Bossa Studios: Anti-Social Gaming

Roberta Lucca, Bossa's head of marketing, is very clear about the difficulty involved in getting core gamers to look at a game on Facebook. Monstermind's first public showing was at the Eurogamer Expo, where it was sandwiched between huge stands for Rage and The Old Republic. The fact that Bossa was at the Expo at all speaks volumes about the sort of gamers Lucca is targeting, but Monstermind generally attracted more interest when running in full-screen, with no Facebook branding in sight.

Bossa acknowledges that making a genuine difference to social games means disregarding pre-conceived notions of what they 'should' become. Audience reaction will play a key role in that process, of course, but Bossa is an open-minded employer when it comes to necessary skills. One employee has a masters degree in robotics, another a masters in anthropology and Olifiers believes that any subject that relates to, "the way things work and the way that people behave," can be useful in pushing social games forward.

"Obviously you have the uber-talented coding ninjas, but there are a lot of people in this building whose technical skills...basically they have to use word processors and e-mail," Bithell agrees." It's more about what's going on intellectually, more about those thought processes."

"I think actually you can have a breadth of skills and abilities in the company that don't need to be focussed on computer science. I read an interesting article that was a few industry people saying that they don't want anyone that doesn't have a degree in computer science, which I think is closing the door a little bit."

Not that veteran design talent is in short supply, of course. Indeed, late last year Bossa pulled one of the hiring coups of 2011, successfully courting the Japanese industry veteran Yoshifusa Hayama. A former vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment with experience on classics like Shenmue and the Final Fantasy series, Hayama is arguably the most high-profile example of AAA talent making the transition to social development. What's more, he was working on Fumito Ueda's long-delayed The Last Guardian at the time.

From a game design point-of-view this is where the cool work is to be done. I've worked in a lot of genres, and honestly the best that you can do is not mess it up, to a certain extent

Mike Bithell, lead designer

"I wanted to send him back to finish it," Bithell jokes, but despite working side-by-side with Hayama for almost two months now, both he and Olifiers still seem amazed at what Bossa has achieved.

"We had this friend in common. He said, 'I have this friend, Yoshi, he works in games.' And I said, Who is Yoshi?'" Olifiers explains. "Then I looked it up and [Jaw falls open]. He was coming to England to spend a week here and my friend set up a chance for us to talk. So we met, in a bar in Shoreditch, and we did the sales pitch for him, right? This is what we stand for, this is what we plan to do, and at that stage we had Monstermind up-and-running already - not launched, but up-and-running - so we could bring him back to the studio and actually show him."

On that particular day, the team was engaged in a long, intense discussion about a huge lizard creature and what its method of attack should be. Hours of talking and dozens of tweaks later, Hayama had made up his mind. In an interview session following his arrival, Hayama said that social gaming needed a "masterpiece" to help remove the stigma. In his view, Bossa had that potential.

"From a game design point-of-view this is where the cool work is to be done," says Bithell. "I've worked in a lot of genres - predominantly platform games, third-person action games and that kind of thing - and honestly, the best that you can do is not mess it up, to a certain extent. There are great games in those genres, and your job is to keep up."

"Whereas every day is an opportunity to innovate within the social space, because there are solutions to problems but there's nothing solidified yet. It can all be played for. We can have a conversation in the office, have that awesome idea, then we can see it in-game a few weeks later, and then we can see how it does in the world after."

"It's a very exciting model for a game designer. And to have that instant feedback; to not have to watch Metacritic and become terrified that other people won't like it, but to actually be able to say, 'Do they like this? No? Okay, let's work it out and fix it.' It's a whole new way of working."

Despite the obvious achievement of a UK start-up hiring a developer of such pedigree, Hayama's arrival still wasn't enough to break through the core audience's resolve to hate social games. With the specialist press on full alert for news of The Last Guardian virtually every major site ran the story, and the comments threads made for interesting reading.

"People were foaming at the mouth," Olifiers recalls. "'This guy's a sell-out! What the hell is he doing?' So [core gamers] were complaining that Facebook games were crap, and they were complaining about a company that realised and was trying to hire talent to make Facebook games that weren't crap."