What’s it for?

Making something fun is a good place to start if you’re building a casual word game like Bongo.

But it’s not enough. Lots of things are fun, for a while, but that doesn’t meant that they’re worth the investment of time and money it takes to build them.

From the user’s perspective, a casual word game works when it offers a combination of:

  • Accomplishment
  • The creation and release of tension
  • A stretch or tickle of the brain’s processing power
  • Connection to friends (new or old)
  • Status from achievement
  • Satisfaction from accomplishment
  • A flow state

And from a business perspective, online casual games need:

  • A compelling reason to share
  • Benefits from the network effect
  • Stickiness (otherwise, you need new games or new audiences all the time)
  • A reason for someone to subscribe or click or otherwise create commercial value
  • A persistent and scalable engine for ongoing promotion of the game

Often, when we set out to design something, we skip most of this, and rely on intuition instead. “I’ll know it when I see it.” If this is working for you (as it does for jazz musicians and clothing designers I know), I’m hardly going to argue against it. But for most professionals, most of the time, saying it out loud is an effective way to not only measure the quality of the work, but to engage and coordinate with a team.

I wrote This is Strategy to remind myself and the people I care about that there’s an iterative process that can make our work more effective. In the case of Bongo, I spent months coming back, again and again, to “what’s it for?” Andrew Daines and the team at Puzzmo worked with me to stay clear about this as the game developed.

You can’t answer that question without also asking, “who’s it for?” Because nothing is for everyone, and identifying the dreams, desires and expectations of the audience is essential to discovering if you’ve actually solved a problem.

Tic Tac Toe isn’t much of a game, because the winning algorithm is too obvious and there’s very little tension, and so, little reward once the tension is released.

And Tic Tac Toe might become accidentally viral, but it’s not likely to happen.

In Bongo, I began with assertions about who it was for. Not hard core videogamers, certainly, nor for the people who can solve a crossword puzzle in 2 minutes. I don’t mind if either group plays, but the core group would be people who aren’t quite that competitive, and who might not have a vocabulary in the top 1%. Beyond that, though, was the nature of the network effect.

Almost all crossword-type games have a single correct answer. The constructor thinks of a puzzle, and every game, the players have to guess the answer.

I find this personally frustrating (because what if my answer is good too!) and it also diminishes the power of sharing. If I’ve solved the puzzle, then sharing it with you is simply bragging. Bragging goes a long way, but I was searching for something more generative.

Part of the breakthrough of Bongo is that there isn’t a right answer. There’s simply a better answer, until, finally, no one can find a way to improve it. This means the creator of the game doesn’t have to know the highest scoring play, and probably doesn’t.

Since the game is constantly iterating, there’s a really good reason to share your score. Just as Wikipedia gets better when others edit an article, you can work with your friends and improve while you’re playing.

Note that this isn’t tacked on at the end. It’s part of the “what’s it for” at the very beginning.

The next challenge was the rise of AI and the destruction of the status of winning because some folks are solving word games in six seconds now. I wanted the game to be resistant (if not immune) to this sort of shortcut, so everyone playing felt like they had a chance to do well. And so the scoring of each tile changes daily, and the bonus word and the blank increase the number of permutations dramatically.

A key tactic that supported the point of the game came from Zach Gage. Instead of rewarding the last 1% of obscure vocabulary (as Scrabble and crosswords do), we give a bonus for common words instead. There are dozens of other methods we used to continually reinforce the delight of the game. I’ll let you discover them as you play.

If you’ve made it this far on this long post, here’s a punchline: A key part of bringing strategy to creativity is that it removes, “because I feel like it/said so” from the conversation. Once you have a clear strategy of who and what it’s for, anyone can chime in and make it better.

Here’s my best play from yesterday’s game. Another non-winner, but I had fun.

And my best word so far for today’s Bongo is CRUX (406) – 1074.