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Schism: bridging the gap from casual browser games to hardcore social worlds

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Schism: bridging the gap from casual browser games to hardcore social worlds

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SCHISM
BRIDGING THE GAP
FROM CASUAL BROWSER GAMES
TO HARDCORE SOCIAL WORLDS

by
Cynthia Nie

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

May 2010

Copyright 2010 Cynthia Nie
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Table of Contents
Table of Figures iii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Motivation 2
The Rise of Social Casual Games 2
The Missing “Social” in Social Gaming 4
Learning From Competition-Driven Games 6
A Paragon of Cooperative Social Interaction 8
Project Goal 12
Prior Art 13
Skyrates 13
Travian 14
Love 16
User Experience 17
Elements of Individual Action 17
Elements of Collective Action 19
Encouraging Collaboration 21
Evaluation Scenarios and Methods 23
Mechanics Prototype 23
“Digital Paper” Play Test 23
“Some Assembly Required” physical prototype 25
Final Game Release 26
Discussion 28
Conclusion 30
References 31

iii

Table of Figures
Figure 1: Daily Active User (number of users who logged in on a single
day) count for various Zynga and Playfish games. 3
Figure 2: A Mafia Wars player invites a friend to join their mob 5
Figure 3: Purchasing "hired guns" in Mobsters 2. Players are permitted
to spend real currency in exchange for “favor points”, which
are then used to buy special items or virtual mob members. 6
Figure 4: A Ponzi, Inc. player browses the shop for "anti-perks" to use
on their friends 7
Figure 5: A World of Warcraft player uses the Dungeon Finder tool to
be grouped with random players that complement his/her role 9
Figure 6: When a full group has been found, all five players receive
a status window that indicates who is ready to go 9
Figure 7: Players share resources through the guild bank. In the new
expansion Cataclysm, Blizzard has stated they will take guild
functionality to whole new levels, such as access to unique
benefits that become available to all guild members. 11
Figure 8: A player queues up flight path across the world of Skyrates 14
Figure 9: A Travian player looking at the status of their town 15
Figure 10: Schism players visit the Outpost to see what adventures
they may go on 19
Figure 11: A sample scout report 19
Figure 12: Assigning available citizens to gather resources.
(Early prototype with temporary art.) 21
Figure 13: Play test message board color-coded by speaker to
illustrate posting frequency and habit 24

iv

Abstract
Schism is an online, persistent-world multiplayer game in which a team of players band
together to help build up their small town into a prosperous city. Players' actions in the
game consist of both individual efforts and collaborative ones, and create compelling social
experiences without requiring an extensive time commitment.

1

Introduction
Currently the market of online, persistent-world multiplayer games is saturated by games
that fall into one of two categories. The first is the “hardcore” massively multiplayer online
role-playing game that frequently demands a significant time investment in order for the
player to become fully involved with the game experience. The sheer depth of these games
gives their players an interactive social experience rarely found in other games: they spend
many hours within the game collaboratively working to accomplish various game-related
tasks and just as many outside of it, discussing game mechanics or encounters with other
players. People from greatly disparate cultural spaces and social stations are able to feel
instant kinship through their shared experiences in the virtual world. On the other hand, the
required time commitment makes these games inaccessible to many potential players and
the complexity of these game worlds will frequently alienate more novice or “casual”
gamers.
On the other end of the spectrum, there exists a plethora of asynchronous persistent-world
games that target the working individual who cannot commit large blocks of time to playing
games. These games generally revolve around a single mechanic that is repeated every day
and are relatively uncomplicated, leaving them readily accessible to the masses. However,
the lack of depth results in the simple fact that the players of these games have relatively
little to be enthusiastic about when communicating about the game to others. In addition,
though these games are delivered on a social networking platform, they fail to provide a
meaningful social experience due to the fact that most of the implemented social mechanics
are designed to promote viral marketing rather than to improve the quality of the game
itself. As a result, these game experiences are generally too straightforward and fleeting to
create a genuine community following.
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Schism is an exploration of the space that exists between these two extremes. The goal is to
see if a game could be produced that combines some of the best aspects of these two genres
while avoiding their pitfalls.
Motivation
The Rise of Social Casual Games
Since the inception of the term, “casual games” has garnered many different definitions and
connotations. For the purposes of this paper, we will define the casual games paradigm as
games that are relatively simple to pick up and put down at the player’s leisure. These are
games that fit into the player’s life, rather than the player being forced to adjust their
schedule to suit the game. In addition, the player should be able to get a sense of the entire
game without committing excessive amounts of time and the game should be easy to
understand by players who have never played other games like it.
Social casual games build upon this concept of extremely accessible games by adding
components of social networking to enhance a game’s “stickiness”, or likelihood to obtain
and retain players. By delivering games over a social networking platform, these games are
able to use a player’s provided personal information to automatically integrate information
about a player’s existing social group into the game experience. Friend notifications allow
players to quickly broadcast their latest in-game successes and invite others to partake in a
newly discovered game. Message boards allow friends to leave notes to one another within
the game. Leader boards automatically track the progress of all a player’s friends who are
also playing the game and gently challenges each player to take first place. Through these
and other similarly simple social layers, these games have taken social networking spaces
by storm with their explosive popularity.
3

