A View From the Road: FarmVille Isn't Going Away

[Sylocat]

So social games are here to stay. Um yes, I agree. Is the point of this article just to hear yourself talk?

Are you not familiar with the idea of an editorial arguing a point...?

What point was being argued? That Zynga's games are popular? We know that. They still suck, they're still all ripoffs of much better games that are only so popular due to Zynga's constant spamming of Facebook users, and nothing mentioned in this article changes that or even touches on it. The entire point seems to be, "Zynga is more popular than good games, so there."

I don't want to see FarmVille go away. As long as that piece of crap exists, and as long as people play it, they can't criticize me for being a gamer when they spend up to 8 hours playing that crap.

Good point, I hadn't thought of it like that. Go Zynga!

Facebook won't dethrone Google until the mouth-breathing computer-illiterates can actually FIND Facebook without using Google ala the ReadWriteWeb fiasco of a couple months back. Remember that? If there was ever a single event in human history that made me lose all my remaining faith in humanity, that was it.

Oh-ho-ho yeah [http://blog.nerdstargamer.com/2010/thoughts-and-links-about-the-facebook-login-fiasco/]. In a "having already accepted that society is doomed" kind of way, that was funny to watch.
And I've always thought those numbers were skewed anyway. Facebook may get more hits (by some convoluted system of measuring), but how much time does each Facebook user spend on Facebook versus how much each Google user spends on Google?

 

[Regiment]

This is absurd, honestly. Zynga makes games (and no matter how you argue it, what they make are certainly games of some kind or another) that people like, people who generally don't play games. And apparently this is some sort of travesty. What do people playing casual browser games do that's so abhorrent? You don't have to like these games, but we can certainly stop complaining about them and demonizing anyone who plays them. Are these serious hardcore macho difficult games? No, of course not, but do the people playing it care? Of course not! They're having fun. Why is this a bad thing?

Complaining about people playing browser games because "they're not real games" or "they're not real gamers" is disturbingly exclusionary and superior of us. We play video games too. We aren't better than... people who play video games.

Where's the 'video' part of zynga games? Anyway, people complaining aren't really saying 'stop Zynga making games, don't let facebook players have their fun', they're saying 'don't write about it in the Escapist because this is a magazine about proper videogames'. Obviously some of that is exacerbated by hard feelings from the Popularity Contest Versus Thread Extravaganza that happened recently.

Let's not split hairs. Zynga makes computer games. These are a subset of video games. (If you want to be really picky, the "'video' part of Zynga games" is the part where you use a computer video monitor to view the games.)

While I agree that a lot of people are saying that the Escapist shouldn't write about browser games, there's this strong undercurrent about how these games are bad for someone or another, which is frankly absurd (bringing more people into a medium is never a bad thing). And how are browser games not "proper" video games? Where is that line drawn and who gets to draw it?

Certainly this is all because of the March Madness mishegas. People are angry that their favorite developers lost (or were severely challenged by) someone else's favorite developer, a developer they don't personally like.

It's all part of the curious trend against "casual" gamers. It's a silly line to draw, and it happens in all fandoms. People who memorize the Red Sox rosters and know every player's statistics, age, birthplace, favorite food, and underwear preference aren't "better" fans than those who just watch the World Series because it's fun and their friends like it. People who can recite the lyrics to every single Metallica song ever recorded aren't "better" fans than people who just like that one song they heard on the radio, and people who can get 1000 kills on Modern Warfare 2 without dying once aren't "better" fans than people whose idea of a day gaming involves a grand total of twenty minutes in FarmVille.

 

[Xanthious]

I think what is being ignored here is that the people who come to The Escapist day in and day out couldn't be paid to care about Zynga unless it's to hear that Mark Pincus (or whatever his name is) was mauled by a bear and suffered horribly waiting to die in some ditch. Seriously, you may as well report on the closing price of pork bellies you might get in some of the commodity crowd too and just as many Escapist regulars would care about that as they do about Zynga "news". The fans of The Escapist aren't denying that Zynga makes popular Facebook apps we are just saying we don't want to hear about it. We are saying that we want The Escapist to stay true to what made it successful in the first place and unless I missed something that wasn't whoring it's self out to the lowest common denominator.

