A Word On Facebook

(...and no, it's not about the privacy issue crap that everyone is talking about these days.)

It occurred to me the other day that Facebook has become a way of making everyone more immediately accessible (duh), but not just in the conventional "Oh hey it's that guy I went to high school with, I'm going to send him a message." sort of way. In a far more immediate sense, it's made at least a small portion of virtually everyone's existence accessible to whoever wants to access it.

For example, I was with a couple friends the other day, just out enjoying the sun on Granville. One friend mentioned in passing that he was kind of into this girl he'd met somewhere. Now, as recently as a couple years ago, that would have been pretty much the end of the conversation (possibly with the "Is she cute?" question thrown in somewhere.) Instead - since this isn't a couple years ago - we were lurking her Facebook pictures on my iPhone within moments, and concluded that she was a cutie and that he should go for it.

Is this weird? Well yeah, kind of. Is it extremely gratifying to be able to know things about someone - even things as simple as whether they're cute - instantaneously, on demand, wherever we are? You bet!

I for one think this kind of immediacy with others may prove to be beneficial. The more you know about someone, the harder it is to justify wronging them; hopefully, that means all this interconnectivity between strangers and friends-of-friends will result in a more tightly knit society as a whole. Am I pipe dreaming? Probably. But it's a nice thought, isn't it?

An Open Letter to Game Developers

So over the last few days, I've played through a bunch of the latest demos that have been released on Xbox Live. One thing was clear by the time I'd finished several of them: there is no consensus in the industry as to what a demo should contain. Everyone is including different content, different limitations, and different portions of the full game in their demos.

There is nothing wrong with this, generally speaking. It's nice to have that variety, and it's fun sometimes to not really know what you're getting when you download a demo. However, some things work a lot better in demos than others, and developers don't seem to be clear on what exactly these things are. So, here's a short list of things that make for an enjoyable demo.

1. Limit the experience, not the exposure

I'm going to pick on Skate 3 for a minute here, to make it clear what I mean by this. Fire up the Skate 3 demo, get through the menus, and you'll find yourself presented with some tutorials and missions, all of which take place in one fairly small skate park. Once you're done these missions (or even in between them, if you want) you can ride around freely within this fairly small skate park. Obviously, this is only a tiny fraction of the full game's environment, and this is exactly what I mean when I say "limit the experience." There is nothing wrong with keeping the majority of the games content unavailable in the demo; that's kind of the whole point of a demo.

But then Skate 3 falls off the good demo wagon. Skate around in this tiny skate park for long enough, and you will notice a countdown timer appears at the top of the screen. You'll be informed that you're running out of time on the demo. When this timer reaches zero, you will be forced to exit the game. This is what I mean by "limit the exposure." There's simply no reason to do this, and it accomplishes nothing but irritating slower players who haven't finished everything yet. You've already limited the content enough by excluding the vast majority of the areas and missions; why then do you need to limit how long players spend in the limited environment you've given them? No one is going to be satisfied enough by unlimited time spent in one tiny skate park that you need to limit the time they have in order to get them to buy the game.

2. Try to present an accurate cross-section of the full game's content

I'm going to use the Split/Second demo as my example for this one. For those who haven't given it a try yet, Split/Second is a combat racing game that lets you use the environment around you to take out your opponents. Here's why this game works as a great example of the point I'm making here: In the demo, you are given a single track and a single car. Fine, it's a demo. You're also given virtually every feature of the full game within this very limited environment. All the different types of attacks, from minor explosions to enormous calamities that change the actual route of the race on the next lap, are included. This one track you're given is a perfect microcosm of the full game. Chances are good that if you don't like the demo, you won't like the game, and the adverse is also true. That's exactly what a demo should do!

3. End on a high note

This applies mostly to narrative games, rather than something like a racer or sports game, so I'll use Splinter Cell: Conviction as an example here. The Splinter Cell demo is essentially just the first mission of the full game's single-player campaign. This is a pretty common demo format, especially for games that are primarily single-player experiences. There's a couple ways to optimize a demo that is done in this format, particularly in regards to how to end them.

The classic TV-show-commercial-break style cliffhanger ending works great for the end of a demo. Everyone who enjoyed the demo, and the demo's narrative, is going to want to know what happens next! It works to keep people glued to their TVs through the commercials, and it works to sell games to people to who play the demo.

Another way to really sell a game via its demo is to have the end of the demo mission be a fantastic spectacle. Have something enormous explode, have your protagonist kill fourteen people while doing a triple back-flip, or whatever you want that will make people go "whoa!"

4. Focus on your strengths

Both the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 demo and the Blur demo are strictly multiplayer experiences. Incidentally, both of these games are heavily multiplayer based. They may have a token single-player campaign of some sort in the full game, but they will largely be sold on the merit of their online content. Therefore, it's a great idea to have the demo focus on the content you know is going to move copies of the full game; in this case, the online experience.

Well, that's all I got. Hopefully some developer somewhere will read this, and I will have made the world a better place. Feel free to link your friend who happens to be a CEO of a major studio to this.

-MB