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On Spymaster’s virality
What started as a crazy idea I had because I’m now not-so-secretly-obsessed with superspy films and the luxury aesthetics of the Craig-era James Bond is currently battling Google Wave for the top spot on Twitter’s trending topics. By just about every metric I know, Spymaster, a game I built with my colleagues at iList, has become a wild overnight success.
As far as I know, we’ve been the pioneer of using Twitter as a social gaming platform at this scale. With being a high-profile pioneer of an application of a social technology, it’s expected that you’re going to get both the wild support and the criticisms of your technology’s detractors. While the huge majority of the messages I have received about Spymaster have been insanely positive, with people explaining how much fun this little creation has given them, of course I’ve had my detractors. I’ve been called the man that ruined Twitter, a “social media f–ktard,” and some other, more profanity-ridden things from those who feel that the rest of the Spymaster team and I have completely destroyed the user experience of Twitter and everything they once found good about it. It all comes down to the notification system that tweets your given Spymaster actions, such as this one from ReadWriteWeb’s Jolie O’Dell. Some backlash is to be expected, and I’m not all that worried about it. Former Digg Architect Joe Stump was the first person to really start it amongst the digerati, which eventually led to MG Siegler’s backlash post on TechCrunch. Like Joe said, though, it was bound to happen. And Joe, if you’d like to hate anyone in particular for Spymaster’s notification system, you can hate me. I came up with the idea to incentivise people in-game. But please, if there’s one thing I could say right now to you and the Twittersphere at large: don’t shoot the messenger.
Uncovering a flaw in Twitter
As Joe very respectfully said — and I completely agree with him — Twitter is in dire need of a way to filter content from followers. Even in the complete absence of social games on Twitter, this is something I’ve been dying to do anyway, and it’s not an issue of spam: it’s that much of Twitter’s social hierarchy, no matter how asymmetric it is in practise, really isn’t in a real-world scenario. Follower reciprocity is basically psychologically required by Western culture in most of the cases where you actually know the person. At the risk of possibly outraging nearly everyone I follow, there are few people on my followers’ list that really just don’t say anything all that relevant to me. Having filters would also help with those issues where you still feel like you’re supposed to follow your ex on Twitter, but you don’t really want that real-time reminder of your breakup.
Previous to working with the iList guys, I was a Product Designer at Facebook, and Feed filters found their way into the product shortly after the launch of News Feed. Thankfully for me, they’ve saved plenty of frustration (or depression) from the psychologically-obligated reciprocity of people I haven’t talked to since middle school (or exes.) As Twitter matures as a platform, failwhales notwithstanding, we’re watching this happen as the demographic broaden. As much as many wish it still were, Twitter is no longer the playground of the digerati, something I’ve had to painfully recognise as former Twitter superpowers such as Kevin or Veronica fall to the likes of Diddy or Ashton Kutcher. With that, we’ve found Twitter’s trending topics go from news-junkie subjects and obscure technology releases to current network memes. It’s the byproduct of the growth of the network as both a messaging service and a platform.
Yes, we’ve found a flaw in Twitter’s user experience, and I fully trust the guys over there such as Doug and Vitor to fix it. Spymaster has caught Twitter by surprise, Stump by surprise, and probably myself by surprise most of all in how quickly it’s spread, but none of us mean any harm in it. The one thing I do take offense to, though, is being called out as being spammy because of the fault of an interface I have no control over.
I’m not trying to point fingers. I’m trying to explain my perspective: as an interaction designer, I am trying to maximise the user experience of those playing Spymaster. That’s what my job is and what I’m paid for, and it’s what I can control. I want to create a compelling social game, and with anything social you need to get your friends involved. Somewhere in the product process, I laid down a basically we-do-it-or-I-quit directive on what we checked by default and chose the three I thought were the most publicly relevant (and least noisy) of actions Spymaster can generate on the public timeline: assassinations, wiring money to users, and spymaster level increases. Why? Assassinations are something that people want to brag about anyway: other friends that are playing Spymaster find it funny if you’re ganging up on a friend in your social circle (and I’ve seen this happen firsthand quite a few times.) Wiring money rarely happens because it’s so hard to get a Swiss Bank account unless you’re at a really high level, and level increases happen rarely enough as you progress but give other Spymaster players (in the world at large) a good strategic count of how you’re progressing. These were things I thought I’d find the most strategically optimal to be able to know about in near real-time from other players in my spy ring (and my opponents’ spy rings, for that matter.)
Let’s talk about spam, baby
I watched Facebook explode from the inside during its days as a nascent platform, and I fully remember applications that were wildly spammy; no lecturing is required to make me remember things like Zombies/Vampires/SARS and their variants (which I still despise, because they have absolutely zero entertainment value internally.) At Facebook, we worked really hard to combat spam whilst still maintaining both a development environment that allows the platform to thrive at the creation level and people to have fun at gaming in the social environment. Of course, we ran into a lot of problems, and we learned a lot of things that I think Facebook still wishes they could take back: users were forced into the invite process. Users published tons of hidden notifications without their consent to their friends. In the end, a lot of Platform players felt completely violated. I’ve learned what players don’t like, and I’ve actively avoided those things in optimising for the player. If we want to talk about a real flaw Twitter is going to have when they move forward that Facebook dodged masterfully, it’s that their open platform has absolutely no way to police this type of behaviour. I’m sure someone else with a truly evil and enterprising intent will come along and do something like this and make Spymaster’s day of being a trending topic make what is currently the Sean Connery of Twitter games look like David Niven. I am a well-intentioned messenger of something that could really be bad. If I wanted to drop a viral nuclear weapon, I could have. I have no desire to do that, because such work is anathaema to my very existence as an interaction designer.
Furthermore, we are limiting Spymaster’s virality even further because we were afraid of it being wildly noisy. Things like tasks, which are rapid-fire actions in the game’s UI to progress quickly, we quickly found to dominate public streams. Spymaster public notifications are throttled internally, something which Siegler himself noticed on a Black Market shopping spree.
I agree with Joe that this was all inevitable, and honestly I’m trying to set in place best practices for that community before it gets bigger. If Spymaster can set the UX precedent, I’ll be happy. If I was worried about nothing but virality, I would force people through invite processes before I let them touch the game. I would send out tons of public notifications without a user’s consent. I would do all sorts of things that are remarkably self-serving to the application that I have explicitly chosen not to do on the grounds of integrity over popularity, and I am thankful that the application has become as powerful as it has without a coercive user experience. From those in-game, I haven’t heard a single complaint about Spymaster’s virality. I’ve done all of the things I know to make the virality of the application completely user-controlled. I learned one more thing from Facebook, which is granular control, and it’s something I took with me on Spymaster. Nothing on Spymaster is sent without a user’s direct consent. As far as I’m given the liberty to call the shots on Spymaster’s user experience, I won’t let that behaviour happen, either.
One last thing: let’s get something straight about Spymaster strategy
Also, one thing I need to clarify before it gets too large is that although Spymaster does incentivise you for your notifications (and it is an intentional in-game strategic move,) it is being seriously shortsighted about Spymaster’s models and gameplay to assume that is the only way you can excel at Spymaster. The 8% money increase you get from all of Spymaster’s notifications is a little over half you’d get from choosing to simply be American CIA out of the gate. It’s nothing compared to the increase you’ll get from even the cheapest Safe House or doing the lowest of tasks. There are so many ways to play Spymaster that the heavy notification route is one of them, your friends be damned. I was actually surprised at the psychological effect of this; some people have outwardly defended their notification-increasing actions as part of the game’s strategy. If that’s the way people want to play, I’m not going to stop them; they’re having fun and it’s the player’s user experience I am controlling. They can alienate themselves if they feel it is worth the reward.
I won’t make these decisions for Spymaster players. That’s a mission they choose to accept, self-destructive or not. As long as my players are happy, I’m doing my job.
Article Abstract
Posted 29 May 2009. Approx. 1,705 words.
In roughly three weeks, the Twitter game Spymaster went from an idea in my head to the second-most trending topic on Twitter. Along the way, we’ve exposed a lot of weaknesses in Twitter’s platform. While Twitter has some flaws in their current user experience, I can’t fix them. What I can do is optimise for my own users.
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Great game, really brilliant idea ;) Want to get as many people into it, as I can..
Didn’t realise how it seems spammy to some people..
Think innovations like this are most definitely the way forward ;) Look forward to seeing more innovations like this in the future.
Also, the suggestion above, about refreshing individual tasks, please ;)
I absolutely love the game. This is probably the first “Twitter trend” bandwagon I’ve hopped on. Even after being turned off to this style of game after all the Facebook Notifications I got from Mafia Wars, I decided to give Spymaster a shot. Excellent UI, and your client-side code… it’s so clean and lean!
It’s a bit sad that people are freaking out so much regarding the notifications. Such animosity. Ultimatums everywhere. In the end, it comes down to: 1) your friends’ sense of responsibility to maintain a “clean feed”, or 2) Twitter’s openness to implement some level of filtering. As you said, I think it’s unfair for them to blame the game for being fun enough that people want to share it.
Keep it up, yo.
Great idea. Great game. Amazing you pulled it off in under a month. Excellent move with the internal throttling of the public comments. I agree with pretty much everything you said. I can also see some really ingenius business models you can attach to this – as I’m sure you have as well. Congrats! and Thanks! Can’t wait to see what’s next.
First thing: I don’t care about the minutiae on the stragegy of choosing to spam friends versus being American, because I DON’T PLAY THE GAME.
All I care about, is that this spams my feed, my direct messages(!) (no longer, I stopped following all who spam me) and is/was literally ruining my twitter experience. THIS GAME, not twitter, is ruining my experience.
Feel free to be first out the gate to require twitter UI changes based on YOUR UX choices. That doesn’t mean it is THEIR inherent failure. It means, your games sucks in terms of its interaction with their product.
I am a proponent of filtering by hastags etc. Congratulations on being the person and product that most likely causes this to happen. Surfacing a weakness in a product’s design is not a valid defense of exploiting said weakness.
Someone told me, to not worry about this, as everyone will have moved on in a day or two. They were referring to your game sir, not twitter. Consider that, and consider creating a game that people want to continue playing because it does not pollute their and their friends’ experience of using twitter.
@laura –
One of the things which initially drew me to Twitter was the speed of everything. Memes came and went. Trends came and went. If a trend sticks around long enough, it becomes convention. And then it becomes a feature.
Consider the “@”-sign. In Ye Early Days, this wasn’t a feature of the site. It was an ad-hoc way for people to reply to each other. Eventually, it became convention, and then a feature.
Same with the hashtag. The users decided they wanted an easier way to search for tweets by tag, so they started prefixing words with “#”. Searching hashtags wasn’t even a first-party feature. It wasn’t until Twitter Search went live that the official hashtag site became obsolete.
The point is… Twitter has _always_ been a place where features are added according to the community’s needs. How is this any different? In fact, how is this game any different than all the ridiculous #trends that circulate Twitter? I don’t give a flying flip about #FollowFriday. I don’t care about #FML. But this is the first time that a trend has been so wildly viral that people are up in arms about it. And so… we may see filtering added to Twitter. Great! Now I can block people posting #Caturday and #somethingidon’tcareabout posts. And it’s all thanks to a game that some of us liked, and some of hated.
And that’s the important part to realize, I think. It’s not bad if it evolves the platform. It may be annoying on the short-term, but it’s not worth swearing about. It’s not worth raging about. It’s not worth insulting people or their work over.
It’s Twitter, not your front yard. Take a chill pill.
Also, @eston – I fully intend to set up an army of harvesters, and create a third-party site where users can buy and sell virtual currency… so you should probably put up some Terms of Service. Unless that’s all part of spy-vs-spy – who has the better connections/tech. ;)
@mason Right, but if someone creates a shit wordpress theme, I don’t blame wordpress, I blame the designer.
There may be flaws in a platform, I’d think a good designer would strive to not expose/exploit flaws as a central part of a product they are building on top of said platform. And they certainly wouldn’t go back and blame the platform (that they built on) for the ensuing crap experience!
I’d prefer to read a 500 word post that went something like: This part of twitter sucks, but we made a mistake in designing our game this way. Next time, we’ll think about it more.
Laura:
I partly feel like I am feeding a troll here, but I think you misunderstand my point. I am attempting to optimise for the user experience of the players of Spymaster. If they are happy, I am happy. It is outside my responsibility as a developer to build Twitter’s user interface, and anything I do on that side is taking away from the ability of me to develop better content for those who are enjoying the game. Twitter wants us as developers to use them as a platform; we are doing so. I’m not being exploitative of Spymaster users in any way; any actions they take on their public timelines are done with their consent, as are direct message/invites.
Mason:
A terms of service is coming but you are in private beta and to some extent we’re trusting you won’t do anything idiotic. We do have a fair amount of cheater detection in place as is and will not hesitate to ban complete spy rings. Auxiliary sale of a free commodity is most definitely not allowed.
@laura –
Bit of a weak metaphor. How do you measure the quality of a WordPress theme? Usability? Stability? Popularity? A “shit” WordPress theme is a theme that fails to meet those metrics by which it is judged.
But how do you measure the quality of a game? Stickiness, entertainment value, usability, etc. By nearly every metric appropriate for games, Spymaster is a success. If you want to stick with “themes”, it would be like… a Pro-Choice themed blog. Some would sing its praise. Some would hate it. Some would say one thing, but think another because his/her boy/girlfriend thinks otherwise.
A closer parallel would be… a WordPress plugin, perhaps. Say a plugin developer creates an amazing plugin that does X. This developer follows all the conventions of normal WordPress development. He plays by all the rules. Additionally, the developer allows the publisher to enable function Y, which also plays by all the rules, but enabling it kills other WordPress plugins due to a flaw in the plugin system.
The publisher can enable function Y, and all his other plugins stop working. Or the publisher can disable it, and things play nicely, but the publisher loses function Y.
So who should fix it? If the developer isn’t doing anything crafty, and the publisher wants everything working, the code has to change in the platform.
Spymaster doesn’t force its users to push notifications. It incentivises it. But it does not force it. In the end, it’s up to the people YOU ARE FOLLOWING to say, “Gee, this might come across as spammy” and disable it. Or Twitter has to put together filtering. It comes down to the people using the tool. Just like… every other tool.
If you live in an apartment across the street from a high school, you may or may not be familiar with summertime car washes, or sporting even pep-rallies. Scantily clad high school girls hold up signs that say, “honk if…” and, whaddya know, people honk. During dinner. During phone conversations. When you’re reading. When you’re watching TV. So who should I be pissed at? The girls, for raising money and “incentivising” honking? Car manufacturers for creating horns?
Or the morons for using them? Or myself for choosing to live across the street from a high school? Or the city for not having a code against such practices? Or the neighborhood for not having a constitution?
Idiots will always be idiots. Cars will have horns. Girls will wear bikinis and hold signs. But I can’t hate them for it. Instead, I’ll stand on my balcony and scream, “UNFOLLOW!” Or, I’ll move.
You are all right, I am wrong. And your users are idiots.
@eston
If this game was a real life game, and players won by doing stupid shit to people not playing, it would be a poorly designed game.
fin.
@laura – You know, they were (and still are) your followers before they were @eston’s players. Just something to chew on.
s/followers/followees
Remarkable. So, Laura is a a troll because she’s telling you like it is from the perspective of a Twitter user who could care less about this game and who does not want to receive notifications about it? Yes, she’s pissed off. Yes, she could have framed it better. But that is not the definition of a troll… I doubt she’s trying to bait into a non-winnable argument. She’s just a pissed off end user. And somehow, this is Twitter’s fault, not the developer’s fault?
I was not a fan of this Spymaster thing when it first hit my feed. I not only had to remove contacts from Twitter but also from friendfeed, because the noise was ridiculous. I am surprised that the developer of this game is passing the buck so easily by saying it’s Twitter’s problem, not his. With that attitude, there isn’t actually room for debate, is there? You’ve decided you’re in the clear, Twitter’s wrong, and anyone who dislikes the Spymaster phenomenon is a troll.
Many early adopters of Spymaster did not realize they could disable those notifications. And by providing incentives for the notifications, you are condoning and encouraging their use– after all, your app wouldn’t be the viral sensation it is without the possibility for that virality, would it?
Would Twitter be a better place if it had filters? Sure, I agree with that. But is your app the forerunner of many such apps, and will Twitter start looking like Facebook soon? Clearly. And that puts the onus on me, the Twitter user, to filter out crap from my feed. Frankly, it’s easier for me to unfollow and would be even if there were filters. I don’t want to have to spend any time configuring any filters, be that viral application spam on Facebook or on Twitter or spam sent to my email account. In the end, if this is Twitter’s future, I’ll be as happy to stop using it (as I did with Facebook) than to play with filters or unfollows every day.
So, at the risk of being called a troll simply because I’m not going to pat you on the back for your “engaging success” with your viral app that leaves your users happy and their contacts unhappy, I have to say that I have no respect for developers who won’t consider the entire eco-system of the platform they develop on let alone who brush off responsibility, blaming the service instead for its “shortcomings”. That reminds me of the spammers who just say, “Hey, the end user can just delete it.”
@eston –
I’m not actually going to sell money. :P
But you should shoot me an email. There’s some funkiness with your Swiss Bank Account system. It’s double-posting to the recipient and sender accounts… which is especially cool if you put your own account as the recipient. Double the money, minus the transaction fee.
@Criz –
“That reminds me of the spammers who just say, ‘Hey, the end user can just delete it.’”
It’s more like… if you subscribed to a mailing list about Mac OS X development… and then all of the sudden a bunch of iPhone developers start chiming in with their issues. It’s tangentially related, and verily, iPhone development can be considered an extension of Mac development… but it’s just off-topic enough that it makes you cringe.
1) Moderators can tell them to take it elsewhere
2) You can unsubscribe
I’ve been playing for a day fairly obsessively, and I’m nearly over it already. I’ve switched off all of my notifications because quite frankly they were annoying me and I’m sure they’re annoying others too. Spymaster relies in part on how many followers you have and if they’re getting spammed by notifications all the time people will start to unfollow me.
@mason
To take your example, it is more like, if your wordpress plugin started autocommenting on my wordpress blog, once an hour.
My all caps came across as heated (I don’t know if italics would work in comments here, but would have preferred that).
But yeah, a game on a platform has to consider the platform, and all its users, not just its players.
Hey Eston,
Came across your blog and totally agree with what you’ve wrote here. You have given the users complete control of Notifications, the responsiblity lies with them.
If you don’t like it well It’s like on Facebook, if someone is filling up my newsfeed with crap status updates and lame posted items I can just hide them or delete them. My choice.
Have fun being millionaires guys, careful nobody swipes your armored luxury car !
Can’t wait for your next game, whats the genre going to be?
I must say, I haven’t played the game yet. Though I do think that the unanimous decision here is that Twitter itself needs to give the user significant control over filtering what they come into contact with. This is so crucial because Spymaster or no Spymaster, Twitter is a way of life for a lot of people. It has a lot to do with their quality of life in more ways than any single person can fully appreciate.
I am sorry, the second half of the paragraph on uncovering a flow in twitter just took my breath away. You are still very young I hope you can change!
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Spymaster has a problem.…
settings, turning off all #spymaster notifications. Although Spymaster’s creators have said that they’re trying to be responsible…
Hey digging Spymaster so far, props for the idea. I’m shocked Twitter hasn’t added some serious filters yet. Either a way to group your followers and feed your content to them accordingly, a way to make individual Tweets private rather than your entire stream, and a means to remove content with specific hashtags from your view.
As fun as the game is though, I do wonder how long I’m willing to clutter up my Twitter feed with notifications if Twitter doesn’t respond to the demand for filters. It’s because of this same clutter concern I auto ignore all application/cause/fan requests/suggestions on Facebook.
One humble suggestion: When you’re on the tasks page and Spymaster refreshes and your energy re-ups, refresh the individual tasks too so I don’t get the “You don’t have enough” alert anymore.