Casual Games get Serious

Introduction:

Serious Games, in their broadest sense, are games that have a purpose other than entertainment. This doesn’t mean that serious games are not entertaining, just that other there is other objectives.

Despite this broad definition, the genre of game most closely associated with Serious Games is the military sim. Military sims are among the oldest professional examples of serious games for many reasons. The military has a long history of investing in simulation technology, so co-opting gaming technology is a natural extension. Recent advances in gaming hardware and software techniques, when applied to military sim problems, have reduced costs. Middleware, such as Unreal Engine, made game creation tools readily available, and led to an explosion in teams that knew how to use these tools to make games. And gaming technology had finally “come of age” where the fidelity and realism possible met the minimum military requirements. Put another way, for the cost of a $300 console, the military could deploy the same simulation experience that previously required a half-million dollar Silicon Graphics work station.

Games such as America’s Army and Full Spectrum Warrior set the bar in terms of graphics and gameplay for many subsequent serious games in non-military fields. Projects such as Virtual Leader (corporate management game) and Pulse! (medical simulation) all featured advanced AI and a fully functional 3D engine. A dominant direction of Serious Games was being defined. Games in this space were being modeled on successful triple-A titles from the entertainment world. In addition to First Person Shooters, real-time and turn based strategy games were another popular genre.

The deep pockets of early serious games adopters, such as the US military, made it possible to pay for budgets to make triple-A styled titles but with a more serious bent. Persuasive Games – another form of serious games that focused on changing people’s viewpoints or advocating social causes – lacked the luxury of similar budgets. After all, if your goal is to make a game to showcase the environmentally unfriendly practices of McDonalds, such as “McDonalds Videogame” did, it is unlikely that McDonalds will fund the project.

The budgetary limitations necessarily focused these developers to use cheaper production methods. This, in turn, led to persuasive games that resembled many casual games. Most are distributed on-line, either as small downloadables or web-embedded games built with Director or Flash. Many use 2D graphics, and those with 3D graphics have lower polycounts and lower resolution textures than their triple-A counterparts.

Because of these two, roughly parallel paths in serious games, the casual game development companies were unfortunately left on the sidelines. Projects that could afford to pay developers for their time wanted skills most often associated with console and PC developers. Projects that could use the skills of casual game developers often had no budget.

Now the time is coming for Casual Games developers to take advantage of the Serious Games space. Recent projects, such as Cisco’s “Binary Game” and GameLab’s “Cost of Life,” are showing that casual games are a viable medium for serious games. This article examines why organizations are starting to deploy casual serious games, rather than triple-A inspired projects. It also makes the case that casual games developers should pay attention to this space and how they can become involved.

Reasons for Casual Serious Games

While many of the initial commissioners of Serious Games projects paid a premium for console quality graphics and deep gameplay, newer organizations interested in serious games for their purposes are starting to look at casual games as a gameplay model. There are many reasons for this new interest in casual games.

Demographics

In the military, games worked because the target student was young, about 19 years old, and was already conversant in the language of video games. The training platform was ideally suited for the training audience. Early forays into the corporate market tried to make a similar argument. To effectively reach the new worker demographic, traditional training methods, such as movies and classroom instruction, needed to be replaced with a medium that was more in tune with the younger work force.

Unless your organization had a large workforce in their early twenties, such as large commercial retailers, the coming shift in demographics made little short term sense. Sure, eventually your entire workforce will be video game savvy, but that tipping point is still a long way off. The reality today is that a significant portion of workers needing training are not video game literate. Moving to games modeled on triple-A console titles might not be the most effective way of reaching large groups in need of training.

Casual games fit the corporate demographic reality better than console games. One distinguishing characteristic of casual games is their design emphasis on gameplay and control schemes for a less hardcore market. Traditional board and card game mechanics often serve as inspiration for casual game design. Puzzle and matching elements are emphasized over timed and reflex based challenges. Control schemes are simpler to their console and PC brethren, some using simple point-and-click interfaces.

