Things I Hate About Web Games

I'm coding again, and somehow that also means doing "research" - playing new games for a bit. A friend suggested I check out Lord of Ultima, since I like Ultima and also played Travian for a year. I also wound up playing some Facebook games, and checking out some of the other online, browser-based RTS games, including Ikariam and Nile Online. I've played Evony before, and I checked into a few other real-time strategy multiplayer browser-based games, like NationStates and Monopoly City Streets.

I've got a few major complaints against these games. The time element tends to suck in these games. The facebook games are spam-based. Help and tutorials tend to be abysmal, and goals are rarely well defined. Tack on some obsessive play-to-pay rules and I don't wonder that they're not all making bank.

Time Element

The worst sin is the time element; you can't log in and play. Log in, hang out for a bit, watch, scroll around the map, contemplate your navel - then 10 minutes later you make a move. Great! Now wait another 10 minutes before you can move again. Most people play games because they want to play games; stuff like Lord of Ultima and Travian both are centered around a mechanic where you can't make any moves for hours. I'm on my fourth day of LoU and I have to tell myself not to play, because it's a waste of time. Come back in three hours.

Nile Online does this a bit worse, because the first thing you do is stare at the map trying to figure out wtf is going on. I'll get to that later, but when you finally do read the primer, it's basically "click some stuff for about 3-4 minutes, then go get caffeine. Come back in 20 minutes cuz you won't be able to do shit for 20 minutes." You read about it, looks like fun, sign up, play for 5 minutes -- then you're done. Quit. Go do something else now, please!

They like to compare themselves to a garden or other sort of tend-it-here-and-there activity. But if you wanted to, you could go out to your garden and weed & plant & water & fertilize & fence for hours, for a whole day. And if you run out of stuff, it's easy to leave for a day, because it's not a game. You can't really tend a real garden every 10 minutes, but these virtual gardens want you to do just that. Games are fun, and can be addictive - but an addiction that you can't feed is lame. Stupid. Why do you make me hate you?

The thing to do is to log in and chat with your buddies, possibly spending your evenings chatting - while occasionally making a move or two. That's what I did in Travian, and that game did tons of things right to make such socializing possible. Coordinating with other players is a big part of the game, and it's easy to make friends there. The stuff you have to do can be done in batches, once or twice a day, so it's easy to log in and putter around for a couple hours, chatting while you wait. Raiding, especially, is something that you can kind-of-actively do: send out some raids, wait twenty minutes for them to come back and chat while you wait. Poke around your other villages.

It sucks if you're lonely. One thing WoW did very right was to allow solo gameplay. Want to log in and play for a bit? Sure! There's quests, farming, crafting, the auction house - tons of stuff to do. If you're not max level, questing solo is cake! The game is made for it. These browser-based games? Bzz! Sorry, you're not wanted! Give your money to someone else, please.

spam

Facebook games are a bit better in the time-wasting department. They can be played in 20-30 minute chunks, then you run out of energy or mana or whatever. That's a great model; 20-30 minutes of constant fun, no waiting, and then a clear indicator that I should go do something else for four hours.

Nile Online was offensive with its 5 minutes of initial gameplay. After playing it for a week, I'm a bit more at ease with the 5-minutes-here, 5-minutes-there model, but it's not really a game. It feels like the tend-me-occasionally garden that it wants to be - but it's not really a garden. Guh. I'm not really drawn into that gameplay model. Maybe you'd like it, there's others out there that seem to like it, but I think my time with that game is over. Not my cup of tea, but at least I'm not saying it's a cup of piss.

Anyway, back to spam.

The big downside to the facebook games is that they're asking me to spam all my friends with a half-dozen or more posts in my 30-minute play session. Optimum play requires being one of those boring jerks that spams all their friends with crap. And I'm not going to be that guy; most of my facebook friends don't play these games. I'm not going to crap on their wall with what are, effectively, ads. Multiple times a day. In sets of 5+ posts.

Which doesn't address the fact that all of the facebook games I've tried so far are slot machines. I ranted a bit about that when I talked about designing fun, so I'll leave it alone for today. A slot machine that asks me to piss off my friends? Fuck you.

Help and Tutorials

Mostly these games seem to be built by companies that get the idea to clone someone else's popular game, shove it out the door, then start collecting money. Game design? We've got artists to make the pixels, that's game design, right?

Tutorials are essential in complex games. They're a way of taking what can be a forbidding mess and make it appealing to new players. Another alternative is to start with a simple, obvious game and gradually add complexity to it. One of my favorite city-building games, the Settlers series, does this great. It's the gameplan for PC-based RTS games: start the player off with a few tools, let him learn to use them through the play of a scenario, then add another tool or two in the second scenario. Somehow the makers of all these browser-games never learned that lesson, or didn't bother to apply it. They throw every single tool at you in the first five minutes. Confusing = lost = bored = quit = zero revenue. Negative revenue, after including the costs of hosting that player's little play session.

Nile Online has a Primer, not an in-game tutorial. It got me started, but it didn't mention the heart of the game: upgrade stuff, balance your workers, and upgrade your palace to get more workers. That's its core gameplay. Yeah, sure, you eventually choose a specialty good and make your mark in the world that way - but that's not what you do.

