable indie marketplace has seemed rather lackluster. Much like Nintendo and their WiiWare, it has been released and abandoned with a mentality of “they will figure it out themselves”.

While this is not a far-fetched strategy for a market that is used to do everything itself, one must consider the implications of a sit-back-and-watch strategy on a rather narrow and closed platform. Microsoft have a big say in the visibility and features of the XBLIG titles, still lacking Achievements integration, search functions in the interface, international outreach, easy sharing and promotion opportunities and much more. Despite the best of intentions of developers, they find it difficult to create an attractive and even sufficient revenue stream, forcing them to new pastures.

While lead users are often capable of and willing to innovate on their own, it is a strict requirement that freedom of innovation is enabled. This requires open environments and full sharing, as well as a tight and rapid feedback and development process, where the company and the lead users can innovate collaboratively and rapidly. But XBLIG has remained a rather enclosed service within Microsoft, taking little input from its lead users and allowing little freedom to innovate outside the set perimeters that is the actual games.

If Microsoft truly want XBLIG to blossom, it must let it rise to a level where it can actually compete with the Xbox Live Arcade game. While this may create an internal fear of service cannibalism within Microsoft, it should only be because it displays that these two services should be unified to create one, shared digital distribution interface, where everyone has access. And it must allow that indie developers have access to all the same tools and features that do professional developers, such as Achievements, special promotions and so forth. And even better, they should open the development of their development tools and services to the lead users, who can help shape an even better marketplace, interface, distribution and promotion strategy for tomorrow.

If one wish to harness the truly great and relatively cheap power of the indie game community, one must learn that it requires true passion, true commitment and true collaboration. These are people who are pouring hours upon hours of their free time into products that could eventually turn one’s own product or service into the dominant factor of the market, and they must be treated with the same heart that they develop games with. Anything else is hypocritical and bound to fail.

Cloud Gaming was introduced to the world with OnLive in June 2010 and, despite a fair amount of skepticism, the entrant competitor has proven to be a force to be dealt with, receiving attention from a still greater sum of investors.  The idea of the Cloud is a major buzzword today, being wildly attractive and in everyone’s interest, but the fact that most cloud solutions mainly revolves around data storage and certain server-side calculations, OnLive has taken a major step forward in the true Cloud-isation of at least gaming.

Technologically, the feat is nothing short of incredible. The main concept is incredibly simple, but still seems sci-fi to most of us. The fact that the client computer just sends input – keystrokes, mouse movements, touch and so forth – to a powerhouse server park and receives pure audio/visual data to display may not seem like a big deal, but when it all happens at around thirty frames per second, processing complex graphics and artificial intelligence, and sends it all back and forth within seconds, its breathtaking.

I first had my go with OnLive last fall , when I suddenly found out that it wasn’t region-locked anymore. While I expected fairly heavy lag as a result of US-only server farms, I was pleasantly surprised. Extreme speed games like Unreal Tournament 3 and general mouse behavior felt a little too off to truly enjoy, but keyboard-controlled games played like a breeze, and I quickly became occupied with defending my cores in Defense Grid Gold. It ran perfectly smooth.

Most people today seem to ignore Cloud Gaming as nothing more than a niche, as they believe that the lag time, no matter how small it may be in reality, will still sufficiently annoying to allow for a switch between local processing to cloud processing, at least in regards to games. But in my eyes, the technological leap that has been made within the last year proves that, while services like OnLive might initially appeal to certain niche markets and demographics, it will over time come to be the preferred way. Simply because it already offers features that far outshines local processing – such as high and frequent hardware costs – and over time will reach satisfactory performance in every aspect for 99% of the gamers out there.

It follows perfectly in the footsteps of Clayton Christensen’s model for disruptive innovations, initially delivering worse performance in some regards, but will be appealing to certain niches that have suffered from performance oversupply. If we think of the amount of netbooks and low-spec computers  that populate both less tech savvy people in the western world and most of the developing countries, demanding games are simply not an option. OnLive services as a perfect service for those that want to move past light, browser-based games and into rich and compelling 3D universes.

While the future for Cloud Gaming may be fuzzy – will OnLive become the dominant player, who else will enter the competition, what are the optimal business models, et cetera – I cannot but see it as the future. For some players, for some genres, for some game experiences, client processing may always be the only solution, but for the mainstream, the majority of consumers that shape the development of any industry, Cloud Gaming will become the de facto standard as I see it. But it is a future that takes a strong amount of  confidence to see… and I for one am excited to see, which of the current dominant competitors in the industry are brave and open-minded enough to see it in due time.

Today when I boot a newly bought game for my Xbox 360 I’m prompted on the first day for an update. It might not weigh more than a couple of megabytes, but it’s there and something in my game is changed (although that information is rarely highlighted). Just recently, I put on FIFA 11 and despite being half a year old and only on the shelf for about a month, it had received an update. Now, according to the doomsday prophecies of 2005, this should mean that the initial release was garbage and full of errors. But today, I feel more enjoyment from patching than I’d ever thought.

In this day and age where the internet has washed across everything in existence, the idea of a “static” object has begun to vanish. Products are released in early phases and slowly formed by their use. A recent example in the world of games is Minecraft, which has benefitted hugely from its organic development approach. We see Google constantly releasing new beta products, where any infant problems and quirks are overshadowed by the fact that you get access to new and exciting technology. And every time our smartphone is hit with a new shadow, we rush to try it out.

I’ve always enjoyed updates. I’ve always been one of those people that didn’t mind eventual problems that would follow from being a first-mover. As soon as I saw an update for windows, a new driver for my hardware or a new patch for a game, I instantly downloaded and installed it. And today, more than ever, I feel we have moved towards a patch generation of players. We love updates. And we cannot get enough.

