At the recent Austin Game Developers Conference, area/code co-founder and lead designer Frank Lantz discussed the development of Parking Wars, an advergame on Facebook. Parking Wars was, admittedly, more successful than even area/code anticipated. Frank’s proposal for why was simple. According to Gamasutra:

The game, in which your park your cars on your friend’s ’street’ on Facebook, is specifically intended to take advantage of a “light but persistent” rhythm of interaction.

Lantz explained that, sure, there is a competitive aspect, but there’s also a sense in which it functions as a light social MMO. In fact, it’s “…designed specifically to be something that you would do twice a day for five minutes.”

Social networks benefit from bringing users back day after day — through tropes like inboxes, newsfeeds, notifications, invites, messages. What could be a more perfect game than one where players feel compelled to return day after day, week after week, month after month?

This is what I’m calling the “long tail” of game design (a cousin concept to Chris Anderson’s long tail of business strategy). Rather than building games that promote brief and intense play, why not build games that promote short spurts of play over a much longer timeline?

Zynga gets the best of both worlds by enabling both of these play styles, but ultimately is focused on the long-term. You can play Scramble against your friends in a turn-based capacity, or you can engage in one of our many live rooms, and play Scramble fans around the globe for hours every day. For the ultimate long-tailers, RPGs like Street Racing, Mafia Wars, and Fashion Wars are great games. I guess the only question is: what kind of player are you?

I have a little paper scroll from a Chinese fortune cookie that sits on my desk at work. It originally read “Necessity is the mama of invention,” and while I find nothing wrong with that statement (except maybe the use of “mama”), it didn’t exactly suit me. So I grabbed a pen and made a few edits. Now it reads:

“Constraint is the mother of innovation.”

As a game designer, I refer to this principle on a daily basis, so it’s nice to have it in writing. Whether working on a brand new title, or making improvements to an existing one, the best ideas are born out of limitations — boundaries which designers must work around to achieve their goals.

“Easy” problems are simply those with too many solutions. It’s when our options are severely limited that we begin to look in new and exciting directions. That’s why my favorite days at Zynga are also the most challenging. And that’s why I immortalized the sentiment on a fortune scroll. It’s the best advice you could ever get from a cookie.

- sj