Braid Creator Calls Social Games "Evil"
- Thread starter Logan Westbrook
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What's left to say? he is right. I gave facebook "games" a chance for a little while, but I couldn't do much because I needed more friends. Soon the concept of friends became the same as earning money in game. It became entirely pointless, and for what?
Getting a bigger farm to put more garbage on in farmville?
Stopping someone from stealing your imaginary stuff in mafiawars?
I rather have actual friends on my face book, then random people I needed for facebooks crummy games.
Getting a bigger farm to put more garbage on in farmville?
Stopping someone from stealing your imaginary stuff in mafiawars?
I rather have actual friends on my face book, then random people I needed for facebooks crummy games.
I enjoy eating chocolate, but if someone sent me a ton of it, with the intention of me eating it and getting fat to the point of it being dangerous to my health, then I'd call the sender "evil" too.AvsJoe said:
Heroin addicts enjoy that shit as well.
Your enjoyment of the product has zero relevance to this argument.
I'm actually gonna have to disagree with Blow here, and I'm going to use a few people I know that do play social games on Facebook as a counterargument (and yes, I know it's not conclusive, but no one wins debate by being as general as possible, Blow).
Thing is, they are still social, and the games can expand on the number of people you do get in contact with--it all depends on how you actually use the games. And they can be used to keep in touch more easily with the people you do know. Take, for instance, my mother, her friend, and my cousin. All three of them play, or have played, FarmVille and FrontierVille at the same time, and there are times when I'll see my mother utilizing Facebook chat with one of her virtual neighbors to coordinate something in-game. And they also "trade" friends with each other so that they all can achieve the social milestones implemented in the games.
And I know my mother and her friend do talk a lot about these games--about Zynga releasing new games and their plans to not get sucked into it, about certain in-game events, recent exploits, stuff like that. And they also talk about people that they "met" through my cousin. While they may not exactly talk to her directly, they still know she exists, which is more than they knew about her before playing these games.
The games aren't any more social than WoW or (current WoW-killer of the week). But they aren't less social than the MMOs, either. It all comes down to how you actually play them and utilize the chat associated with the games. And really, saying that friends are "resources" in the social games can also be applied to MMOs, too, especially if you "need healz" for your current raiding party. Blow just sounds as smart as the rest of the gaming journalism world by putting these statements forth--and Gog knows that gaming journalism on the whole is nowhere near close to getting a doctorate.
Thing is, they are still social, and the games can expand on the number of people you do get in contact with--it all depends on how you actually use the games. And they can be used to keep in touch more easily with the people you do know. Take, for instance, my mother, her friend, and my cousin. All three of them play, or have played, FarmVille and FrontierVille at the same time, and there are times when I'll see my mother utilizing Facebook chat with one of her virtual neighbors to coordinate something in-game. And they also "trade" friends with each other so that they all can achieve the social milestones implemented in the games.
And I know my mother and her friend do talk a lot about these games--about Zynga releasing new games and their plans to not get sucked into it, about certain in-game events, recent exploits, stuff like that. And they also talk about people that they "met" through my cousin. While they may not exactly talk to her directly, they still know she exists, which is more than they knew about her before playing these games.
The games aren't any more social than WoW or (current WoW-killer of the week). But they aren't less social than the MMOs, either. It all comes down to how you actually play them and utilize the chat associated with the games. And really, saying that friends are "resources" in the social games can also be applied to MMOs, too, especially if you "need healz" for your current raiding party. Blow just sounds as smart as the rest of the gaming journalism world by putting these statements forth--and Gog knows that gaming journalism on the whole is nowhere near close to getting a doctorate.
"Evil" is the wrong word...I'd call it "potentially damaging", "numbing" and "objectifying". In fact, there is nothing that is genuinely "evil" to everyone, because the concept good/evil is entirely subjective. So to me, it could very well be evil.gibboss28 said:
Maybe. But both music and movies can be art, you don´t interact with music and movies the same way you do with games. I just don´t see the need for games to be it to, not at the cost of playability and gameplay anyway.boholikeu said:
It´s not really the topic in this thread, so im gonna leave it be for now.
