Trip Hawkins interview – GDC ‘07

This is a rough transcript of an interview I recorded with games industry ‘cockroach’ (his term), Trip Hawkins, during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco in March 2007.

The full audio file – which aired on Australian radio for the ‘Homepage‘ show – can be downloaded from www.mobilemedia.net.au.

At GDC ‘07 much of the talk was about the latest competing technologies behind the new high-powered games consoles on offer from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. But some industry insiders are looking to the mobile phone as the next big games platform.

Trip Hawkins is a video game pioneer. He founded software company Electronic Arts and he’s now tackling the mobile games market as the boss of his new company which is called Digital Chocolate.

His keynote speech to game designers was titled ‘Making mobile phones the ultimate game platform’.

Trip, how easy is it to convince people to consider the mobile phone as a games platform?

You can see the migration of the herd. They start out by getting a mobile voice phone and within a few years many of them – in fact about half of consumers in a market like the US, but this is also true in other markets like China, which is quite different from the US – half of them have discovered text messaging, half of them are starting to use the browser that’s on the phone and a smaller percentage have downloaded games. But I think there’s this migration taking place where just like with the Internet people will get to much more sophisticated behaviours. The users of popular services on the Internet now, their machines are downloading all kinds of stuff and they’re dealing with more sophisticated programs running on the client-side which is their own machine, and our industry’s definitely going in that same direction.

So are the companies designing these features for our mobile phones actually slowing down their acceptance by not educating consumers more about what our mobile phones are capable of beyond, say, voice and text messaging?

I think for the customer today it’s still kind of a pioneering thing where the public has to really figure out their handset for themselves, and it’s a beautiful thing when they do. I think particularly if you know a friend who has already figured out how to work the camera a lot more people will end up using it if they learn from somebody else. And the same thing with “well where are the games, how do I go find the games, how do I download them”. It’s really not that complicated, but I think a lot of people haven’t ventured there yet and hopefully a friend will show them how to do it.

And the industry has struggled a little bit because these systems are not perfect yet, so they’re a little slow and a little cumbersome because it’s kind of remarkable – it’s really rocket science that this little handset over the air is able to transfer big computer files and communicate with players that are all over the world. It’s a pretty amazing thing but at the same time this is very much the pioneering phase of it where you have to as a customer kind of enjoy being out on the cutting edge and doing some of that pioneering, and of course a lot of people do enjoy that.

I think for maybe a more conservative customer as a few more years go by the technology will be better; you’ll be more likely to be surrounded by other people that are already familiar with it and, you know, I saw this with the personal computer how it sort of crept across every desktop in the world, it was the same kind of deal. From a gaming standpoint the industry has maybe let itself down a little bit in the early stages here by making too many games that are just re-purposed from some other gaming medium and I really believe in mobile as its own platform and making new kinds of experiences that are first rate experiences that perfectly fit what mobile can do.

When you’re walking around and you’ve got a few minutes with your mobile phone we want to give you an experience that you can handle, that you can get into immediately that has instant gratification – that’s of course why we call the company Digital Chocolate, our slogan is ‘seize the minute’ – and we want you to be able to immediately to be comfortable with getting in and playing and having fun and we always make it very easy and very accessible. And we’re giving people relevant subject matter that’s really unique and fresh and again hopefully something that people would enjoy and then tell their friends about. And this approach for us has worked quite well, and last year and the year before we had the highest ratings from the critics for the quality of our games. We also cleaned out by winning the most awards in the industry so there’s definitely something about what we’re doing that’s working. It does require customers to take a chance and try some games that they maybe haven’t heard of before, but if you buy a Digital Chocolate game you’re definitely going to get a fresh new experience.

Now with mobile phone games in particular at the moment they seem to be marketed very much as just a way to kill time – so when people have a spare minute or two. Is that actually working against the creation of a market where people are prepared to pay, say, even small amounts to download new games or add features to their mobile phones?

Yeah, I think if all we’re doing is killing time there are a lot of other ways people can do that. And they’re not going to think oh I have to spend more money to do that with mobile games. So we try to offer a more compelling, unique experience. And the market research now shows that more than half the time that people spend playing mobile games they’re actually at home, and if you make a really great game – and we do make great games for these mobile phones – then you just want to play it any time you can play it, and it’s a very convenient platform. So it’s one thing if you’re on the train, if you’re on a plane, if you’re waiting somewhere in a line, you have that mobile phone with you and you not only can play, you can connect with other people and that’s a very big part of why people carry a mobile phone in the first place. When you’re home what’s nice about it is that it’s such a convenient form factor. I can be in bed and if my wife wants to go to sleep I can still be playing and I’m not lighting up the big TV, I’m not generating a lot of noise. And you can be comfortable playing on a sofa; there are a lot of environments where it’s a very convenient platform.

You mentioned connecting to other people and you’ve spoken previously about how, in the developed world at least, we’ve largely given up the human relationships we used to form in village life and how the mobile phone is in some ways a replacement for what you’ve called “the lost village”. Can you explain that concept?

This is a really fascinating thing when you look at the way the public has adopted social media capabilities on the Internet and now they’re adopting new digital media like text messaging and mobile games and so on. What you’re seeing is people trying to fill a void. A hundred years ago everybody lived in a small village. They spent their whole day with their family, they saw the same intimate friends everyday, they had a perfect social life. We’ve since then had the benefit of all these really incredible technologies, but its all happened so fast that of course global warming is one example of the on-rush of technology, and another example is that we’ve degraded our social lives.