All of these reasons make casual game design and production methodologies attractive to serious games projects. Using ideas from the casual games space, serious games can be effective with learners who are not video game literate – even to users who are afraid to try traditional video games.

Play time and structure

Another issue for corporate training is finding the time to train your employees. Classroom training takes the employees away from their jobs, which results in lost productivity. An early rallying cry for serious games was that the gaming element would make a training product that was so immersive and entertaining that employees would want to do the training on their own time. This is an admirable design goal and products that succeed in this area are great.

Having employees want to do training on their own time does not solve the problem for the training manager. Very few organizations feel comfortable requiring salaried employees to do job related functions at home. Hourly employees must also be compensated for most work related activities – including training. Even if the training is entertaining, it is still something that most organizations want done on company time. Sometimes training is a time-sensitive activity, such as ensuring that all employees have received training prior to an audit. Even if the training is more entertaining and motivating, training managers still want the experience to take less time.

A common goal is to provide training in 10-15 minute chunks. This session time restriction fits very well within the casual game framework. Another distinguishing feature of casual games is that they are designed for shorter play sessions than traditional video games. Casual game progression models provide clearly delineated breaks in the action that invite the user to take a break and come back later. Level design emphasizes a shorter play time, with each level often being completed in ten minutes or less.

When time is a scarce commodity, casual games are better suited to offering compelling experiences in short play sessions than the more time-commitment heavy console and PC games. 

Network delivery

Companies are acutely aware of the cost of deploying resources to their employees. Internal supply management and logistics can be a real headache, especially when it comes to software. Most corporate IT departments prefer to pre-load machines with required software before providing the machine to the user. Updates and new software are provided over the local network. This reduces the cost of maintaining physical media, supporting the hand installation of software, and the help desk support for users having difficulty with installation.

These same rules apply to training software. Serious games that require installation from a disk may lose out to similar products that can be distributed over a network. The type of game experience that casual games provides is not compromised by small code footprints or browser based delivery. Games that try to be like a triple-A titles, on the other hand, may feel compromised if they are stripped down to network delivered size.

Some retail games are being successfully delivered via online services such as Steam. Similar services may enable larger serious games to be delivered over the network, but it will take time before corporations embrace these types of delivery methods.

Cost structure

Finally, casual games better fit the new cost structure for serious games. Most of the organizations with the budget and desire to afford million dollar budgets for game development have done so. Organizations that feel they need to have the triple-A gaming experience on an ongoing basis are realizing that it is cheaper to hire in-house talent than to commission large projects. Million dollar budgets for serious games are becoming the exception.

Because of the large, groundbreaking Serious Games projects that have been, many more organizations want to move to games based training. Budgets are coming down to the $50K to $100K range. While this is a paltry sum for traditional titles, the price fits well with the cost of many casual games titles.

With this new costing model, customers are aware that they must make tradeoffs. They are willing to take 2D graphics over 3D graphics. They can also live with less sophisticated AI models within the game. The scope of the game can be scaled down to a point where it focuses just on the training essentials. Rather than pointing to the latest real-time rendered first person shooter and saying “I want that, but with accountants,” they are now modeling their expectations on the latest match-3 web-delivered game.

Reasons for developers

With many serious games projects going casual, there are becoming more and more opportunities for casual games developers to enter the space. But this is not a gold rush for the next big thing. While there are many advantages to this space, one must understand really how a casual game developer can make a difference and why working in the space can be beneficial.

Leverages current skill set

The biggest reason for an existing casual games developer to develop serious games is that their in-house skill set is becoming more closely aligned to the shifting needs of the market. Making casual games involves a different skill set than that of larger PC and console games. While larger development studios might have some of these skills, they might be in roles ancillary to production – such as web design and marketing. Acquiring these skills or moving existing skills into a production role might not make the best long term business sense.

