INSIDE ZYNGA | BETA
BOB THE BUILDER Famed designer Bob Bates explains why building games for social networks isn’t evil
SO IF John Schappert shows Zynga can attract console/publisher talent, and Sean Kelly reflects Zynga's upstart web hero legacy, then Bob Bates is the smart answer to what the firm's detractors claim. He's the first to bring up the accusations made against Zynga, but is no paid PR voice. Now chief creative officer for external studios, he
started out by essentially vetting the company while a consultant. His job now also demands he bring a level of game design class, that Zynga's top brass likely realise their games need to become more sophisticated. And more legit. Bates calls himself a “roving game designer” at
Zynga. Formally, he oversees the traditional concept greenlight to pre-production and so on cycle. Informally that means regular chats with design teams across the Zynga business. He is, in essence, Zynga's Miyamoto. The designer has been active in the industry for
25 years, having overseen over 40 titles of varying types, and having written some well-known tomes on making games, and most recently working as a freelance consultant designer. Of course, this esteemed career many will see as the antithesis of what they think Zynga is – an unstoppable force of creative freedom meeting the immovable object of data-driven games creation. But you can marry strong design ethics with the analytics that helped social games get so big, Bates insists. “Yes, Zynga is a really metrics driven company,”
he confirms. “But we use those metrics in interesting ways.”
NUMBERS GAME He points out how The Pioneer Trail (formerly called FrontierVille), Zynga's social game set on the cusp of the American culture's geographic expansion across the Old West, grew creatively thanks to player data. Fittingly, the game pushed Zynga beyond the point of understanding that players love stories, not just clicking virtual items. The game launched in 2010, and its users soon became hooked on reading letters that they received from NPCs. “Zynga called me up and said 'We need more of
this story and narrative stuff as it turns out players just really like it.' That's what got me in as a consultant here. “That's a great example of metrics driving design,
rather than ruling it with an iron thumb. “The impression people have of Zynga is that we
have little dials and every time someone does something significant we twiddle them and change things to manipulate them. But it's really not like that.”
you look at a game that closely you learn things to take advantage of –where the balance was off slightly and where I could earn more XP than I was supposed to. But two weeks later that loophole would be closed. [Presumably by the dev team.] And that happened pretty damn often.” This helped open his designers eyes to the power
of free, social games. He explains: “People don't really understand that a
The impression people have of Zynga is that
we have little dials and every time someone does something significant we twiddle them and change things to manipulate players.
BETTER BY DESIGN Bates says he had heard all the bad claims about the company before signing his employment contract. “I was apprehensive – that's the best word. Like I
say, I consulted with Zynga for the last six months of 2010, because of that apprehension. You hear a lot of stuff about Zynga, and if you want to learn about a company like that from the inside, a consultancy gig is perfect. “But I very much liked what I saw, obviously.” He even dissected one of the firm's defining early
games, Mafia Wars, as part of his research. “I started playing it in November 2009 because a
European client was interested in that space. I was determined not to spend money on that game. Every time I wanted to spend money I would stop and ask why that was. So I slowly dissected that game, I ripped it apart until I was over level 2,000. That's a lot of Mafia Wars time, I can tell you. When
large part of what Zynga does is sell entertainment. “The real trick in social is to get lots of people
playing, and have them be happy for a long period of time. “There are different kinds of players, people who
play with different things in mind. We make money from the group of people that like to decorate and customise a space of their own. We make money from people who want to show off how good they are through special items. We make money from the competitive people, who want to be higher in the leaderboard so we sell them power-ups. “But a percentage – and I mean millions of people –will be happy to play for free. If you design in a broad enough way to keep that mass of free people happy, you will have those other groups emerge, develop, and spend.” Zynga is easily described as a bully. Its critics say it exploits the little guy, whether a developer it has 'taken' an idea from, or an individual buying virtual goods. But Bates flips that on its head. In his terms, every player is valued for contributing to the scale of an audience, and that's more important than what they are worth. “People can be viral and social and play our games en masse and grow the audience. Or they can give us money to get farther quicker. We don't really care which. They don't have to spend money – they might feel the urge to spend money to advance, but they don't have to, they can wait or be social. “It's just that in a Zynga game you can go as far in every direction as you want.”
ZYNGA SEATTLE Engineering and coding team formed in late 2010 to tap into the region’s rich games dev scene. Output includes Zynga’s first hidden object game Hidden Chronicles, launched in January this year and developed by “some of the most talented women in casual and social game design and entertainment”.
ZYNGA MOBILE UK Formed in 2009 as Wonderland Software by former Lionhead employee Matthew Wiggins. The studio created GodFinger for Ngmoco before being acquired by Zynga in April 2011.
ZYNGA TORONTO Canada. Zynga bought the assets of apps firm Five Mobile in July 2011, as part of its growing mobile ramp-up.
OMGPOP New York, USA. Formed in late 2006 as a social network and dating site with games. Best known for recent release Draw Something, then a whirlwind flurry of popularity. And subsequently Zynga’s “biggest buy”, acquiring the relatively small outfit for $180m. Now part of the Zynga New York office.
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