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TIGSource ForumsPlayerGeneralWhat Minecraft and Farmville have in common
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Chris Whitman
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« Reply #60 on: December 04, 2010, 08:29:23 PM »

I have dropped by the library at the university here to print something out for a presentation only to find that all the computers were occupied, and at least half of them by students playing Farmville or other social networking games, and this is a complaint you hear echoed basically everywhere on campus.

The amount of work time people lose to these games has also been a serious issue, and has been reported on extensively. And this is even before you start discussing how they push you to exploit your friends and contacts for in game items and prizes.
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« Reply #61 on: December 04, 2010, 08:38:37 PM »

@Jimmy: That would definitely be an interesting experiment. I can't help but feel the end result would feel a bit like playing a database (like those football management games, for instance), but  perhaps something good could come out of it.

@Chris Whitman: There's a case to be made that having these games playable on Facebook causes concerns about drops in productivity when they're played on work time, but I don't see how that's an issue specific to social networking games but not other web-based games. Isn't that something to be discussed in terms of how a university or workplace monitors the activities on its computers rather than the specific designs of the games themselves?
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Chris Whitman
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« Reply #62 on: December 04, 2010, 09:38:27 PM »

My point is that when that many people are doing something they aren't supposed to be doing, and it's the same thing, there's probably something there.

I mean, when a company has meetings where they try to figure out, "Okay, how can we get people wanting to play the game all the time," and then people wanting to play the game all the time causes a serious problem for those people and other people around them, there's an issue, and the people responsible are, to some degree, the company that is actively trying to make that happen regardless of the consequences.

Edit: I mean the difference between Farmville and the WoW model is that Farmville (and similar games) steals your life in small increments, whereas WoW gets people playing for contiguous hour upon hour.

And you could argue that isn't as bad, but interrupting your work, studies or social life constantly to get you to check stuff (when you aren't even really having fun) is obviously bad, at least when it's due to arbitrary constraints placed on the game specifically to get you to do that, and certainly recruiting you to harass your own friends is bad.
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gimymblert
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« Reply #63 on: December 05, 2010, 05:08:03 AM »

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There's an obvious solution to that though.  Of course you'd still need to keep time as a resource, you just make it a virtual resource the game tracks explicitly.  So an RPG could say, "ok, you have time for 100 battles, choose the high-level details of how and where you'll fight them."

Okay, now that's farmville

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And you could argue that isn't as bad, but interrupting your work, studies or social life constantly to get you to check stuff (when you aren't even really having fun) is obviously bad, at least when it's due to arbitrary constraints placed on the game specifically to get you to do that, and certainly recruiting you to harass your own friends is bad.

Now you have a game based on fixed schedule, You have crop with growing time from 4 to 16 hour + half that time before the plant wither. Because the schedule is fixed you don't have to check constantly UNLESS you explicitly plan your game to be like that. Most people I know who play farmville play 5 mn to wake up, 5mn at lunch and 5 more back to home (some who don't play video games makes sudoku or cross word).

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I have dropped by the library at the university here to print something out for a presentation only to find that all the computers were occupied, and at least half of them by students playing Farmville or other social networking games, and this is a complaint you hear echoed basically everywhere on campus.

This is old, back when I was into school, they complain about people installing game, then when internet came, they complain people checking personal e mail ... I have heard similar story for facebook using, checking webcomics, people news, etc... People always do that kind of stuff when they feel down time. Old news unrelated to social games.

So far social games win the healthy side of gaming consumption.

Unrelated but I want to put the popularity of social game in perspective.

When you consider that only 20%-10% people who play also pay it's not far from the 90% piracy rates of traditional game. So when people boast about social game success, it's easy to show that the scale is comparable to normal game in term of pay rate.
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« Reply #64 on: December 05, 2010, 05:22:16 AM »

OK, I think it's time to state what I really hate about Farmville: The graphics. Those characters with their googly faux-anime eyes and dumb grins. The environments that look like they were collaged from MS Office clipart. It reminds me of some dystopian vision of a communist dictatorship: A world full of clinical blandness and lobotomized mediocrity.
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« Reply #65 on: December 05, 2010, 05:43:41 AM »

Okay, now that's farmville
That's still not making time a virtual resource though?  I think a management sim would fit the description better -- like the football management sims Lemon mentioned.
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« Reply #66 on: December 05, 2010, 06:48:49 AM »

I mean, when a company has meetings where they try to figure out, "Okay, how can we get people wanting to play the game all the time," and then people wanting to play the game all the time causes a serious problem for those people and other people around them, there's an issue, and the people responsible are, to some degree, the company that is actively trying to make that happen regardless of the consequences.