Figure 1: Daily Active User (number of users who logged in on a single day) count for
various Zynga and Playfish games.

The video game industry has long attempted to tap into new audiences for their games and
the recent financial success of developers such as Zynga and Playfish has revealed that
games delivered through a social networking platform have great potential in terms of
reaching new masses of players. Companies like Zynga have seen in excess of 65 million
players logging in to play their games every day, considerably more than World of Warcraft
at its peak. These numbers permit the games to boast the greatest accessibility of most
4

others before them and demands greater investigation into what aspects of these games
make them so easy to play in bite-sized chunks of time.
The Missing “Social” in Social Gaming
Despite the categorization of popular Facebook games as “social games”, the truth is that the
social mechanics of these games are fairly shallow in terms of any memorable social
engagement. Facebook friends are permitted limited interaction with each other in ways
that attempt to emulate the feeling of community that Facebook users already enjoy, but
these game experiences are rarely enhanced from these thin social layers.
The asynchronous aspect of Facebook games has also lent itself to the proliferation of other
pseudo-social mechanics. In FarmVille, a player is able to visit a friend’s farm and see how
their friend has laid out their crops and buildings, regardless of whether or not the hosting
player is presently playing the game. The extent of the action that a visiting player may
actually take on the farm is limited to simple observation. As a result, visiting a friend’s farm
is in actuality not much different than if the hosting player had taken a screenshot of their
farm and simply shared it with everyone else. Being able to take these social actions
becomes meaningless when the player may make them regardless of whether or not the
reciprocating partner is actually there.
Many Facebook games are completely deterministic. This means that the actions taken will
result in almost completely predictable outcomes. For example, planting strawberry seeds
in FarmVille means that the player can return in four hours and expect to earn exactly ten
coins from the harvest, no more and no less. This deterministic behavior is a double-edged
sword. On the one hand, it increases the game’s accessibility by reducing the amount of
thought per decision made. Predictable outcomes means the player only needs to consider
the ramifications of their actions once. This also becomes the downside as well, as play
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becomes unvaried and potentially dull, and the lack of any “surprise” factor means that the
emergent narrative from one play session to the next is always the same and therefore not
worth recounting to others.
Finally, Facebook games suffer from a lack of deliberate decision-making. The vast majority
of exchanges that occur in Facebook games are passive and go only one way. In Zynga’s
Mafia Wars, a player may recruit among their Facebook friends for potential players to join
their “mob”. Through the person’s tacit initial agreement to join their friend’s mob, the
player may utilize their friends to defeat other players. Victory is generally decided by who
has the greater number of teammates. The only decision the player’s friends ever make is
simply the one at the beginning: whether or not to join the player’s mob. To further this end,
as a method of monetization, players are able to purchase “virtual friends” to pad their mob
numbers, meaning a player who has few friends but is willing to pay lots of money can
achieve the same strength as a player who has a large number of friends. This “feature”
further cements the impression of a player’s mob being nothing more than a number, rather
than a group of sentient human beings.

Figure 2: A Mafia Wars player invites a friend to join their mob

6

Figure 3: Purchasing "hired guns" in Mobsters 2. Players are permitted to spend real currency
in exchange for “favor points”, which are then used to buy special items or virtual mob members.

