We sat down with Kars Alfrink-interaction designer, teacher, and consultant for Playyoo-to learn a little about his thoughts on social participation, casual games, and the mobile platform.
What do you think is the significance of bringing the social or participatory aspect into mobile games?
Well, I’d say for one, it adds an extra dimension to play. Traditionally, if you look at games outside the digital world, most games are social by nature-like board games or playground games. It’s a weird situation with digital games: for a long time they were mostly focused on the single player. And that’s fine, but from a game design perspective, there’s nothing more interesting than playing with or against another human being. After all, they exhibit the most interesting behaviors.
Now when it comes to Playyoo, we’re targeting a very broad audience. And people have very different needs and motivations-and their ideas of fun are different as well. We want to have multiple levels of engagement. So at the beginning level, users can just casually play a game, or snack on a game, where they might play a game for a few minutes and then put it away. These users just want to play a game, and have fun for a few minutes. The social aspect becomes interesting for people who want to engage with Playyoo at a more intense level. You have people who are into competing; you have people who are into socializing, etc. And we want to cater to these different interests.
Can you give us some examples of how participation is going to enter Playyoo?
Sure, I’m working on something right now that I call the meta-game-which will essentially be an umbrella for the mobile games in Playyoo and will let users compete and collaborate on a different level within the community. For example, users can submit their high scores for a game and check on how their friends are doing. We’ll also be creating rewards for various achievements, and let people team up and compete against other teams. And our game creation tool is going to let users participate in the game design experience on a whole new level. And again, if people don’t want to participate in these extra activities, that’s fine. They’ll hopefully still have an enjoyable time playing the mobile games themselves.
What does the term ‘casual game’ mean to you?
‘Casual,’ to me, says something about the level of attention and engagement that a player has (or is required to have) with the game. For me as a designer, casual games provide interesting challenges. It might seem simple to create these casual games, but they’re actually quite tricky to pull off, or pull off well, that is. From a game design perspective, I think it’s more challenging to pull off a high quality causal game than yet another first-person shooter game.
Do you think the mobile game experience needs to stay casual?
I definitely would never say that you can only do casual games on the mobile phone. Certainly, there have been efforts to replicate the experience of the console game on the mobile phone. But I don’t think that makes a whole lot of sense, because they’re such different platforms. However, you can do all kinds of games-any kind of activity can be turned into a mobile casual game. And it certainly doesn’t have to be limited to the games we already know, like parlor games or arcade classics. There can be original development on the mobile phone, and I think that’s one of the most interesting areas at the moment
You mentioned the difference between the mobile and console platform. What are some of the unique aspects of mobile gaming?
Well, for one, designers can play with the context of use with the mobile phone. Location is the most obvious example of this-and we’ve already seen this in alternate reality games, where for instance players have to be at a certain place at a certain time to get a message needed to unravel a puzzle or get to the next stage.
I’ve been teaching a class on mobile game design at the Utrecht School of Arts and I challenge my students to think of interesting things on a mobile phone that you couldn’t do anywhere else. And they come up with very interesting examples. For example, in one game, distance traveled becomes a factor. Players try to grow an exotic plant, and the food for that plant is travel. So, the distance-and direction-that players travel feeds back into the game. That might sound kind of conceptual and artsy, but it’s a nice example of what you can do with the mobile platform.
Mobile games are often defined as games you can play anywhere, and while traveling, but on another level, I’d say in mobile games, you have to be traveling and be physically in motion. That puts a whole new twist on mobile.
Photo credits: Alper Çuğun / http://alper.nl
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