I agree, if a company did that, it would be bad. Which company are you talking about? Because I don't know of any company that does that.

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I mean the difference between Farmville and the WoW model is that Farmville (and similar games) steals your life in small increments, whereas WoW gets people playing for contiguous hour upon hour.

Right, so WoW is many orders of magnitude more invasive and time-consuming, then. And yet Farmville gets all the hate. Weird.

Also, what constitutes engaging in an activity for one's personal amusement, and what constitutes having one's life stolen? I'm not clear on the distinction but it seems you are.

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And you could argue that isn't as bad, but interrupting your work, studies or social life constantly to get you to check stuff (when you aren't even really having fun) is obviously bad, at least when it's due to arbitrary constraints placed on the game specifically to get you to do that, and certainly recruiting you to harass your own friends is bad.

Anecdotal response to hyperbole: I play several of the -Ville games, and a number of other social games. None of them interrupt my day, and certainly none of them do it constantly. I've never paid a penny to play any of these games, which puts me in the roughly 90% of other players who don't pay either. I have fun playing them, or rather, I thought I did - I hadn't realised that you were the sole arbiter of what is fun or not and that I've clearly been mistaken all this time.
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gimymblert
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« Reply #67 on: December 05, 2010, 07:35:42 AM »

OK, I think it's time to state what I really hate about Farmville: The graphics. Those characters with their googly faux-anime eyes and dumb grins. The environments that look like they were collaged from MS Office clipart. It reminds me of some dystopian vision of a communist dictatorship: A world full of clinical blandness and lobotomized mediocrity.
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Cheesy

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That's killing me too, I don't play barbie nor bratz game too

Imagine zelda with pink unicorn and sugar color ... no matter how good, I would probably stay away. That's why some people can't stand smash bros, mario kart and pokemon an many social game. pika pika!

BUT gamer are on facebook too, it's time some people make game for gamer on this platform. INDI get your weapon and forget the mass, forget the million! Gamer on Facebook need you!
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Chris Whitman
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« Reply #68 on: December 05, 2010, 09:23:46 AM »

Former Zynga employees have said as much about their strategy. All they are concerned with is numbers.

Besides unethical game design in terms of reward scheduling, there's the obvious exploitation of other people's contacts, which is shady. And Zynga specifically people hate because they steal other people's work on purpose (that isn't related to game design; it just sucks).

Anecdotal response to hyperbole: I play several of the -Ville games, and a number of other social games. None of them interrupt my day, and certainly none of them do it constantly. I've never paid a penny to play any of these games, which puts me in the roughly 90% of other players who don't pay either. I have fun playing them, or rather, I thought I did - I hadn't realised that you were the sole arbiter of what is fun or not and that I've clearly been mistaken all this time.

The phenomena I'm describing are really pretty common. I never meant no one had fun playing Farmville, only that many people wind up playing far past the point of having fun.

Lots of people also play World of Warcraft for fun with no impact on their social lives. I still sort of think the MMO grind is unethical design.

Edit: look, I'm not saying you're a bad person for playing Farmville. I still hop on WoW on rare occasions, and I have fun playing for a bit, but I still get that it has a really negative effect on some people.
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« Reply #69 on: December 05, 2010, 11:48:37 AM »

Yep that can be said for every activity when you were more specific about social game, that point is just irrelevant as hell. It also happen with game like gears of war, I have played the game well beyond it was fun (even the horrible car sequence). Doesn't 3ps have no redeeming quality or that the game does not have any quality that people may enjoy genuinely everytime they play?


People can drown into water, it happen all the time, let diss on water because of that? We should have better argument against water, maybe there is, but this one is clearly not a good one.  Durr...?

