Psychic Hotlines are Evil
Recently upon a midnight dreary, I was watching Futurama and saw a commercial for a psychic hotline. As I wearily pondered what kind of weak-ass reasoning someone would use to justify paying $3.99 a minute to talk to a “real psychic,” it struck me like a raven hitting a plate-glass window: psychic hot-lines are evil!
Social Games Are Evil!
At least that’s according Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, because they aren’t Dwarf Fortress, and the customer can’t be responsible for knowing what’s good for them. They’re eroding game developer’s ability to get paid, and causing them to work long hours; if you believe Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo. They’re “doing something shitty” said Jeff Roberts, an owner of RAD Game Tools.
They’re exploiting people, they’re not real games, they’re cow clickers, and I think Muammar al-Gaddafi also claimed they’re responsible for recent protests in Libya.
Video Games as a Culture
What does it mean to be a gamer? Or more accurately, what did it mean to be a gamer? Games were counter-culture. If you played video games (back when they were real games I mean, of course) you would dedicate weekends to grinding out levels to beat a boss fight in Final Fantasy on the NES. You trudged through Ultima Underworld with a notebook of scribbled clues of things you needed to remember. You eagerly awaited the next issue of a gaming magazine because the bundled CD’s were the only ways to get demos. You were part of a secret club. Getting to hang out with a fellow gamer was like meeting a countryman in a foreign land. You could talk about the same movies; have arguments about the current/next/previous game console. The other gamer likely shared similar motivations and desired play-experiences with you. You could vent common frustrations, exchange tips, suggestions of other games to try.
Being a gamer meant, upon meeting another gamer, you could form an instant connection with them.
The Beginning of the End
Then came Farmville…well actually casual games came before that, and everyone bitched & moaned about ‘bubble poppers’ too, but let’s stay focused, people. This is a new crisis in gaming, and it’s not like any other previous crisis because this time it’s actually going to ruin gaming and we’re burning righteous indignation here. Geez, it’s not like this pattern of behavior has repeated itself throughout human history, and could be categorized and identified by common elements or something.
Now where was I…oh right, Facebook, evil, Farmville…cows, those horrible cows.
So along came Facebook and about a bajillion people said, “Wow this looks like a good place for me post pictures of myself in mirrored sunglasses, or with a martini in my hand. I can destroy gaming while I’m at it!” right? Well part of that is true, at least. There were web-based games before Facebook, like Kingdom of Loathing, Travian, and many more, but they didn’t get nearly the type of exposure that was just around the corner. Late 2006 Facebook had just recently started their development platform, and opened up registrations to all comers. They ended that year with about 12 million users. By April of 2007, that number had almost doubled to 20 million. In May, the Facebook Platform launched with 85 applications. By October, there were over 50 million users. Overnight, it became possible to spread, virally, the ability to use a 3rd party application to slap, poke or wink at someone.
Soon came getting bit by Vampires, getting invited into someone’s Mafia, and the cows…
Nouveau Riche
So what actually happened amidst the deluge of wall-spam, and shady offers? The gaming population grew; massively. In the span of less than a year entire demographics of people, who were previously uninterested in any kind of interactive play-experience offered to them by things with screens, were playing games. They became motivated by intangable, electronically stored, rewards. They integrated the need to dedicate time to play games into their daily schedule. They wanted to make the numbers go bigger. They wanted to demonstrate, and advertise their prowess at virtual tasks.
They became gamers, and gamers lost their secret clubhouse.
Zynga became a game developer.
The industry reeled. This was not of our doing; this had to be a fad. This was Gatsby showing up to the Buchanan’s mansion. We alone had the lineage needed to carry the torch of gaming into the new millennium. We, the gaming elite, had the integrity, the honor, and of course the moral high ground. These scammers, these spammers; these ill-bred rakes…dey tuk our jerbs!
Or to quote Theognis of Megara, “In former days, there was a tribe who knew no laws nor manners…These men are nobles, now, the gentlemen of old are now the trash.” He was bitching & moaning about this very thing back in 600 B.C.
Rampant Butt-Hurt
So by this point, you should probably be picking up on the fact that I think the social-game detractors, and their fanatical following (hint: yeah I probably do mean you) are a bunch of mindless, change-averse, dimwits who couldn’t identify an anthropological pattern if it showed up on their Facebook wall and asked them to help build a barn.
We denounce, as ignorant, every mis-characterization of…whatever is the latest game Fox News has talked about. We bring out facts and statistics every time some dipshit with a PhD claims, baselessly, that video games cause violent behavior. Exasperated, we take refuge in our belief that the mainstream doesn’t understand us; they just don’t get it.
Hardcore gamers, and game developers are a minuscule minority. We like this when we are up late at night perfecting our split-second reactions in PixelJunk Shooter, but when faced with any of the implications of this minority standing, we cry foul. In fact the only thing we whine more intensely about is the mainstream trying to understand, and join us.
