Let’s talk a little about each of those. First, games where it’s actually way more interesting to not spend money on the game. You’ve all probably played one. You know, games where the most interesting challenge is to see how far you can get without paying money. Games where it’s way more compelling to figure out all the ways you can get the fancy gear or compete with the paying players without spending a cent. Games where all the challenge disappears when you pay, where a system that was before a crafty puzzle that you felt clever for solving just becomes dull and routine because you bought a fast track to the finish line. These types of games fail not because they aren’t good for the player but because the player, by definition, won’t enjoy spending money on the game. Why would they want to? Working around the pay system is often actually a more engaging challenge than the core game plan of these games and so the player never has a reason to monetize. In fact, it’s in their best interest not to.

While this may be a lot of fun for the player, at least for a little while, it fails completely as a monetizing strategy and that failure actually ends up having negative consequences for the players too. Without a high conversion rate or a substantial revenue from their users, most of these games tend to fade away or simply stop being supported by the company that built them. Because the game isn’t earning enough to justify the investment, the developers slow down the number of updates or simply cease adding new content all together, just letting the game continue to shuffle on and provide the last few drops of revenue it can until it does. That sucks for developers and players alike and yet it’s the inevitable result of that underlying design philosophy because while many such games are just the result of careless monetization design, many others were designed that way out of fear of being seen as the other type of Free2Play game; the game that feels like it’s extorting you.

We’ve all played that second type too. These are the pay to win games or the games that let you invest 20 hours and then hit you with a pay wall that essentially requires that you pay up to continue. These games stem from a design philosophy that doesn’t really consider you to be a player so much as a source of revenue. It’s game design done by accountants rather than designers and it’s inevitably destructive. It’s the complete divorce of play from pay and the worst thing is at first this type of monetization appears to work. Many of us have, at some point, grit our teeth and paid for some stupid thing we felt like a game was forcing us to pay for and we resented it and that niggling resentment stuck somewhere in the back of our minds and made the whole experience worse until at some point we hit yet another monetization squeeze and just threw up our hands and said screw you guys, I’m done.

This is the worst possible experience but because it forces monetization so hard it will get a comparatively sizable number of players to convert early on and so it will appear to be very successful until a year down the line when it becomes clear how many players it’s forced out of the game and how much it’s segmented its own community. This is the method that zynga went with in many of it’s games and this arc can very clearly be seen in many of its products. Unfortunately, because this method appears at first to work if you’re simply looking at raw numbers and because from a design perspective this doesn’t require a great deal of effort or skill from the team, the extorted version of Free2Play is something that much of the industry decided to emulate and this is what led to the bad reputation that Free2Play has gotten which in turn now drives many customers away from the Free2Play model entirely. That’s bad for everyone.

We have got to find a way past this manipulative strategy as it leaves us with nothing to build on from a business perspective and it’s becoming less and less effective anyway as consumers are getting savvier. How do we avoid the pitfall of making it more engaging for the player to game the Free2Play system than to pay money while at the same time not falling into the trap of making your player feel like the game is extorting money from them at every turn? Well, it’s different for every game but it all comes back to the central philosophy of creating an environment where the player’s happy to spend money on your game. Think about when you back something cool on Kickstarter or even buy something at a regular game store. You’re excited. You’re happy to spend that money for something that you’re just glad exists. Sure you might rather it be free, I mean that’s probably true about everything, but you don’t mind paying for it. In fact, you’re often very happy just to be able to buy that thing.

That’s what a player should feel in a good Free2Play experience. The best of these experiences feel like buying a toy or a model or something to treasure. Something that you want to own just for the sake of owning it and every time you look at it it makes you smile. For any of you who have played Warhammer or maybe even HeroClix, you know how that feels. Games like League of Legends really capitalize on this well. But things to own aren’t the only things we treasure, so are experiences. Sometimes the experiences games can sell us are big things like a new [inaudible 00:05:38] mystery in the Secret World, which I would eagerly buy and then lose myself in like getting a new season of my favorite TV show, but as a developer you can’t always provide that new large-scale adventure or episode so what else can we do?