So yeah, we can agree that Activision Zynga is evil, What Ray kassar Kotick Pincus said and do is clearly bad.

About exploitation of people contact, while Zynga is the one that push spamming to an evil level (beyond just incentive), Facebook social graph should be criticize first, A social application is by definition "abusing" the social graph, that's the whole point of the system really.
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« Reply #70 on: December 05, 2010, 11:55:23 AM »

To me, it basically boils down to this:

When designing a game and considering a new gameplay element, if the primary factor the gameplay element is judged by is how much it extends the game time instead of how much it improves the overall quality of the game, then I'd consider that bad game design. Whether or not that's evil or morally wrong, I don't know, but I'd rather play a game where the focus was on making a quality game and not just getting people to spend as much time on it as possible.
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« Reply #71 on: December 05, 2010, 05:49:18 PM »

OK, I think it's time to state what I really hate about Farmville: The graphics. Those characters with their googly faux-anime eyes and dumb grins. The environments that look like they were collaged from MS Office clipart. It reminds me of some dystopian vision of a communist dictatorship: A world full of clinical blandness and lobotomized mediocrity.
 Epileptic

This I agree with. It doesn't make the games evil, but it does make my eyes want to puke.

Former Zynga employees have said as much about their strategy. All they are concerned with is numbers.

I'm pretty sure what they're interested in is profit, not "how can we get people wanting to play the game all the time". The short-burst gameplay likely works for them because it makes for a game that's well-suited to the lifestyle of its target audience and because it reduces their server traffic. It's not in Zynga's interests to get people playing all the time.

Besides unethical game design in terms of reward scheduling, there's the obvious exploitation of other people's contacts, which is shady. And Zynga specifically people hate because they steal other people's work on purpose (that isn't related to game design; it just sucks).

Yes, they're pricks for the plagiarism. And the aspects of the games that make use of social graphs are... If not inherently evil and exploitative, definitely annoying. Facebook have stepped in to curb some of the shadier aspects, which says a lot for how far Zynga (and others, in fairness) pushed the boundaries. Heh - lectures in ethics and corporate responsibility from Facebook... Fuuuuck. I think this stuff that works with social graphs could one day become something genuinely awesome, but right now there's a lot more these games get wrong than they get right.

Edit: look, I'm not saying you're a bad person for playing Farmville. I still hop on WoW on rare occasions, and I have fun playing for a bit, but I still get that it has a really negative effect on some people.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I've not seen any actual stories about Farmville having negative effects in any great number of people, I've just seen fearmongering about how it might be destroying lives. It isn't. If it was, forget about the games press - the mainstream media would be hyserical about it. I mean, more hysterical than they are about "proper" games.

When designing a game and considering a new gameplay element, if the primary factor the gameplay element is judged by is how much it extends the game time instead of how much it improves the overall quality of the game, then I'd consider that bad game design. Whether or not that's evil or morally wrong, I don't know, but I'd rather play a game where the focus was on making a quality game and not just getting people to spend as much time on it as possible.

Agreed. I don't think artificially extending a game length is evil, but it is a bit crap. Obviously every game is comprised of performing the same actions over and over again for a few minutes/hours/days (depending on genre), and that's fine, but those actions need to be fun, and they need to be performed in the context of a larger unfolding narrative, of medium- and long-term goals. They need to result in the player's experience changing over time. The repetition needs to not outstay its welcome, because it's better to leave players wanting more than to just drift away bored, or upset at the design's apparent cynicism. But I think that exactly how that's balanced and presented for a specific game is a question of technique, not of ethics.
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« Reply #72 on: December 05, 2010, 05:52:37 PM »

communist dictatorship: A world full of clinical blandness and lobotomized mediocrity.
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What is this I don't even. Huh?
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« Reply #73 on: December 05, 2010, 06:07:59 PM »

Please don't.

Thank you.
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« Reply #74 on: December 06, 2010, 03:59:57 PM »

Except farmville IS NOT a competitive game therefore it does not change the fairness of the game. [...]

