Jaime_Wolf said:
DracoSuave said:
Jaime_Wolf said:
Jesus fucking Christ.
So things are only social now if you can use them to meet new people? Even as crazy one-sentence definitions of words like "social" go, that's pretty goddamn absurd. I would hazard a guess that the overwhelming majority of social situations people find themselves in involve established friends and few, if any, strangers.
Social pretty much is defined by interpersonal interaction, if something does not involve interpersonal interaction, then it can't be described as social. Your point has nothing to do with his argument. Two people who know each other playing Resident Evil 5 (online or not) are engaged in a social behavior, thusly the game they are playing can be described as a social game, because it IS a social activity. Playing farmville by yourself is not social, it is an asocial activity because you are not interacting with other players. Ergo, it is a misnomer to call it a social game.
If it had you playing and interacting with another player, either cooperatively, or competitively, then it would be a social activity, and therefore, it is a social game. That's his point. And the more possibility of those interactions, the more social a game is. Hense, CoD(multiplayer) and WoW. Both of those necessitate interaction with other players, and therefore can be described as social games... it's an inherent part of what they are at their core.
Farmville just looks for invites into farmville. This is not a social interaction on your part.
"Blow though[sic] that name "social games" is actually something of a misnomer, because players usually couldn't meet anyone new."
I'm just going off of what was said. This very, very clearly states that a requirement of social games is that they allow you to meet someone new.
If you're going by what he said, then you'd have focused on his point that it doesn't involve social interaction, and not on the one talking point of 'you couldn't meet anyone new.'
You've taken the LEAST important part of his point, and tried to replace that with his point... which is less about 'meeting new people' and more about the utter lack of social interaction involved in playing them.
Further, FarmVille does have social aspects: it has a sort of gallery aspect to it and it does have the ability to work cooperatively (unless that's mysteriously been taken out since I last saw the game).
I have to claim a measure of ignorance, the extent of 'cooperation' I've seen is it using social networking to spam me so I can help them 'take care of their crops' or some schlock. Not actual social interaction, like... say... me interacting with the player.
DracoSuave said:
But don't worry guys, even though you're idiots with no idea what's being done to you, this brilliant "auteur" is here to help you out of your dark and ignorant ways.
This also has nothing to do with his points.
Right, it has to do with my point
about his points.
"Interestingly, he said that the players weren't really to blame for letting themselves be taken advantage of, as he didn't think that they were aware that it was happening."
There's always the possibility that he's right (I don't think he is in this case), but there's no doubt that he's saying "you guys probably don't realise the evil you're involved with, but I'm here to help explain it to you so you can be saved".
That's reading a lot into what he said. He said that players don't realize they are being exploited. That's not the same thing as 'Don't worry, I'm here to save you!'
DracoSuave said:
AND HORROR OF HORRORS IT TURNS OUT THE GAMES ARE DESIGNED TO MAKE MONEY. Because auteur developers always scorn money and real games should be commercial failures. And wanting to make money could never lead developers to make a good game because making good games is never something that crosses their minds as a way to make a commercially successful game.
He never claimed that making money was the problem. He said that
making money as a game design goal rather than improving people's lives as a game design goal is what is bad.
He's not against them making games to make money. He's against
designing games with the intent of being a cash cow, rather than
designing games to be good games.
The last bit is where I have a problem. Game design doesn't have to have one goal. It's very possible to set out to design a game with the intention that it be both good
and commercially successful. The idea that these two goals are mutually exclusive is silly and pretentious, just as it is in so many areas outside of games.
No one said they were mutually exclusive. Let's start again, because you seem to have missed the point.
It is not evil to make a game to be profitable. It is not evil to design a game to improve peoples' lives. It is NOT evil to make a game using those goals.
What he is saying, however, is that it IS 'evil' to make a game designed to be explotatively profitable as its
sole design goal.