Lately The Escapist has been trying to get us to accept Zynga as if Zynga was their socially awkward and stinky child who has no friends on the playground. Most of us are core gamers and loathe what Zynga stands for. Thinking that we will ever care is simply fooling yourself and trying to make us care or accept your precious Zynga is simply wasting your time. I urge you to put up a poll, close it off to Facebook accounts and get an honest answer from your core audience to the question of "Do you want to see Zynga news on The Escapist?". I'm sure the 10 people that will answer yes already know where to go to find that sort of thing.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

snip

Well I actually have two uncles who have only very recently got into gaming or even thought about it and they are both well into their 40s I suppose that is only 2 examples. Yes the point could be argued that the older you are the harder it is to get into and yes I accept that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. As the older you are the harder it is to retain new skills. If we are talking about people getting into gaming I'd assume they would be younger as older people wouldn't bother not for lack of effort or laziness but lack of time and that is fair enough. Very few people even bother to learn new things so yes I wasn't taking that into account. Also two of my friends' Dads are avid PC gamers granted I don't know when they started. It is possible granted harder for older people to get into games. Isn't that why people are making main stream games easier?

Also I have a story of a friend from my primary school but I will keep it brief. Basically he left his Gameboy and pokemon game at his Grandad's house. When he came back about 6 months later to get the game his Grandad had finished it and cleared the Elite Four. Also this friend is not likely to tell tales that is why I am using this as an example. When I see examples like this I don't see why it is too hard to get into gaming with games like Pokemon which are easy to pick up but difficult to master. Also I would assume everyone who is on Farmville can work a search engine and type in something like Flash games or Browser games if they wanted to play them so I don't think finding these websites is a problem.

In fairness yes I was 3 when I started playing so I have a bit of an experience advantage over most people. Although I was also introduced by an uncle who was then in his 30s. So yes the earlier you start the easier it is. Yes while any game can be complicated I cannot see a problem with someone playing something like Pokemon or Mario to start off. Obviously you have a desire to do it as you said I am not disputing that. If someone actually goes to look for something like this or look for a decent flash game website I think it is safe to say not matter what age they are they have the desire to actually want to play what they are after.

I will agree to the point that it is harder for older people who have no experience to get into gaming. Also that it is a challenge for anyone to get into. I don't think it is the Herculean task it is being made out to be in the article. Obviously people like the super easy, "cheap", accessible games like Farmville but it is by no means impossible to get into. Yes it does require effort and desire. If the person does have the desire they are going to put in the effort and if someone spends money buying something like that. They must have some desire to learn how to game and they are damn sure going to put in a bit of effort so the money isn't wasted.

I shouldn't of said it was easy but I really don't think it is as hard as it is and has been made out to be but that is just my opinion. You have a different opinion and a different point of view completely but I will never see it as something that is inaccessible or too hard to pick up. With a bit of time and effort it is easy. Once that first hurdle of getting the hang of it is done it is mostly downhill from there. Admittedly the older you are the harder that hurdle is but it is really downhill from there with a few more hurdles game and genre depending.

 

[Mantonio]

I think what is being ignored here is that the people who come to The Escapist day in and day out couldn't be paid to care about Zynga unless it's to hear that Mark Pincus (or whatever his name is) was mauled by a bear and suffered horribly waiting to die in some ditch. Seriously, you may as well report on the closing price of pork bellies you might get in some of the commodity crowd too and just as many Escapist regulars would care about that as they do about Zynga "news". The fans of The Escapist aren't denying that Zynga makes popular Facebook apps we are just saying we don't want to hear about it. We are saying that we want The Escapist to stay true to what made it successful in the first place and unless I missed something that wasn't whoring it's self out to the lowest common denominator.

Lately The Escapist has been trying to get us to accept Zynga as if Zynga was their socially awkward and stinky child who has no friends on the playground. Most of us are core gamers and loathe what Zynga stands for. Thinking that we will ever care is simply fooling yourself and trying to make us care or accept your precious Zynga is simply wasting your time. I urge you to put up a poll, close it off to Facebook accounts and get an honest answer from your core audience to the question of "Do you want to see Zynga news on The Escapist?". I'm sure the 10 people that will answer yes already know where to go to find that sort of thing.

I second this motion.

 

[TheSeventhLoneWolf]

Alright then. I guess I'm fine with that.

But I didn't speak up, because I was not a google..

 

[Delusibeta]

The problem I have with "social" gaming, specifically Facebook gaming, is that the rip-offs outnumber the original concepts. FarmVille/Farm Town, Mob Wars/Mafia Wars, PetVille/Happy Pets, Resturant Town/Cafe World, so on and so forth. Gamers dislike "social" gaming because of this, and also a lack of quality. The first "social" game that tells a good story and is fun to play is likely to do well, although it seems to be really popular, your game must spam like hell. And, as everyone knows, spam is Not Good.

