The second wave hits the beach

The second in a two part series on social games.

First the news of Disney purchasing Playdom, the company that has been purchasing Facebook game developers like there was no tomorrow, for over three quarter of a billion dollars.  Then this morning this crossed our news feed from Worlds in Motion :

“Some have speculated for months that Zynga, the biggest social game and application developer on Facebook (at least according to total monthly active users across its catalog), is positioning itself for a future IPO, what with private valuations for the company estimated at around $4 billion to $5 billion.”

Like it or not, Facebook games, or social games (perhaps we should call them anti-social games) are descending upon us all like a massive tidal wave. Is it simply Zynga that makes us grit our teeth like a vice grip? Perhaps it is a perception that the new trend, or at least what marketing specialists would have us believe is a new trend, sounds a death knell for more traditional games like triple A mmos? This concept is reinforced by recent failures of mmos that took millions to develop. 

Yesterday we ended with a quote from Ian Bogost, the developer of the poignant satire Cow Clicker. It is to that same source that we will turn as he examines why he dislikes social games, and in turn the rest of us may consider them with such a seething hatred.

“I think a great many social game developers are mistaking the success of their games for positive contributions to humanity,” – Ian Bogost

So why such hatred for social games from some sectors of the industry and the market? Obviously the hatred isn’t shared by everyone or the mighty Disney mouse wouldn’t have just spent Mount Everest sized pile of money for Playdom – obviously someone at Disney thinks they are diving into a pool of cash the size of the Great Lakes.

At this point, if you haven’t done it already, it is well worth the time to go out to Ian Bogost’s own site   and read his analysis on why he dislikes social games. In short his reasons are enframing, compulsion, optionalism, and destroyed time.

Enframing, to be honest, had me saying “huh?” (And I have two Master’s Degrees in Business related fields and 20 years experience in project management). Bogost describes social networks as “enframing apparatuses” that promote the idea that people are merely there for what “they might do for you when you need them.” (Que Janet Jackson singing What have you done for me lately.)

Author/designer Bogost says social networks like Facebook tend to be “enframing apparatuses” and points to LinkedIn as an example.  LinkedIn, he says, “formalizes and standardizes the old idea of business networking—the concept that people are just the things they might do for you when you need them”. He goes on to say the following…

“In that respect, Facebook in general and social games in particular are certainly not alone. But there’s something particularly insidious about enframing in games—taking even the contexts of interaction that don’t have to do with work, stripping them of enjoyment, and imbuing them once more with the spirit of potential use. In social games, friends aren’t really friends; they are mere resources.” – Ian Bogost

For the perfect example you have to look no further than Zynga’s Mafia Wars. The whole premise of the game necessitates adding Facebook “friends” to your virtual mafia (up to 500 of them) creating the rise of forums where people become nothing more than another tick in the strength column.

Compulsion is the easy one to understand – it is the brass ring in players noses that publishers and developers alike use to lead us around, continuing to suck money out of our wallets long after the leveling is done.  He quotes Jesper Juul from a New York University seminar entitled “Social Games on Trial” (which, in fact, was the very seminar for which Bogost created Cow Clicker to make his point so well) citing mmos as amounting to “brain hacks that exploit human psychology to make money.” When Richard Garriott described WoW’s endgame as “a system of inventory management” he hit the nail on the head – and it is a compulsion that works.

Optionalism seems, at least to me, to be the very quality that causes the executives at Disney to feel they are diving into an enormous pile of money. Optionalism, as Bogost  describes it, is the very reason that microtransactions exist as a viable business model in the first place.

“By contrast, the gameplay in social games is almost entirely optional. The play acts themselves are rote, usually mere actuations of operations on expired timers. And then more so, even the enacting of those rote maneuvers can be skipped, through delegation or (more often) by spending cash money on objects or actions. Social games are games you don’t have to play.” – Ian Bogost

Last, and certain not least, is destroyed time.  He points out that social games do more than waste our time, they also destroy the quality of the time we spend away from the games.

“Compulsion explains the feeling of struggling to return to something in spite of ourselves. Its flipside involves the disrespect of time that we might otherwise spend doing more valuable things—or even just pondering the thoughtful and unexpected ideas that an asynchronous game might raise. Social games so covet our time that they abuse us while we are away from them, through obligation, worry, and dread over missed opportunities.” – Ian Bogost

We wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to get that rare cow, or celestial steed would we? After all then we wouldn’t be one of the hundreds of thousands of other players who didn’t miss the opportunity to get the pretty starry little pony. In the end, the best summary of the issue is from the following words by designer/author Ian Bogost:

“It’s one thing to express a distaste for social games, to consider them bad art and to opt out of them. But one also cannot ignore their popularity entirely, nor leave it to the mere whims of personal taste. In addition to being bad art, social games are also troubling specimens of human tragedy. For one part, they threaten us with the negative future of games. But for another part, they also act as a talisman that might help us see our future perceptions of the present. What will we have thought of ourselves?”  – Ian Bogost

Side Notes

First – When customer service goes right from the Pink Pigtail Inn

Next -We love Farscape

Do you remember the sci-fi series Farscape?  It was four seasons and a miniseries long and preceded Ben Browders jump to the Stargate SG-1.  Normally Fran and I loathe on screen romances, Sci-fi or no, but this time I made an exception.  I recently finished watching all four years of Farscape and was deleted when news came across our feed that Ben Browder will be staring in a new series entitled Naught for Hire. The series is based on stories of John Stith and will be done in a 1930s noir movies style but set in the year 2030. We were hooked even from the brief description…

“…with each episode ending on a cliffhanger, Naught For Hire is about a detective who has issues with modern technology, including a car that is in love with him, an elevator that won’t cooperate and an answering machine that wants to do nothing but pull pranks on him.”  – via Blaster.com