Critical analysis of the social mechanics in Facebook games generally leads to an important
conclusion: Facebook game developers do not actually want their games to be truly socially
interactive. A game that requires a player to have friends to play it is a game with a
restricted player base, and therefore a restricted customer base. So despite Facebook
games’ remarkable accessibility, they rarely reach the level of social interaction that
hardcore massively multiplayer online role-playing games are so lauded for and end up
being relatively forgettable as a result.
Learning From Competition-Driven Games
One of the most prominent and widespread mechanics of Facebook games is the leader
board. Harkening back to the days of old arcade games and their high score lists, leader
boards have proven to be a tried and true method for giving a player a sense of the others
who are playing alongside with or against them, without actually building a multiplayer
experience into the game itself. This makes the leader board a particularly efficient feature
to include in just about every social game. However, some games go further and choose to
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use a leader board in tandem with actual competition-driven social mechanics. The result is
that these games manage to provide a genuinely involving and fairly memorable social
experience for their players.
Ponzi, Inc. sets the player as a company owner who is responsible for building his little
business into an economic empire. What the company actually does is irrelevant, since the
game functions as a satire of the corporate world. Inventory items in the game are known as
“Perks” and are used to temporarily affect the game in either a positive or negative way. The
interesting part is that perks may be used by a player on either themselves or on one of
their friends. This allows players to both either help their friends or temporarily weaken
their friends’ forces as they compete with each other on the leader board. When a group of
friends play Ponzi, Inc., the overall social experience mirrors that of a long-term game of
Sorry!, with players constantly causing setbacks to their friends in order to further their
own position.

Figure 4: A Ponzi, Inc. player browses the shop for "anti-perks" to use on their friends
The Facebook game Parking Wars gives each player their own street with parking spaces as
well as a few cars, which become the player’s responsibility to park on other players’
streets. Cars are the primary method through which a player earns money and though a
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player may endeavor to find legal spaces in which to park their cars, the rules of a parking
space are subject to change at any time, thus no car is ever completely safe. The owner of a
street is given the ability to ticket cars that are parked illegally and earn the money that the
ticket charges. A great deal of the enjoyment incurred from the Parking Wars playing
experience comes from the responsibility of a player checking their streets and being able
to ticket friends who have parked, willfully or otherwise, illegally. Again, it is the
implementation of a competition-driven mechanic that makes the game memorable.
These two games demonstrate that careful design of socially conscious game mechanics, in
addition to the standard group of social tools common to most Facebook games, can
significantly enhance the experience of a social game. Both of these games use competitive
tactics to enhance the leader board. It then seems to be useful to ask whether developers
may be able to use cooperative game mechanics to improve upon the lackluster social
experience of noncompetitive social casual games.
A Paragon of Cooperative Social Interaction
In all likelihood, the genre of video game that has generated the greatest reputation for
giving its players unforgettable social experiences is the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-
Playing Game (MMORPG). Most notably, World of Warcraft (WoW) has achieved
unprecedented renown, reaching a record of over eleven million active subscriptions in
December 2008 and invading popular culture to a degree never before seen for video
games. Its exceptional popularity makes it an important case study for this project,
especially in terms of recognizing what components of the game best foster social
interaction. Unlike in Facebook games, cooperative player interactions in WoW are very
rarely one-sided and almost always consist of “give and take” exchanges: a player’s actions
will specifically cause another player to take an action, which in turn causes a reaction from
the original player. The information that players receive from other players informs what
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decisions they make and players are constantly reassessing the situation on how it’s best to
proceed, which results in the eventual success or failure of the players’ efforts as a whole.
There are a number of reasons why hardcore MMORPGs, such as WoW, lead the pack in
providing meaningful social engagement to players. The primary one is also the simplest:
though there is a fairly large single-player component to the game, the vast majority of
game tasks in WoW necessitate that players work with others on a regular basis. Player
character types in WoW, known as “classes”, are designed with specific deficiencies and
strengths for the express purpose of coercing players to find others who will complement
their abilities. While some players chafe at the idea of being forced to group with other
players to accomplish certain goals, most willingly search for team members in friends and
strangers alike to tackle the game’s most difficult challenges. This in itself is already a
significant departure from Facebook games in general. In most Facebook games, players
will only ever search for allies amongst their friends whereas in WoW, working with total
strangers is commonplace.

Figure 5: A World of Warcraft player uses the
Dungeon Finder tool to be grouped with
random players that complement his/her role

Figure 6: When a full group has been found, all five
players receive a status window that indicates who is
ready to go

10

In direct opposition to the more deterministic outcomes of casual games, this reliance on
the human element of deliberate decision-making and potential fallibility adds
unpredictability to the results of every player’s actions. In turn, the satisfactory feeling of
actually accomplishing a goal is intensified, as the players are then able to take greater
responsibility in making it happen. It is also likely that the numbers requirement results in a
greater satisfaction factor when players successfully reach a goal: the achievement feels
more epic and noteworthy when it requires more hands, which in turn requires more
coordination. The resultant emergent narrative is inevitable and even though every group is
accomplishing the same set of missions, they rarely all achieve it in precisely the same
manner.
Another critical social element that MMORPGs typically excel at is community-building.
Over time, players will generally build friendships and alliances that can be consistently
trusted to accomplish in-game tasks. WoW naturally supplements these feelings by
providing social structures to ease communication and accessibility to a player’s frequent
contacts, such as the friends list which permits players to see which of their friends are
currently online and where they are located in the game world. There are also guilds in
WoW, which allows players to publicly band together under a common name. Players who
are in the same guild have their own chat channel for communicating with one another
about anything they like, as well as access to common inventory space so that they may
share resources. This access to a common space, the chat channel, and sharing resources is
one of the most effective methods through which WoW fosters a sense of community. More
often than not, players within a guild are interested in each others’ well being and will go
out of their way to aid a fellow guild member in need.
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Figure 7: Players share resources through the guild bank. In the new expansion Cataclysm,
Blizzard has stated they will take guild functionality to whole new levels, such as access to
unique benefits that become available to all guild members.