Maybe. But both music and movies can be art, you don´t interact with music and movies the same way you do with games. I just don´t see the need for games to be it to, not at the cost of playability and gameplay anyway.boholikeu said:
It´s not really the topic in this thread, so im gonna leave it be for now.
That rather depends on how you define "evil". Is murder an evil act, while mugging is not, or are there different degrees inherent in the term?Andy Chalk said:
In my humble opinion:
Coercion for financial gain can be considered a form of evil, and while Zynga is no Bernie Madoff (I still chuckle at how appropriate his last name is), it certainly qualifies as a representation of (please excuse the Dr. Evil quote) "The diet coke of evil".
Here's the thing, at no point have I said that I condone Zynga's behavior, and if you refer back to my originally response I said the company was "provably unscrupulous." If that's not enough for you I'm sorry, but that's all you're going to get. I may throw in a "greedy" and "unethical," but my worldview isn't so black and white that I'm going to start calling things "evil." I'd appreciate it though, if you didn't make accusations about my character and integrity over semantic differences.Xanthious said:
How we might describe Zynga's wrongdoing is really besides the point however. Your claim that Zynga represents the majority of the social gaming market simply isn't true. The most recent figures from AppData [http://www.appdata.com/] show that while Zynga is certainly the single largest player in the market, it doesn't have bigger numbers than everyone combined like you suggested. Am I willing to concede that the most popular social games are made by a company I consider to have unethical business practices? Yes I am, but that's not the same as saying that social games are inherently bad.
Oh, and my comparisons to Activision and Blizzard hold up just fine. The problem is that you were taking them too literally. My point was that the market leader in a given genre is distinct from the market itself.
My biggest problem with it is that throwing the word "evil" at every behaviour we find objectionable undermines its power. Hyperbole is fun but if we stop recognizing it for what it is we risk losing the ability to recognize the real thing, too.craddoke said:
Thank you for that link to appdata. It proves my point marvelously. Of the top 10 apps 5 are Zynga titles. The others aren't even games. There is a dating app, messenger app, some daily quote app, some community organization app, and an app for bands. No games other than Zynga's are in the top 10. There isn't a non Zynga game til Millionaire City at number 13. Looking at the developer leaderboard Zynga has a 7:1 lead over it's nearest competitor and nearly a 3:1 advantage over it's three closest competitors combined. Looking at those numbers I think it's fair to say that Zynga does indeed represent close to, if not a total majority of the social gaming scene. Furthermore with that big a marketshare their actions good or evil reflect largely on social gaming as a whole.Logan Westbrook said:
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I've never suggested that Zynga wasn't a big deal, or that it wasn't an unscrupulous company, but I just don't agree with your conclusion that because Zynga is bad, all social gaming is bad.Xanthious said:
You're missing the point here. I'm not arguing for relativism at all.PhiMed said:
But you're making a categorical mistake. You're not saying "Mass Effect is better than Farmville". You're saying that all "core" games are intrinsically better than all social games, because the latter don't have anything to offer. You didn't say "Farmville has no value", or even Zynga games. The Braid guy didn't qualify it either: he said all social games are evil.
It is basically what anti-gaming conservatives do: movies and books are better than games, the latter don't have anything to offer to society. The same thing was previously done to comic books, and so on.
And I've been on the internet long enough to not hold much hope people will think about their views after a forum discussion. There are people who do, fortunately, so sometimes it is worth it.
As for why I responded to your post? I was bored, and I find it funny that every time social games or Zynga are mentioned in this site, there are a bunch of people with the "bring torches! let's burn the witches!" attitude.
