Article Title: The Metrics Aren't the Message

by Laralyn McWilliams [Design, Social/Online]

Paragraph Heading: And the Science gets done, and you make a neat gun... for the
people who are still alive.
So here I was working on social games, faced with changes required to increase t
he friction. These changes would get the small group of paying players to pay mo
re but they would also increase the churn across the rest of the player base. I
was adding elements to disrupt the play experience -- to knock the player out of
the Zen state of connection with our game -- to get him to pay money.
These changes would almost certainly generate more revenue for the company. The
company wasn't evil. No one was twirling the ends of his moustache while tying h
elpless players to the railroad tracks. On the contrary, this company was filled
with great people who wanted to make great games. Company growth -- and to some
extent company salaries -- depended on the game making money.
As I struggled with these decisions, I watched the industry and I played other s
ocial and social/mobile games. I saw players struggling to try to stick to games
they genuinely liked. My friends and I were even paying money in some games...
just not at the whale level. I watched those games churn us all out. I saw the h
eart of any online game -- the community of players -- start to flounder as the
friction curve increased.
Even as players struggled to stay connected to games that seemed determined to c
hurn them out, I saw companies start to struggle because the "time to churn" was
getting shorter. There was more competition in the space and the monetization m
echanics in the games were so similar that the games started to feel the same re
gardless of gameplay mechanics.
Yet the production values were rising, so given the short churn time, even the b
ig companies couldn't put out games quickly enough to churn players into another
one of their games.
Friends got laid off. The games didn't change. The companies didn't change. Desp
ite my misgivings and doubts, I didn't change.
Then in late March 2012, I was diagnosed with Stage IV throat cancer.
Paragraph Heading: Even though you broke my heart. And killed me.
As you would expect of "the metrics lady," I did a lot of research. At first, it
was dumb research because I didn't know any better. I looked at outdated studie
s or ones based on a different type of cancer. When I started doing better resea
rch, I looked at statistical outcomes, survival odds, and other data points. Des
pite everything I believed, I looked to metrics for answers. And I started to de
spair because the "answers" weren't promising.
Luckily, I stumbled upon The Median isn't the Message by Stephen Jay Gould, the
noted biologist. He'd been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and his doctor
refused to give him statistics. When he did the research himself, he understood
why: the survival odds were terrible, with a median life expectancy of eight mon
ths.
When I learned about the eight-month median, my first intellectual reaction was:
fine, half the people will live longer; now what are my chances of being in tha
t half. I read for a furious and nervous hour and concluded, with relief: damned
good. I possessed every one of the characteristics conferring a probability of
longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early s
tage; I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to li
ve for; I knew how to read the data properly and not despair.
Suddenly I remembered what I already knew: metrics aren't the answer. They're ju
st a source of information and, like all information, they have to be interprete
d. Some of that interpretation -- and even the outcome itself -- requires emotio
nal context. Even as a scientist, Gould recognized that "...attitude clearly mat
ters in fighting cancer."
Paragraph Heading: And tore me to pieces. And threw every piece into a fire.
I worked from home during chemotherapy and radiation, but when I was well enough
to return to the office, I had changed. The pivotal moment came when a designer
asked me if he could add more quests to the game. In this specific game, quests
clearly made the game more fun for players. They were motivating and moved the
story forward. They reduced -- or in some cases eliminated -- the tedium of grin
d.
Except paying to skip the grind was a core monetization element. Making a change
that was clearly in the player's benefit would be against the benefit of the co
mpany. In a premium game, a subscription game, or even a free-to-play game like
League of Legends, there would be no question. But in the friction-based monetiz
ation world of social games, anything that removes friction also removes monetiz
ation. It's not about having a happy player base: it's about having a paying pla
yer base.
That moment -- the act of telling the designer not to add quests and soften the
grind -- cemented my decision to leave social games.
Original Article: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/188197/the_metrics_arent
_the_message.php?page=2
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