
The secret to Farmville isn't gameplay or aesthetics - aditya
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-play-farmville
======
jim-greer
There's a lot of validity to this argument, but Farmville is not unique. If
you take his criteria and replace Farmville with World of Warcraft, most of it
still holds:

 _(1) WoW is defined by obligation, routine, and responsibility;_

 _(2) WoW encroaches and depends upon real life, and is never entirely
separate from it;_

 _(3) WoW is always certain in outcome, and involves neither chance nor
skill;_

 _(4) WoW is a productive activity, in that it adds to the social capital upon
which Blizzard and Activision depend for their wealth;_

 _(5) WoW is governed not by rules, but by habits, and simple cause-and-
effect;_

 _(6) WoW is not make-believe, in that it requires neither immersion nor
suspension of disbelief._

WoW does require more skill. And it is governed by rules not 'simple cause and
effect' - but so is Farmville. WoW is also more immersive.

These differences are what make it a 'better' game to most gamers. But they
don't change what the OP finds sociopathic about the game, namely that they're
_applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to
satisfy their owners’ needs_.

It is much more controlling, it just reaches a narrower audience. It is also
equally social - the social interactions are arguably deeper and more
meaningful, in fact.

I say this as someone who works in the field of online games (I run
Kongregate). I do think the feeling of accomplishment and social satisfaction
provided by games are powerful, and not totally positive. I also hope that the
positive aspects of online game communities balance this out to some degree.

Edit: WoW succeeded in a competitive field largely on quality (and massive
capital outlay). Farmville succeeded through the hyper-fast and skillful
application of the A/B-testing 'lean startup' techniques widely admired and
practiced by most readers of this site. If you hate it, it's worth thinking
about how it came to exist.

~~~
iron_ball
Hey, good work with Kongregate. It's got a great concept and great execution,
though (being a Street Fighter fan) I never really played much beyond Kongai
myself.

~~~
benologist
<http://www.kongregate.com/games/GameTap/street-fighter-2-ce>

------
baguasquirrel
_Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine seventy-three million people playing
a game that isn’t fun to play, just to keep up with the Joneses._

I couldn't disagree more with this. Ever glimpsed at WoW guild politics? Many
people get involved in this game because it's possible to keep up with the
Joneses in-game, if not in real life. This is not a small nitpicking point.
Games like these develop complicated social webs and social capital because
they create a reality preferable to the one we live in, one in which anyone
can see a path to success, a path that they are in control of. The real world
is more ambiguous.

~~~
piguy314
I was addicted to world of warcraft for about 18 months and I finally came to
the conclusion that I was mostly using it as a "success surrogate." It was
much easier for me to be successful in game than in real life, and the cycle
time was much shorter. In an MMORPG you can achieve meaningful progress in
your avatar in one weekend of solid grinding, but in real life to achieve
meaningful results usually takes weeks, months or years of hard work. It was
partly the immediacy of the rewards that made the game so compelling I think.

~~~
patio11
I think that was a large portion of the attraction for me, too. Plus, all the
mental engagement of running a guild filled a void in my life, since my job
was not very mentally engaging at the time. (Running a guild is of comparable
complexity to running a fairly simple business like a hairdresser or
restaurant, except with a bigger staff. You have employee relations,
accounting, governance issues, embezzlement, the whole nine yards.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can structure your business
such that it is also a success surrogate. Less dragons, better loot.

(A sufficiently data-driven business can produce shiny pixels of happiness
every week out of a few hours of effort. Trust me.)

------
weilawei
While it's cool to note that Obama's involved in social media, his appearance
in this essay seems a bit tenuous. Roger Caillois is repeatedly quoted and
torn down again. His definition of a game is suspect. I don't think
immediately think of a game as "free from obligation." To me, it smells like a
straw man.

All that aside, I think his analysis of how Zynga made/makes money is pretty
fair. The idea of social capital is crucial. But, why is Zynga depicted as
evil--even sociopathic--for utilizing that social capital, while Facebook
appears to be treated neutrally, and our government officials are portrayed as
doing the right thing?