Probably the most transparent method through which WoW facilitates social interaction is
with its written text communication channels. Apart from its plethora of chat channels and
even voice chat support, there are the forum boards that exist externally to the game itself
and are accessible via web browser. Due to their external nature, not all players can be
expected to utilize these, but they do provide a convenient communication tool for those
who would like to still interact with others in their game world when they cannot be in the
game itself at that time. Message boards also benefit from the fact that they are a relatively
permanent and public record of communication that can be accessed long after the
conversation itself has actually taken place, making it invaluable for facilitating interaction
between players who do not keep to the same playing schedules.

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Project Goal
The aspiration of Schism is to bridge the gap between these two vastly different types of
game worlds: to improve upon the social experience that is currently delivered in casual
games by looking at what hardcore MMORPGs do well. Schism aims to be a multiplayer
experience with a low daily time commitment, while simultaneously retaining enough depth
to create a compelling and involved social experience for the players to think and talk about
when going about their business for the day.

13

Prior Art
Skyrates
Skyrates is a Flash-based persistent-world game that explored the concept of “sporadic
play”, defined as a game that could be experienced in short play sessions, rather than one
large chunk of time. The project’s self-stated goal is to “create a game with a persistent and
meaningful online world, but with an interaction that didn't demand huge amounts of a
player's time”.
The game’s premise involves the player becoming the manager of an airship and its crew.
On a regular basis, the player is able to log in to the game world and queue up a series of
actions, which then occur in real time: flying the ship from one location to another may be
as brief as half an hour or as long as four. Combined with the ability to queue multiple “legs”
of a trip at once and a player may be able to queue actions to last the next two days,
meaning they will be able to continue playing the game despite not logging in for the
duration. In addition, the player may log in at any time and cancel any actions that have not
yet been undertaken and put new ones in their place.
Skyrates certainly seems to succeed at its stated intents and purposes and garnered several
awards for its casual, yet still strategic, game play. However, the game has little to no
interest in social interaction and therefore almost completely ignored the inclusion of any
socially interactive mechanics. The game’s Flash client does include a chat interface which
players occasionally make use of to discuss game mechanics and there is the capability for
creating your own “wing” of players, but by and large, Skyrates plays very much as a single-
player experience.
14

Figure 8: A player queues up flight path across the world of Skyrates

Travian
Travian is a massively multiplayer online browser-based strategy game, where players
become responsible for the growth and livelihood of their own village. The player is
responsible for building an army strong enough to defend the village from other raiding
armies and is able to make alliances with other villages and they are freely able to attack
anyone at will. The game is highly social and there are very few actions that a player can
take that will not have ramifications on a larger scale, from other nearby villages feeling
threatened by a rising power to sending an army to aid an allied village.
15

Travian’s difficulties arise in the fact that, though it is accessible in terms of learning curve
and basic mechanics, it is absolutely not a casual game. Each decision takes very little time
to make, but then the actions are carried out in real time. For example, the player may
decide to build a barracks to start churning out army units, but apart from requiring
resources that are also accumulating in real time, the building itself also takes a certain
amount of time for its construction before any units can be queued for production.
Similarly, a player may decide to attack a village several hours away and this travel time is
also played out in real time. One very aggravating but completely legitimate and frequently
utilized tactic is that players will wait to send an army off at such an hour that it will arrive
at their enemy’s village at a completely inconvenient time for the player owning the enemy
village, thereby catching their victim off guard.

Figure 9: A Travian player looking at the status of their town

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Due to Travian’s fiercely competitive game play, some players are quickly alienated by the
demanding time constraints of the game. Despite the low amount of time required by each
decision, a serious Travian player is unable to dictate their own playing schedule and is
forced to react to the schedules set by opponents.