'Social games' are not generally designed with their gameplay as the number one focus. They are designed with their ability to make money as their primary focus. Everything in the game is designed to make money happen. The games' designs are very straight forward: Make money by selling you things, or make you bring in friends in the hopes they buy the things they sell. You are either a consumer, or an advertiser, and they consistantly have reward systems around that simple concept. Contrast this with the latest F2P MMORPGs, which were designed to be enjoyable RPGs, but have microtransactions added in to the core gameplay to enhance the experience. The former is a game designed to exploit you as a revenue stream. The latter is a game designed to be enjoyable, and hopes you become a revenue stream.
The difference is major.
DracoSuave said:
Take Magic: The Gathering. Is it a cash cow? Yes. Does it require investment of time and money to become proficient at it? Yes. Is it a well designed game, and is that quality of design as a game the central focus of the game? Yes.
Do you think that they focused only on making a good game and it just accidentally happened to be profitable? Of course you don't. My point isn't that it isn't bad to make games SOLELY to cash in, but rather that it's wrong to assume that you can't ALSO attempt to build something profitable while building a good game.
Actually, that's exactly what happened with Magic: The Gathering. It was not designed to be 'printing money.' It was designed as an exercise in a new type of game by Richard Garfield, whose PhD is actually based on game design. He made it. It sold a LOT more than they expected... it got very huge very quickly. They've had to learn how to properly handle the property since then, but the design of the game itself is created by people who love the game, because of a love of the game. Their game designers aren't psychologists who have studied the behaviors of human addiction and how to apply it to Magic... they employ people to design and develop the game who are experts in the game itself, and who have a selfish desire for the game to be a good game.
Of course, is profit an important motive in a successful commercial game? Of course it is. But that's not the argument at hand here. The argument is that the designers of most social games generally design games to be addictive as a design goal, rather than to be good games.
Can a social game be a game designed to be a positive experience for the user? Yes. This can happen. But the social games industry generally does not.
That is his point. Your point that the two CAN happen in concert is valid in and of itself, but it is not a rebuttal to his point that social games
don't try to and don't care to.
DracoSuave said:
FarmVille, and most games of that stripe, are not designed to be good games. They are designed to be good revenue engines, with the game design itself of secondary importance. Look at games like most of those on Facebook, and yes, even Echo Bazaar. They are simply 'push button to get xp/key items to get a different button to push'. They're not actually deep games. The only difference between Echo Bazaar and the others is Echo Bazaar has differently named buttons and differently named key items and differently named progress bars. Well named progress bars. Other than the -names- of things, its no different than Bitefight, or that game 'Outland' that was so pervasive years ago before there was a facebook.
If we want to go down that route, EVERY game is just "push button to get xp/key to get a different button to push". You just effectively described any interactive system possible (input, change of state, new input). For the moment, I'll agree that they don't have the depth (fewer inputs, fewer states), but I'm not convinced that there isn't a place for games without depth. Games don't have to be about simply pleasure, but that doesn't mean they
can't be.
Your first point is nonsense. "If you get down to the essence of every game, they all consist of matter, therefore the point is invalid" is as valid a rebuttal as yours. Really.
It's not a matter of depth. It's a matter of the mechanic being EXACTLY THE SAME. You have a list of 3-4 choices, which consume action points but return experience points and a chance at an item. That item, singular or more often in multiples, is often required to either access other menu choices, or to access other menus.
For example, in one game, you may have the choices:
Fight goblins for gold
Fight kobolds for gold and possibly a piece of a map
Use your map to find the lost city of Atlantis
Go to Zurembourg
In Echo Bazaar those choces might be:
Skulk in the fighting pits for money
Stalk a cat to discover its treasure, and possibly part of a lost secret best left unspoken
Whisper a secret best left unspoken so you can pay the toll of a harpy to enter the circus of lost marvels
Go to Slitthroat Street
Different fluff... exact same mechanic.
It's not a question of a lack of depth, or simplicity. Those aren't relevant to the argument here. It's simply a statement of fact... most of these games use the exact same mechanic, and just change the words used to describe what happens.
The only reason Echo Bazaar gets praised is because it uses such INTERESTING words to describe it.