Those argument are irrelevant.
You could argue that any game where the results are shared and can be compared is, to some degree, competitive. But it doesn't matter - I was talking about the general concept of the fairness of microtransactions in multiplayer games, not Farmville specifically.

Spending time isn't valuable. It's the expression we want. So no, painting's not a grind.
And half the stuff you are calling grinding in Minecraft is expression too. I've hardly spent any time digging away randomly, but I have spent time carving out spaces. It's the difference between killing 50 orcs to try and get a rare drop and killing 50 orcs to get into the orc stronghold.

Personally I hate the term 'grind' because it's a nebulous idea referring to any repeated action that someone somewhere finds boring. Some of these actions may be more down to compulsion than fun, but people have vastly different scopes for what counts here.

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People grind in MMOs and in Farmville and in Minecraft for the same reasons: to unlock the ability to do something later (raid, buy, build). Unless your mine is a creative expression for you (like my friend who's carving out the mines of Moria, but unlike myself who just wants more iron), I'd say it's just another type of grinding.
Almost everybody I know plays Minecraft as some sort of expression. There's virtually no other point, is there? You combine the resource acquisition with the sculpting of your landscape. Occasionally there's a bit of one without the other, but not in such quantities that I'd consider it laborious or arbitrary, which I think is the key.

I disagree with trying to split this into two distinct categories. The social aspect and the business model are orthogonal, and there's nothing inherently wrong with either. The problem is when you tone down elements that are fun, replace them with elements that are compulsive, and then essentially put paywalls between the player and their next reward.

I think this is the crux of the anti-Farmville sentiment. The problem with this argument is that "fun" is incredibly subjective. The thought process behind the anti-Farmville camp seems to go something like this:

I don't find the game fun. Therefore it isn't fun. Therefore no-one can find the game fun. So what's keeping the millions of players playing it? ZOMG MIND CONTROL!
You are trivialising a serious issue by characterising it as an extreme situation when it's more nuanced than that. The problem is:
  - we know people repeatedly do things in life that they will tell you that they'd prefer not to do. Typically we refer to this as addiction.
  - we also know most of these things are originally done "for fun". Thus it's not just about subjectivity, but about a sliding scale of where something crosses over from "fun" to "compulsive".
  - we know enough about psychology - or at least the behaviourist approximation of it - to know how to create stimuli that specifically pushes behaviour into the bounds of compulsion. This has been empirically studied.
  - we are seeing games that are beginning to resemble these behaviourist experiments - as we always have - but where there appears to be little narrative or ludic justification for this.
  - worse, we are seeing games where these approaches are coupled with microtransactions to convert successful compulsion into payments.

Surely you can see how this is a cause for concern, at least?

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Characterising the microtransactions in those games as paywalls is pretty unfair and fallacious as well.
Perhaps it's a bit strong, but there are certain activities that require FarmCash to buy, and FarmCash accrues very slowly if you're not willing to pay.

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The vast majority of players of freemium games never pay a penny to play - they just log in when it's convenient, do what they do, log out again, and eventually get the stuff they want.
The game is designed to work that way - you don't want people on your servers for too long, after all. It costs money. The fact that lots of people aren't playing isn't a sign that "paying is optional" - these people are additional content for the paying customers and referral sources for potential future paying customers.

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Hard-wired into their design is a mechanic that ensures they'll be played in short bursts, in a schedule that suits the lifestyles of the players. How many "proper" games have that?
You make it sound as if it is done to be nice to the players. I assure you that it is not. It is done primarily to reduce costs, by getting people off their servers and back on the Facebook infrastructure which is essentially free for them. The perfect player is one that is paying you money but barely using your resources. This is how they can afford to have so many people playing without paying. Note that they go to some effort to try and get you back into the game, via daily reminders, gifting, etc., because they do want you back frequently - just not for long periods.

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The problem is that Farmville provides mechanisms to encourage you to harass your friends in order to make your own gains in the game.

And that's why I wanted to make a distinction between the "social" aspects of these games and the monetary aspects.
But they're just separate parts of the same machinery. There are things in Farmville you can spend real money on, or instead get lots of 'neighbors' and acquire the stuff that way, and Zynga have measured these quantities out based on the amount of cash they expect a typical new player to bring in.

