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John has sent you a drawing in Draw Something*!*
Becky wants to play a game with you in Words With Friends*!*
It’s your move in Hero Academy*!*
The last revolutionary moment in multiplayer gaming was when it went online: Instead of having to occupy the same video arcade or living room couch as your opponent, you could game against people located anywhere in the world, any time you wanted. Since then, much of competitive gaming’s progress has been about iterating on that experience, from dial-up Doom to Halo: Reach on Xbox Live.
With the rise of game-adept smartphones, there’s a new revolution happening. Not only do you not need to be in the same room as your opponent, you don’t even need to be playing at the same time.
The you-take-a-turn, I-take-a-turn style called asynchronous gaming is coming to define the way we play on iPhone and Android. In top-selling games like Words With Friends, Draw Something and Hero Academy, players can compete against dozens of opponents at once, making their moves when they have a few spare minutes and waiting for friends to return fire all in their own good time. Of the 10 top-grossing games on the App Store, four of them feature asynced multiplayer. On March 21, Words With Friends maker Zynga took notice of the emerging popularity of Draw Something and acquired its maker for an estimated $210 million.
“The big thing that asynchrony allows is time,” says Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost. “You don't have to synchronize your time with someone else’s. I can make a play, and you can get around to playing back, or not, in your time.”
The roots of asynced gaming run deep. 19th-century nerds played “correspondence chess” with each other, sending their moves back and forth through the mail. The iPhone game Chess With Friends is only different because it is significantly more convenient. Thanks to the fact that your phone is always with you, making a new move takes just a few seconds. And it’s not that different a behavior from the things you’re already using your phone for.
“Look at Twitter and text messaging,” says Chess With Friends co-creator Paul Bettner. “It’s all these little byte-sized information packets that you’re sending back and forth. If you apply that to gaming, you get asynchronous games.”
“We used to call it text-messaging meets gaming,” says his brother and business partner David Bettner.
The Bettners understood that asynced gameplay suits the smartphone; it's always with you, but you aren't always able to play with it.The Bettner brothers found themselves out of a job in 2008 when Microsoft shut down their longtime place of employment, Ensemble Studios, creator of strategy games like Age of Empires and Halo Wars. With the recently opened App Store promising a more hospitable environment for developers of niche games, the Bettners bought a couple of MacBooks and got to work on a game.
Chess was the most sensible vehicle for their experiments. It could be done quickly, with few art assets. Development took only a few months; the game was available on the App Store by November that same year. It had all of the features that players now expect from the With Friends series: a chat system, iPhone notifications, and games that could stretch on for days or weeks.
Chess With Friends wasn’t a hit at first, so the Bettners decided to try their luck again with another board game. Words With Friends, a Scrabble clone, hit it big, exploding to the top of the App Store charts. The Bettners sold their company to FarmVille maker Zynga in 2010, which started expanding the With Friends series every which way: new games, Facebook versions of existing games, even renaming the studio Zynga With Friends.
The Bettners began their company with the idea of doing asynchronous gameplay, innately understanding that it suited the nature of the smartphone: It was always with you, but you weren’t always able to play it. Other developers had to stumble on this revelation. Days of Wonder, developer of the board game adaptation Ticket to Ride, for example, launched the game requiring iPhone and iPad users to play it against each other in real time.
The data showed that it wasn’t working, said Days of Wonder CEO Eric Hautemont. Tablet users, who typically play at home, were staying engaged for long stretches. But iPhone players, he said, were prone to being interrupted since they play while out and about.
“The data that we collected showed that the iPhone is not used the same way as the iPad,” Hautemont said. “With the iPad, you’re typically in the living room. With the iPhone, you’re usually in line for a bus ticket or anything else.” Days of Wonder switched the phone version of Ticket to Ride to use asynced play.
One of the reasons that chess wasn’t as compelling as Scrabble, say the Bettners, is that shorter games work better for asynced gameplay. When two evenly-matched chess players are playing defensively, a game might take over 100 total moves. That’s a long time to wait for payoff.
In one of the most popular iPhone games on the market today, payoff comes fast. Draw Something has been an overnight sensation with its simple premise: Draw a word for your friend. Next time they log in, they guess what you’ve drawn, watching a real-time replay of your sketch session. Then they draw for you. Repeat forever. Each time somebody guesses right, you win coins that can be spent on more colors for your palette. It’s cooperative, not competitive, and you get the satisfaction of winning every time you log in, unless your friend is a total moron and can’t decipher your finger-painted masterpiece.
Draw Something is so addictive that many of its 35 million users can’t even be truly said to be playing asynchronously, says Dan Porter, CEO of developer OMGPOP.
“Almost two-thirds of people are almost playing in real time,” he said. “Those turns are being taken within only 3 or 4 minutes apart.”
Before creating Draw Something, OMGPOP created over 30 other games, all of them utilizing real-time multiplayer. Porter believes that the real-time element that his past games were built on is the thing that held them back. “The fun of real-time multiplayer is always limited by the number of concurrent users that you currently have,” he says. “With asynchronous, you and I don’t need to be connected to the server at the same time.” But Draw Something is so addictive that we often are.
"When you play FarmVille, it doesn't really matter what the other person is doing." Georgia Tech’s Ian Bogost, for one, is not surprised by the explosive success of asynchronous games. In 2004, he presented a paper at a Copenhagen conference titled “Asynchronous Multiplay: Futures for Casual Multiplayer Experience.” At the time, most futurists were extolling the brave new world of hyper-realistic, always-on virtual worlds like Second Life. Bogost thought this a mistake.
“The material demands of the real world simply preclude simultaneous participation in multiple, high-maintenance virtual worlds,” he wrote. “Asynchronous multiplay offers a way to connect people in multiplayer spaces, while affording them greater flexibility in and reflection on that participation in their daily lives. Synchronous play may facilitate technological innovation, but asynchronous play will underwrite human innovation, making the latter the real future of multiplayer experience.”
Bogost, who created the satirical Facebook game Cow Clicker, says that games like Draw Something make human innovation a fundamental part of their gameplay. When you play against a friend, you have to make assumptions about what they know, and how they specifically would react to a drawing. This effectively turns the other player into content, allowing for a game with nearly limitless potential for fun – depending on how many other people you know.
Good asynchronous games, Bogost says, allow two players to play in and make a lasting effect on a common area, like the board in Words With Friends.
"In FarmVille you have a farm, and I have a farm, but we don't have a shared farm," Bogost says. “When you play FarmVille, it doesn't really matter what the other person is doing.”
Bogost says he’d like asynchronous games to grow beyond adaptations of classic board games. And he’d like to see more games where the identity of the other player has a stronger impact: “When you play with me, will that matter?”
We will probably see all of these issues grappled with as the concept continues to evolve. “Asynchronous gaming in this form is and will be the predominant form of mobile gaming going forward,” says Paul Bettner. If he and Bogost are right, asynchronous isn’t just a popular trend in mobile – it’s the new world order.
