My Mum has started playing Castleville. “It’s alright,” she says, “but it’s no Ravenwood.” I should probably mention that my Mum is one of the most well-engaged social gamers I know, playing for 3-4 hours a night and up to 8 hours on weekends, although she’s not the type of user most developers care very much about since she’s never spent a cent on premium currency.

That said, as a 59-year old female she fits so ideally smack-dab into the target demographics and her Facebook game addiction is so established that whenever she has something to say about social game design I listen. Also, she’s my Mum. It helps that she’s got pretty good taste and she knows what she likes.

“The best part about Ravenskye and Ravenwood is the story stuff” according to Mum. “You mean the wedding missions, that sort of thing?” “I guess so, but more like the funny things the characters say and the whole bigger mystery you have to figure out.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of story in games lately, and I’m not the only one. Last week I attended an interesting discussion in the UX/UE and web design community on the art of storytelling – interesting as much because it was a tech group having the discussion as for the insights on how the storytelling functions as an innately human impulse for organizing and transmitting information. Designers and marketers of all stripes are rediscovering story as a tool to communicate their message effectively, memorably and meaningfully.

Narrative is hot right now. Telling stories to convey information is powerful, and what’s more, it’s something we’ve been doing to engage one another since humans lived in caves. So hearing it directly from a hardcore social gamer like my Mum hit the point home: narrative is a fundamental, crucially under-utilized resource in social game design.

Zynga has stolen (I’m not even going to bother with softer words like “borrowed” or “mimicked”, y’all know how Zynga rolls) a great deal from Ravenwood and repackaged it in Castleville as “Gloom” – an undeniably brilliant gameplay concept that introduces an element of exploration and discovery, danger and the need for protection (exploited well by lolapps and not so well by Zynga), all while providing a neat and intellectually congruent conceit for staged quest progression.

But Zynga’s Gloom lacks a critical element of Ravenwood’s creepy forest and Ravenstone’s mysterious mine – a mythology. Sure there are layers of missions and a vague sense of forboding as the player explores a darkened map section by section. But the writing just isn’t as well-developed so neither is the back-story of Castleville’s world.

In a freemium market where designers are trying hard not to be exploitative or predatory in the mechanics we use to keep players coming back, this should be a bolt of lightning. Story engages at an organic level, unlike compulsive behaviours forged in response to Skinner-boxes and random loot drops. A good narrative keeps players engaged (and even encourages them to skip forward) to find out what comes next.

If this seems like too much of a linear model for interactive media, you can view it in terms of mythology over narrative. Build a compelling back-story for your world and let players explore it in a non-linear fashion – the effects are the same. Users enjoy playing, but they will pay to progress faster because they crave more information. Nobody waits a week for their next TV episode in the era of torrents/Netflix. Now we are monetizing the desire for more content and more value sooner rather than a desire to skip laborious gameplay tasks – the classic criticism levelled at poorly designed Cow Clickers.

Maybe this approach only works for a certain type of gamer – I never used to understand why anyone would skip a cutscene in an epic RPG like a Final Fantasy or even a Metal Gear, for example. To me, those nuggets of story exposition were a better reward for my grinding than any stats or level boost. But I’m inclined to think that story has a bigger potential draw, rooted in human nature and the heart of what makes us “social” beings.

And even if I’m wrong, at least it works for players like me and my Mum.

Sometimes it feels like all anybody talks about these days is user acquistion. Well, I’m sure people still talk about popular YouTube videos, the weather and local sports teams too but not so much in the social game circles where I hang out. How to get people to play games and pay for them is a really big problem (apparently).

I’m not being facetious. Discoverability, positioning, monetization and platformization are largely fake words describing real challenges to the success of a game in today’s social ecosystem. The standard argument is that if you make a really awesome game in the woods and nobody is there to play it, your company is screwed.

So a lot of smart and creative people I know are banging their heads against ways to take the games out of the woods, adding hooks and viral channels and positing more social forests that actually sound kind of like suburbs where your neighbours are algorithmically populated by recommendations from your friends and acquaintances. And this is all very important and actually interesting to me as well, because I love mobile and nobody has done a social mobile network in a meaningful way outside of Japan yet. So I’m not denying that these questions and their solutions matter a great deal. There is just one thing that’s been worrying me.

In all this talk about helping users find and play awesome games, I’m losing track of the last time I heard anyone talk about the actual craft of making awesome games. Are we really so self-confident at our collective ability to make rad content again and again that the “awesome game” part of the equation can be completely taken for granted? Are we as game developers really that shit-hot? I raised my concern about this over work beers a few nights ago to a chorus of laughs and dismissals like “content is cheap” and “content is the easy part”. O RLY?

