(2024-07-10) Hon A Thousand Primers Not Just One

Adrian Hon: A Thousand Primers, Not Just One. Andy Matuschak’s essay, Exorcising us of the Primer, highlights the limitations of Neal Stephenson’s influential The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. (2024-07-10-Matuschak ExorcisingUsOfThePrimer)

I want to add one more consideration: effective gamification must be highly specific to the subject in question. In my experience, this is anathema to many investors and technologists, who are more interested in general purpose and massively scalable solutions.

I encountered this misconception when designing Zombies, Run!

You might think its game design principles could be applied to all forms of exercise, not just running (just think of the total addressable market!) but you’d be wrong, because running is completely different to other forms of exercise.

Zombies, Run! was far from the first running game on smartphones. It wasn’t even the first game where you ran away from zombies. But it was, and still is, the most popular and most successful running game, and I believe that’s because it was the first to fully understand and accommodate the nature of running within its design.

This understanding didn’t come about because either I or Naomi Alderman, the game’s co-creators, were expert runners—far from it. It’s because we spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about and around the problem.

Part of running’s appeal is how little it demands—throw on a T-shirt and shorts, slip on your shoes, walk out the door, and you’re off. Having to negotiate with three other friends on where and when to meet raises the barrier to entry considerably.

It’s hard to know the true causes for why a game succeeds or fails, but when I first tried Cache & Seek, it invited me to collect treasure from places I had no interest in running to—busy streets, back alleys, odd corners of parks

I may be more of a creature of habit than others, but I suspect most runners don’t vary their routes that much either.

It’s one thing for video games to bend players to their will with interminable cutscenes and tedious gameplay; at least you can soldier on in the comfort of your home, glancing at your phone or listening to a podcast as you play. But expecting people to change their real-world behaviour is entirely different.

one final problem

When you’re out doing cardio exercise, the last thing you want is to be stopping every thirty or sixty seconds to get your phone out; and if you don’t stop, you’re liable to have an accident.

I wasn’t sure I could design the perfect running game, but I knew I could design a better game by respecting and accommodating runners’ requirements

the narrowed options also provided clarity. If the players couldn’t look at the game on their screen, we’d have to use the next-richest output: audio.

And audio was ideal for a small team like Six to Start. While it didn’t have the wow factor of amazing graphics or maps, I knew it was comparatively cheap to produce high quality sound effects and dialogue.

The input method was harder to decide on.

falling back to the one sensor we could definitely rely on: GPS tracking. Players would control the game merely by speeding up or slowing down—nothing else.

My belief is that game designers are so entranced by the possibilities of telling players where to run that they completely forget to consider what players are actually prepared to do. Alternatively, designers assume that because they’d play such a game, so would everyone else.

At the time, everyone was making a zombie game or TV show or book

I had no interest in following the pack

But as we talked through the idea of a zombie theme, we realised how well it fit a running game.

The advantage of media oversaturation was that everyone already knew how zombies behaved. Zombies couldn’t be reasoned with, they were almost impossible to stop, and so the only smart way to survive was to run. A zombie apocalypse also implied a world with blocked roads and no electricity or gas, meaning your own two feet would be your most reliable mode of transport

We would borrow a trope from spy movies and action-adventure games, though, with a radio operator guiding your actions through your headphones and delivering the story.

The story, effectively a first-person audio drama with the player as the silent Runner 5, would be players’ primary experience in the game, meaning it had to be excellent—better than any audiobook or podcast you might listen to instead. This is where Naomi’s role as cocreator and lead writer came to the fore; she provided a thrilling, emotional story with a cast of characters that remain beloved by millions to this day.

This led to Zombies, Run!’s motto: “As long as you can move faster than a slow shamble, you’ll be useful.”

there would be little of the usual generic gamification points and levels in our game (despite this, it would soon become the poster child of the gamification industry). My goal was always to make people excited to get up and run

We did provide some markers for progress in the game. At certain points in the story, you would receive “milestone emails” from characters you’d met.

The emails were far more time-consuming to write and illustrate than generic achievement badges, but they’ve proven more memorable and valued than the rewards you might receive from a Fitbit or Apple Watch

The lack of traditional rewards means we’ve never had to worry about cheating

Following a Kickstarter in late 2011, Zombies, Run! launched in early 2012 and went on to attract over ten million downloads by 2022

Over the years, we’ve been asked countless times to make a Zombies, Cycle! spinoff. On the face of it, cycling has a lot of similarities with running

it wouldn’t be a good game.

Because cycling is completely different to running. It’s unsafe to cycle with headphones in traffic, so we wouldn’t be able to rely on audio. Since cyclists can coast, I’d want the game to respond to the way cyclists experience momentum, climbing uphill and coasting downhill

Andy’s essay remains optimistic about good gamification, but concludes with a call to arms for creating a ubiquitous computing-powered learning environment to support and structure learning in general. That’s a worthy goal, one that Neal Stephenson coincidentally touches upon in Anathem, but it reinforces the idea that general solutions are more interesting than specific ones.

the quest for the general solution can distract us from a thousand specific solutions that we could have with today’s capabilities – solutions whose funding remains limited due to their very specificity