Casual Gaming, Passive Gaming

March 21st, 2006, By Duncan Gough

I must finish this post without falling back on any kind of joke about Passive Gaming giving way to the next wave of mass casual gaming, called Horizontal Gaming. So passive it’s asleep! That kind of thing..

I have found my new favourite blog, m3mnoch. From reading these four blog posts, I am immensely impressed. Not all of it I agree with, but the ideas are very, very interesting all the same.

Primarily, the concept of Passive Gaming is strikingly similar to what I’ve been calling MCOs, Massively Casual Online games.

“Passive web games are brilliant because they fit into your life in the same slot as checking your email or checking the sports scores or checking your portfolio. its hitting a site. clickity, click. okay. my turns are done for the day. and youre done.

its persistent. its massively multiplayer. its comptetitive. its social. its portable. its passive.”

First of all, the important distinction being made here is between downloadable casual games and browser-based web games. Mainly due to the difficulty in defining casual gamers and an unwillingness among developers to cater to what appears to be an un-educated demographic, the casual games label can be applied liberally, and yet web games often get dismissed as just advergames. Advergames that make a lot of money, hit their targets and appeal to a very similar audience though, it has to be said. For example, when people talk about the big portals, they rarely mention the web-game focussed MiniClip in favour of portals that offer downloadable games, like MSN Games.

What I saw last year, in talking about MCOs, was the similarity between many Web 2.0 applications and the browser-based games portals, like Grab.com. As the web 2.0 bubble has grown, social software is becoming mainstream and, to a large degree, catching up with the community features on offer in many games websites. This presentation clearly demonstrates this (and is way ahead of me), even in the subtitle – ‘applying game mechanics to functional software’. In it, Amy Jo Kim defines five ways to game your webapp. Namely collecting, points, feedback, exchanges and customisation. For a web game portal, that’s bread and butter, especially when you think about high score tables and avatars. Indeed, one of Amy Jo Kims’ points is that once you define the value of social interaction and user feedback, you can then start publishing tables and giving every user a ranking.

Passive Gaming, then, seems to be a much better definiton of browser-based online casual games. Games where you don’t play in isolation on your desktop, where you’re limited to 15 to 20 minutes of dedicated play. Passive Games are immersive and form part of your daily routine. A web based online casual game can be played in anything from 1 to 5 minutes. They’re short bursts of fun and activity where your continued presence acts like your avatar in a persistent online world. 99% of passive games have scoreboards and it’s there that your short burst of play is recorded, making each turn act as a ping that tells the other players you’re still around. I’ll talk about this game meta-data in another post as the parallels it draws with social software is starting to be fully recognised and I think that games should aim to learn from it as much as the new breed of webapps do.

With regards to Passive Gaming, though, there is one element m3mnoch has not expanded on, and it’s the most crucial. Whilst he is correct to say that web games are the stickiest content around, meaning people will remain on and return to your site for a long time, it is the element of competition that I believe drives them to do that. With web games, high score tables are the obvious expression of this. With social software, it is the collecting of friends on Myspace, the seeding on exclusive news on Digg and Newsvine. Broadly speaking, the generation of fresh content which is the lifeblood for most social software websites just so happens to be exactly what drives users to take part and return to the website, over and over. On a games website, the generation of new scores and especially of high scores, is the lifeblood of competition and feeds into the whole ‘collect them all’ mentality that is so appealing.

Elsewhere, m3mnoch also questions whether niche MMOs can really work, to which the answer is clearly ‘yes’.

“me? i really think the niche mmo market will grow into being web based. more passive (not casual) play. and not, i repeat, not flash or java or anything else. the world you inhabit would be the entire website. login in periodically from any browser to make adjustments as necessary.”

The proof of this is already there. Audition has millions of users (it’s niche but it isn’t web based). However, Go-Pets, Neopets, Puzzle Pirates and Habbo Hotel are niche, web based and also have plenty of users. What’s missing from all of these is the fully integrated web site. Whilst I think that a flash component is crucial to their success, I wholeheartedly agree that a successful passive mmo, a true MCO, would have a complete and useful website behind it. Then again, aren’t we both talking about the magnificent Kingdom of Loathing?

Finally, to take the definition of Passive Gaming on a bit further, I’d like to see an implementation of ‘lazy co-op’ play included. Ad-hoc group play would be a great feature to implement and perfectly fits with the ethos of social gaming. If we’re creating a massive, passive virtual world then opportunities for meeting new people and playing together are huge. It’s got to be lazy though, there are plenty of people who will want to play on their own, just as there are plenty of people who will join a group only to disrupt it. As much as passive gaming should encourage lazy co-op, it needs to be ad-hoc so that it can support a consistent brand of massively single-player gaming, when you just want to play by yourself.

Oddly enough, the key phrase that made me realise how relevant co-op play could be came from a post that I just Googled. The phrase was ‘virtual couch’, here’s the post Halo 3 is an FPS MMOG and, er, it’s written by m3mnoch.

One comment

« Casual Game MMOs/usr/bin/playsh »