Reality is a Game

Game thinking from Adam Clare

Author: Adam ClarePage 82 of 262

Are Race Car Drivers Athletes?

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On 18/07/2013

In Stuff

Last weekend I went to the Indy race in Toronto (where I saw some ducks) and enjoyed the spectacle. The craft beer tent was a great bonus.

In-between races I read an article on how physically intense driving an Indy car can be and the flack drivers get for making it look easy.

Imagine being strapped to a wall standing straight up so only the balls of your feet touch the floor. Then, someone wraps a belt around the back of your head and pulls it as hard as possible while you try to stop your head from moving forward.

As you try to keep your head up, you also must hold two bricks out in front of your body and twist them up and down in a circular motion when the belt gets pulled.

Yet, the article contests, the people who do this aren’t called athletes like pot-bellied baseball players are.

When talking about sports game design in class we inevitably get to the question: is car racing a sport? The people who think it isn’t tend to fall back on the idea that to participate in a sport one needs to be fit. So here, I want to address that question.

I’m on board with the idea that drivers are athletes. I must admit, it is sometimes hard to argue when people think all racers look like this NASCAR fellow:

Sure, not all kinds of racing require one to be able to run a triathlon but not all physical sports need that too (I’m looking at you NFL).

Car blog Jalopnik also wondered about the physical acumen of drivers and asked an Indy Lights champion about it. It’s clear that you do need to be strong and have good stamina to race. Here’s his take on a day or relatively light racing after a break from the sport:

My face became blotchy with purple splodges, and I felt incredibly sick. I could hardly breath, and my arms didn’t work. I wasn’t sure I could get back in the car, meaning I would have to admit to my lack of fitness, and potentially blow my opportunity to impress a team as esteemed as Ganassi.

After a glass of water, I held back the vomit and clambered back into the car. Fortunately, I finished my session without crashing and ran to the bathroom to finally throw up

He also concludes that F1 and similar are harder sports. Just take a look at this video with former F1 driver Martin Brundle exploring the physical hardships of being an F1 driver.

TL;DR: With all of the above in mind I can’t help but think that race car drivers are indeed athletes.

How to Make Money With a Freemium Model (F2P)

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On 11/07/2013

In Business, Design, Psychology

The free to play (F2P), AKA freemium, business model for games is a popular one but because it’s still a relatively new one for video games people are still figuring it out. That being said, some things are fairly obvious strategies, but the beauty of games is that the mechanics of the game itself may require new monetization methods.

Here’s what people who have experience and researched this topic deeply have to say:

First off, the person who literally wrote the book on Free 2 Play, Will Luton, sat down for interview on the basics of the F2P approach.

With publishers of console games testing the free-to-play, do you think it will work or is it only for mobile gaming?

F2P will work on any platform as long as games can be delivered digitally to it and the platform owners allow the model to occur. Consoles will need to embrace the model, indeed on Ouya free is the only model.

What’s the best way to ensure your game stays free-to-play without just becoming pay-to-win?

By letting players gain anything paid that gives advantage through play. Most games that offer a competitive advantage IAP are really offering convenience: Keep on grinding or pay and get it now.

You can read the full interview here.

A much more indepth article on the F2P cane be found at Gamasutra. Ramin Shokrizade outlines his top F2P magnetization tricks which range from genre-specific to psychological tricks to get people hooked.

Reward Removal

This is my favorite coercive monetization technique, because it is just so powerful. The technique involves giving the player some really huge reward, that makes them really happy, and then threatening to take it away if they do not spend. Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value the same item as a reward. To be effective with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful is the effect.

One place to launch a game is on Kongergate, and online gaming portal. The portal has a great presentation on keeping players and getting them to pay.

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