 

[Vitor Goncalves]

Facebook will die out.

Social networking and social platforming will not.

No, Facebook will turn into zombie website that hides in the tubes and infects other packets as they go by, slowly turning the entire internet into a mass of websites sending you requests to join your friends.

...Anyways, I wonder what will kill Facebook, another site or an internal collapse. I'm going to say the later, but I am curious as to what would replace it.

Will be replaced by an even more obnoxious site of unspeakable horror. My guess.

 

[Plurralbles]

haha, the title was tl;dr. You know why? Becaus it's fucking obvious.

I'd rather see someone argue the opposite. That it's just a fad and it'll go away.

All we can hope for is that it will mature into something actually fun.

 

[John Funk]

This is absurd, honestly. Zynga makes games (and no matter how you argue it, what they make are certainly games of some kind or another) that people like, people who generally don't play games. And apparently this is some sort of travesty. What do people playing casual browser games do that's so abhorrent? You don't have to like these games, but we can certainly stop complaining about them and demonizing anyone who plays them. Are these serious hardcore macho difficult games? No, of course not, but do the people playing it care? Of course not! They're having fun. Why is this a bad thing?

Complaining about people playing browser games because "they're not real games" or "they're not real gamers" is disturbingly exclusionary and superior of us. We play video games too. We aren't better than... people who play video games.

Where's the 'video' part of zynga games? Anyway, people complaining aren't really saying 'stop Zynga making games, don't let facebook players have their fun', they're saying 'don't write about it in the Escapist because this is a magazine about proper videogames'. Obviously some of that is exacerbated by hard feelings from the Popularity Contest Versus Thread Extravaganza that happened recently.

Let's not split hairs. Zynga makes computer games. These are a subset of video games. (If you want to be really picky, the "'video' part of Zynga games" is the part where you use a computer video monitor to view the games.)

While I agree that a lot of people are saying that the Escapist shouldn't write about browser games, there's this strong undercurrent about how these games are bad for someone or another, which is frankly absurd (bringing more people into a medium is never a bad thing). And how are browser games not "proper" video games? Where is that line drawn and who gets to draw it?

Certainly this is all because of the March Madness mishegas. People are angry that their favorite developers lost (or were severely challenged by) someone else's favorite developer, a developer they don't personally like.

It's all part of the curious trend against "casual" gamers. It's a silly line to draw, and it happens in all fandoms. People who memorize the Red Sox rosters and know every player's statistics, age, birthplace, favorite food, and underwear preference aren't "better" fans than those who just watch the World Series because it's fun and their friends like it. People who can recite the lyrics to every single Metallica song ever recorded aren't "better" fans than people who just like that one song they heard on the radio, and people who can get 1000 kills on Modern Warfare 2 without dying once aren't "better" fans than people whose idea of a day gaming involves a grand total of twenty minutes in FarmVille.

Not claiming to be a better fan of anything, I'm claiming that, for example, a fishing magazine should not bother to give news updates about what's going down at the Hook-a-Duck stall at the fair. To use your World Series analogy, a magazine catering for dyed-in-the-wool baseball fans, who know their favourite team well, know about the main players of most other teams, know names of coaches etc, would be devaluing itself by suddenly pandering to the once-a-year fans who just watch that game. Twenty minutes of FarmVille isn't gaming, as those who would call themselves gamers understand it. It's just not the same.

You do ask a good question though as to where the line should be drawn. I have struggled to come up with a workable definition that would include most of what I would call 'videogames' and exclude most of what I would call 'crap'. As a gamer, I do not consider my playing of Tower Defense flash games 'gaming' and so would seek to exclude that as well. Perhaps one useful definition would be that you have to pay for 'proper' games. But that brings up potential other problems. However, the current state of play of including facebook games is not really justifiable, because I can't find a way to include them and not to therefore also include the RP games in the forum on here. Or googlewhacking. Do we get news or reviews of the RP forum? Would we want them?

And if the managers of baseball teams were looking at Little League games for tips, and if hardcore fishing aficionado were suddenly seeing a revolution in hook-a-duck stands, it would be remiss for publications to not cover them because they're "beneath" them.

 

[VanBasten]

They're not games that appeal to YOU (or me, frankly), but they're still games, and some people who aren't us derive enjoyment from them.

