All Change

I think that there are certain things we look at, as just gamers, about social games and we feel that there's a lot lacking. The game that we want to play just hasn't been made yet, so there's a big desire from us to push games in that direction, but at the same time I think we all have a healthy appreciation for the people that have come before us. There have been some amazing trailblazers, and they really opened a new market and a new consumer, and they've done it in a way that was non-intuitive for people who had been making games.

I think it would be a little foolish to come into the space and say, 'Look, I've been making games for 20 years, I don't need to learn anything new.' That, to me, is the excitement of new technology, new platforms and new business models - the ability to learn and bring your own kind of take. We don't want to compete with Zynga, we don't want to compete with Playdom, because that's not who we are. We bring something entirely different to the table, so ideally, the next three game launches that we have, you'll play them, you won't know who released them, and you'll be able to identify them as a Row Sham Bow game.

Well, I suppose there are things that have been done really well. All of the successful games and the successful companies really understand user experience and how to reduce friction points. There's no inherent investment in your game from consumers... So if they don't understand what the game's about, if they don't understand how to play it, if they're not having fun instantly, they're gone and they're gone forever. That was really cemented by playing a lot of those games out there.

I think what's lacking in a lot of those games is they're not really fun; they're very compulsive experiences but they're not very fun. Some elements of traditional game design are just lacking. The risk-reward calculus that you make in a game just is not really there on Facebook. So we wanted to create risk for players where they had to make choices, and then let there be consequences to those choices. That's the biggest thing we concentrated on with Woodland Heroes: we wanted an element of strategy, we wanted people to be in a loss state so that the wins would be that much more satisfying.

I don't know. I'm sure that Zynga has a ton of research around how much risk people are tolerant of, and I think some of it comes down to the sort of audience that you want to attract. Companies like Zynga and Playdom are going after mass audiences; they have to be aware of frustrating the players.

For inspiration, one of the places that we looked is to the classic arcade days: the risk-reward scenario was only 25 cents, you only ever have a quarter on the line, and as long as the game felt fair, and you felt like your mistake was the reason for some kind of failure, that represents challenge. People like mastery - it's a fundamental motivation for play, usually, the ascent to mastery.

We're not necessarily focused on attaching to 200 million people. I mean, it would be nice, but I think the kinds of games that we're going to make are going to serve a smaller audience.

Exactly.

The first focus in everything we do is to answer the question, 'Is this game fun?' And I think a lot of that comes from years and years of working on sports games, where the rules of the game are defined for you by the sport. When you present the sport to the user it has to be a really fun and engaging experience to keep them coming back year after year. The requirement for innovation around game mechanics in a sports game is very, very high. That unending focus on making a game the most fun experience possible is one advantage that we have.