Games should explain what you do as well as what you strive for. They tend, generally, to put the shine on the game's goals, how the game can be fun, but don't teach players how to play the game. That's a great way to lose players! Someone went through the work and commitment to try your game out, create an account, and start playing - keep them playing! Show them the light!

Some of the games do have good tutorials, not all are necessarily bad. The worst documentation is reserved for the goals (see next section), but I wanted to split that out so I could talk about it more. Travian, Lord of Ultima, and Ikeriam all have decent tutorial/quest chains that get you started. They don't tell you where you're going, but they do tell you how to look busy.

Goals

Some games define their goals well (like Nile Online), others have good tutorials. The most popular games, though, feel like time-wasters because they don't explain their goals. Lord of Ultima seems to be grossly negligent in this way, mostly because it doesn't actually have a goal. The "goal", if any, is to "win" the game - apparently by being Rank 1 when it ends. Maybe it doesn't end? Maybe the server keeps going? Who knows? They apparently don't. So why are you playing?

"To have fun!" Ugh. These aren't games, they're toys - but competitive toys. Someone can come into your sandbox and kick over all your castles. That's one reason why people hate Travian and quit. It markets itself as a sort of multiplayer sim-city, but that's not what it is at all. That's a fucking lie. It's a competitive game. The goal is to help your alliance build up enough members, cities, armies, and allies to grab some plans, build a world wonder, and defend it against the other alliances. It's a team game! It's a fun team game! (One that just happens to have really bad time-demand issues.) Travian really should push what it's about. It doesn't. It does something really well, and they should brag about it. That's what I mean by goals: tell everybody what their goal is! Tell them how they, too, can be great!

"Do whatever you want!" I don't want to do whatever. I'm looking for a game - something with a goal, a way to win. What's your way to win? Nile Online does this somewhat well; it doesn't have a "win" condition per se, but it does lay out the promise of being a notable player. Everyone in the game has their own specialty; everyone can be special. That's a great promise, especially since everyone wants to be special and well-known.

To be clear: I'm saying it's a bad thing to refuse to specify goals. There's games, then there's toys - sandboxes. Trying to do both tends to piss off players; doing both well is extremely difficult, such that I seriously recommend not trying. Especially if you're gonna half-ass your way through the design process. Lord of Ultima is kinda bizarre in this respect, until you figure out what must have happened. Some suit must have said "Travian is popular, Ultima is IP that we want to make money from, throw a bunch of money at this!" They then refused to hire an experienced designer (or to listen to the one they hired) and built a pile of shit.

Play-to-pay

The idea of microtransactions is to give players some cool little doodad that they can buy with just a wee bit of money. Make it optional, so that people can still play your game for free (or cheap), but allow the guys willing to spend money a chance to set themselves apart.

Travian does this well. For about $5 a month, you can double your monthly growth. You only buy a small percent increase in production, but because the game basically runs on compounded growth, a small percent each day translates into integer multiples in strength each month. But if you don't pay, you can still contribute to your team's success. Plus, by spending a bit more over that, you can jump around a bunch of other restrictions.

The last is probably the worst microtransaction model. You don't want to make gameplay annoying, and then offer to make it less annoying for a small fee. The correct response by a player to that offer is "fuck you, I'm gonna go play a different game." This is one reason why WoW has gradually reduced the level when you get horses. Travel is a pain in WoW. At low levels, it doesn't matter too much because everything you do is right there. But at some point, you have "enough to do" in the game world that you want to travel further - and getting there by foot sucks.

But browser games often commit worse microtransaction sins. The thing you buy with money is the actual game itself. The facebook games I've tried are all like this. The game that you play for free is a slot machine version of Progress Quest: pull the handle, get your chips, and brag to all you friends about how many times you pulled the handle. (WoW is kinda this game, in that you get to brag about your level, but there's strategy to killing mobs; it's not just a button-press.)

Alternately, a player can spend $50 and get a sandcastle where they can build a cool little diorama to show to their friends! Now that sounds like fun. Give me some cool diorama parts, let me find (or better yet, quest for) some rare parts, and let me create something cool. Plus, show me other people's cool dioramas, so that I can be encouraged and inspired to create my own!

but wait! You gotta pay for that!

Ugh. It's bait-n-switch. It looks like a treasure-hunting game, or a farm sim, or somesuch - but it's actually a very expensive dollhouse. Why not just get rid of the slot machine? Or, better yet, let me choose to go questing for the parts I want? And replace the 'slot machine' with something that requires strategy?

-conclusion-

Yeah, in conclusion: that last paragraph. I don't mind microtransactions. Some games, I am willing to pay a bit to be stronger, to get something cool. Others are diversions I don't enjoy enough to pay for - which really means they're sucky games.

A cool browser game would be one that's (1) not a slot machine, but requires some strategy in its play, (2) allows players to specialize the way in which they're awesome, and (3) lets me play in meaty chunks. Tell me (4) how to play, and (5) what my goal is.

Game audiences are a stochastic thing. Some people are willing to pay for the diorama. Others get caught up in building their little world and don't mind paying a bit extra for it. Others have addictive personalities and get sucked in by slot machines. And others are too stupid to realize that there are better games out there.

Like WoW. Bye, Treasure Isle / Lord of Ultima / Nile Online, time for me to start getting ready for Cataclysm.