Word Games
June 22nd, 2006, By Duncan Gough
As Game Tunnel noticed at the start of this year, there are plenty of downloadable word games available. And as I noticed last year, a large chunk of the online word games are stuck in casino and ‘adult gaming’ websites.
It’s a shame that word games have become the ugly cousin to Match Three, Grouper style games. Word games are notoriosuly hard to create and localise though, as Phil Steinmeyer has illustrated. Raph Koster calls it ‘don’t pile in your dressing until the game is fun‘, and this is where I think word games get discarded as too difficult in comparison to match three and card games.
PopCap, for example, clearly have a culture for rapid iteration which is something that their framework surely helps with. I think that this is why so many casual games actually aren’t that much fun to play. Recently I’ve found that there are so many of the same pick-up-and-go style games, that I don’t revisit them often. Nice idea, shame about the execution. This lack of addictiveness and shallow pool of ideas is really killing casual games – rapid iteration of game concepts is key to a games’ re-playability and it seems that, with the exception of PopCap who look like a jolly good publisher, agile game development just isn’t happening in large numbers.
For word games, to get back to my original point, it often takes so long sorting out a dictionary that gameplay and re-playability gets lost. Without a framework for building word games, that’s a classic example of a frustration loop.