Well, just as an example that I particularly love, there was an item I saw once in a Korean MMO called the money bomb and it was this item where when you used it it exploded into goodies like a popping pinata. Now, the buyer of the money bomb couldn’t pick up any of the goodies that popped out but everyone else around you could and people loved buying these things because someone would walk into town and throw one of these babies down and it would just turn into a party. The person who bought the money bomb would get tons of love from everyone around them and often other people would announce that they were going to go buy one too. Soon the town square just turned into an impromptu online festival. People loved buying these things. They enjoyed buying them. They didn’t resent the money spent or feel like they had to spend that money and it wasn’t actively more fun to not buy them. Fantastic design.

When building a Free2Play game, don’t think about the money first but build a good game and the money will come. Don’t base your design around fear of being perceived as extorting players either. Instead, build your game around finding joy for the human beings playing your game. What will make each purchase something the players happy to do? What’ll make each dollar spent feel completely worth it? What will make finally spending your money feel like buying that thing you saw in that store window and longed for every day for a year until you finally saved up enough to buy it? That’s where you should root your Free2Play design. That’s what’ll make Free2Play a great model for everyone involved.

We’re back. Now the first thing to remember when analyzing a game is that as game designers, we are scientists. We engage in the scientific method. We find a question we want to explore, we form a hypothesis, we test that hypothesis against empirical data, and then iterate on that hypothesis based on how it fits with the data we’ve acquired. Let’s start with a question. How does Bejeweled 2’s leveling system work?

First, we need to form a hypothesis and then test that hypothesis against a real world data you acquired from playing the game. For example, you might guess maybe beating a level is determined by the number of moves you make on that level. When you make enough moves, you progress to the next level. All right, so you’ve got your own hypothesis in mind? Awesome. Now pause us and go test it out.

You’re back? Cool. How did it go? Was your hypothesis correct? You probably found that progressing through levels is actually determined by the player’s score. Now we need to dig a little deeper. We’re going to try to understand if there’s a purpose behind this system. The first thing we’re going to do is establish how many points does it take to complete the introductory levels? It’s time to collect some data ie. play some games. Pause this, go beat the first six stages, record your score, and come back. Go.

All done? Great. Now to those scores. I’m going to do something here you should never actually do and I’m going to round these numbers a bit to make the math easier for the show’s sake but you should never do that. Bad designer. No.

All right. On to the numbers. To beat level 1, it takes 500 points. To beat level 2, it takes 1,500 points. To beat level 3, it takes 3,000 points. Level 4 takes 5,500 points. Level 5, 8,800 points. Level 6, 13,200 points.

A designer should always be thinking about how the player experiences the game. How does the player experience those numbers? What would we have to do to our current data set to make it more accurately represent the player’s experience? Well the player rarely starts at level 1 thinking, “Oh man, only 13,200 more points till I reach level 7.” No, no, no, no. They spend much more of their time thinking how long until I beat this stage. Were going to have to take the difference between each level value to see how long it takes to get from one level to the next, much more useful than simply looking at raw point values required to get to a given level. Pause, do the math, and come on back.

You got it? Here’s how the numbers should break down. It takes 500 points from level 1 to level 2. It take a thousand points to get from level 2 to level 3; 1,500 points to go from level 3 to level 4; then 2,500 points from 4 to 5; 3,300 points from level 5 to level 6; and to get from level 6 to level 7 takes 4,400 points.

Now that we know how many points it takes to get between the first few levels, we can say it gives us a weird, slow exponential curve. Now what? How do we make this data useful? Well, let’s return to the player. What other system affect how the player experiences this system? Well of course, the scoring system. Now we have something else we need to get data on. How many points does matching 3 gems on any given level earn you? How about matching 4 gems on any given level? How about matching 3 gems and chaining into another set of 3? Pause, grab some data, come on back.

