Designing Software Products with Game Flavor
Cover art for Magic: The Gathering Duel of the Plansewalkers
The first time I raised money, one of the most frequent questions I got from investors was around design. “Your app looks too much like a game. And the images are so aggressive. Have you talked to women about this? They probably won’t like the color black.”
But when I speak to our users (male and female), their reaction is completely different:
“The Pantheon app looks so cool!” “We really wanted to try this out because of how it looks.”
Why the disconnect?
We think it’s because we are intentionally designing Pantheon with an important ingredient missing from the software industry: Flavor.
What is Flavor? It’s sort of what it sounds it sounds like. Flavor is a concept popularized in game design, and it’s the way a game’s aesthetic come together with its mechanics to give the player an experience. It’s the game’s vibes. And with few exceptions, software products have no Flavor.
“There is no flavor. There are no spices. Where are the chips?”
It’s not hard to notice that most software looks similar, and it’s not just because design trends roll through the industry (e.g., skeumorphism, minimalism, neumorphism). The bulk of consumer and enterprise products are simply utilitarian. A button looks the way it does because it’s easy to identify and will get you to click. It has nothing to say outside of delivering functionality. These types of products aren’t about anything.
If branding, visual design, and UI are the packaging to a software’s utility, the best way to describe this packaging is “generic.” Generic doesn’t mean ugly. There are some beautiful generic products. And being generic has some benefits. Generic products have a brilliant scalability: because they have no identity, they can serve anyone with a specific need.
But this same lack of identity has a drawback. Because generic products aren’t about anything, they don’t give customers anything to connect with aside from the functionality. Most software aspires to universal appeal and, in exchange, sacrifices the connection that comes from being about something. This is an expensive tradeoff, especially when giving up the connections that come from emotion, stories, and identity.
Target’s budget products and Mixpanel are both beautifully designed, but they’re both generic.
What is Flavor?
I first learned about the concept of Flavor in a Magic: The Gathering design blog from Wizards of the Coast. For the uninitiated, Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is the most popular trading card game and features gorgeous fantasy art.
In Ten Things Every Game Needs, MTG’s head designer, Mark Rosewater, says that every game needs Flavor. As Rosewater argues, “a game wants to have a trapping. It wants to be about something… games are more fun if the elements of the game refer a story or an environment or a theme.”
In The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell, game designer and professor, writes about the importance of a similar concept: themes. “The theme is what your game is about. It is the idea that ties your entire game together—the idea that all the elements must support.”
MTG is played by collecting cards, building decks, and pitting your deck against other players. But that’s not what the game is about. MTG is about powerful wizards who cast spells and summon mythical creatures to aid them in battle against each other, with each wizard drawing on different colors of magic (Red, Blue, Green, White, and Black). MTG’s Flavor is of a magical, Tolkienesque fantasy-world powered by color.
Compare this to your typical software product. Facebook is a platform for connecting with friends, but it’s not about friendship. Microsoft Word enables you to create documents and nothing more. It does nothing to give you a great writing experience or make you feel like a writer. Designing without Flavor makes sense when building a product intended to serve as an office utility, but designing with Flavor can give a team a big boost in creating any other product.
The Function of Flavor
Flavor is not just about having a backstory and art. Flavor has several valuable functions:
As Rosewater explains in another MTG design article, Bursting with Flavor, Flavor gives players metaphors they can latch onto to better understand a game’s rules. In MTG, it’s easier for players to understand the game within the context of a duel between wizards because players have an existing framework they can draw from to learn rules. Players understand the concepts of monsters, spells, and attacks, even before they understand MTG. In some sense, skeumorphism is the flavor of the software world: by giving users metaphors from the real world, they can learn new software more quickly.
Flavor gives players the opportunity to be surprised and make discoveries. In another Wizards of the Coast design article, designer Doug Beyer explains that once a player has an existing framework of understanding a game (dueling wizards), a game can modify and expand off that framework in original ways. A hideous monster in a fantasy world is generally expected to be evil, but when you encounter one who is kind and helpful, you experience a form of discovery and surprise. Additionally, the broader the existing frameworks afforded by the game’s Flavor, the more opportunity there is for surprise.
Flavor makes games appealing on their surface without the player needing to understand the underlying game. For many players, the fantasy art is the initial hook into MTG. This is not just great as a sales tool, but it creates another avenue for connecting with players. Flavor can give a product an emotional base, or simply make it cool.
