November 28, 2006

Game Theory
How a Grad-School Thesis Theory
Evolved Into a PlayStation 3 Game
November 28, 2006

Eager gamers don't need to scour eBay or retail outlets to sample a game for Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3. Thanks to a graduate study on "flow theory," a prototype of a future downloadable title is already finding success on the Web.

With the help of classmates at the University of Southern California's Interactive Media Division1, 26-year-old Jenova Chen published "flOw2" on the school's Web site in March. In the Flash game, players control a sea creature that must eat and evolve to attain higher levels. The browser-based game was meant to be an academic exercise, but it scored more than 100,000 hits in its first two weeks, Mr. Chen says. That was enough bait for Sony.

Sony eventually struck an unusual deal with a startup company formed by Mr. Chen and classmate Kellee Santiago, 27. The company commissioned an enhanced version of flOw that will be sold through its PlayStation Network3, which features an online store4 accessible through the next-generation console.

Swallow Everything

What makes flOw addictive is its intuitiveness. The Flash version5 eschews navigation menus and how-to-play instructions, instead forcing players right into the action. Adrift in a blue expanse, players meet their unusual avatar: an abstract sea creature with an oversized U-shaped mouth and short tail.

Even without prompts, the controls are clear. The mouse guides the creature's movement through a two-dimensional seascape, in the same way it moves the cursor on a PC. Clicking the mouse button delivers a boost of swimming speed.

A player's instinctual urge (when controlling an avatar with such prominent jaws) is to pull a Pac-Man and swallow everything in sight. Each time the creature consumes another organism it grows, first adding orbs to its tail and eventually sprouting leg-like appendages. Evolution allows the creature to swim faster and withstand greater damage from hungry deep-sea rivals.

Two special organisms -- one red, the other blue -- serve a non-nutritional function. Consuming the red unit whisks the avatar to a lower depth, while the blue unit sends the avatar back to shallower waters. Since the completely blue seascape makes it difficult to get your bearings, these level-altering organisms emit red and blue ripples from off-screen to announce their location.

Gameplay is incredibly smooth, particularly for a Flash game. But it's the design touches that set flOw apart. Players will notice faint outlines of the creatures lurking at lower depths, a foreboding sign that vicious manta- and squid-like enemies await. The water darkens as the creature advances to deeper levels. The game's ambient sound is somewhat hypnotic.

The intuitive controls and design simplicity are among Mr. Chen's mandate: build immersive games for people who don't consider themselves gamers. "My parents and grandparents don't play games. My girlfriend, she doesn't play either," he says. "I want to make games that those people can appreciate."

Totally Engaged

As Tolstoy might have put it: Hardcore gamers are all alike, but every casual gamer is casual in his own way. Take two different first-person-shooter6 titles: The particulars may diverge -- slaughtering aliens or killing Nazis -- but the gameplay tends to be remarkably consistent from one game to the next.

GET IN THE FLOW

Though flOw won't be released for the PlayStation 3 until next month, the Web-based prototype is still online. The link below will launch the game in a new window:

• http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/7
 

Publishers bank on this shared videogame vocabulary to attract buyers to the latest shooters. The same goes for racers, fighters, platformers, role-playing games, the annual "Madden" football sequels and other established genres.

But catering to hardcore gamers leaves out the much larger "latent gamer" population. This demographic includes occasional players looking for a 10-minute break, senior citizens who've never picked up a joystick, lapsed gamers who have grown too bored or busy (and, evidently, Mr. Chen's girlfriend).

Ms. Santiago, the USC classmate and business partner, says that's the stage of gaming now. "We have a generation of people that grew up playing games, love games, but just don't have time to play these hardcore games anymore," she says.

How do you hook such an audience? Mr. Chen's solution stems from "flow theory8," a psychological concept first developed by Claremont Graduate University's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi9. Flow, he explains, "is a mental state where a human being is totally engaged in an activity he is doing, where he is so involved that he loses track of time and space." In sports, broadcasters call this "the zone," that rare time when an athlete excels by forgoing active decision-making in favor of unconscious instinct.

Mr. Chen has elaborate theories on getting players into the "flow," but it mostly boils down to impulsive, easy-to-understand gameplay that eliminates disruptions. Nothing comes between the gamer and the experience -- no menus, no tutorials, no prompts or instructions; most of all, no dying. In flOw, depleted vitality sends the avatar back to shallower waters to find food. The only "game over10" moment is when the player closes the browser.

Conventional games often collect data about a players' in-game performance to adjust the difficulty level in real time: If a player falls too far behind in a racing game, for instance, the system might force computer-controlled opponents to slow down and give the player a chance.

Mr. Chen's concept hinges on users unknowingly setting their own difficulty level. "Not with an option box that says easy, medium and hard," he insists. "I want the player to control it subconsciously, based on what they're doing." In the face of a frustrating enemy, players are free to avoid the fight and search for more food, evolving into a more potent form. (Mr. Chen says the first squid-like enemy, encountered at level five, was made excessively difficult on purpose to see if players would instinctually flee from an unfair fight.)

On the other hand, if creature-on-creature combat is too easy, players may gravitate toward more fighting and less eating, and that self-imposed diet will make "flOw" tougher. Mr. Chen hopes players over time will self-select the correct difficulty -- keeping the game engaging, but not frustrating -- without ever really thinking about it.

The Tipping Point

Last spring, as Mr. Chen and Ms. Santiago neared graduation, they began forming ThatGameCompany11.

Their commodity, they thought, was "Cloud12," a more polished game conceived by Mr. Chen that employs many of the same theories later featured in flOw. But "Cloud" proved a tough sell to game publishers. When it came time to meet John Hight, executive director of external development for PlayStation, word of flOw was spreading online. The game has drawn more than two million "plays" since launch, Mr. Chen says, without the benefit of a promotional campaign.

This time, Mr. Chen and Ms. Santiago added flOw to their pitch. Mr. Hight saw the game's potential for the PS3 as a downloadable title, a newer avenue console makers Microsoft Corp., Sony and Nintendo Co. are exploring. The console adaptation of flOw will differ: the sea creature will swim in a 3-D environment, there will be a more diverse population of underwater organisms and players will be able to use the PS3's new motion-sensitive controller.

ThatGameCompany landed a three-game production deal with PlayStation and moved its fledging four-person staff into Sony's Los Angeles headquarters, where they were set up with equipment, consultants and extra workers -- a rare arrangement for first-time developers, Mr. Hight says. Under the terms of the deal, which Sony won't detail, ThatGameCompany received an advance on the PS3 version of flOw and royalties on every copy sold, as well as financing for future development.

The enhanced version of flOw is nearly complete, Mr. Hight says, and is scheduled for release in December. Sony won't reveal its price, but a launch title for the PS3's download service -- "Blast Factor" -- sells for $7.99.

Meanwhile, Mr. Chen has left the game company that he co-founded and hasn't been part of the PS3 remake of his thesis project. He received perhaps the only job offer more compelling: a chance to work with legendary game designer Will Wright13, father of "The Sims" franchise, on his new project "Spore."14

Write to Aaron Rutkoff at aaron.rutkoff@wsj.com15