z on life

For some reason I woke up this morning and really wanted to play some old school Warcraft 2. In my opinion, it’s the best RTS of all time, but I am biased via serious nostalgia. It’s been forever, and by that I mean at least 5 years since I have even set foot inside the lands of Azeroth, Lordaeron, and Draenor. To my dismay, I didn’t have OS 9 Classic installed so I couldn’t boot up my disc image and hop on over to Battle.net so I was left to look at some YouTube clips (see below) of other people playing. On a good note, I saw some clips had come onto YouTube within the last month which means people are still playing and that is awesome. I look forward to playing again once I get my computer adequately equipped.

So I was thinking about what I liked War2 so much and thought I’d write about it. The game was originally release by Blizzard in December of 1995 when I was 8 years old. It dominated my life for the next 5-7 years with varying degrees of obsessive attachment. For a while in elementary school, I would wake up at 5:30AM, 2 hours early, just to get a few games in before the drudgery of school. I would come home and put off my homework for 3, 4, 5 hours at a time because of playing War2. All my closest friends played and we would either sync up over IM, phone, or bring computers to each other’s houses and play sometimes for 12 hours at a time. And yes that meant carrying desktop machines. We would sit on the phone together while playing just for fast hands-free communication, tying up both the phone line for the dialup modem and the house phone. My parents were usually less than pleased. It was an addiction. It was a serious problem. But boy was it fun.

So why was it so fun?

If I could make a product with even half the long-term appeal as War2, I’d die happy. That said, I decided to think back and dissect what made it so great.

The game was relatively simple with only a handful of unit types, buildings, upgrades, and players generally stuck to a handful of maps (GoW, Friends, PoS, HSC, and maybe a few more). It was a relatively newbie friendly game with a not-so-steep learning curve to capture the basics, but gave enough room to grow that seasoned veterans could wipe out more novice players with ease. The game was both inviting in the short-term and challenging in the long-term, a combination that is hard to get right.

The end-game scenarios begged you to play one more. By that I mean winners always felt they could play a rematch to win in even grander style and losers always felt as if they ‘knew why’ they lost and could correct it next time. This is an interesting dynamic, that games always seemed closer than they really were. Moreover, the games were relatively lightweight and you could be up and playing again in literally less than a minute from ending the last game, greatly reducing the psychological barriers to deciding to play again.

The unpredictability of gameplay was so fascinating in that the same exact game setup could yield very different types of games. A 2v2 Garden of War could be over in 5 minutes with a well-coordinated rush or could last 2+ hours with players choosing a long-term power strategy. When you were launched into a new game, you never knew if you were in for a quick, scrappy scrum or a drawn-out epic battle and this kept things interesting. You played for the epic games, but quick fights were also very gratifying, so you left happy no matter what. But overall, the variable degree of satisfaction and surprise kept things new and alluring each time you immersed yourself in a game.

The tension of the rock, paper, scissors dynamic creeps in at the beginning of each game. All you can see is you and your allies’ base, with the fog of war obfuscating the rest of the map. Every second the apprehension builds. Will it be a rush, a power, an offensive tower, a quick expansion, or some hybrid? The complexity compounds when you have a team-game. Both rush? Both power? One of each? And what if it’s 3 or 4 players per side? Wow, it gets crazy. A good strategy is 20% guesswork and 80% execution, but great guesses can prove to be powerful. The serendipity of choosing the right or wrong counterstrategy to your opponent is enough to create anxiety but not enough to leave the game to pure chance.

The masculinity of destruction is so empowering for the players, who, by the way, were mostly male. There is simply nothing like a group of fully upgraded and bloodlusted ogres pounding a townhall down or a death knight casting death and decay in an enemy’s gold flow. It feels amazing to slaughter your opponents troops and leave a path of razing and sheer destruction behind you. It’s one of these things that feels so indescribably good but you don’t know why and you just can’t explain it to someone who “doesn’t get it”.