Love
A procedurally-generated MMO that is mostly famous for the fact that all of its development
is being managed by a single person, Love implements the same values of community-
centric game play that Schism hopes to evoke. Power-ups in Love, according to developer
Eskil Steenberg, do not go directly to the player who obtains them, but instead to the
settlement of which that player is a member. The power-up is then similarly accessible to
anyone who plays in that settlement. This means that players who are busy with other
things will still be able to play alongside players that are able and interested in committing
more time to the game. This principle of strengthening the community rather than the
individual is similarly utilized in Schism.

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User Experience
The Schism player’s experience is divided into two major camps. The first is in the control
and maintenance of their adventuring party, a group of up to four characters that the player
handpicks from a batch of randomly generated citizens. This party is the means through
which the individual player will grow in power and general ability to contribute to the
town’s well being. Decisions made regarding a player’s party are generally short term and
have very little long lasting impact.
The second category of player actions is in player activity regarding the town itself, from the
management of freelance civilians to decisions on how town resources should be spent.
These decisions are made collectively by all the town’s players through “majority rules”
voting systems and will have long-lasting repercussions on the well being of the town.
The game experience begins with registering for an account on the game’s website and
joining a town. By the game’s definition, a town is an instance of the game that has its own
uniquely generated citizens and encounters. A player may only be a member of one town at
a time and towns do not interact with one another in any manner. Ideally a town will
contain anywhere from three to seven players, but the game play is capable of scaling to
accommodate more or less.
Elements of Individual Action
The basic premise of the player’s role in the town is to act as a member of the town council.
As a council member, each player has their own adventurers’ guild at their disposal, where
they are able to hire citizens of the town to go out on adventures and complete missions.
One of the first tasks for the player upon joining the game is recruiting their first
adventurer. Already when new users join a town, the game system will be populating the
18

town with randomly generated citizens. Players can browse through the citizens and sort
them by various combat-related statistics, such as their physical strength or speed. What
criteria a player uses to choose a citizen is up to the individual, and players who are
disinterested in analyzing the game at such a level may choose citizens based on their given
names or what they look like visually. The player will eventually be able to hire up to four
town citizens at a time, known as their “party”. The player is responsible for the
maintenance and action of this party, from making decisions on a daily basis of what their
party should investigate to outfitting their party appropriately for adventuring.
Each day, the player returns to the game website to send their party off on an adventure.
The Guard Station provides a listing of recently discovered locations that are in need of
investigation and each location has two to three possible encounters. There players can
review any available scout reports and leave messages for one another about where they
would like to go. When choosing a location, players have the option to have their party
either “scout” or “clear” the location. The former means that the party will simply explore
location and discover what lies there in terms of numbers of enemies and possible rewards.
The latter means that the party will go to the location and actually engage any monsters
they find. Scouting is a risk-free way of earning some experience points for involved party
members and also leads to the discovery of new locations, but actually clearing an area is
necessary for obtaining any special rewards that might be at the location, such as armor or
weapons and access to resource nodes.
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Figure 10: Schism players visit the Outpost to see what
adventures they may go on

Figure 11: A sample scout report
The player must make their selection before the “rollover” hour: this is the time each day at
which the game considers the day to be over, whereupon it goes about the business of
calculating the results of all the actions made. The calculation process takes less than a
minute in computational time, so any players who happen to be checking the website near
the rollover hour will be able to see the results more or less immediately. On the new turn,
players may read the results of their previous day’s actions and begin to make decisions on
their next turn, having the next twenty-four hour period within which to actually submit
their action.
Elements of Collective Action
As a member of the town’s council, each player is also able to participate in decisions
regarding the growth of the town as a whole. Aside from the management of their individual
parties, a player may head to the Town Hall to see what motions are currently being voted
on. These will almost entirely consist of proposals to spend town resources to upgrade town
buildings or to build new defensive structures.
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Any player may submit a proposal, which then must be seconded by one other player in the
town. Should it be seconded, the proposal then becomes a motion that becomes available
for approval. When a motion has a majority of the players’ support, it will be carried at the
next rollover: the resources required to build the upgrade will be consumed and the new
building’s capabilities will be available immediately in the next turn. Only one motion may
pass per day, but this limit can be increased by upgrading the Town Hall building.
A sample building that might be constructed through a motion is the armor shop, which
then allows players to purchase armor with which to equip their adventurers with.
Upgrading the armor shop will increase the effectiveness of the armor that can be bought
within. This allows players who have not been able to find special armor through
adventuring to still armor their citizens. In addition, it is possible that the effectiveness of
armor purchased through a high-level armor shop may surpass that of the armor found
through adventuring, which benefits all members of the town equally.
Apart from voting on civic matters, there is also the task of gathering natural resources and
materials for the town’s stores. When parties successfully clear adventures, a possible
reward is the discovery of a resource node, of which there are three possible types: lumber
yards, mineral veins, and gold mines. When resource nodes are discovered, they become
available in a listing in the town’s Labor Hall. Here a player can look over all the
unemployed citizens in the town and assign them to work at a resource node. The citizen
will then visit the node and bring back a fixed amount of that resource every turn until the
node has no resources left. The amount that a citizen can carry in one turn can be increased
by upgrading the Labor Hall.
21

Figure 12: Assigning available citizens to gather resources.
(Early prototype with temporary art.)