------
SlyShy
Yes, but with my Facebook friends I have taken a decidedly different tack.
That is, friends don't let friends play Farmville. My friends don't play
Farmville because my friends don't play Farmville. If someone where to, they
would be ridiculed. :)

~~~
barmstrong
Haha...love it.

------
duck
_If Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many
people playing it? The answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing
Farmville because people are playing Farmville._

Very true from what I have seen. Nobody just starts playing something like
Farmville unless someone else has asked them to.

It is kind of sickening to think about how much time is lost to crap like
this.

~~~
xsmasher
>It is kind of sickening to think about how much time is lost to crap like
this.

That's rather judgmental re: leisure time. Are you sickened by the time "lost"
by people following or playing sports, or reading novels, or watching movies?

~~~
neilk
We can make judgments about leisure activities just as we can about any other
part of life. Playing sports, reading novels, and watching (good) movies can
all make you a healthier, more reflective person, while being intrinsically
entertaining. Even WoW, while it has some disturbing aspects, has the wonder
of exploring a fantasy world, online society, and some strategy.

I don't play Farmville but I don't know of anyone that argues it's time well
spent. Players don't even seem to be having "fun" by any normal definition. At
best, it exploits social rewards to make you conform to the game makers'
agenda.

Perhaps it's closer to _fashion_ than recreation; where you're on a
consumption treadmill that's largely controlled by others. Without the
consolation of having nice clothes or looking any better.

~~~
robryan
You would have to think farmville would have a high churn rate to, I played it
casually for about a month before I realised there was little point
continuing. Even some of the most dedicated amongst my friends eventually
stopped after a few months. If anything the achievements in the game seemed to
keep people coming back, even though some of them were just arbitrary large
numbers of things done.

I don't think it is really a fun game at all which makes me think how
successful a similar game would be if someone got the fun factor right,
something like a civ for facebook or something.

~~~
duck
Yeah, but I think what we would consider fun would pretty much kill a game
like Farmville in terms of popularity. I am only guessing... but your typical
gamer is not playing Facebook.

------
neilk
This article helps articulate this deeply creepy feeling I have about where
online business is going.

Does anyone else think using "addictive" or "habit-forming" to describe your
product design goals is deeply immoral?

And yet this probably appears in a lot of Powerpoints pitched every day in the
Valley. I had to sit through just such a presentation a few weeks ago, and I
work at a _non-profit_. The whole thrust of this Valley drone's presentation
was that he could get users to value anything, any behavior that the customer
wanted, by means of psychological tricks and social rewards. Now that may not
even be true, but when your Powerpoint starts referencing Pavlov and Zimbardo
I think you have to take a look in the mirror.

~~~
jim-greer
It depends on the context - selling items on eBay is addictive and habit-
forming. So is running your own business, or running marathons.

I notice that you have 2258 karma. I think it's safe to say that you've formed
a habit or even addiction to HN, but hopefully a rewarding one.

~~~
neilk
I disagree that these things can be conflated. Just because you find something
rewarding, it does not mean you are addicted, or (more broadly) that any of
one's reward systems are being manipulated.

If my internal reward systems are telling me that running is good, for the
most part it's because running is good.

Even on HN, there's a fundamentally useful activity -- contribution to
discussion. The measurement system is distributed to users, but that's because
the benefits are similarly distributed.

Things cross into "drug" territory when most of their value comes from
tricking your reward system. Even drugs can be beneficial from time to time,
but when too much of a person's activity is about chasing simulated rewards,
we start calling that person "addicted". Most drugs manipulate the brain's
desire for pleasure, or the rush of excitement. If we believe the author of
the OP, FarmVille manipulates our desire for social connectedness.

~~~
jim-greer
So you can't be addicted to running? Or posting on Hacker News?

You have a fair point, the dictionary definition of addiction includes words
like 'damaging' and 'pathological'. But the mechanism of addiction is very
similar whether the ends are beneficial or not. And a lot of the people use
the word to apply to things that are not terribly negative.

~~~
neilk
Oh, I'll agree with you on that. Sometimes people even use 'addiction' in a
positive sense, to describe their dedication to something. But in the context
of this debate I want to draw a clearer distinction.

------
zemaj
I find the idea of "sociopathic applications" mentioned in the second last
paragraph interesting. I wonder what other applications could be included in
that. World of Warcraft? I guess even twitter and facebook are in extreme
usage. There's no attempt by those companies to stop people excessively using
their services, beyond the point where its beneficial to the individual and
only beneficial to the company.

------
jshen
This "essay" could have been two paragraphs. I almost stopped reading when the
first two were talking about Howard Zinn.