The game is very much a social experience both for real-life friends and friends made through online play. As I said earlier, my friends and I would play religiously day in and day out. If any of us was lukewarm on playing on a given day, the others could easily convince them to play ‘just one’ that turned into many games and many hours of fun. Like all bad decisions, you will almost certainly follow a few of your friends jumping off that bridge if they push hard enough. After all, they need you or they can’t play that awesome 4v4 match!

Rankings and clans pushed the achiever-types to constantly want to pump their stats. Playing with some of the big online personas (the best players) was awe-inspiring. I remember wanting to be in some of the best clans so badly that I would dream about it. It was something to aspire to that never got old. If you made it, you were in the club and got to append a clan symbol to the end of your name, a sign that you were among the elite and obviously cool. I would seek out games with the top players and try to impress them. Because I never quite made it, I was always looking up to them and their God-like statuses. It kept me going.

The gameplay was not long tail in that there were a few core setups that were played over and over again. I would say 80+% of games were GoW or Friends with high resources on fastest speed. This meant that everyone was training to perfect the same set of tactics and it was not as though every player had their niche map and setup. This made the competition all the more fierce and wins all the more rewarding. If you can win on some obscure map because you have specialized unique knowledge of the terrain and strategy, that’s okay. However, if you can win consistently on the map everyone is an expert at and plays many times a day, then you are really powerful.

Every game was about the team and not the individual. In games like Diablo and WoW we see the end goal as a selfish one, to advance your character. Although I did play Diablo a lot and loved it, there is something unique when the win involves the whole team and is for the whole team, especially if you’re playing with real-life friends. The ‘Aha! We did it together. Yes!’ moment is what meant the most for me. It’s like going to war with your best friends and coming out the victors, something that’s so uniquely special.

So what got me to stop playing?

The last key War2 moment I remember was a 2v2 Garden of War match where my friend Derek DiPietro and I were beating Metal and Azteca, the top-ranked two-some in the world at that time. Upon sensing defeat, they disconnected their modems and dropped. We got a ‘disc’ instead of the win. Somewhere in the depths of the hard drive of an old machine in my house, there is a screenshot of the pending victory, and that’s what counts. I guess having won the ultimate prize was enough and my play trailed off from there.

I still played a few times off and on since then. Even more surprising is that now I am 21, it’s 13 years after release, and I still have the urge to play. Blizzard definitely did something right.

I Love It
The other day my friend Arjun got me hooked on Bitstrips and after using it for a while I realized that the mechanics of the site were so good I would just have to discuss it. The basic principle of the site is that you create little characters of yourself and your friends and make hilarious comic strips out of them. The process is fun, quick, and so easy. The first time I got sent one, I almost fell out of my chair laughing. That said, I clearly liked the site a lot. The following are a number of great strategic, design, and interaction principles that totally impressed me about Bitstrips.

Effective Landing Page
The initial homepage (see above) is colorful, friendly, inviting and you just get a good feeling when you go there. The organization is actually intuitive with the full menu on the left, an eye catching focal point on the scene builder logo, the different core initial actions on the far right, anchors to the most popular or recent content, and functional boxes below. For existing users, there is a lot to do, but for new users it is also very clear how they should initiate their Bitstrips experience. These two concepts are generally mutually exclusive (unless two different pages are used), but I think Bitstrips nailed it. The best part is that, no matter what you click on, you delve into fun and action right away.

Viral Loop
The site has an immediate viral loop that comes into play when you go through the registration funnel. It lets you “find your friends” who are already on the site or invite new ones via email address book importing. I’m not a huge fan of email inviting, as the overuse of the medium across thousands of sites has strongly diluted the effect. In this case though, going through the process was actually useful, because people on the site generally have fictional personas (not many real names) so it is hard to search for friends other than via email. It was a pretty frictionless process and one that was reinforced by the banners on the site saying “It’s More Fun With Friends!!” For the first time in a while, I felt I agreed with the viral incentive. Kudos to them for making the spam useful.

