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Zynga Protests That Their Games Are Creative, And That Numbers Breed Fun

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“We used to give people 10 horseshoes when they start [FrontierVille] – then we did a little test of, ‘Well, what if we gave 15?’ We thought that maybe the would help them get over the hump of building the cabin because we noticed that people who make it to finishing the cabin were more likely to stick and keep coming back. We tried 15 horseshoes and sure enough we had a substantial uptick in early retention – in people getting to the cabin and therefore sticking as players. In that way, essentially, it made the game more fun.” — That’s the lead creator of FrontierVille, Brian Reynolds, telling Industry Gamers why caring about the metrics of how people play their games is a plus, not some anti-fun, accounting-as-game-design misery.

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