If content is so easy why do the majority of Facebook games suck so fundamentally? Why has nobody solved the glaring usability issues and disregard of Human Interface Guidelines prevalent across social game interfaces? Why are so painfully few developers in this space innovating in graphics or taking risks with visual art styles? Why are the set of themes and game mechanics narrower and shallower in social games than in any other genre? And why are we talking about driving players to such shitty games when we could be answering the above questions and talking about ways to make the games better? Tim Rogers (not my hockey-playing Coors-Lite-drinking friend Tim Rogers) came up with a lot of reasonable game design innovations in his Kotaku article about What Would Make Facebook Games Great which I would love to hear some actual Facebook developers debate and hell, while we’re at it let’s brainstorm some even better ideas because Tim Rogers is only one vegetarian journalist dude.

I almost wonder if it’s an issue of snobbery. Remember when all the “best” animators and 3D modelers wanted to work in film and turned their nose up at the games industry? Are there no UX ninjas and true game design heads interested in applying their expertise to innovate the social space? Are they being turned off by the overwhelming focus on numbers and marketing concepts like user acquisition? No talented creative person wants to be told “content is cheap” when there are obvious design challenges going unmet and areas the size of gaping chasms begging for innovation.

Because content isn’t cheap. And awesome games don’t just make themselves. A game like Superbrothers:Sword & Sworcery EP that takes risks with its art direction and gameplay while maintaining high production values is a singular rarity in our industry. And that is not only completely bewildering to me, it makes the focus on user acquisition over content appear quite disingenuous indeed.

I’m not naive enough to think that “if you build it they will come” is an applicable axiom in our current discoverability-challenged ecosystem. But insofar as monetization is concerned, building higher quality or even more niche content has big potential to dramatically increase conversion rates (something I’ve experienced personally in releasing a relatively polished niche game for teenage girls). If something is good and rare and connects with me I will pay for it and go out of my way to share it, viral or no viral.

Good content – and actually, fuck the word content here because it abstracts and trivializes what we are really talking about which is an experience – with the capacity to connect with people is hard to do, requires honesty, commitment and risk-taking as well as skillful execution, but has the potential to be inherently engaging in the way a host of viral gimmicky apps aren’t. Crafting engaging, compulsive interactive experiences is emphatically worth the effort. In this regard, content is still king and deserving of our respect as developers.

I’ve never been very good at games. My parents weren’t keen on us having game consoles in the house when I was younger (although for some reason Amstrad DOS games were okay?) so I spent a lot of time at other people’s houses.

I watched my friends and cousins and my friends’ Dads beat Sonic and Mario and Bubble Bobble. I spent a few weeks one summer co-piloting Ocarina of Time at my cousin Monica’s house – her with the controller in her lap and me with the Official Nintendo Player’s Guide in mine. Pre-internet!

My lack of skill was only compounded later on by first-person 3D and dual analog stick controls. I bought game consoles for my boyfriends and forced them to play my favourite games while I directed and formulated strategy. We’d stay up all night, exploring foreign worlds together – taking the bus to our job on the docks in small-town 1980s Japan, battling graffiti gangs in a cyberpunk metropolis and galloping across a barren wilderness to slay Colossi. I was obsessed with those games although I hardly ever touched the controller.

But I eventually started to feel a stinging embarrassment about my role as co-pilot. I could have an encyclopaedic knowledge of a game world but if I couldn’t even walk up a flight of stairs when somebody handed me a controller, could I call myself a gamer? Had I really “played” any of those games I’d marathoned throughout my teens? I eventually bought myself a copy of FFX to assuage my guilt and that was the first game I truly played by myself from beginning to end. It was glorious. Then I bought myself a DS, and a PS3. It felt good to finally spend money on my own hobby rather than buying gifts for whatever dude was in my life at the time.

However, as much money as I poured into my solo gaming hobby I never played as much as I used to when I was gaming as a co-pilot. I’d still get motion-sick after 10 minutes of first-person camera. And I think I sometimes missed the social aspect of local “multiplayer”. Maybe it happened concurrently with me “growing up” and starting to work in the games industry – two pretty big time-sucks that tend to prevent you from sinking hundreds of hours into playing games – but I found it curious nonetheless.