This action of assigning citizens may be handled by any player in the town either
collectively or, if few players are interested in this extra delegation responsibility, one
player may choose to manage this aspect of the town management individually. Citizens
may be reassigned by any player at any time to collect from one type of node or another,
depending on what upgrades the town believes they will be interested in soon.
Encouraging Collaboration
To give Schism players a reason to work together to make their town stronger, the game
includes an aspect of the tower defense format. On every seventh turn, the town will be
attacked by waves of monsters randomly and periodically throughout the day. These turns
are referred to as “schisms”: the narrative indicates these days occur because the barrier
between the game’s two worlds grows thin and allows monsters to leak through. No
22

adventuring is permitted on these days, but players may still pass civic motions and manage
their parties.
Like the combat that occurs during adventuring, these encounters are resolved
automatically by the system, with some additional elements at play. For example, the
monsters in these attacks tend to attack town defenses first, such as city walls and towers,
then other town structures, then the citizens themselves. Should there be no adventurers
left to defend against the remaining monsters, the players have effectively lost the game and
the town will be destroyed.
These monster attack days effectively set a sort of minimum pace for the game to proceed;
players must achieve a level of minimum progress if they should expect to survive each
successive attack. Any damaged buildings may be repaired by spending the requisite
resources and assigning a citizen to that building through the Labor Hall.

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Evaluation Scenarios and Methods
Mechanics Prototype
In May 2009, I completed a prototype of all the game’s proposed mechanics in an extremely
simplified form. Written in PHP with a MySQL database backend, this early version of the
game permitted players to sign up and receive an adventurer and then send that adventurer
off on missions of varying levels of difficulty. Players could also vote on which upgrades
they preferred and the town would suffer from monster attacks every seven turns.
The purpose of the prototype was to determine whether or not the game’s proposed
mechanics, which were all generally inspired by those found in various single-player games,
would hold up in a multiplayer format. I held multiple play tests of this particular prototype:
these were concentrated sessions of a half hour to an hour, where groups of five to seven
players agreed to meet in an online chat room and converse with one another while
interacting with the online game interface.
The results were very encouraging. Play testers avidly communicated with one another
about what they planned to do and what upgrades would be most beneficial. Among some
of the feedback that was solicited, players had a genuine sense of a need to empower their
town in order to survive the monster attacks and therefore they took their limited choices
of where to go and what to upgrade relatively seriously.
“Digital Paper” Play Test
One of my greatest concerns was the possibility that the game would simply not be
engaging enough for people to return again and again. The limited number of actions per
turn, though a staple of many Facebook games, initially appeared to be insufficient for
provoking enough interest in players to return to the game each day. In order to test this
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without first building the entire game and potentially wasting a great deal of time, I held a
“digital paper” play test, or play test through e-mail. This play test took place over the
course of a week. I had a total of twelve participants, whom I split up into two unique towns.
Each day I sent out e-mails to each participant, explaining what actions they could take that
day and giving them a link to a webpage that was crafted specifically for that day’s actions.
The webpage also included a simple message board where testers could post messages for
the others in the town. Participants were asked to submit their actions to me through a
return e-mail by 11pm each day. I then calculated the results of the actions and sent them a
new e-mail the next day.
The results of this e-mail play test were particularly
remarkable. Though I had insisted that players not go out of
their way to submit their actions to me, the return rate of e-
mails was extremely high. In their feedback, testers indicated
that within a couple days of the start of the play test, several of
them had achieved a sort of rhythm with their game
interactions: they would read the update in the morning,
contemplate their possible actions throughout the morning
and early afternoon, and then submit their action later in the
afternoon or evening. This feedback could be corroborated by
analyzing the message boards that were available to the
testers. The timestamps for the messages of a particular
player tended to occur near the same times each and every
day. This meant that the players truly attained some sort of
routine as they integrated the game into their lives.
Figure 13: Play test message
board color-coded by speaker
to illustrate posting frequency
and habit
25

In addition, different play styles also became apparent. Though their actual game actions
only consisted of a few decisions, some of the players quickly seemed to take on leadership
roles and communicated frequently to their fellow townspeople through the message board.
These players, effectively becoming more involved in their town’s well being, gave direct
suggestions on how much gold should be donated and what upgrades to vote for. Other
players, who were possibly less interested in civic matters or perhaps simply too busy to
care, would frequently go along with these suggestions without much fuss. This
demonstrated that the game’s format would allow leader type personalities to surface
naturally and that follower type players would be more than amenable to let them
command.