Clearly not that many people who do enjoy those games here by the looks of this thread, though.

Quite frankly I don't really care who plays what, nor what you choose to write about on this site, but this is just getting ridiculous. Complaining about your readers complaining about some of the things you write about... So just to keep it going I'll just add another layer of complaining on top of that.

NME doesn't often write about Susan Boyle, and when she does get mentioned occasionally the users comments on the website are... not favorable to put it mildly. Nothing really surprising there, their respective target audience don't really overlap much. So why are you so surprised?

Now I'm sure everyone here knows that there's money in Facebook games, same as there's money in Susan Boyle albums, so thank you for that Captain Obvious. Doesn't mean either is having a positive impact on their respective medium of expression(outside of their publishers wallets obviously), and it certainly doesn't mean that people shouldn't express their opinion on how much something sucks, especially since you're the ones that keep bringing it up, and have an open comments section below

 

[Nuke_em_05]

Good article.

I'm an accountant. What right or special knowledge do I have to say what is "good" or not? I like what I like, my friends like what they like. They're smart enough to not get scammed, and I warn those who might not be.

The world keeps spinning.

Maybe we should leave the Social/Economic/Cultural commentary to folks who actually know what they're talking about. Notice that those who do, don't talk about Zynga. I will take my layman's perspective and assume it is because it doesn't matter.

 

[Eldarion]

This is relevant to the games industry because of its success?

Success, mind you that came from a pre existing non gamer audience, a horrendous spam advertising program, spyware, blatantly copying their apps from other companies, ect. You may want to put off these details as "irrelevant" but they are not. The games industry should not be looking at this success as something to be celebrated, this kind of crap should be punished.

As for the audience. These are not gamers. They probably will never become gamers. A social networking app that only exists because people want something mindless to do while they post on facebook is not a game.

 

[Eldarion]

And if the managers of baseball teams were looking at Little League games for tips, and if hardcore fishing aficionado were suddenly seeing a revolution in hook-a-duck stands, it would be remiss for publications to not cover them because they're "beneath" them.

Only in this situation, the little league gains success by using drugs, the rough equivalent of the add spam and malware Zynga is guilty of using.

So in a correct analogy, the little league team "revolution" in baseball is revealed to be a very popular bunch of cheaters and you want to celebrate them because they are popular right now.

This is not a positive thing for the games industry, if Znyga's tactics become acceptable just because it caught on because of facebook, we all will suffer. This isn't a revolution in the gaming, its a shameful fad made popular by a built in audience made by a bunch of dirty, spyware using, game stealing fucks. Like I said before, this should be condemned, not celebrated.

 

[Regiment]

(games are games, even Zygna's))

(we don't want to hear about Zygna)

(casual vs. core gamers)

...You do ask a good question though as to where the line should be drawn. I have struggled to come up with a workable definition that would include most of what I would call 'videogames' and exclude most of what I would call 'crap'. As a gamer, I do not consider my playing of Tower Defense flash games 'gaming' and so would seek to exclude that as well. Perhaps one useful definition would be that you have to pay for 'proper' games. But that brings up potential other problems. However, the current state of play of including facebook games is not really justifiable, because I can't find a way to include them and not to therefore also include the RP games in the forum on here. Or googlewhacking. Do we get news or reviews of the RP forum? Would we want them?

Honestly, as much as it pains me to say this, I have no objection to the core and casual categories. (I'd personally draw the line at console or long-term games, so something like D&D Online [even though it's a free game played in a browser] would be "core" and Farmville would be "casual".) My objection is just that it seems to be core VERSUS casual, and that I don't understand.

Besides, people have to start somewhere. To continue the baseball analogy, if the once-a-year World Series fans pick up a magazine or start talking to the dyed-in-the-wool fans, and the magazine or DITW fans belittle the newbies for not knowing enough about baseball, they'll never know anything about baseball, and they might stop watching altogether. However, if they pick up a magazine and see an article called "Baseball for Newbies", they'll be more likely to learn more about the sport. If someone who never plays video games starts playing a browser game- as derivative, cheesy, tedious, and unoriginal as it might be- there's a greater chance that they'll start playing other games and eventually migrate to the "core" crowd. This can only be a good thing.

Now, is the Escapist the proper venue for this? Not being an editor, I don't know. I'm not advocating some sort of "all browser games, all the time" thing, but I also like Alt+Escape.

Irrelevant postscript: What's "Googlewhacking"? I've never heard of that before.