Are we less tolerant of the content that is initially released? Probably not. Going out and buying a game for $50 or $60 still employs a high quality bar for most players, but we’ve almost come to expect a regular rollout of updates, depending on the popularity of the game. One, single release simply isn’t enough anymore. Both in terms of the often-debated Downloadable Content and the always free patches – mostly containing fixes and minor additions and enhancements, rarely any new content – many players have turned away from looking at post-release update with anger, being excited instead.

I had no clue what the FIFA 11 update the other day was for. But it didn’t really matter. More than anything, it showed that the game was still alive “out there” and work was being put into it. And maybe that’s enough. The centuries-old Diablo 2 recently received a long awaited patch – maybe the oldest patch in history of single-player games – and more than anything this patch is a signal of commitment and caring. Even if the changes were minor, it could still make me return to a game just to feel the impact.

While Downloadable Content has now become part of any serious post-release strategy for games, I still feel that patches can be neglected as a burden and a necessary evil for the developer, not providing anything valuable. But really, the signal value itself – we have made changes because we care – can create many deeply loyal fans that always will come back for more, patches and new releases alike. And that’s valuable!

Yet, according the findings of my Master’s Thesis, Sony is heading down a catastrophic path. While the NGP may perform well in the market – although not become a breakaway hit like Wii or Kinect – it will be a costly failure for Sony in the long run, losing even more ground to new players and even their strongest competitor, Nintendo.

In the thesis-developed framework for strategic innovation, Innovation-Driven Development, we defined a innovation-assessment matrix, which defined four categories of innovations based on their level of radicality and disruptivity. The least attractive and profitable of these are “Pushing the Envelope”, which are radical innovations with little to no disruptivity. While they can garner much attention from their groundbreaking technology, they are resource-heavy and expensive innovations, merely pushing the envelope of the existing paradigm – which may already be on the verge of exhaustion. As history shows, paradigms are often destroyed by newer and more exciting paradigms, which may initially appear less attractive in many regards, but carry a promise of a better future. The current switch from fluorescent lights to LED is one such example.

The Nintendo Wii effectively introduced a new paradigm in the console space. They surprised everyone, especially Sony and Microsoft, but introducing new value propositions through a motion-based control scheme and a low entry price, while ignoring the race of state-of-the-art graphics and all-in-one media features. After the sales success was obvious, Microsoft and Sony fumbled to catch up with Kinect and Playstation Move, but while Microsofts counter-attack as effective by establishing a new paradigm, Sony became an obvious follower. A signal of downfall.

The same can be said in regards to the NGP. While it boasts many attractive and state-of-the-art features, it does not bring anything new to the table. Conflictingly, it displays a lack of focus, pulling together as many currently hot trends and features as possible, old and new. Front and back touchpads, analog sticks, more social features than you can imagine, a super high resolution screen, the best mobile processor available, and much more. But none of this carries a new and unique vision. None of this breaks any paradigms. It is a pure example of a stumbling reaction to competitors, trying to overdo everyone, but only reacting. Leaders don’t just react, they show new ways.

Not that there’s anything wrong with incremental and radical innovations and improvements and reacting to the competition. Leaders must still do this, but when the current paradigm is showing weaknesses – PSP have not faired particularly well outside of Japan and the mobile gaming space is on a trajectory to becoming the dominant player – the solution is not to continue pushing the envelope. Nintendo, at least, is trying to differentiate themselves with glasses-free 3D – an aspect that Sony despite their 3D push in the living room have neglected for NGP. Essentially, the NGP is a classic example of a dominant player slowly losing its grasp on a market, and instead of trying to be clever and create a competitive advantage through a disruptive innovation, they use heavy resource spending to try and stay ahead of competition.

In one of the books used in the thesis, Competing for the Future by Prahalad & Hamel, a very illustrative metaphor were used to describe this exact case. Despite being military superior in almost any way, the US still lost the long and exhausting war in Vietnam. The reason, according to Prahalad & Hamel, was simple: because the US had the resources, they fought back against the unexpectedly hard resistance by pouring more and more of the same at the enemy. More soldiers, more advanced weaponry, more machinery etc. Little did it help. The Vietnamese opposition, on the other hand, having few resources, used the abundance to their advantage; they changed the face of warfare by using the jungle and simple, but clever tricks to fool the superior american army. It wasn’t expensive or difficult. But it required that you looked at warfare differently and not necessarily believe that more is better.

While the Playstation Suite announced at the same conference may be a sign of clever thinking at Sony, the NGP is one of the strongest example of a failure in the making. It may contain anything any gamer would ever want today, but it does not carrier its vision of tomorrow. Instead of trying to be simple and clever and discover new directions, Sony are, just like the american army in Vietnam, merely throwing more of the same at the market. It didn’t work with the PSP. It won’t be any different for PSP2.

So now I’ve settled with this theme. It might not be perfect, but hopefully it will improve over time, and now, besides finishing my thesis of course, I will focus on producing all the content. Which means a detailed Curriculum Vitae and full descriptions of all the various games I’ve developed over time.

Deadline: end of February.

At the same time, it also my aim to use this site for a steady stream of blog posts on the topics of strategy and project development within the games industry. My about-to-be-finished thesis have recently fueled a range of subjects I wish to dwelve further into, so hopefully it shouldn’t be too difficult getting it started… but you know how it can be with new year promises

I hope you’ll enjoy what you find on the page, and be sure to return now and then for new posts (or make it easy and subscribe to the RSS feed!)

Cheers, Jesper