Gamers, and game developers bitch & moan about any expansion of the gaming demographic. Table-top war gamers hate Magic: the Gathering players. Console gamers think anyone who can’t make headshots in HALO while twitching like a rabbit-on-meth isn’t worthy of the gamer title. PC gamers think anything without a mouse and an upgradeable video card is low-brow. Nintendo complains that everyone should still go to a store and buy a $40 cartridge to get a new play-experience. Pen & paper die-hards think all of this technology stuff just dilutes the concept. We rail against anything new, with no recollection of the last battle fought.
Don’t want to believe me? Watch Warren Spector’s PAX 2010 keynote:
“We spent 20 years trying to convince the public how amazing games are, and we’ve won. …we have to get past not wanting to let more people in the club.”
Psychic Hot-lines Are Evil
So what is this psychic hot-line crap, and what does it have to do with social games? The psychic-hotline does not appeal to us; it has no application to the things we consider important, and does not hold a valid position in our world-view. It’s a scam, and any customer of this kind of service must not actually know what they want, or what is good for them. Right?
The psychic hot-line represents an experience we understand neither the desire-for, nor the benefit-of. It doesn’t appeal to our demographic, our needs, or our sensibilities. Does this make the psychic hot-line ‘wrong’, or more apropos ‘evil’?
The first recourse for which you should reach is not the easily-shouldered mantle of moral superiority; but instead that of logistics. Simply put, if there existed no market, the product wouldn’t be viable. At least some people must feel this service to be useful; enough people to maintain a staff of “psychics”; enough to buy air-time; enough cash left over to make it lucrative for owners.
Go ahead, attempt to justify your righteous indignation for this idea by marginalizing the number of people this could possibly appeal to; I’ll wait. While I do, though, I’d just like to mention that a recent poll found that, within a 3% margin of error, 14% of Americans answered ‘yes’ to the question, “Do you think Barak Obama is the anti-Christ?” So, at least 30–50 million people in the United States believe that. In contrast only 11 million PS3’s have been sold in America, and 35 million world-wide.
We back yet? Or does that last factoid still hurt? Go get a glass of Scotch; I can wait a bit longer. Want to know the number of Americans that don’t believe humans evolved? No, probably not; I’ve abused your brains with enough statistics for this blog entry, I think.
Why is the desire-for, or the value-of the psychic hot-line experience inherently less-valid than another experience? Why do only some markets deserve to be served, and others do not? At what point are opinions no-longer fact-based, and instead become shields the mind erects to protect itself from information it doesn’t like? That’s probably out of scope for this discussion, I suppose.
We Don’t Need No Justification
So more than 1% of the population of the world has played Farmville. What’s that mean? Are people leaving Call of Duty, in droves, to go click on some cud-chewing cows? No probably not. Are some percentage people who play Call of Duty playing Farmville as well? Seems statistically likely. So the game industry is experiencing non-cannibalistic growth.
What about the converse? Will people who play Farmville start parking their chopper-gunner over my spawn point? Probably not, but there will be overlap into the more traditional game industry for certain. As entire new demographics of people discover that gaming can offer them a play-experience which is enjoyable, they will seek-out new play experiences. As social gaming matures, quality expectations will rise. It is inevitable. Do you still see web-pages covered with animated gif’s and horrible tiled background images? Do we still use the
So who will lead this improvement of quality in the social games space? Veteran game developers who haven’t cemented their heads inside their asses, mostly. Zynga, who gets accused of simply exploiting people with optimized metrics, shared one of the secrets they discovered by way of Brian Reynolds at Austin GDC 2010, “Fun monetizes well.” Will they dedicate themselves to fun, though? Or simply collect data and use that to drive future game-play? I will paraphrase Brenda Brathwaite, “If you use metrics to optimize hockey, you end up with boxing.” Not everyone likes boxing. Not everyone even likes hockey.
So lets stop “justifying” social games. The burden of proof is no longer on the proponents of social gaming as a viable medium for fun. The detractors, you nay-sayers, start proving your case. You can start by examining the patterns of logic and reasoning you are applying to this argument, and taking a look at with whom you share philosophy.
So In Conclusion…
Mexican immigrants cause unemployment, comic books aren’t art, homosexuals destroy the sanctity of marriage, and psychic hot-lines are evil.
Apply the critical thought processes our industry values so highly in all your endeavors.
Afterword
There will doubtless be discussion in the comments; I will likely not feel the need to wade into it. I brushed on politics, religion, and other issues to illustrate a subtle point: the debate surrounding social games is no longer objective. I write with the full knowledge that the reader, no matter which side of the debate they are on, will only walk away having their viewpoints re-enforced in their own mind (if this does not describe you, congratulations, you are a statistical anomaly in the human landscape).
I will simply close with the words of one of my favorite authors,
“There are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, and the third is useless.”