I think judging social gaming as a whole based on Mark Pincus' character is akin to commenting on the American auto industry solely based on Henry Ford's character. You're tripping over several logical fallacies to do it.Logan Westbrook said:
Anyway, everything Blow said has been levelled against the entire gaming culture since the early 1980s. Those arcades sucked quarter after quarter out of us for a few mere minutes of frenetic joystick waggling and all the moral guardians clucked their tongues at this anti-social, addictive, pocket-picking destructive behaviour. Yet all of us are here because of those games. I can't shake the feeling that this hatedom for social gaming is like the kid who was bullied in school, grows a bit, and then starts bullying younger kids.
I consider it fully-evil as well, but not because they aim to make money... it's the base philosophy of these games where they basically say "you can play this for a little bit, then you're done, come back tomorrow (and on time, dammit)".
You can't actually sit down and deep out on these things. You just do some maintenance on your previous actions, check when you can come back and do it again, then rearrange your schedule for it. If you don't check in daily, or multiple times daily (in some cases) you are effectively punished. An example would be adultswimgames.com's Hemp Tycoonm, which *IS* basically Farmville. The game amounts to "buy seeds, plant em, come back when they are fully grown"... but if you forget about it for too long they wither, your efforts go to waste, and it forces you to be a zombie that constantly keeps the timers posted on your internal alarm clock so that you don't get punished for *having a life*.
They are designed to be evil, period.
You can't actually sit down and deep out on these things. You just do some maintenance on your previous actions, check when you can come back and do it again, then rearrange your schedule for it. If you don't check in daily, or multiple times daily (in some cases) you are effectively punished. An example would be adultswimgames.com's Hemp Tycoonm, which *IS* basically Farmville. The game amounts to "buy seeds, plant em, come back when they are fully grown"... but if you forget about it for too long they wither, your efforts go to waste, and it forces you to be a zombie that constantly keeps the timers posted on your internal alarm clock so that you don't get punished for *having a life*.
They are designed to be evil, period.
Mental masturbation. That is such an awesome two word summary of 'social' games, that I have to save that one for the future. Bravo! You reminded me of Kevin Smith, and Kevin Smith is AWESOME.PhiMed said:
It's very true. I actually block all requests from social games on Facebook, mainly because half of them require you to play so Billy can get an energy refill or some crap.
Heh, I guess the kerfluffle about Blow's comments re: the WGA awards had died down, so he felt the need to be outrageous again. Seriously though, once you dial down the hyperbole, his points stand. Uncreative games like Farmville that require you to use friends and family as an end to scoring games points do damage interaction on social media. People aren't communicating for the intrinsic rewards of social contact, they're doing for extrinsic rewards.
There's an old cognitive psych study about teaching kids to fingerpaint. Give kids candy to fingerpaint, and they'll paint more. But when you stop giving them candy, they stop painting. The kids in the control group without the rewards didn't paint as much initially, but they kept at it longer because they simply liked painting.
Replace fingerpainting with "talking with friends and family" and candy with "Scoring points in Farmville", and you get the idea.
Now, social media games CAN be interaction enhancing. They serve the same function as party games;they give you something to do together. Echo Bazaar is a great example of this sort of game. But EB is a well made game, and one worth sharing with friends-- not to score points, but because you want your friends to have a good time, too.
And that's the key difference.
There's an old cognitive psych study about teaching kids to fingerpaint. Give kids candy to fingerpaint, and they'll paint more. But when you stop giving them candy, they stop painting. The kids in the control group without the rewards didn't paint as much initially, but they kept at it longer because they simply liked painting.
Replace fingerpainting with "talking with friends and family" and candy with "Scoring points in Farmville", and you get the idea.
Now, social media games CAN be interaction enhancing. They serve the same function as party games;they give you something to do together. Echo Bazaar is a great example of this sort of game. But EB is a well made game, and one worth sharing with friends-- not to score points, but because you want your friends to have a good time, too.
And that's the key difference.