As a user I have stayed away from all these games. I’ve still never played Farmville, and I didn’t play ‘We Rule’ for ages. I could see what they were about, and knew they were just a drug.
But as a developer, I should have looked at them a lot earlier. I have spent hours over the past few days using We Rule and GodFinger. It has been a real eye opener, so I thought I would share some thoughts on them.
I’m going to call them “obligation games”. I’ve heard the words “social obligation” thrown around about these types of game in the past, and while it does apply, I think the genre is better defined by the word “obligation” alone.
The main obligation is to come back and stay a while. They prey on the deeply rooted human need to care for things so they grow, and to not let things die. Stuff grows quicker if you spend more time in the game, and If you don’t start up the game within a certain period of time, things die.
The user part of me, who gave up smoking a year ago, sees this as another smoking habit. It’s a bit nasty to start with, then once you get the hang of it, you feel unfulfilled without it. At a level below the conscious and reasoning mind, you simply have no choice other than to start up the game to harvest the onions you sowed 1 hour ago. Imagine the horror if those onions went bad. You’d lose like 7 fields worth. And that would be 1050 gold, shit, then I wouldn’t be able to sow another 40 fields of onions.
So you spend hours a day looking after your virtual farm. That is the “killing yourself” part of smoking. You are spending hours a day accomplishing absolutely nothing. That farm will not teach you useful skills, it will not help you to create meaningful new relationships, or put food on the table. The hours a day you spent harvesting virtual onions could in fact have been used in the real world achieving all of the above.
But as a developer, I think it’s brilliant. People are hopeless at seeing the real world. People smoke even though it kills them, they gamble even though they will lose over time, they get insurance even though on average they pay more than they get, and they buy on hire purchase even though in the long run they’ll get less stuff as a result.
It’s perfect. Hook people by praying on their most primitive urges, offering them primal candy and punishing them if they don’t come back when they said they would. Make the gaps between the candy slightly larger each time, so just like a real drug the user plays for longer and longer to search for that elusive first buzz. Then once you’ve got them completely and utterly addicted, start charging them.
I’m sure most people who know me would expect I am about to take the moral high ground here and dismiss the whole obligation game genre as evil.
Well I’m not going to.
People have to take responsibility for their own lives. If you’re an alcoholic gambling smoker with insurance playing ‘We Rule” on your credit-card bought iPad, you deserve the consequences. Now all ngmoco have to do is make the games actually fun (they’ve got the addictive part nailed, but the gameplay is poor), and we’ll all be doomed.
“they get insurance even though on average they pay more than they get”
So you’re saying if I have a family, I shouldn’t take out a life insurance policy because, statistically, I’m more likely to pay more than I “get”. This is such a non sequitur I don’t even know where to begin. Even if I pay for life insurance for 20 years, until my kids are grown up and I can cancel the policy, you’d claim I got nothing in return. But in fact I gained 20 years of protection for my family. If you cannot understand why this is important, I feel sorry for anyone dependent on you for their well-being.
Comment by Trevor — May 3, 2010 @ 3:08 am
I like your argument. Don’t really like the tone, but I’ll ignore that.
I have house insurance. I don’t have car insurance. If my car crashed I’d just buy another one. If my house burned down I’d be screwed.
It was said tongue in cheek really, and I certainly wasn’t telling you that you shouldn’t get life insurance. But I do think a lot of people have certain kinds of insurance when they really shouldn’t. The worst is these extended warranties where you pay 50% of the price of the gadget so that if it breaks in the second year you get it repaired for free. I’ve never done that, and never had anything break in the second year. Even if something does break in the second year it’s often cheaper to just buy the new model than it was to pay for the extended warranty.
Anyway, you can do what you like. My point was that lots of people do non-logical things because they have non-logical human desires.
Comment by David Frampton — May 3, 2010 @ 3:21 am
Great points and parallels. Although I found there was one difference to smoking on an individual level: it’s easier to kick the habit almost accidentally.
I was playing We Rule exactly as you describe, but then went away for a couple of days abroad, and due to a combination of work and fear of roaming data charges, didn’t log in. And that’s been it for me, I never went back.
Possibly a combination of shame at the thought of all those spoiled fields and unfulfilled orders, and the realisation of ‘hang on, what WAS I getting out of that daily grind?’
I guess the truly successful social games are those that can get players over those hurdles if they drop out for a few days…
Comment by Stu — May 3, 2010 @ 4:48 am
“Now all ngmoco have to do is make the games actually fun (they’ve got the addictive part nailed, but the gameplay is poor), and we’ll all be doomed.”
Good blog post. I think that is the key to the long term success of these games. I played We Rule for a while and just got bored. Even if I did pay up for more gold in the game, it wouldn’t have really added anything extra. I wonder when someone will come along with a WoW or Diablo 2-like game with this addictive model that might actually keep me playing!
Comment by Will Robertson — May 3, 2010 @ 10:23 pm