You got it? Awesome. Matching 3 gems at level 1 will give you 10 points. Matching 3 gems at level 2 will you 15. Matching 3 gems at level 3 gives you 20 points, then 25 points, 30 points, and at level 6, it gives you 35 points. We see that all other block combinations simply give a multiplier to this match 3 base score. How does the player experience the conjunction of these two systems?

To put these two systems together, we’re going to have to divide the amount it takes to get to the next level by the amount of points that a base match 3 will get you on any given level. Now you may ask why we’re doing that. What will the number we get out of that mean? If you guessed it will define how hard the level is, you’re dead on. There’s another important variable here. What helps define difficulty? Your losing condition. In Bejeweled 2 classic mode, what’s the losing condition? When you can’t make any more moves.

Also worth noting is that at the beginning of every level, the board is shuffled. I’ll leave it to you guys to piece out why on average, making a valid move in Bejeweled leaves fewer total valid moves on the board. Just assuming that’s case, the number we’ve now come to, the amount of points to progress to the next level divided by the base points on a given level tells us directly numerically how challenging we can expect the given stage to be. What’s amazing about this system is the level of control over the difficulty it gives to the designer. You can see it right there in our initial data set. PopCap took a vaguely exponential set of numbers, used a completely linear number set to smooth out that exponential curve, and then tweaks the numbers wherever play test told them that players were having a hard time or not being challenged enough.

For example, if you’ve been doing all the math with us up to this point, you may have already noticed that the increase in difficulty from level 3 to level 4 is much greater than for level 4 to level 5. This relatively complex system is totally invisible to the player. To them, it simply feels like they’re progressing since the system is built to continuously increase the amount the player is rewarded and make them feel empowered without breaking the difficulty curve. In fact, its this system that let the designers construct Bejeweled carefully hone the challenge curve, but this entire system is dependent on the lose condition and board re-shuffling it every new level. A slightly lazier designer who didn’t shuffle the board between rounds would’ve created a totally different and probably inferior game.

The really incredible thing is that you’ll see players who’ve played a lot of Bejeweled no matter causal, no matter how uninterested in strategic thinking, playing around with this system. Ask any long time Bejeweled player, and they’ll tell you not to use your special gems until you need them since they carry over between levels. If you ask them why, they’ll probably tell you, “Well, because it’s better,” without a word about the math going on under the hood. The math ensures that that’s the way things work, and it also ensures that they get a sense of that for playing.

Also, if you really want to know how deep this rabbit hole goes, answer me this. How much harder is it to make your first match on level 5 as compared to level 1? That’s correct. No harder at all but your road for doing so is vastly increased. This system is even designed to make you feel like a bad ass every time you get to a new level just by the way they combine their point system and their lose condition.

You can see the depth of thinking that goes into making a good game, puzzle game, or any other kind. The next time you hear someone trying to claim that building little puzzle games like this is simple, you will know better. Just for the masochists out there, here’s a little easy homework assignment for you. See if you can figure out what they changed in Bejeweled 3 or the Facebook version of Bejeweled and then see if you can figure out why. If you’re ever feeling stumped, just come back to the golden question: how does the player experience this?

As a designer, you have to observe everything. If all you’ve taken down are just the words your testers said, you haven’t looked closely enough. The order that people give their feedback in, is almost as important as what they’re actually saying. It tells you what’s most important to them, and where in your experience they encountered these issues. Make sure to listen closely. You’re going to be naturally biased about your game. You have a set of things that you know are wrong with the game, that are on your to do list to fix, so when a tester describes something similar to a problem you already know about, it’s remarkably easy to subconsciously think, “Yeah, yeah, I know about that one. I’ve already taken care of it, no problem,” when they actually might have been talking about a different problem entirely.

