Poppit & Bejeweled: New Hit Web Games
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SCOTT KIM’S PUZZLING NEWS / MARCH 2001 Poppit & Bejeweled: New Hit Web Games |
| For several years the most popular games on the web have been classic games like Spades and Bingo. Now two new standout games have shattered the classic game barrier: Poppit on Pogo, and Bejeweled on the Zone. Both are single-player turn-based puzzle games. Both are wildly popular. This month we'll take these games apart and see what makes them tick.
Poppit overtook Spades a year or so ago to become the most popular games on the casual gaming site Pogo. Poppit starts with a random array of balloons in different colors. Click on a balloon and all similarly colored touching balloons also pop. Balloons float up and toward the center to fill in holes or missing columns. The game ends when there are no more balloons to pop, i.e. no two balloons of the same color touch each other. Poppit is hardly new. It is yet another variation on a popular Japanese game called Makigame, which has been copied countless times as shareware. Another nice version is Checkout Line on clevermedia.com. So what makes Poppit special? First there is the metaphor of popping balloons, which helps motivate the rules. Just popping a balloon is rewarding all by itself. There is also the incentive system throughout Pogo: the more you play, the better your changes of winning cash prizes. But these features are hardly special. Then there is the scoring system. Poppit gives you many intermediate goals to shoot for along the way to popping all the balloons. This smooth ramp of rewards differentiates Poppit from other Makigame clones. In addition, the game trains you to look for certain kinds of pattersn. Even after you stop playing, you keep seeing clusters of similarly colored objects wherever you look. Tetris has a similarly engrossing quality. What most makes Poppit addictive, however is randomness. Poppit seems to be a game of skill. But it is really a game of chance. How well you do is determined largely by the randomly chosen starting position, just like in the card game Solitaire. It's gambler psychology. When you're winning you feel lucky and want to keep playing. When you're losing you feel like you want to play again so you can do better. Either way, you keep playing just one more game. As you learn in Psychology 101, nothing is as addictive as a random reinforcement schedule. Bejeweled is a runaway success on the Zone, where it regularly beats out Spades and Asheron's call. Second place often goes to the puzzle game Runes. Both games are from Popcap, a new web game company that is hitting it big months after launch. Bejeweled (called Diamond Mine on popcap.com) is a close variation on the arcade game Columns. You start with a random array of colored jewels. To move, you exchange two adjacent jewels, creating a vertical or horizontal line of three jewels of the same color. You must create a 3-in-a-row on every move. As you clear jewels, new ones pour in from the top. The game ends when you cannot make any more moves. Bejeweled and Poppit have many similarities. In both games you try to eliminate patterns from a random array of colored pieces. But I bet Bejeweled would beat Poppit in a head to head popularity contest. Certainly Bejeweled is outpacing other games on the Zone by a wider margin than Poppit on Pogo. What makes Bejeweled better? I see three key differences. First, Bejeweled is even more random and less predictable than Poppit, since you don't know what jewels will enter from the top. With Poppit no new pieces enter after the start of the game, so it would be easy to write a program to play it perfectly. That means Bejeweled is even better at invoking gambler psychology. Second, in Bejeweled it is possible to set off cascades -- creating one 3-in-a-row can in turn create another 3-in-a-row, and so on. That means Bejeweled surprises the player with randomly sized payoffs, like a slot machine. Poppit is more predictable. Finally, it is harder to find potential moves in Bejeweled than in Poppit. You might think this would make Bejeweled harder to learn, and it does at first. But this little bump in the learning curve also means that each move feels more exciting. The pain of searching increases the gain of discovery. Tetris. How do these games stack up against Tetris, the most popular electronic game? First the positives. Poppit and Bejeweled are both turn-based games, which means you can play them while doing other things, which many people do while surfing the web. Tetris is a continuous action game that requires complete concentration. Poppit and Bejeweled are even simpler to learn than Tetris. Fewer rules, fewer controls. Finally, they reward the player on every move, whereas Tetris rewards the player only on line clears, which happen only every several moves. All these properties make Poppit and Bejeweled work better on the web than Tetris. As much as I impressed by the addictive lure of these games, however, I still prefer Tetris. Why? Because Tetris has both short-term thrills and a long learning curve. You can keep getting better and better for months on end. Poppit and Bejeweled hook you up front with short-term reward, but the fall short on depth. (Poppit does have strategy, but I'm not motivated to work at it.) Nonetheless there's a lot to learn from here. I plan to steal as many good design ideas as I can from Poppit and Bejeweled.
WHAT’S NEW MARCH 2001 Inversion of the Month: Mirror Discover Magazine Boggler New product: Strategy Games Talks: Designing Web Games that Make Business Sense, and Building Web Games in Flash
FROM READERS Michael Morton, a.k.a. Mr. Machine Tool, is an obsessive anagrammist. His latest opus is a list of Top Ten Anagrams for "Temptation Island": Alan Schaffner improved one of my solutions for the February Discover puzzles. You can read about his improved solution at: Lutz Tautenhahn from Germany created a cute collection of puzzles, for online playing on his site. Janette Agg sent in this 40-move solution to my flash Convergence: Cihan Altay translated my article "What is a Puzzle?" into Turkish, for his web site. The tricky part was translating the last sentence, which gives the answer to a letter puzzle by including all letters but the answer in the sentence itself. In English, the sentence is: "To confuse you; the answer to the puzzle is the only element what means gansho in Japanese that doesn't appear in this sentence." (Gansho means "letter"; the Turkish word for "letter" unfortunately contains the answer letter.) Mathpuzzle.com contains an ongoing discussion of improved solutions to my attacking queens problem, originally published in Scientific American in 1981. I especially like the new transparent queen variations. Akessandro Pocaterra created a page of his inversions, influenced by Arabic calligraphy.
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Copyright 2000 Scott Kim. All rights reserved. |