“Some Assembly Required” physical prototype
During the mid-winter 2009 exhibition “Some Assembly Required”, I ran an informal play
test of a version of the game that somewhat combined the elements of both the previous
prototypes. The participants, who were easily identifiable through their donning of Schism
baseball caps, numbered nearly twenty throughout the evening and returned to the game
station every half hour to receive updates and make out new actions. Though the session
was less of a test of game mechanics and more of a demonstration, there were still a couple
valuable lessons learned from the experience.
The player play styles, which revealed themselves in an earlier prototype, became a more
serious issue as some players seemed to entirely forget to return to the station for updates.
While this was partially due to the nature of the environment of the show, it was a hint that
I should consider what the ramifications were for missing a turn and to ensure that the
penalty for doing so was not anything that could not be overcome in the next several turns.
26

In addition, when the player did choose to return, the interface should support the fact that
players may be more interested in the last turn in which they made an action, rather than
the last turn for the town as a whole.
The “leader” players made themselves obvious in this prototype as well, going so far as to
designate themselves the official town spokesperson and delegating the citizens out on their
adventures as if they were the player that hired the citizen in the first place. It was this
willingness of certain player types to get more involved with the game that inspired the
delegation of unemployed civilians to gather resources, a task that would inevitably fall to
players who were interested in taking a more active role in guiding their town’s future.
Final Game Release
While a releasable version of the game is still in production, testing of current builds has
revealed some issues that need to be addressed. Though some of these problems may be
alleviated with the inclusion of more features, I do have some concern that more analysis
and development must be done in order to properly accomplish the project’s goals.
Foremost is the observation that in the “digital paper” prototype, or e-mail prototype,
players demonstrated a clear willingness and eagerness to discuss what they had
discovered on their respective missions and were vocal about their need for allies for their
next adventure. This is contrasted by a much more marked lack of text discussion in the
current builds, even though players do still appear to check in with the site and take their
actions on a regular basis. While some of this could be explained by the lack of implemented
features and therefore actions that are possible, it is also likely that the automatic inclusion
of seeing other players’ activity has precluded each player’s need to specifically discuss
what they had personally discovered.
27

A second serious concern is in the players’ remembrance that they are participating in the
game at all. The problem of players forgetting to come back and take their turns has been
exacerbated, so much so that testers have requested the inclusion of a feature that will send
e-mail updates to players when the game is prepared to let them take another turn. While
this is certainly a feature worth considering, it is perhaps disappointing that the game itself
thus far does not have a significant enough memory imprint on its players that they would
automatically remember to come back for their next turn. Again, this problem might be
solved when more development has been completed. In the meantime, including an e-mail
reminder feature is a likely future inclusion.

28

Discussion
Though early prototypes seem to suggest that the game concept has promise and potential,
it remains to be seen whether the actual implementation of the game will successfully
achieve the goals of the project. One of the most significant problems is in the balance of
accessibility and ensuring that the game has enough intrinsic depth for players to have
something to communicate and strategize about. Facebook games owe their accessibility to
the fairly limited number of game elements players have to worry about. Most games
require that their players only make a couple actions in each play session and players need
only manage a limited number of resources. This makes the games excessively simple and
makes decision-making a fairly easy-going process, but also means that fans of the game
have relatively little to discuss.
The solution seems to be not in avoiding overcomplicating the game mechanics, but rather
in allowing players to choose the depth at which they wish to participate. By giving players
a small number of mandatory tasks and additionally a number of optional tasks, players are
able to participate and contribute at a base minimum level while “leader” players come to
the forefront willingly to take on more responsibility.
A similarly difficult line to straddle that is very much related to the first problem is in the
balance between player convenience and player responsibility. As stated before, the
decrease in the amount of text communication between the e-mail prototype and the final
release builds has been significant, likely due to the fact that some of the material that
players had been responsible for reporting themselves was now publicly accessible
automatically. This particular difficulty is something that would likely benefit from further
testing and focus: it is difficult to intuit exactly how much information should be provided
automatically versus what should be the player’s responsibility to report.
29