Usage Loop
Possibly even stronger than the core viral loop is the number of usage loops they have created. A usage loop is like a viral loop stemming not from the invite process but from usage of the site that throws off cues for others to join. Inherently, these strips are most fun when they involve friends. So, once you make a Bitstrip you will likely send it to friends, making the core of the site an effective usage loop as the friends come onto the site to see the comic. But it goes a bit deeper. Not only can the user base spread through passing links to whole comic strips, but since you create characters of yourself and others, your friends can use your characters to make strips. When your friend uses your character in a strip, you get notified and want to come back to see what they did with him or her. This is an awesome and highly playful mechanic that sucks you back again and again.

Minimized Entry Process
One of the hardest things for web people to do that games people do so well is to not give the user every piece of functionality right away. When the user is able to do too many things at once, they get hit with a paradox of choice and/or utter confusion and leave the site. When the experience is limited and directed, they are much more likely to have fun, stay un-confused, and actually complete whatever process they were attempting. I love the restraint the Bitstrips creators exercised on the initial character creation step. Despite the fact that the characters can get incredibly rich with hundreds of variables, they limit the initial granularity with which you can edit your character to a smaller, more manageable subset of attributes. Why take power away from the user? If the user is overwhelmed and they leave, this is far worse than if the user gets through the process and generates a character at only 80% detail. If they want more, they can go back and refine later, but the initial process is smooth, quick, and fun even for the non-power users. Kudos to restraint!

Sustained Calls-to-Action
Like LinkedIn has the progress bar of completing your profile, Bitstrips has bold, colorful, simple messages telling you what is left to complete on your profile. If you don’t complete them, these huge annoying boxes stay on the page. This in-your-face incentive is awesome as a subliminal cue to make a strip, find friends, build more characters, etc. If the site can get you as a user to buy in by filling in everything in the cues, you are much more likely to stay an active user because you have fully experienced the site and have significant investment in it.

People to Media to People Navigation
An interesting facet of the site is how you find yourself navigating through it. The navigation, at least for me, worked like this. First, I would go to a friend’s page and see what their new strips were. I would view a strip, and immediately look to see what other characters were in the strip. Upon clicking one of the other characters in the strip, I would be taken to that character’s page. That page provides links to the creator of that character, and I would see who it was that made that character and view more of their strips. The interesting thing is I didn’t just move people to people (Facebook, with the exception of photo viewing) or media to media (YouTube) and instead I get this very rich experience where I am interested in people and media and consume them in parallel.

SEO Hooks
There is lots of potential for SEO-able content on the site. Every user, character, and strip has a static detail page with rich metadata that can be indexed via keywords, genres, references to people, etc. There is the ability to embed these strips on external pages, providing a great number of external hooks to come back to the site. The link structure within the site is interesting with all of the highly intuitive relations between the different types of pages (users, characters, strips, series). Finally, these things are just so playful and funny that it is the type of thing bloggers would post, people would put on their Facebook or MySpace, or and friends would email/IM around. This site has the ability to push so much content to external locations that, if done right, it could be a great SEO play.

It’s Just Fun!
When it comes down to it, I really do just love the product as it is inherently fun for me. What I think is more neat is that the product really provides something for everyone. The achiever persona can focus on racking up points, views, laughs, and favorites. The explorer has a huge array of people, characters, and strips to dig through to find funny stuff. The socialite can leverage the platform to flirt with, poke fun at, and harass others and try to incite reactions from their friends or enemies. The builder has an obvious method of achieving satisfaction in the extremely rich tools they can leverage to create some really cool, detailed comics. I think what’s best is that they have really nailed a casual, fun, social interaction where there is something for everyone no matter what type of person you are, or if you’re a power-user or newbie.

