Ravenwood Fair

» see ravenwoodfair.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Ravenwood Fair shipped in nine languages and Turkish was one of them, which means it was in front of me in 2010 whether I asked for it or not. I did not play it. What reached me was the invitations, the same channel FarmVille used, and I dealt with them the way everyone dealt with them. That is the honest extent of my contact with a game twenty five million people opened.

The thing that makes it worth a grave is who built it. Lolapps had been grinding on a stalled Facebook game called Critter Town since january 2010, redesigning it over and over for seven months without finishing it. Their new creative director, Brenda Brathwaite, suggested bringing in John Romero to take it apart and land it. Romero walked in on 1 august 2010 with eleven developers, and Ravenwood Fair went live on Facebook on 19 october. So the man who co-designed Doom spent the autumn of 2010 building a game about running a fairground in a haunted wood.

You chopped trees for materials and spent them on hotdog carts and rides, and when the fair got fun enough the visitors arrived by zeppelin. The forest kept generating monsters and eerie noises. Visitors got frightened, and you clicked on them to calm them down so they would go back to spending. Under the cartoon animals it was a resource loop with an energy meter, the same shape as every other Facebook game of that year, and the painted art and the pop culture jokes were what made people stay.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

It landed into a crisis. In october 2010, days before launch, Facebook shut Lolapps down entirely over its use of RapLeaf, an advertising firm caught passing user identifiers to data brokers. Ravenwood Fair launched anyway and was then shut off itself for seven days a week later before Facebook let it back. Lolapps read that correctly as a warning about renting its entire business from one landlord, and put Ravenwood Fair up on its own website off Facebook as insurance.

Then it worked. Twenty five million players inside six months, on Facebook and on Mixi in Japan and on Orkut in Brazil and on StudiVZ in Germany. An expansion, Ravenstone Mine, arrived on 20 april 2011. In january 2011 the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences nominated it for Social Networking Game of the Year against CityVille and FrontierVille, and CityVille won. Romero and Brathwaite spent early 2011 giving talks in San Francisco about how you take AAA design discipline into a browser game.

~ the decline ~

Lolapps merged with 6waves in 2011, and by 2012 Ravenwood Fair had been handed to a third-party studio for what the industry calls sunsetting: keeping the lights on cheaply while the numbers decay. Romero's own account is blunt about what happened next. The quality dropped, the game lost millions of players, and then it lost its life. Two sequels, Ravenskye City and Ravenshire Castle, had already come out of Lolapps to make a trilogy nobody now remembers.

When 6waves finally closed it on 18 july 2013, the stated reason was that the player base had become too small. That is true and it is also circular. A game with an energy meter and a daily loop dies when nobody is left to log in, and nobody is left to log in once the studio that cared about it has been replaced by one paid to manage the decline.

~ the long tail ~

The Facebook game era produced a lot of numbers that meant less than they looked like. Twenty five million players is a genuine figure and it was also a figure assembled out of invitation spam on a platform that rewarded any app willing to be noisy about itself. When Facebook changed the notification rules, that whole category deflated at once, and by 2013 the survivors were the ones that had built a habit rather than a viral loop.

What is left of Ravenwood Fair is a soundtrack album and a set of conference talks, plus a footnote about the week Facebook nearly killed it before launch over a data-broker scandal. The fair itself is gone in the most complete way a game can go: server-side, browser-based, with no client to preserve and no offline mode to fall back on. There is nothing to emulate. There is only the art people saved.

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