~~~
apphacker
Indeed, concise it wasn't. So much filler text such as "With this in mind,"
"To illustrate,"

This:

"One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely because they invest
physical effort and in-game profit into each harvest."

could have been:

"People may play Farmville because they invest effort and in-game profit into
each harvest."

It is a horribly written article. Those extra adjectives all over the place
offer absolutely nothing. One might speculate that if the comments here on
this site - Hacker News - were written deliberately with such very many
adjectives, punctuated through out each paragraph and sentence, you may
imagine that perhaps one would precisely spend an entire laborious day
completing in the end simply a singular article within that languishing
timeframe.

~~~
adriand
I thought it flowed very nicely and had a thoughtful, conversational tone.
Taken farther, your desire for concision would eventually bring us to a list
of Powerpoint bullets.

This style of writing and speaking encourages reflection. When he says "One
might speculate", his audience is encouraged to speculate themselves, to
question his point, or to ponder if there are perhaps other reasons for why
people play. Your revised sentence is dry and scientific, it says, "here's
why, period, no need to keep thinking about it."

~~~
jshen
what did the howard zinn paragraphs add that justified the space? How many
paragraphs did it take to even get to farmville?

~~~
c0riander
The beginning of the essay makes it clear that "This essay was given as a talk
at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have
left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk."

So to the audience at the time, the paragraphs were a timely hook that
contextualized the idea within a relevant current event. Also, though they're
not as well integrated as they could be (perhaps we can forgive the author
that one, given that the talk was the day after Zinn's death, so it was a
pretty quick addition I'm guessing), they tie back into the overall idea that
a democratic society suffers from this kind of gameplay.

~~~
jshen
I understand, and I'm not trying to be a hard ass. It's just that the internet
has caused a giant flood of information, and one way I'm trying to cope is to
prefer/choose concise and efficient expression. This means that I tend to stop
reading or watching if a piece of content seems to take a while to get to the
core of it's point.

------
IsaacL
Yes, social obligation is an important factor in Farmville's growth, but it's
not the main reason people continue playing. Short answer; they enjoy it. The
game's basic cycle of "do action x to get a reward and unlock action y which
gives a bigger reward and alloys you to do action z..." is one that's
optimized to deliver predictable squirts of dopamine into human brains, and is
also a mechanic that appears in numerous other games, including more
respectable genres like RPGs and strategy games. Farmville and other social
games just show you don't need to wrap it in a layer of strategy or skill,
though it does mean that people tire of it quite quickly.

Reading this is like watching an alien race trying to figure out why these
hairless primates are so fond of naked gymnastics. "It appears to be for
procreation, but they frequently use contraceptives, so that can't be it.
They're generally lazy, so exercise can't be the motivation. I know! It must
be a complicated sense of social obligation."

------
chipmunkninja
Let me be the first to jump in here and express a certain degree of
uncertainty with what the author has written.

While it does seem to be that, in Western societies, the societal pressure to
cooperate and reciprocate would encourage people to keep playing, in Asian
cultures (read: China), games like FV are based less on cooperation than on
"sticking it" to other people.

The local version of FarmVille here is called "Stealing Vegetables" by pretty
much everybody who plays it, and you get ahead by sabotaging or stealing your
neighbours' vegetables in addition to growing and protecting yours. Kitchen
games involve sabotaging ingredients, parking games stealing spots, and so on.

Indeed, a group of us were playing an iPhone game similar to FV called "We
Rule", and while it was interesting for the first couple of days, it became so
mind-numbingly dull that even the risk of annoying our friends couldn't keep
us on the game. Cooperation only motivates so far.

So, while the author has (in a very long and winding way) hit on some
interesting points about these games, I think there's still something else at
work. My current inclinations all lie in how simple tasks give rewards
immediately (see 4square "hey you logged in, get a badge!" or stack overflow
"You posted! here's badge!"). By constantly adding new things (WoW even spends
lots of energy adding in new mounts, quests, and whatnot) you keep that reward
loop active and keep me hoping for more.

