David Frampton, developer of the very fun Chopper iPhone game, wrote a good blog post about what he called “Obligation Games”, for example FarmVille or We Rule.
“The main obligation is to come back and stay a while. They prey on the deeply rooted human need to care for things so they grow, and to not let things die. Stuff grows quicker if you spend more time in the game, and If you don’t start up the game within a certain period of time, things die.”
I never tried FarmVille, but I did start playing We Rule on my iPhone. I thought it was a pretty fun game to begin with, and it certain did have an addictive quality. I would plant crops with varying lengths of time to grow, and have to make sure I got back into the game at the right time to harvest them. It sounds stupid, and it is, but it made so much sense when I was playing it!
Having kicked that habit I can easily see how these games manage to be so successful. They suck you in with a fun concept, I’ve always like castles, so why not build one in We Rule? But where the game wore thin was the limited depth. Once I had quickly gotten to an advanced level, there was very little for me to do, even if I paid money for gold in the game, it wouldn’t have really added much. These games have great potential to suck people in, but if they are going to be long term successes, they need to have more depth. Something like World of Warcraft or Diablo Two using this model might really take off on the iPhone platform, or as David said:
“Now all ngmoco have to do is make the games actually fun (they’ve got the addictive part nailed, but the gameplay is poor), and we’ll all be doomed.”