Flavor can help you find new ways to deliver an experience to players. As Schell argues, themes are important because they help focus your work. A game’s Flavor affects not just the way it looks, but can inspire the name, logo, and packaging, how instructions are written, marketing, distribution, and more. The original The Legend of Zelda game cartridge was gold, fitting with the game’s themes of adventure and treasure: it immediately became an iconic part of the Zelda experience. A product with Flavor has more room to be creative and engage users.
When done well, Flavor reinforces a game’s mechanics. MTG’s Flavor affects the way the game plays: Red Magic has a fire Flavor. The monsters on Red cards are not just fire-breathing dragons and demons, Red spells are fast and chaotic, like fire. Flavor can give designers another toll for creating, evaluating, and prioritizin product features, which is especially important in an era of KPI-driven design.
More altruistically, Flavor is a great mechanism for creating art for human appreciation. Wizards of the Coast hires artists who create beautiful fantasy art for MTG. This art can be appreciated on its own, and inspires other artists, who then create more art. Games like Halo, Journey, and the Zelda series have led to the creation of iconic music that people listen to outside of the games. Without Flavor from games, the world would be a less rich place. It’s not easy to think of art that has come from a software company that has had any particular impact on the world.
By Dave or Atox - 2008 Leftovers: Zelda Gold Cart, CC BY 2.0,
Flavor in Software Products
Many of the benefits of Flavor don’t exist in Flavor-less software products, but in a few software products with Flavor, the impact is clear.
Superhuman is an email client that helps users clear their inboxes faster. But it is also about being fast at email. The name, Superhuman, the minimal design, and a UI that frequently teaches how you to be faster at email, all reinforce the Flavor of being fast. Even when a user may not be responding to email any faster than on another client, they probably feel faster using Superhuman.
Day One is a journaling app, but it is also an app about storing your memories. Day One’s features reinforce the Flavor of memories by adding supplemental information to each journal entry that you might not have thought to include yourself. If you’re using a music app while journaling in Day One, it will automatically log the song you were listening to in that moment: when you go back to a journal entry you can replay the song you were listening to and re-live that moment. Day One also has a separate service where users can order high quality physical books of their journals. This is an offering that they wouldn’t have offered if they were simply out to build a utilitarian app.
At Pantheon, we are not just helping people log their physical activity, we’re building a product about empowerment. We want our users to feel like they are achieving great things. The name comes from our desire to help people feel like they’re in the pantheon of greats. And the aggressive colors and designs are meant to elevate the casual fitness experience from the stereotypically cutesy aesthetics so that people feel empowered when they complete physical activity.
The Drawbacks of Flavor
Designing with Flavor comes with a few drawbacks.
Flavor makes your product or game about something, and if you’re trying to reach a massive audience, not everyone will like that your Flavored product is about. Colin Feo, founder of Windwalk Games, made the argument that most games are “opinionated” in a way that software products are not. Games have to have opinions on what stories they’re trying to tell. By deciding what the story is, games make themselves appealing to specific audiences, and that could preclude them from reaching mass markets.
Giving your product Flavor also makes it harder to change your product, which is especially risky for startups. If you’ve built a highly Flavored product for teenage boys, but later learn the solution you’ve engineered is better suited for enterprises, you have a lot of work to do to make your Flavor something that resonates with enterprises. Generic software products don’t have this problem. Facebook didn’t have to change what it was about when it expanded out of Harvard for the first time because it wasn’t about anything.
Designing with Flavor is also a challenge because it’s not a common practice in the software industry. If you want to develop Flavor for a game, you can start by recruiting concept artists or by drawing from a vast history of games. But because regular software products don’t incorporate Flavor, there isn’t a lot of history to use as inspiration. Even if a concept artist did want to help you build an app, there’s no software industry practice for converting concept art into app design. We believe video game UI designers will become really popular in app design because they do have this experience.
The Future of Flavor in Software
I have one prediction about Flavor: we will see more software products (consumer and even enterprise) introducing Flavor into their products. Video games are eating the entertainment world, and game design concepts are more popular in software. And while Flavor can limit a product’s audience, more people are moving online, which means the total available market for any product is growing. Software companies may find they can introduce more Flavor into their products and still reach a large-enough audience to sustain their businesses.
Until then, software companies that embrace Flavor may have a competitive advantage because of the benefits it lends their design and development teams. At Pantheon, we’re embracing the importance of Flavor and doubling down on it as a source of inspiration and growth, not just for ourselves, but for our customers and members.