Tom Chatfield
Stronger than ever: World of Warcraft keeps people playing with constant updates and fresh rewards, like this flying mount
Kristian Segerstråle is telling me what makes his videogames company unusual. “Most of the $50bn [£30.4bn] or more spent on videogames each year goes on that emotional, solitary, caveman-like journey of you versus the monsters,” he says. “But our games are different. They’re not about what is going on between you and the screen; they’re about what goes on between you and your friends when you play. They’re much more of a medium and a catalyst, for expression, competition, co-operation.” They are also a stupendously good way of making money.
Segerstråle, a boyish 32, is founder and CEO of Playfish, one of the world’s leading “social gaming” companies: makers of a new kind of videogame that is rapidly becoming as essential to online life as sharing images or reading a blog. It’s mid-November and he is “super excited”—not surprisingly, given that Playfish has just been bought by one of the world’s largest and most revered videogames publishers, Electronic Arts (EA), in a deal worth up to $400m (£250m). Playfish didn’t exist two years ago. Today, its games have over 60m unique monthly players and it’s not even the largest in its sector (market leader Zynga boasts over 100m after just two-and-a-half years in existence). So what, exactly, has been going so right?
The easiest answer has two words: social networks. Facebook, the world’s most influential social networking platform, now has over 300m active users. The only website to command more online traffic is Google. Other leading social websites like MySpace and Bebo reach several hundred million users globally. Factor into this the swelling number of smart-phones with internet capabilities, such as Apple’s iPhone, and you have a big business opportunity. Because, next to sending messages, the single most popular activity within these new social platforms and on these new devices is playing games.
The history of games is as old as civilisation. Competitive games are recorded as far back as 2,600BC, while archaeologists have found game “boards” that were apparently scratched onto the backs of statues by bored Assyrian guards in the 8th century BC. Technology has not changed human nature but it has given unprecedented rein to some of our innate impulses and, in particular, to those parts of us that the world of work and business have not used to best advantage: our love of exploration, learning, interaction and, perhaps above all, our sense of fun.
Playfish has created ten games to date, and most of them are a long way from the traditional idea of videogames as a violent, crude form of escapism. Its first title, Who Has the Biggest Brain?, is an IQ quiz. Starting to play it takes less than 30 seconds: having logged into Facebook or MySpace (or switched on your iPhone), you look up the application and, after a few clicks and no expenditure, start playing. An excitable cartoon figure invites you to pit your wits against four classes of game: analytical ability, calculation, memory and visual processing. And then you’re off—counting the number of blocks in increasingly complicated Lego-like shapes, for instance, or answering a series of sums against the clock.
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Tom Chatfield
The biggest name in the online world…
It’s five years today since World of Warcraft first opened its doors to the public, something I’ve been writing about on our website as it’s an anniversary that lies close to the heart of my gaming life (and millions of others’). I also wanted to take the chance, though, to mark a slightly less-celebrated but equally significant anniversary—the fact that it’s now 15 years today since the very first Warcraft game burst onto the global scene.
In 1994, videogames still looked faintly embarrassing to the uninitiated: cheerful, blocky collections of pixels that represented a variety of mythical creatures, but which resembled nothing so much as an artfully arranged set of technical lego. They were impressive—but they were also, really, a toy for boys. My friends and I played Warcraft, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, and their space-age companion, Starcraft, huddled in our bedrooms. All four were examples of the genre known as “real time strategy,” and involved directing tiny armies of troops and harvesting resources in a frantic effort to destroy an opponent’s base. The games got prettier and more complex over time, of course. But they were still the kind of games we had grown up with: playing at war with pixels, with four players at most involved—and some seriously fiendish mouse and keyboard work to learn if you wanted any chance of victory. That was what videogames were all about.
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Tom Chatfield
It’s five years today since the world’s most famous computer game, World of Warcraft, began. And I’m both proud and slightly embarrassed to say that I’ve been there since the beginning, in the company of friends, an ever-shifting circle of guild-mates and my wife (who has asked me to point out that she’s considerably better at the game than I am)—something I’ve written about in a little more detail on our blog.
