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[Servant Corps]

A long time ago, Jonathan S. Fox and I had an argument over Zygna-style social games. I argued in favor of social gaming and why I like it, Jonathan S. Fox argued against it. Considering that social games are unpopular, and that Ian Bogost created a satire game (Cow Clicker) protesting these social games, I want to know the beliefs of Bay12Games about social games.

[Sowelu]

I think roughly the same thing about them, that I would think about people who use special pheremones in upscale retail stores or casinos...you know, the pheremones that researchers have discovered can manipulate people into lowering their guard.  (I find them fascinating, btw.)

It's manipulative psychology, and it works pretty darn good.  It's only going to get more finely honed as time goes on.  Eventually I think there will be a backlash...maybe.  That people, in general, will decide to stay away from 'em.  But hey, people still get addicted to gambling.  It tweaks different buttons, but it's still taking advantage of neurological misprogramming.

Yes, I think that's the comparison I would make.  Wasting your time on a social gaming site is like wasting your life on nickel slot machines.  It doesn't get you anywhere, and you're better off staying away.

[Zangi]

Social Gaming, you mean stuff like Farmville?  Little substance, high social pressure. 

I avoid like the plague, prefer something that takes a bit more effort and thought without being a blatant mind-numbing time sink.

EDIT: Argument that Fox makes is quite compelling and rings true to me.

[Servant Corps]

If it is so...er...compelling, where's the counter argument to my counter argument? I mean, it didn't persuade me, so I need another argument addressing my points...  I argued a lot about resource conversion and the removal of grind to just have it...so...er...

[Sowelu]

Man that's a lot of words.  You're making compelling arguments back and forth.  I admit that I'm only tangental to any argument myself, but the words "behavioral training" still stuck out to me, so...to me, the fun level doesn't matter, nor does resource management or difficulty or whatever.  Any game that includes behavioral training of the player is a bad thing--and in my book, that is essentially the definition of social games.  I may be missing another definition.  Is there a different definition I should be using?  I mean...sure, they frequently are easy, but it's the "you can't leave the game alone, or you will suffer", the "you must feel guilty if you don't come back and click something", that's what makes a social game for me.  And that's what I hate.

[Soulwynd]

To my personal experience, considering I think most of my cousins play social games of one type or another. It attracts people who mainly don't have a computer or really cannot games regularly. I doubt you'd ever see a social game with huge hardware requirements. The topmost I can think of is Free Realms and they at least tried to make a game out of it.

Personally, I don't care about them but it makes me cringe whenever one of my cousins is playing farm ville on my father's computer. I watched it for a while and she basically said it was fun. Then again she's an orkut (google's myspace) junkie and so on...

[Cthulhu]

I don't think about Farmville at all, because I clicked the Hide Notifications from Farmville button.  Same with Happy Aquarium, FishVille, Happy Zoo (or whatever) and all the other social games.

Oh, and Mafia Wars.  The game that started it all (At least I assume)

My favorite is Band of Heroes though.  Dopest graphics, sickest storyline, it's awesome.

[Zangi]

If it is so...er...compelling, where's the counter argument to my counter argument? I mean, it didn't persuade me, so I need another argument addressing my points...  I argued a lot about resource conversion and the removal of grind to just have it...so...er...

Oh you wanted something else?

Your argument makes sense.... But, I don't agree with it as a 'gameplay' type player. 

You remove 'gameplay' so that players would get to the meat of... advancement and reward?  The problem with it, in my opinion is that it becomes a grind in itself, even more repetitive and mindless, essentially clicking with little variation to the scenario.  The more you click, the more you advance and get rewarded...
Which, from watching my sister on facebook... much of them are essentially that. Though I believe she has grown out of the more clicky ones over the year(s)...

And agreed with you on cooperation... I like L4D after all...

Short and sweet...

[Servant Corps]

There we go. That's a good argument against social games, and I'm starting to sympathize with that sort of argument myself (since I do quit from social games eventually). It does go a long way to explaining the hostility to the genre.

[nenjin]

I find the behavioral programming argument interesting, because my father was making those arguments about Nintendo back in the 80s to me.

You can argue how much or how you little you dress up that behavioral programming....but at its core, all video games do this. React, get rewarded. Press a button, get rewarded. Slay a dragon, get rewarded. It's not even an in-game reward, it's entirely biochemical. We're not even conscious of it. Yet studies show that when males succeed at a task, they get a surge of testosterone. Ever killed a dude in a FPS that was really pissing you off? What did you probably say, out loud or in your head? Probably some variation of "Yeah, I GOT you mother fucker!"

Video games provide an alternate reward pathway, with much less effort, to gamers. And so in a sense we're all hammering our pleasure centers when we game.

So on to social networking manipulating the neophytes...do I honestly think it's that bad? No. Taken apart from the viral nature of game play, where it's about getting as many people to play as possible, they're not much different in my book to Puzzle Quest or MW2 in how they're designed to make our brains go "SQUEE!"

When everything else is taken into account though...yes, it's a pox on gaming as art or whatever. It's showing that money can be made on video games with significantly less effort and money than was thought. There will always be devs who want to push the limits of what they offer a player...but the legions of el cheapo studios cranking this stuff out have found their niche.

[Grakelin]

Why is this a dilemma, exactly?

[Astral]

Simply put, if I want to be a "social gamer," I will play WoW or take my Xbox/Wii to a friend's house.  Farmville and its ilk is a scourge on the face of the internet; the game for people who don't play games. They are an addiction RPG in its purest form, without fancy graphics or a huge budget. Even higher budget games have to face the fact that companies are putting more into the psycology of getting you to play a game and continue playing it / paying for it rather than gameplay improvements or significant changes to the content.

They're more focused around getting you playing, giving you a degree of autonomy that you don't feel you have in real life, keeping you pushing that magic button over and over again, and providing penalties if you don't push it on time.

World of Warcraft gets referenced alot in this, but it's scary how true it is.
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

[Cheeetar]

Eh. I find these types of games boring but I don't think they're having any major negative effects.

[Tilla]

Almost all these games are incredibly shallow and as the cow clicker parody makes abundantly clear, involve simply clicking on objects at a leisurely pace. Meh.

[Muz]

Personally, I've hated "addictiveness" right from the very beginning. There used to be a time, about 5 years ago when people would brag about how addictive their games were. Sid Meier does it all the time. These 'social games' and modern MMOs show that addictiveness is a bad thing. I got hooked on those games for a while. After a few months.. I realized that I just wasn't having any fun. I found myself wondering why I was playing Tycoons on Facebook instead of Capitalism 2, when Capitalism gave me a compressed experienced, instead of this crap that only let me take one small step a day.


However, I'm not all against "Social Gaming". It's just been very poorly implemented, because punishing your customers brings in money. Zynga was an evil, evil company right from their first games, succeeded only because they forced their customers to spam.

The problem with social games is that they use the social aspect as a form of advertising, not as a serious gameplay mechanic. If you can actually have fun with your friends... as in real fun, not just "help fertilize my crops or i lose", then it'd be good. I was thinking of building sort of like a football game in Facebook, where you take control of a football player, log in and train him daily. Then you gather up some friends, build a team together, and play in a league style. If someone doesn't want to play the game any more, you can just put them in reserves. That way, communication with your "friends" is still needed to form a good team.. it's not just a "invite 5 friends to unlock a bigger farm" mechanic.


The only "social game" I still enjoy is Cyber Nations. As with the others, game mechanics are rubbish. But the fun is purely in communicating with others - what social games should really be about. It forges real friendships, and accomplishes a lot of the goals that they set out to achieve.