World of Warcraft benefits from the fact that it is a very large game with a great deal of
information that must be parsed by players every moment of the game: it can afford to be
totally transparent with its mechanics and information supply, as players have plenty of
other material to discuss. Schism, in its effort to be more accessible and lightweight like
Facebook games, is in contrast a very small game, with far less material inherently available
to discuss. Caution must be exercised in deciding how much of the game should be made
transparent in order keep the game engaging without inconveniencing players. Travian
suggests that it is certainly possible to have a game with a casual learning curve and enough
strategic elements to keep players interested, but it remains to be seen whether the format
can be altered to suit a group of players that only play sporadically.
It is also possible that text communication should not be the primary measurement for how
social the game actually is. Player feedback should be solicited in regards to how they feel
the social experience compares to that of Facebook games and whether they felt like they
were working with other players, despite the lack of actual text communication.

30

Conclusion
Though further testing and analysis must be done before Schism can be called a success, the
preliminary results are fairly satisfying. The most critical aspect to successfully developing a
better cooperative social experience in casual games is to start with a game design that
naturally lends itself to social interaction, rather than attempting to build social layers on
top of a single player experience. By starting with the communal experience of managing
and nurturing a town together, Schism is off to a strong start.
While the Facebook games market has seen explosive success over the past year, the fact
remains that many of the games are forgettable and companies’ new releases frequently
cannibalize their own player bases. Already there are predictions that the next step in
Facebook games is the production of games that make better use of a player’s friends and
contacts, rather than what passes for social gaming currently. Schism is one possible
approach in how to improve upon the social gaming experience and it’s only a matter of
time until we see others.

31

References
Airship Studios. 2006. Skyrates.
Anon. 2010. “The Farmville rage – Rise of Social Gaming”. Gaming Box. March 17.
http://gamingbox.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/the-farmville-rage-rise-of-social-gaming/.
Blizzard Entertainment. 2004. World of Warcraft.
Bogost, Ian. 2007. “Parking Wars on Facebook”. Water Cooler Games. December 22.
http://www.bogost.com/watercoolergames/archives/parking_wars_on.shtml.
Brathwaite, Brenda. 2007. “Facebook’s Parking Wars’ Play Dynamics – Updated”. Applied
Game Design. December 27. http://bbrathwaite.wordpress.com/2007/12/27/facebooks-
parking-wars-play-dynamics/.
Challenge Games. 2009. Ponzi, Inc.
Chokshi, Niraj. 2010. “The Rise Of Casual Gaming”. The Atlantic. March 18.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/03/the-rise-of-casual-gaming/37697/.
Coelln, Eric von. 2009. “FishVille Gets Millions of Users in First Week, But Sees Slower
Growth Than Past Zynga Titles”. Inside Social Games. November 13.
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/11/13/fishville-gets-millions-of-users-in-first-
week-but-slower-growth-than-past-zynga-titles/.
Eldon, Eric. 2009. “Zynga’s Vision for the Social Web, in PowerPoint”. Inside Social Games.
October 21. http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/10/21/zyngas-vision-for-the-social-
web-in-powerpoint/.
Nutt, Christian. 2009. “Playfish: The Social Gaming Provocateurs”. Gamasutra. August 24.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4113/playfish_the_social_gaming_.php.
Parking Wars. 2009. Parking Wars.
Playdom. 2009. Mobsters 2: Vendetta.
Smith, Justin. 2010. “Slides from Presentation at GDC on the State of the Social Gaming
Industry”. Inside Social Games. March 10.
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2010/03/10/slides-from-presentation-at-gdc-on-the-
state-of-the-social-gaming-industry/.
32

Square. 1995. Chrono Trigger.
Travian Games, 2004. Travian.
Totilo, Stephen. 2010. “‘Love’ Is The Game That Earns You Respect, Breaks The World Of
Warcraft Rules”. Kotaku. March 24. http://kotaku.com/5501295/love-is-the-game-that-
earns-you-respect-breaks-the-world-of-warcraft-rules.
Zynga. 2009. FarmVille.
Zynga. 2009. Mafia Wars.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Nie, Cynthia (author)

Core Title Schism: bridging the gap from casual browser games to hardcore social worlds

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 05/04/2010

Defense Date 03/25/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag browser game,casual game,cooperative play,multiplayer,OAI-PMH Harvest,persistent-world,social interaction

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Brinson, Peter (committee chair), Gibson, Jeremy (committee member), Liu, Jonathan (committee member)

Creator Email cnie@usc.edu,cynthia.nie@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2993

Unique identifier UC1323415

Identifier etd-Nie-3457 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-307835 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2993 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Nie-3457.pdf

Dmrecord 307835

Document Type Thesis

Rights Nie, Cynthia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu