The importance of conventions
Conventions are great - they’re guardrails or principles to follow that focus your creativity on the task at hand.
Badminton would not be worth playing without a net and court lines. But with that net and court lines … I can try to do some really cool shots 🏸!
They also give your audience much more certainty about what to expect, which in today’s world is critical for instant engagement.
Imagine you have a choice of two movies to watch:
“Moment by Moment”: a 2hr 35m drama
“Attack of the Mutant Mango 3: Stone Dead”: a 1hr 23m …. do I need to say the genre?
You can already guess the genre for the second from its name, I bet.
Setting aside the creative worthiness of either, “drama” doesn’t really tell you what to expect (lots of talking?).
(I actually completed a Masters in Screenwriting - I recommend reading Robert McKee’s Story for a primer on the actual storytelling genres within drama {coming-of-age etc.})
Luckily, thanks to Wordle, all the games that spawned in its wake cemented the conventions established by Wordle.
So as I was coming up with the idea for Hold!, my mind was fixed on its unique gameplay and I knew what it simply had to contain, no questions asked…
The conventions of a daily game
A very quick and simple game
if it’s a puzzle game, it might not be so quick…
Easily accessible via the Web, optimised for mobile
while an App is possible, it is absolutely not required
an App would actually harm growth to begin with because you’re already throwing up a barrier to engagement: making someone download an App
today it’s common to make Progressive Web Apps that are basically websites that you can quickly ‘add to homescreen’ and hey presto it behaves just like an app.
A single game session, played once a day only, then the player must wait for the next day
bizarrely, this restriction actually makes people come back, I think.
When Wordle was really going viral, I remember Netflix put out an image from Queen’s Gambit (also going viral at the time), where the character lay in bed awake visualising Wordle instead of chess, obsessed.
Players build a streak of successful and consecutive daily plays
All players globally have the exact same game instance per day
The player’s achievement is shareable via a simple message and emoji string
this is critical to help the game spread via word-of-mouth
If you break any of these conventions, you risk of engagement.
E.g. if I said I’ve made a daily game, but the ‘game instance’ that I play is different to the one that you get served … it just wouldn’t be right.
You can see these conventions in:
New York Times’…
Wordle
Connections
Strands
Daily Waffle
Framed
LinkedIn’s Games
and MinuteCryptic
who I’ll do a case study soon
and countless others.
You could even say Wordle inspired its own genre of daily games. There was Quordle (4 Wordles at once!) and Nerdle (a maths version), and Daily Crypticle gives you the Wordle format when trying to solve a cryptic crossword clue.
Why these conventions are useful when working with AI
I get the sense that coding with AI is going to be a bit like taking an excitable (and strong) dog for a walk on a leash - it will always be trying to pull ahead and just make a whole bunch of code.
These conventions will be so useful when I need to give clear and detailed instructions to the AI for the extreme specifics of what to make, and how it needs to work.
The looser you are (“make me a web app about the stock-market”) the looser the AI will be, and the more room for errors and a bad foundation to begin with.
These conventions will also be very useful for checking errors and making sure everything’s working properly.
If I was ‘playing badminton with the net down’ and the AI made something, I wouldn’t really know if it was right.
But with these conventions at hand, I already have a framework for the “player journey” and the key “tentpoles” the game experience needs to hit.
This let’s me focus on:
my game’s unique topic and gameplay
the brand
the roadmap
Now let’s see if I can pull off this really cool badminton shot…