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Spamming people who aren't already playing the game? Yeah, that's pretty crappy.
But that is, of course, the absolute only reason this stuff exists. It's to spread the application virally by making your players spam their friends in exchange for benefits. Whereas a less antisocial game like Minecraft relies on you thinking that it's really cool and choosing to spread the word with no benefit to yourself.

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But again, I don't know of anything which you MUST pay for to attain, and even if you do, I think you must be an incredibly sensitive soul if you feel "taunted" by seeing someone owning a piece of virtual property that you don't. I don't hear of anyone being upset that other people's XBox avatars have clothing or accessories that they don't. I happen to have a set of that overpriced Horse Armour in Oblivion - who would be upset if I posted a screenshot?
It happens all the time on MMOs. You see someone with certain kit, so you want it. It doesn't have to be a PvP game for that. People covet cool stuff. Nothing wrong with having a game that shows cool stuff and lets other people want it, of course. What matters is how you, as a developer, choose to advertise that to players, and how you capitalise on their resulting desires.

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There is also a strong thread among gamers which states that you shouldn't be able to introduce external resources to improve your standing within the game, as a point of fairness.

Sure, I understand that point of view. But nobody is making the gamers that hold that opinion play these games. Nobody is making anybody play these games.
Except the deception that people don't know what they're getting into at the start, and the psychological addiction - or a lesser version of it - that can make people do things they wouldn't otherwise choose to do.

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As GILBERT Timmy pointed out, none of these games (at least none I know of, and certainly not Farmville) are competitive. They're co-operative.
Absolutely loads of these viral freemium games are explicitly competitive, but even those that are not can still bring out competitive behaviour from people. Competition doesn't have to mean zero-sum conflict. It can mean something as simple as comparison. If I score higher on Pacman than someone else then the only difference is that I appear higher up the high score table than they do. That doesn't mean I won't be pissed off if someone else put in an extra dollar to get a free power pill on each board and beats my score.

I'm not saying Farmville is evil or entirely without merit as a game. But I am saying there are serious question marks over how ethical this sort of game is, when you take into account the whole package of mechanics, referrals, and monetization.
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« Reply #75 on: December 06, 2010, 06:20:37 PM »

I see your point, the problem is really should we consider a game for merit on its own or should we consider based on the intention they were made of. But what if a mechanics was create with good intention and turn into a devious trick? Experience point was not created to bring retention and promote shameless grind but end up that way.

There is still the "zynga bias" as if all social games use the same metrics with the same goal as zynga, which is not true, most game who create the mechanics first were made with a genuine feeling of making the game better until zynga copy them and change their meaning.

We don't see such a backlash for traditional game design only because most feature create to trick people have became genuinely cool through tradition. Only non gamer see them as devious harmful trick.
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« Reply #76 on: December 06, 2010, 07:48:50 PM »

Goodness me, these quote-by-quote posts are getting lengthy. I'm going to have a stab at brevity. If you think I've omitted a response to something really important, let me know

You are trivialising a serious issue by characterising it as an extreme situation when it's more nuanced than that. The problem is:
  - we know people repeatedly do things in life that they will tell you that they'd prefer not to do. Typically we refer to this as addiction.
  - we also know most of these things are originally done "for fun". Thus it's not just about subjectivity, but about a sliding scale of where something crosses over from "fun" to "compulsive".
  - we know enough about psychology - or at least the behaviourist approximation of it - to know how to create stimuli that specifically pushes behaviour into the bounds of compulsion. This has been empirically studied.
  - we are seeing games that are beginning to resemble these behaviourist experiments - as we always have - but where there appears to be little narrative or ludic justification for this.
  - worse, we are seeing games where these approaches are coupled with microtransactions to convert successful compulsion into payments.

Surely you can see how this is a cause for concern, at least?