I believe that World of Warcraft matters. Exactly how and why it matters, though, can be hard to get at from the outside; much of what reaches the mainstream media is a muddle of scandals, statistics and pseudo-scientific scraps. So I’d like to take a few moments to recall just what it was like to play this game for the first time five years ago, in the company of an old friend who had managed to wheedle both of our ways onto the game’s American servers in time for launch—and why, five years on, the character I created then is still soldiering on through the northern reaches of the world’s most famous unreal destination.
What struck us, first of all, was just how much it felt like a world: huge, organic, inviting exploration. There were lakes, mountains, rivers, forests, cliffs, towns, cities, and lots of things to squash, splatter, maim and generally exterminate for the sake of various rewards. What struck us shortly after this was that, although there was a game here to be played, there was also an awful lot more to it than simply playing and trying to win. My friend had chosen to play a dwarf warrior as his first character but, unlike any other game we’d encountered before, there was no sense in which he was that character. As far as World of Warcraft was concerned, he was himself, and just happened to be strolling around a vast cartoon world in the guise of an aggressive dwarf. And that was much more interesting, because it meant that—for the first time any of us had known—you could actually be yourself while playing. In fact, you could be all sorts of things that your self didn’t normally manage.
My friend, for instance, could give free rein to his love of abuse. He’d team up with other players, and they’d happily talk trash for hours while batting the odd boar on the head with an axe. Soon enough, he got invited to join a guild, where his trash talking began to assume legendary proportions. I, meanwhile, had begun to play the character of a troll rogue and had discovered that I quite enjoyed talking about books with the people I met online. That, and confusing them by quoting inappropriate lines from films at apposite moments. The game allowed it. The game positively encouraged it, with its lovingly detailed mélange of pop-cultural parodies, fantasy scenarios and media cross-references (my favourite is the gruff big game hunter Hemet Nesingwary, a none-too-subtle anagram). You could take it as seriously or as lightly as you liked. And, when the action got frantic, you and the people you’d met up with just half an hour ago would find yourselves forging a whole new kind of friendship in the fires of virtual adversity. There were even members of the opposite sex in there—and much older people, and people from places you’d never even heard of. Everyone was equally welcome, and everyone was equal on the level playing field of a virtual world. All distinction was to be earned.
Plus, it wasn’t really possible to lose. No death was final, no cause ever entirely lost. To all intents and purposes, the game was endless: even after a few hundred hours of hard slog had raised your character to the maximum level allowable, you could always start another one, or explore a new region of endgame content, or wait for the makers Blizzard to patch up the world of Azeroth and generate some fresh content. Or you could just swagger around a capital city clad in eye-wateringly valuable armour and weapons, and watch the newbies follow you around and beg for help with their own quests. And, of course, you could debate the rights and wrongs of everything from what robes went best with a particular haircut to the balance of power between different classes of player in the endless online forums surrounding the game.
World of Warcraft matters for all sorts of reasons, but perhaps above all because it did all of this much better than anything else around, or than anyone had really thought possible. There were other massively multiplayer games before it, and there have been plenty since; some are wonderful, some very popular. But WoW was the bridgehead through which a sub-culture rudely inserted itself into the mainstream of cultural life. It has proved—with hard, unarguable numbers (12m players, over $1bn of annual revenues)—that playing videogames is a very serious kind of fun for many, many people. And it has proved that this kind of fun is bound up with a number of other trends that are worth taking seriously.
The study of virtual economics wasn’t born around WoW, but the notion that there can be such a thing as a billion-dollar international market in buying and selling unreal goods has gained common currency through it. WoW has now become a shorthand for the observation that real and virtual worlds can compete for allegiance in people’s lives—with potentially troubling consequences. But playing a game with strangers can also be one of the most eye-opening ways in which it’s possible to meet someone (my wife and I now regularly visit members of our in-game guild on the east coast of the US). And then there’s the whole culture that has grown up around it. I defy anyone who has played WoW not to hurt themselves laughing at this particular episode of South Park—or anyone who hasn’t to understand a single thing about it. The gulf between those who do and don’t know what playing a video game is like is now one of the most telling cultural fractures around; and it’s thanks in large part to WoW that it’s no longer clear which is the more dignified side to be standing on.
Pre-order Tom Chatfield’s “Fun Inc” at 35 per cent off when you purchase through rBooks. Visit www.rbooks.co.uk/funinc and use the promotional code FUNINC with your order. Offer expires 31/03/2010 and cannot be used in conjunction with other offers
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