Bejeweled Blitz Addiction

I am completely and thoroughly addicted to Bejeweled Blitz right now. BB is a slick mini-version of the classic match-three game that PopCap has put onto facebook in an effort to advertise the full version, along with their other games. It's pretty simple: score as many points as you can in one minute, but the genius part comes from all the ways in which they're using facebook.

Having been both a Magic player and a Magic developer, I already understand how effective "organized play" can be at getting you sucked deeper and deeper into a hobby. It's both aspirational (in that you get the chance to try to be the best at something) and inspirational (in that going to an event and seeing how many other people are also playing this game makes you feel like you're part of something big and important (rather than just wasting your time)). I think a big part of what's going on with Bewjewled Blitz is that online games are finally starting to figure out how to take advantage of social networking in order to tap into those emotions.

The first and almost certainly the most impactful tactics they're using is that they have a leaderboard that shows you how your best score for the week stacks up against your friends list. This is a mechanic that Who Has the Biggest Brain also uses pretty effectively - "There's no way that {so-and-so} is better / smarter than me, I'll just have to play some more and take up my rightful place higher on the leaderboard." This is probably the most impactful improvement to high score board technology since coin-op Asteroids machines first gave gamers the opportunity to pretend their initials are A-S-S. The smart things they've done within the game include a) not showing you your rank with respect to the whole world, b) only tracking your single highest score (not your average or anything else that accurately measures skill as opposed to effort), and c) wiping away the scores once per week so things start over regularly. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in to everything facebook can do, like sending trash talk to your buddies, posting badges on your wall, and bragging about your high scores to your news stream audience. Ron Foster called me out by name when he hung 180k on the board last week, and I definitely plan to enjoy myself when I beat that mark.

This week they pushed a new batch of features that are definitely working their magic on me. Now they're tracking how many times you get each of the badges (25k, 50k, etc.) and they've got a system so that you level-up when you accumulate enough copies of each badge. Leveling up doesn't mean anything other than bragging rights, but it doesn't need to. Making your numbers bigger can be its own reward. (Does anyone know if Gygax invent the level-up mechanic? Or did D&D merely popularize it? It's got to be the most powerful, impactful mechanic in the history of gaming, right?)

Those of you who haven't played the Blitz variant of Bejeweled are probably wonderign what all the fuss is about, and what on earth Bejeweled is doing in this particular blog. I've thought about that some myself, too, and I think what's going on is that I really enjoy the way BB tests my ability to think quickly. The one-minute time limit makes it a very fast-paced game (and the zero-level strategy is to make matches as quickly as possible), but at the same time it's not actually a twitch game. It tests and rewards my brain's reaction time, but not my dexterity. The faster I can think and notice things, the more points I get. This is for me a stark contrast with FPS and RTS type games, where it doesn't matter how good my ability to think strategically actually is, I can't score points because I'm not nimble enough with the controls. Meanwhile, one-minute of sustained concentration can actually be a nice little adrenaline rush.

I don't seem to be the only one who likes it. 81 of my 360 friends have played this as some point with 30+ routinely earning badges every week, and I think it's only been out for a couple of months. According to facebook stats, it's got over 4 million players per month (good enough for Top 25 status amongst all facebook apps) and over a million playing it each day.

I hope PopCap is happy with it, because i want them (and others) to continue doing good quality work like this. Their monetization plan seems to be just to drive folks to their own website. They don't have any ads up except for their own stuff (well, none in addition to the ones facebook themselves always add to the page anyway). As far as their own stuff goes, I do in fact now own a copy of Plants Versus Zombies which I don't think I would even have been aware of if they hadn't tacked a preview video for it onto the front of my BBlitz experience one week.

The forums are now open if anyone else needs to admit any of their own addictions ...
Posted by Randy Buehler at 6/19/2009 3:22 PM
Categories: uncategorized

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