Additionally, early testing gives you data that you’re going to need for later. Each time you test, you’re going to see if the adjustments you made to the game, made the issues you encountered better, or worse. To do this, you need as many data points as possible. The longer your trend line, the more in depth your understanding will be. One final word about early testing. You may be wrong about your game. Embrace that. You may well find that what you thought was the core engagement of your work, wasn’t what people actually found engaging. Don’t reject that, that is the most valuable data you can get. As anyone who has built a game will tell you, the earlier you make changes, large or small, the cheaper it is to make them. Don’t cost everyone else on your team weeks of work, just because you were afraid to playtest early.

Now, let’s go over a few quick and dirty rules of how to test. First, try and talk to your players as little as possible. Anything you say to them, biases them, and prevents you from getting good data. You may feel the need to explain your game before starting, but resist that urge. Let them take a crack at it, before you tell them what they should be doing. This will allow you to observe what they naturally want to do in your experience, and gives you a better sense of where they get stuck, or what needs to be explained. Once they’ve had a go, or 2, then you can inform them.

When observing them, listen carefully for when they vocalize. Anytime your game draws an utterance from them, a sigh, a gasp, a thoughtful hmm, you’ve either done something right, or something very wrong. Also, try and see where they spend most of their time looking in your game. It will give you deep clues into what they feel is important, and what data they felt like they had to spend most of the time processing. Admittedly, this can be a very hard one to do, and you’ll often have to resort to asking the player, unless you can get all high tech and have a camera set up to record the session.

Additionally, create a test survey, rather than trying to get everything from simply talking to your players afterward. This will not only allow you to get data from a lot more people at once, it’s also unbiased data that can be cleanly turned into metrics, if you give your playtesters a 1 to 10 scale question, which I highly recommend doing. It puts less of a burden on your playtester, than making them write out whole paragraphs. It gives you an easy way to know if you’re making changes for the better in future tests. Just watch to see if the numbers trend upward or down. Just be sure to leave the playtesters room for comments at the end too, because that’s also helpful.

When you do talk to your testers, just be aware that as human beings, we all have a tendency to jump to solutions, rather than stating the underlying problem. When a playtester offers you a solution, like, “There aren’t enough power ups,” really dig in, and try to establish what underlying problem they are trying to solve. You’ll often find, it’s something else like, “My gun doesn’t feel powerful enough,” which may require a totally different solution than the one they offered.

Lastly, be aware that we are all hardwired to avoid suffering, so make sure you’re testing in an environment where you tester feels okay walking away from your game. If you lock them in a room, or even have them in an environment where they feel socially compelled to play, they’ll try to make the best of it. They’ll try to get into your game. That will deny you one of the most important data points you can get, where your player gives up on your game, or walks away to do something else. Remember when you launch your game, you’re not only going to be competing with all the other games out there, but with every book, every movie, every TV show, even the the internet itself, so your game better be ready for it.

If you don’t have to worry about NDA’s, it can often be fun to grab several of your other game making friends, and test as a group. That at least gives your players other options for what to do with their time. Before we wrap this up, let’s talk about who to test with. Test with everyone, but know that the test results you get vary in value. For example, you are the worst tester of your game. You’re just too close to it. You’re naturally going to test your own game a thousand times over the course of its creation, but that sort of testing only goes so far. There’s all sorts of things that you’re going to get used to, things that will become second nature to you, that will seem totally alien to anyone picking up your game for the first time, so you need other people.

As a rule of thumb, if you think the difficulty on your game is just about right, it’s probably way too hard. Next, family and friends. Second worst testers. They’re biased, they can’t help it. Next comes the hard core. Hard core players are often the most willing to test but unless they’re the only audience you’re looking for, and they are a niche, you need to find other testers too. As hard core players, we simply have too much ingrained in us from the thousands of hours we spend playing these things. You’re really looking for people without preconceptions or biases. People who like games, but aren’t in any way invested in them. Strangers who owe nothing to you, or better still, know nothing about you.

Who makes the best tester? In my experience, little kids. They may not be your audience, but if they are, you can always count on them to be open, eager, and 100 percent honest. I hope that was useful, good luck honing those games to perfection.