Also, I'm not sure I'm even on board regarding a lack of depth. Take FarmVille. You have complete control over where to place things, what to buy, how to lay things out. Where you put your farmhouse may not have any impact numerically, but it's exactly the sort of thing people play FarmVille for. Those sort of aesthetic sandbox aspects to casual games are often the most popular parts and they're definitely places where increased complexity can creep into the games. And that's ignoring the people who use the features of the game to make unintended scenes. I was sitting next to a friend who was playing some sort of casual game just last night when she ran into some sort of giant display someone had made in the game. She thought it looked neat and, upon closer inspection, discovered it was made of different-coloured umbrellas. People can add an enormous amount of complexity to a game even if the mechanics themselves seem fairly shallow.
The question isn't what emergent behaviors can result of such a game... the question is if the game is designed to explore those behaviors, or if the game design was made with those behaviors a non-issue.
FarmVille wasn't designed to be a sandbox game that just happens to be profitable. It's designed to get your money and just happens to be a sandbox. It's not the question of what the game IS, it's a question of what the game was designed to do. In the case of FarmVille, Zynga's motivations are not something one needs to guess at... their motivations regarding its creation is a matter of public record. It's designed purposefully to be an addiction in game form.
It doesn't matter if it's profitable or not. It matters that it's not designed with the players' enjoyment or quality of life as a consideration. It's designed only to take your money. The company itself has admitted it time and time again. They are proud of this.
If you do not realize it, that just means it's really good at that design.
DracoSuave said:
TL;DR: Jonathan Blow remains an amazing designer with all of the pretentious bullshit that seems to go along with that quality.[/quote
'Pretentious' means that they put on an air that is different than who they really are.
In this case, he makes some very valid points that you've chosen to ignore to make an 'anti-elitist' statement towards someone who doesn't even have the pretense of being an elitist.
First, I'm not going to argue lexical semantics. If you don't want to use the word "pretentious", fine, substitute a word of your choosing.
I would argue that he is acting as an elitist (though I'm not really sure how one would "pretend" to be an elitist as pretending to be one makes you one). He's making a blanket negative statement about a genre that is generally considered to be "pandering to the base", his authority to speak on the matter derives from his status as an "auteur", he's suggesting that most people don't truly understand what's going on in the games they're playing (while he does understand it), and he's suggesting that the motivation of the involved designers is somehow impure.
Let's be clear about what he is talking about. He is talking about social games, of which, the company Zynga holds a remarkable market share.
FarmVille was made by a man named Marcus Pincus. This is a man who has admitted publicly, that to get things going he accepted whatever dubious advertising he could. He included inducements to scams and malware and all sorts of nasty things as part of the 'how to get more currency' aspects of the games he made. He has done (his words here) "every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away." Zynga has been served with class-action lawsuits over this, and has been forced to change its business practices because what it was doing was unethical.
His motivation... by his OWN admittance... was never to make games people wanted to play, but make services that make him money.
Let's not pretend his intentions were noble when he HIMSELF has gone on record to inform the world otherwise.
Zynga's been less evil since then, by actually hiring game designers, by working on improving their image by making
games instead of revenue streams. But... FarmVille was NEVER designed with your best interests at heart.
To believe so, in the face of the information that is available... is beyond naive.
DracoSuave said:
If you're going to criticize someone's views, make sure you actually understand what they are saying first. You clearly have not.
Truly no Escapist post is complete without the "you just didn't understand it" rebuttal.
Honestly, I do believe you are being naive, and defensive in your choice in playing FarmVille. Look, I'm not going to judge you on this, if you find enjoyment playing FarmVille, good on you. I don't think you're a moron for doing so. Very intellegent people have played FarmVille, and other social games.
But... you are naive if you think a lot of those games, particularily the once at the top of the heap, were designed not to be exploitive when their creator has gone on record and admitted that they are designed to be exploitive.
That's why the creator of Braid calls them 'evil.' Because... in a sense... they are.
(Calm down, joking). 