For casual games developers, serious games production can overlay on the existing production line. Any additional investment to complete a contracted project complements the core business. This competencies alignment can allow a small casual games developer to complete a project for less than a larger studio. The fact that the skills are coming from the core line of business gives confidence to the customer that they are getting the company’s A-team.  

Be aware that there are some key skills the average casual games studio might be missing. One important person is the instructional designer. Very similar to a game designer, this individual determines what the learning objectives are, how to design the content and curriculum to achieve these goals, and how to assess whether the goals are met. Another role is that of the subject matter expert. The subject matter expert brings professional experience to the process, ensuring that the content is technically accurate.

The good news is that instructional designers and subject matter experts are probably employed by the organization that is commissioning the game. If this is the case it makes sense to include access to these individuals as a condition on doing the project. Otherwise it may be possible to bring the needed expertise in on contract.

Either way, it is crucial to have a highly competent project manager. Working with an external instructional designer and subject matter expert requires excellent management skills. It is not good enough to deliver content at key milestones, as changes to the instructional design or technical content may be much harder to recover from than the typical changes one encounters from a publisher. These individuals must be managed as part of the internal team, even if they are also part of the organization that will also give final acceptance of the product.

Additional revenue stream

Making serious games can provide an excellent additional revenue stream. Most projects are one-off, work-for-hire contracts which ideally can be scheduled in-between the studio’s core projects. Many companies will already have a design document complete and will be looking for a company to execute. Such a project can be fit into the pre-production phase of another project. It can keep the development team busy (and paid for) while the next game design is being worked out.

Many traditional game studios found serious games an excellent source of cash while waiting for the revenue stream of an entertainment title to kick-in. In the casual games space, where many studios self-fund their projects, a 2-3 month delay in revenue can be disastrous. Planning a serious games project at the end of an entertainment release can buy a few months of buffer on the revenue side.

This additional revenue stream does not come for free. There may be long term costs that have to be factored in. One is support for the title. The commissioning organization may not have the internal skills to fix problems that arise. If the game has an expected life of a few months, for example a game supporting a product launch, then support is a time limited activity. But a game that has an open ended lifespan may require a long term support commitment. Many organizations commissioning serious games have never done a game based product before and are unaware of the long term hidden costs. They are relying on the developer’s experience to highlight and plan for these costs. Not doing so may eat a large percentage of the additional revenue that project brought in.

Lightweight & local Business Development

Lastly is the studio’s ability to acquire potential business in the serious games space. The good news is that this can be a lightweight activity done on a local scale. Many organizations would like to commission a game but don’t know how. Attending local business networking functions can uncover many leads. Most professional associations have local networking functions.  For example, Distil often goes to local chapter meetings of the American Society for Quality, the Project Management Institute, etc…

Many cities have entrepreneurship centers, industry advocacy groups, and local chambers of commerce. These groups often host networking functions for business professionals.

Local governments also may be looking to commission a serious game project. The key with governments is that any project must go out for public bidding. By working directly with local governments in the planning stage, it is possible to get the contract request tailored to a specific set of skills that match your organization exactly. Another way to increase the chances of winning a government bid is to work as a subcontractor for a larger organization that has experience in the government bidding process.

A large number of organizations looking to commission a serious game project will attend a game development conference to find a developer. Conferences that your studio is already attending may have many opportunities for finding projects.

The key is effective networking. There is no magic bullet to replace this crucial skill. A casual game developer without a skilled networker will have a harder time finding business than a developer with these skills. Realizing this up front can be a crucial factor in determining if this space is right. With a good business development person, many developers will find that getting some serious games work is a small incremental investment.

Conclusion

Serious games projects are looking more and more similar to casual game projects. Organizations commissioning serious games projects are finding that casual games are a better fit with their needs than more traditional games projects. This means that casual games developers are becoming the best choice for implementing many of these projects. With a little bit of work, it is not too difficult to fit the new business requirements into an existing casual game studio’s business.