More of us now live in a big city, we don’t know our neighbours, we go out in public we don’t know the people that are around us. We feel vulnerable and insecure when we’re out in public and we don’t have enough intimacy and contact with the people that we care about and we also in many cases struggle to meet new people. And this is particularly true for young single people that are still looking for their mate for life, and what you’re seeing now is so many people they’ve discovered that they’ve spent too much time watching TV by themselves, also they’re spending too much time stuck in their car or just feeling isolated that they’re reaching out and adopting these new social media as a way of coping with that. So they’re very, very powerful.

You know we saw this with the mobile phones first in Japan and we started to see evidence coming out of Japan about three or four years ago. Very compelling evidence about single people for example adopting every known method that they could to expand their social network and that’s a bit of an artefact in Japan because until fairly recently the majority of marriages in Japan were arranged by your parents. So you can just imagine a consumer who has their own mobile phone and they have a choice – they can sit around and wait until their parents tell them whom they’re going to marry or they can use their mobile phone and figure it out for themselves. It’s kind of obvious why people are taking control over their own life. So the mobile phone has turned into this really powerful tool for filling in this deficit from the lost village.

Trip you say the mobile phone is replacing the lost village of our day-to-day personal relationships, so how are companies like yours looking to fill that void with new forms of social media?

Kind of as our first generation we made the best games that we could, then we started to add social features to them so most of our games are connected games where you can play with your friends. But now in the last year we’ve started to develop very specific social applications where really the feeling of membership in a club and the opportunity to kind of hang out with friends, to make new contact with people that are like-minded that’s more of a focal point. And we use game play in the same way you would if it was a club where you played cards or a club where you played golf or tennis because you know there’s some game play there and it’s kind of a focal point or theme but clearly the real point of being a member of a club is the social value of it.

There’s a fantastic book I read last year called Bowling Alone [by Robert D Putnam] and the scientist that put it together he actually isolated these variables and he figured out that people who smoke they can cut their risk of death in the next year in half if they stop smoking. He also found out that if they’re not a member of a club they could achieve the same reduction in mortality rate f they just joined a club. So this is one example of many examples now being found in the scientific community about how your social life and your satisfaction in how rich that social life is drives your emotional state, and your emotions drive your biological performance, and it really does affect whether or not you stay alive or not and how well you live.

We see it in countries like the US, in the more advanced countries. I’m sure you see the same things in Australia. There are now a lot more people who have various health problems whether it’s needing to take an anti-depressant or heartburn medication. There’s so many examples of us now being much more medicated than we used to be, and again I really trace it all back to what’s wrong at the core of these short-comings in our social lives and this is a big, big opportunity for the Internet and it’s a big opportunity for mobile phones for what I like to think of as the era of social computing.

Nonetheless most of us probably still look at mobile phones as first and foremost a communication device, and then perhaps as a bonus we might use it as a camera or an mp3 player or even a TV receiver or play games on it – but will the mobile phone ever be a media and games platform in its own right?

You know you really have to think about who is that customer? And it’s everyone. And what are they doing? They’re out and about, and mobile lifestyle has a certain ryhthmn and a certain tempo and everbody likes to play. I mean everybody is going to watch the football finals and, you know, the World Cup and everybody is watching game shows on television and everybody would love to have a free trip to Las Vegas. I mean there are certain forms of gaming that everybody likes to participate in and again there’s a big social dimension usually that’s a big part of that.

So we don’t have any doubt the public is going to be involved in forms of gameplay with their mobile phone. We think the right way to get there for us right now is in making these really innovative original games like Tornado Mania, Rollercoster Rush, Tower Bloxx, Nightclub Empire and it’s relevant subject matter for the mobile customer. They’re really easy to pick up an play, they have more depth there if you want to play longer and get into it, there’s social connections you can make with other players.

We think this is the stage the industry is in right now, and where we’re headed is to just keep adding more social value to the experience. We have the thing now known as Web 2.0 where it’s the next generation of Internet applications and a big dimension of that is user-generated content and that’s definitely something that we’re supporting and really believe in that. I think that when people invest more of themselves in customising and creating and personalising the experience it becomes part of their social identity and there’s a lot of satisfaction there.

I like to think that … Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. I say now that the customer is the message, and this is a great new era in media where the customers really get a chance to define what it is for themselves.

And is there a strategy to make that work in a global market, across cultures?

We’re an extremely multicultural company. We do business in over 70 countries. Even though we’re headquartered in Silicon Valley, only 20% of our employees are based in that office. We have operations in Helsinki, Finland, in Bangalore, India, Barcelona, Spain and you know maybe some day soon in Australia.

Just in the Finland office we have people that came from 32 different countries and that understand a lot about the local cultures around the world and we really get out there to try and make sure that we have our fingers on the pulse of what different cultures want.

And there seems to be such a range of mobile phone networks around the world. What’s your strategy for moving ahead in the face of the different technologies, sometimes within countries let alone across borders?

You know we’ve made a big investment in a technology base because all these networks work slightly differently, and there are several hundred different handset models, and they arrange the buttons differently, and their screens are different and you want to make sure that every customer that has any handset that when they buy a game it really was designed to fit their phone and that everything works correctly, the way it should.

So we’ve been able to do a better job of that by developing technology that helps us port all these variations, and just by having a craftsmen-like approach where we just really love and are very passionate about getting a lot of these details right.