------
Jd
"Does this mean we are becoming better citizens? Ninety-seven percent of
American teenagers play video games.[4] Does this mean they will become more
politically active? Before you dismiss these questions, keep in mind that in
October 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama became the first U. S. Presidential
candidate to advertise in video games"

I stopped reading at this lapse in logic.

Besides, how can one cite Caillois without citing Huizinga. Caillois admits
his project is little more than a commentary on Homo Ludens.

~~~
cubicle67
"I stopped reading..."

I see this phrase regularly, but I don't really understand it. Does it mean
you read no further into the article, or did you actually read more, if not
all, but use this phrase to signify that you disagree.

I find the idea of only reading until you find something you disagree with
curious. It seems to indicate a belief that one flaw in a person's work
invalidates the remainder of that work. Surely you don't consume opinion in a
binary fashion, either accepting or rejecting it in its entirety, but rather
you have the ability to consider each point and reject some and accept others
based on their merit?

[pulls rant up short]

Not meaning to single you out, you just happened to use that phrase at the
same time that I had time to reply

~~~
waterlesscloud
I don't stop reading when I disagree with something, but I have stopped
reading when there's something so ridiculously off-base that it throws
everything else the author may think about the topic into question. If there's
a fundamental misunderstanding of some aspect of a given topic, it makes it
likely the rest is not worth reading.

I'm not obligated to read anything, and if the author is wrong on basic
topics, I'll not be giving them more of my time.

It's rare, but it does happen.

~~~
jim-greer
Do you post your opinion of the article afterwards?

------
yason
In brief: _Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social
obligations._

People are built to be social and be entangled in social obligations with
other people. This may be less reflected in modern life than before but the
tendency to get involved in that is nothing but gone. Earlier, these social
obligations had a big role in reducing risk of famine and ensuring the
continuum of life by making people do things together and keeping them doing
that.

------
Adam503
I do not like Zynga Farm Spam.. I do not like spam, Sam-I-am.

I do not like them in my house. I do not play them with a mouse. I do not like
Spam here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like Zynga Farm
Spam. I do not like it, Sam-I-am.

------
zyb09
You know in the good old days we called it SPAM, today we call it 'social
integration'.

------
barmstrong
Bizarre article.

After lots of fluff, it delivers some good insights into why the game
succeeded, then calls on our moral obligations to stand up to sociopathic
corporations?

Did not see that coming.

------
amichail
This is the sort of thing that should be taught in university computing
degrees -- much more interesting than CS.

~~~
Rod
Sure, because BS on user interface is more important than logic, automata
theory, and complexity. If you don't like the _Science_ in _Computer Science_
you can always go to the Humanities side of the campus and engage in
intellectual circle jerks with a buch of self-important morons.

~~~
amichail
You can of course perform experiments to see whether the author is correct.
Those sorts of social experiments should also be part of a computing degree.

~~~
endtime
No, they shouldn't. They should be part of a sociology, communications, or
(once the field starts having its own departments) HCI degree. You might think
case studies of social experiments are important, and I might even agree, but
they're not computer science (or "computing").

~~~
djcapelis
Cognitive science departments (at universities that have them) generally
provide wonderful coverage of HCI topics, though some CS/EECS/CE departments
do as well.

~~~
endtime
Sure - my point was that you can't really get a degree in HCI yet. But once
you can, they'll include case studies of the referred to social experiments.

~~~
djcapelis
Just FYI: Yes you can and yes they do:
[http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-
study/major/major-u...](http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-
study/major/major-ug_specialization.php#hci)

------
DanielBMarkham
After reading this, I wish I could blog better. I also wish the author of this
article could write better, because he seems to make a lot of the same
mistakes I make.

Some good points, and a thread of relevance here, but aside from a general
call to analysis I didn't see a lot to chew on. The best line in the whole
piece was _We are obligated to examine what we are doing, whether we are
updating our Facebook status or playing Call of Duty, because the results of
those actions will ultimately be our burden, for better or for worse_

The worst line came soon after, _democracy depends upon demophilia, or love of
the people._ I'll leave the analysis of that one as an exercise to the reader.

There just wasn't that much here.