The other big factor was that the shame of being a non-gamer didn’t go away. Whenever someone offers me the controls of a game – which happens a hell of a lot when you and most of your friends are game developers – I have the impulse to run and hide under a rock. No matter how cool the game looks I usually don’t want to touch it for fear of being judged. Imposter syndrome! Oh no, I’m going to be shitty at your dumb platformer or puzzle game. Leave me alone, let someone else try. I’m going to be sick. It looks too hard. It looks too boring. I started to overcompensate by telling people “I hate games”.

Which is really a kind of weird thing to say when you make games for a living.

I’ve got a lot more to say about how my failed love affair with console games drove me toward mobile, and how I still have a problematic relationship with “games” even in that casual space, but this is already getting long so I’ll save those discussions for another day. What I really wanted to talk about today was Skyrim.

My boyfriend and I made plans to play it together – our first time playing games together which is a big step in a relationship, I’m told – and despite everything I’ve just written I could feel my brain buzzing all week with the excited anticipation of crashing out on the sofa with a boy I rather like, and immersing ourselves fully in a brand new world for SIXTEEN HOURS A DAY ALL LONG-WEEKEND OMG. Heavenly.

I was a little bit nervous that I’d be pathetically abysmal at the game and that I’d have to watch him play the whole time. I also worried that we’d have utterly different playing styles and I’d end up wishing I’d bought the game for myself. But we queued up to buy a single copy at midnight and proceeded to play all weekend – and though it’s not a perfect game, it was totally addictively fantastic fun. Weirdly enough, I think I hogged the controller a fair bit more than he did.

What changed? I’m slightly better at games now having played some by myself, and Skyrim’s not a twitchy shooter so I could kill some dragons just fine and contribute to our shared campaign. But really, the surprising thing was that not much had changed at all. Creating a character, discussing strategy and deciding where to go and what to do as a team is fun whether you have a controller in your hands or not.

This got me thinking about what really constitutes gaming anyway. The topic of internet walkthroughs came up at work this week and our lead designer admitted to checking online for hints every time she and her husband got stuck playing Machinarium. Which apparently was quite frequently, causing her to ponder why they even kept bashing their heads against the game at all!

I’m not sure if this was the case for my colleague but sometimes getting stuck can be fun in and of itself. Not if you’re stuck, stuck. As in sitting still and stagnating with no new avenues to explore. But if you have a co-pilot or co-gamer’s opinion to ask or a forum thread to investigate are you ever truly stuck, stuck?

I’ve long had the feeling that whatever information we’re able to glean from google and wikipedia and the like should be considered an extension of our personal knowledge base, if not an actual part of our brains. It’s clear in the case of job interviews – why force someone to memorize something they would obviously look up in a real on-the-job context? That’s a meaningless hoop to jump through. Test them on how well they look things up and apply ‘em! When’s the last time anybody memorized a phone number? We say we know our friends’ numbers even though we have them saved in our external devices. Perhaps the collective consciousness of the internet is just an external hard-drive to our brains – if we know how to access it competently and effectively enough.

And perhaps navigation of walkthroughs and strategy guides is another implicit puzzle to be solved in any given game. And perhaps a co-pilot’s use of natural language is essentially another interface for game input, albeit more nuanced than a controller.

This is a pretty emergent/”alternate reality” theory of gaming that I’m still puzzling out in my own mind. It’s entirely possible I’m confusing things by pulling in the issue of walkthroughs as well. The real question could be one of Human-Computer Interaction and the usability of our current console interfaces. But if games can be just as much fun when you’re directing somebody where to go as they are when you’re pushing the joystick to get there yourself, isn’t that a form of “play”?

Maybe I have been a gamer all along…

I thought I would try this out. This being “blogging” in its more verbose incarnation.

Sometimes I worry what tweeting and liveblogging is doing to my brain. All these years of taking pictures and captioning them in under 140 chars has trained me to document things rather than form opinions about them. I kind of miss having opinions. “Here look at this” is not an opinion. It’s confusing to not know how I feel about half of the information that floods my brain daily beyond a reactive impulse to like/share/+1 the shit out of it.

But the human brain is sort of a lazy bugger. Especially when it’s swimming in the vast and lazy sea of the internet with all these web 2.0 shortcuts like share and reblog buttons allowing us to not have to engage creatively with anything we read. I find myself using the +1 button an awful lot these days. Saying things like “QFT” and “I KNOW right”. And posting pics with Captain Obvious captions (admittedly funnier than full sentences/paragraphs but you KNOW right, amirite.)

So consider this a last-ditch attempt to save my neural pathways connected to thoughtful critique, the formation of discourse and more expressive, sophisticated communication in general. Hopefully I will make an effort to concretely articulate what I really feel and think here, and not just use the word “fuck” a lot.