Slitherine

I think many of the multi-player games published by Slitherine, for example Field of Glory II and Empires, could be improved by seeing them as games within a wider game, to see a Primary Game and a Secondary Game.

To illustrate what I have in mind, consider stocks and shares. The Primary Market is when a company sells shares in an IPO (Initial Public Offering) for example. Prior to that point, the company is privately held and there are no shares. The Secondary Market is when holders of these newly issued shares buy and sell them to each other or to those not originally involved in the IPO. The Secondary Market is in many ways much more important than the Primary Market, and it might be argued that there would be no Primary Market if there were no Secondary Market available to investors later.

In my opinion, developers are focusing all their energy into their Primary Game, which is like the Primary Market, but are not trying to establish a thriving Secondary Market. A concrete example would be the Field of Glory: Empires Multi-Player experience, which I find to be somewhat lacking. The playing of the game in itself is fine, but people drop out of multi-player pretty rapidly, especially if they are losing. As a result, most Multi-Player quickly becomes a two player game, even a one player game. 2 player is very different from multi-player. There isn't a sense of co-operation usually.

The Secondary Market, the "Secondary Game", is yet to be established in Empires, but Field of Glory II has a long-standing digital league, with rankings and standings and trophies that exist outside of the game itself. When you have structures like these in which to participate, you continue to play and enjoy the game even when losing against human opponents. The reason is because the game exists in a wider context.

If you are designing a game, I think you ought to take into account and create structures for the game around the game. This holds true for many Slitherine games, in my opinion. It is difficult for a small development team to do everything, but since the issue is the same for a whole host of Slitherine games, I think that Slitherine ought to be providing some sort of standard framework to support the Primary Game and the Secondary Game which surrounds it, rather than having every tiny developer team reinventing the wheel for each game.

The Secondary Game could become quite popular if there were some medals/badges/awards/acheivements/leagues/perks etc. Culture crystalizes around this Secondary Game. One of the best badge systems I know, which also has Trust Levels, can be seen in They talk about gamification here: To me, the difference between a having only a Primary Game, and having both a Primary and Secondary game is as important as the difference between having a computer and a computer network. I reckon this will be the real area for growth in games in the future, and Slitherine ought to see what can be provided to lead the way. Another way of looking at this is to see Slitherine's various games, FOGII, Empires, Fantasy General II, etc as different disciplines of science, for example Biology, Computer Science, Physics, Genetics. Of course, Physics is growing as a science, so is Biology, but what is growing even more quickly is what is happening between the sciences, rather than the sciences taken on their own. Computational Biology (for example computer analysis of DNA) is growing even more rapidly than either field. Now we also have the study of light quanta and computing, so there is a new field of quantum computing. Or behaviour and computing for machine learning, is another example.

At the moment, there is a vaccuum, a bit like space itself. I think Slitherine should get into this space and start laying down some infrastructure.

@rbodleyscott @pocus @IainMcneil @AMG @OBG_primetide @Surtur