Some Subtle Nice Touches
I wanted to close with two little things that impressed me regarding the level of thought put into the site. First, instead of the boring, played out, not-fun positive and negative ratings of “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down”, Bitstrips uses “laughs” and “groans”. Subtle cues like these indicate to the user that the ability to rate the strips isn’t just a bland feature, it’s a fun social stimulus. Second, in the address book importer, it defaulted the pre-@-symbol portion of my email address to my Bitstrips user name. While this guess could have been wrong, for me it was right and ended up being hugely influential (not sure why, subtle psychology is in play) in me actually going through the import step. From experience with analytics of viral invite processes, I can’t stress enough how important “all the little things” are. Even “little things” can make single or double digit percentage gains in success rates through a viral funnel. I love the attention to detail here.

So that’s it. Go make some Bitstrips!

When you’re creating a web property that you intend to ‘go viral’ with, whether it be a Facebook app or full-blown destination site, you’re going to have to meticulously track the growth to understand how you’re doing, where improvements can be made, and so forth. Tracking the growth correctly is actually very hard and even the most rigorous analytics can sometimes fail to reveal the true growth rate.

There is one easy trap to fall into, and it’s one that I just did, so I thought it would be good to talk about. The trap is in not understanding that you may be locally viral, where being ‘local’ is defined relative to some super-specific demographic, or user-behavioral context. In English? You may only be viral for some small set of or narrow type of users that will quickly adopt whatever it is that you’re making. However, if that demographic isn’t sufficiently sizable, you may burn through all of those people and be left with no new users to acquire.

The worst part about this is that, early on, you may see excellent growth. My roommate/coworker Aman Gupta and I recently released the ‘Hotter Than’ Facebook app as a pet project. It took a few hours to build and was a fun experiment (it’s not by any means our day-job). When we opened the floodgates, we saw in the first week a doubling day over day. If you study viral, recursion, and logistic growth from a mathematical perspective, as long as the remaining population of potential users is large compared to the amount of current users, your growth per new user on day N should be a good indicator of growth per new user on day N+1.

So have we continued, then, to double day over day? No, in fact growth has slowed to basically nothing. Why is this? Well, from looking through the raw data logs, we can see that during our growth phase we had spikes of users in very specific demographics. Moreover, it is fun to look at who was actually sending out invites. It turns out invites were sent mainly by a few categories of users: older, international, small friend networks. Now certainly, there are plenty of older people and international people on Facebook, many with small friend networks, so shouldn’t we have spread like wildfire through these huge demographic categories?

Interestingly, no, and here’s why. We thought a bit deeper about this and it turns out these were all indicators of being a newbie Facebook user. The average Facebook power user is something close to a United States college student with tons of friends*. The farther outside of this age, location, and dense friend networks you get, the less savvy the users likely are. We were way outside of this.

So what does that tell us? What we actually probably got were users easy to trick into viral invite processes, and thus, our invite scheme was not effective, logical, and enticing enough to hit the mainstream. Thus, we prayed on a few ‘fish-in-a-barrel’ types for whom this was likely a very early application install in their personal Facebook lifecycles. These people were most likely not aware of the ramifications of spamming friends and were thus much easier to convince. We burned out those users quickly and eventually there were no new accessible users who would succumb to the virality. After day 7 or 8, the growth halted and the usage flat lined.

Moral of the story, you need to understand exactly why people are taking the bare and sending your invite. Is it appropriate only to a certain culture, age, or interest group? Or can it be generalized to the mainstream? Hopefully, when all is said and done you’re not just tricking newbie users like we were. If you cannot generalize to the average user, then you’re early growth may not be any indicator of future growth so don’t get excited until you have a diverse set of users who have proven acquirable across enough of the spectrum to make the pool of potentials huge enough for a macro-success. It’s crucial to know where are you viral? Is it local, or is it global?

*note: This definition of an FB power user isn’t backed up by any data and is more by ‘feel’. Thus, the reason for our failure is still a hypothesis, not proven fact. The point here isn’t to know exactly what users we attracted, but to understand that those initial users were not normal and their affinity for our viral hooks was not generalizable over the whole population.