Social Media Games – Page 4

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

New Annals in Design Stupidity

We are all familiar with the principle that you can design anything as a bonus or a penalty, right? You can give characters a “hunger” debuff, or you can give them a “well fed” buff for eating food; if you balance enemies with the assumption that everyone will have eaten, the practical effect is negligible, but players like the idea of being rewarded instead of being punished. Similarly, most games give you the normal amount of experience if you are “rested” in some form, rather than saying that you only earn half xp if you play too much. No, it’s not “bonus xp” where you are somehow putting something over the very developers who implemented it.

Most Facebook games reward you for logging in every day or having many friends. Many will even give you increasingly large bonuses for playing many days in a row or for having many friends. I have found two that take the opposite approach to an idiotic degree. Hotel City is the latest from Playfish, and if you go a few days without playing, cockroaches will take over your rooms so you must pay to clean them out. Yes, they punish you for returning to the game after an absence. Food Friendzy randomly hits you with a “21 Club” tile. If you have at least 21 friends playing, you get 21 points for landing on it; if not, you lose 21 points. That sounds like an unfortunate prospect to bootstrap: “Come play this game with me where we get punished for not having enough friends playing. No, not many, we’ll need to recruit about 12 more, why do you ask?” It is also one of the worst excuses for a game I have ever seen, where the entire gameplay is picking tiles at random to get points. Many of those tiles will make you lose points, including “lose all” and one that flips your score from positive to negative. And then they will mock your “strategy” if your score ends in the negative.

: Zubon

Digital Carrots II: Meat Brains

In the most important neurological finding I have read all year, mammals have correlated but entirely separable systems for wanting and liking. Ponder that a moment. To some extent, that seems intuitively obvious: you can get what you want and not be happy. This is not, however, about mis-calculating how happy something will make you. Your basic theory of the world presumably includes some version of, “If Bob keeps doing X, he must like X.” You might make exceptions if X is heroin.

Some have proposed that MMOs should be in that same category of unhealthy addictions, and I suddenly find myself forced to take the idea seriously. You don’t need surgery or drugs to skirt that connection between motivation and enjoyment, any more than you need to hack the server to exploit flaws in the system. Our brains are meat hardware that worked well enough to reproduce itself on the savannah, while modern memetic software can develop quite powerful malware.

Let’s make that more concrete. Your brain gives you the same neurochemicals for watching that little bar fill that it would for actually accomplishing something. Even if you know you are accomplishing little, we can fill that bar faster than reality could and give you lots of numbers popping up telling you that you are advancing. There are lots of flaws in the human brain we can exploit to make you feel like you need to continue, preferably keeping you from pausing to consider whether you are having much fun or if you should stop. Too many players quit when you make them stop to think about whether they should keep going.

Why play worthless “social games”? We have found formulas that line up with how our brains pass out neurochemicals, even if they provide no value, even if they provide no enjoyment. The relevant neurochemicals go together often enough that you are conditioned to think you are having fun when you are just feeling compelled to continue. Cognitive dissonance should carry you through the rest.

Sometimes you take a week or two off and are eager to get back. Sometimes you take a week or two off and completely lose the motivation to log on. For some in that first case, congratulations, you really are having fun and not just following your highjacked motivational programming. For some, I worry that we just failed to make it through withdrawl symptoms the way that people in the second case successfully did.

: Zubon

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to refresh the waitstaff in my Facebook restaurant. I wish I were kidding.

Software Toys

A game is something you play; a toy is something you play with. The divide is not a bright line, but I do find myself playing some games and thinking that I am playing with them. It usually relates to the degree of interactivity. When I click and then sit back and watch it go, the less it feels like I am playing something. Pandemic is an example: you set up a bit, get to push a few dials every now and again, but mostly you watch it go. Overlord is clearly a game, Evil Genius feels narrowly on the game side of the line, and Master of Orion 3 was probably on the toy side. Penny Arcade described it as a space empire management simulator rather than a game as such, and that is probably fair. Most simulators are toys rather than games. Details matter there: various editions of Sim City might fall on either side.

“Social games” are mostly software toys. Raising a virtual pet is not so much a game, nor is managing your virtual restaurant, farm, or fish tank. If the intended gameplay is for you to click some stuff and walk away for an hour, that is probably a toy. Which is really weird, because that in no way describes how we play with physical toys, but I almost always think of Facebook games as something I play with. Except Bejeweled Blitz, which is not a “social” game. And social games aren’t really social, since you just send each other presents or steal each others’ crops, instead of perhaps talking to one another. Wow, this is some severe abuse of terms.

This has also become an indicator of when I am about done with an MMO. If I think of myself as logging on to “mess with” the game, rather than play it, I am probably tidying up things before unsubscribing. Gotta get quests and vault space in order, in case I come back someday.

: Zubon

I just found D&D Tiny Adventures on Facebook, so if you’re my friend, you should totally play (with), just because I need more people to buff me. :p I like that they are advertising their product without any RMT add-ons to the game.