Yes, I do see it as a cause for concern, which is why I bothered reading/replying to the thread in the first place. I agree that a bunch of the games we're talking about are vastly more simple than what we're used to, and when combined with the use of these psychological techniques, they warrant questioning. What bugs me is that the discussions about this stuff seem to be coloured by our ("our" meaning us as longtime gamers and designers) fear/incomprehension of the success of new platforms like Facebook in the same way that every new media has been reviled by those who considered themselves experts in the existing media. We know how games are reviled by the existing media, in the same way that paperback novels, cinema, TV, Rock & Roll, comic books, D&D, Punk, Heavy Metal and the Internet were in the past, and we know how nonsensical all those arguments are. Now here we are, active defenders of some of those media, and grown-up enough to be way past being concerned about others, and we're suddenly finding a new target to rail against ourselves. We'd better be damn sure that that target is worthy of genuine concern, because otherwise we're becoming the next generation of "Get Off My Lawn" dinosaurs.

Yes, we should be constantly double-checking ourselves about the ethics of our designs. And yes, I think it's valid to have a discussion about how the current state of social games is, frankly, a bit crap. But I don't see evidence of actual harm being done. We should be talking about how to improve the genre, not how to vilify it.

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You make it sound as if it is done to be nice to the players. I assure you that it is not. It is done primarily to reduce costs, by getting people off their servers and back on the Facebook infrastructure which is essentially free for them.

Of course it's not done to be nice to players. But the end result is a game designed to keep people from spending a long time hitting their server is also a game which slots nicely into small chunks in players schedules, which attracts a big audience of people who don't have a lot of time to sink into games. It's kind of win/win.

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Spamming people who aren't already playing the game? Yeah, that's pretty crappy.
But that is, of course, the absolute only reason this stuff exists. It's to spread the application virally by making your players spam their friends in exchange for benefits. Whereas a less antisocial game like Minecraft relies on you thinking that it's really cool and choosing to spread the word with no benefit to yourself.

Uh, that's why I said it was pretty crappy. We're in agreement here. As I've said, I think game mechanics that utilise people's social graphs could become really cool one day, but right now they're pretty exploitative.

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It happens all the time on MMOs. You see someone with certain kit, so you want it. It doesn't have to be a PvP game for that. People covet cool stuff. Nothing wrong with having a game that shows cool stuff and lets other people want it, of course. What matters is how you, as a developer, choose to advertise that to players, and how you capitalise on their resulting desires.

If you've got a game that's monetised, entirely or partly, by microtransactions, doesn't it make sense to find a way to show the have-nots what the haves have? The iPad is powered by Magic, and owned by Hip and Trendy People, and I should feel bad for not being able to justify the cost of one, and my girlfriend should find me less sexy because I don't own one. It's shitty, but it's the world we live in. You can't pretend games invented advertising.
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« Reply #77 on: December 07, 2010, 04:30:52 PM »

I see your point, the problem is really should we consider a game for merit on its own or should we consider based on the intention they were made of. But what if a mechanics was create with good intention and turn into a devious trick? Experience point was not created to bring retention and promote shameless grind but end up that way.
Yep, a lot of it comes down to perception. Do we know the mind of the designer?

Personally, I am not inclined to think highly of Zynga, partly because I think they have honed the compulsive mechanics at the expense of normal gameplay, but also because they cloned existing games and worked on making them more profitable. I've not seen much evidence of them caring about gameplay or bringing something new to games, just something new to monetization of games. Maybe some of that is valuable if it protects 'better' games (whichever they may be).

Goodness me, these quote-by-quote posts are getting lengthy. I'm going to have a stab at brevity.
Good plan; I will do likewise.

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What bugs me is that the discussions about this stuff seem to be coloured by our ("our" meaning us as longtime gamers and designers) fear/incomprehension of the success of new platforms like Facebook in the same way that every new media has been reviled by those who considered themselves experts in the existing media.
Agreed. We mustn't fall into the trap of thinking it's about "real" games vs "Facebook" games, or giving Zynga a hard time where we let Blizzard off on a similar charge, etc. And I do think there is a place for microtransactions; I'm just not sure exactly what form I think it should take.

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Of course it's not done to be nice to players. But the end result is a game designed to keep people from spending a long time hitting their server is also a game which slots nicely into small chunks in players schedules, which attracts a big audience of people who don't have a lot of time to sink into games. It's kind of win/win.
That's one way of looking at it. I'd like to quote Jonathan Blow here as I think he can say things better than me, and his opinion carries more weight:

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But I mean now that we've got FarmVille and stuff like that, I pretty much would say "don't make that kind of game" because I don't see much value in it.

It's only about exploiting the players and yes, people report having fun with that kind of game. You know, certain kinds of hardcore game players don't find much interest in FarmVille, but a certain large segment of the population does. But then when you look at the design process in that game, it's not about designing a fun game. It's not about designing something that's going to be interesting or a positive experience in any way -- it's actually about designing something that's a negative experience.

It's about "How do we make something that looks cute and that projects positivity" -- but it actually makes people worry about it when they're away from the computer and drains attention from their everyday life and brings them back into the game. Which previous genres of game never did. And it's about, "How do we get players to exploit their friends in a mechanical way in order to progress?" And in that or exploiting their friends, they kind of turn them in to us and then we can monetize their relationships. And that's all those games are, basically.
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If you've got a game that's monetised, entirely or partly, by microtransactions, doesn't it make sense to find a way to show the have-nots what the haves have? [...] It's shitty, but it's the world we live in. You can't pretend games invented advertising.
It does make sense, and I'm not entirely against it. But on the other hand, a lot of people don't want advertising in their games, and don't want to be shown that other people can do better at the game if they pay for it. It's the whole 'sanctity of games' thing, the 'magic circle' within which there is a presumption of equality, etc. Perhaps we're breaking down that presumption, but I'm not convinced that's a great way to go.
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« Reply #78 on: December 07, 2010, 06:24:47 PM »

It sort of feels like after many poorly-worded posts, I'm sort of honing in on my standpoint, which I should probably have found a way to make more clearly and succintly.

I don't think microtransactions are for everyone, and I'm not saying every game should be built around that business model. But for certain types of games it makes sense. I like it because you're already playing the game for free, and assuming the game designers aren't being completely dishonest about what you'll get for your money, the games put the players into a situation where they're a lot more informed about what their hard-earned cash will buy them than the currently prevalent business model where you pay up-front for a whole game that might be crap. These days, you might not even get the whole game for the price you pay for the box, since certain companies seem to be getting pretty exploitative with charging for "DLC" for just unlocking something which is on the disc already. DLC might be a discussion for a different thread, though.

I guess what this discussion has sparked in me is that it would be great to find a way to have a framework in which we can discuss the relative morality of different types of game design whilst being objective as possible. If there's a way we can do that, I'd love to know what it is. What irks me is knee-jerk reactions to new directions in game design. I think there needs to be a process of questioning of the designers' intentions, some actual concrete statistical data about the effect those designs have on players (socially, psychologically, financially), and from that a way of formulating some theories about whether certain types of games have a net positive or negative effect on games in general and society as a whole. There's something about social games right now (I suspect it's just their "newness" - they borrow a lot from older design concepts, albeit in a new context) that seems to frighten people and cause them to demonise them in a knee-jerk way without sitting down and really analysing what they're all about. It might be that in time we gather evidence that supports the view that these sorts of designs really are objectively Bad Things, but in the absence of that evidence I kinda feel like the burden of proof lies with the critics.

I even kind of see some of that in Blow's comments. He's not shrieking "OMG EVIL!" but he's expressing some degree of discomfort about the designer's motivations. My personal take is that regardless of how villainous the designer might be (and let's be clear: Zynga fit the model of Big Evil Corporation pretty well), the true measure of evil is the effect on the people who actually play the game, and I've looked and failed to find compelling evidence of actual harm. He's highlighting potential ethical issues, and I think those are worth exploring, but I don't see enough evidence to support his view that people shouldn't be making those sorts of games. I think that rather than not making them, they should be looking to find ways to make them better. If the quality bar can be raised a bit, there could be something really incredible in there - both from the business/profitability point of view, but also from the creative and player experience points of view. Social games are the babies of the games world right now. Let's not advocate killing them because they cry and poop everywhere and annoy people on public transport. Let's try to raise them properly and see what they're like when they grow up.
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gimymblert
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« Reply #79 on: December 08, 2010, 01:41:33 PM »


Next generation spamming




Zynga what have you done!
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