Chris Hecker is my hero and has been for a few years. I worry that someday I’ll meet him and he’ll turn out to be a dick and my vision will be shattered. From GDC:

“You want to make an intrinsically interesting game,” he said of game designers at large. “[When] you add extrinsic motivators to make your game better, if these studies do apply to games, you’re destroying intrinsic motivation to play your game.”

“The game industry used to use no metrics whatsoever,” he continued. “Everything was gut and by the seat of our pants. Then metrics came around, and [now] we’re addicted to metrics. If I change a value of my purple hat, fourteen more people buy it, and we think we’re totally in the zone.”

Sigh.

Finally watched Jesse’s DICE speech. Amazing as always. Really inspirational and frightening. Especially to those trying to ride the Farmville wave. What he talks about is what I think Booyah Society was trying (unsuccessfully) to do.

Contrast this:

Pincus has acknowledged not being vigilant enough with the automated ads that appeared on Zynga games during the company’s early days.

With this:

So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs* We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.

Zynga’s done the right thing since then and I’m having issue more with CNN’s reporting than anything. I have to give them their kudos for their huge success.

I just hate, hate, that they and everyone else uses the term “social gaming” for what is essentially a solitaire experience. WoW is a social game. Parking Wars is a social game. Actually, I’d call Parking Wars the definition of a social game. It can’t be played without your friends and the mechanics are based on the actions of those friends.

From the first link:

[Pincus]: “A great social game should be like a great cocktail party. If you want it to appeal to absolutely everyone you invite, it has to be broad in its content so that everyone gets it.”

If his cocktail parties are everyone sitting by themselves while occasionally getting their friends a drink or a snack, I probably don’t want to go to his cocktail parties.

Facebook games don’t all need to have Parking Wars levels of social engineering, but “social gaming” is awful (and almost ironic) nomenclature for the genre.

This is offensive and misleading. And I doubt they have 2K’s permission to use Bioshock:

Do you feel guilty when Farmville tells you to send a gift to someone and you don’t? Because I don’t. I may just be a soulless bastard, but I generally don’t waste my time with all the pop-ups and hootenanny that the gifting entails. Is gift giving what draws people back to Farmville? Or is it the customization? Or the unlocking new things by leveling?

From Gamasutra:

MiYon Richardson, a mother of two and a digital scrapbooker in Texas, says that after her network ballooned for Zynga’s Mafia Wars, her news feed and E-mail box became cluttered with game-related messages. “I get so much spam now,” she says. “I very rarely see an update from my real friends.”

Where is the breaking point? I personally move people into separate groups and hide messages from applications I don’t care about or want to see (hi Zynga!) but most users aren’t that sophisticated or care to take the time. And there is absolutely nothing I can do about the half dozen people a week who add me on Facebook whom I’ve never met or talked to whose note just says “mafia wars”. Adding these people leads to exponential growth in spam unless managed as more fake friends play more social games.

The mechanic of friends-as-currency makes a ton of sense on the surface for social games – the companies want more people playing, players want to be able to interact with their friends in some way. But the effects of this mechanic are widespread – not only does it make these games unplayable by people who don’t have large networks, it incentivizes the destruction of the very platform it needs to leverage by making the value of real friends (whom you can influence – which has bottom line implications for the developer) identical to the value of a stranger who happens to be connected to your node in the network.

But developers don’t care because more happy players today means more money today.

And players don’t care because incrementally it is hard to observe the negative effects.

And Facebook doesn’t care because it gets them page views.

But they are the ones who should care the most because it is a short term bump leading to a burnout and exodus. People first came to Facebook from Myspace in waves because the former was garish, unusable and ugly while the latter was utilitarian and clean. And if they lose that utility thanks to something as basic as spam status updates, they are going to find the Next Big Social Network eating their lunch.

Back to games. It has been spoken by the prophet that the future of shooters is RPGs. What does that mean?

I was having this discussion with someone at the last IGDA meeting. I was talking about how soulless RPGs have become and that WoW had increased the problem of context-free grinding. Her response was that grinding is a fundamental aspect of RPGs. I took that as a challenge, and started listing some of my favorite RPGs where grinding was unnecessary. Her response was that those weren’t really RPGs. I guess if your definition of RPG is that it is a game with grinding then, sure, grinding is a fundamental aspect of RPGs.

I bring this up to point out that the definition of an RPG changes greatly from player to player. “RPG-elements” is even more loaded requiring an additional layer of abstraction. Madden has player attributes, leveling-up and so forth. Is it an RPG?

So what does it mean that RPGs are the future of shooters? More story/dialog? Less reliance of twitch mechanics? Experience points? Grinding? Classes? Special items? Blond androgynous heros?

Genres are collections of aesthetics and mechanics. I believe that the term “RPG” has become an empty vessel and no longer contains any sort of mapping to “role-playing” or even specific sets of mechanics.

It’s got what plants crave.

As you all know, I loves me my Zynga games. That’s why I was excited when I saw Farmville advertised during Mafia Wars as released. Unfortunately, Farmville‘s dynamic is essentially waiting which usually isn’t really a fun activity. Given the choice between farming and La Cosa Nostra, clearly the latter is more appealing.

You take the role of a farmer and lay down SimCity-esque isometric plots which you can then fill with any of a number of crops. You then wait for the crops to grow. When they are ready, you harvest them and get coins so you can start anew. Whereas in Mafia Wars the different jobs provide different rewards and outputs (fill up the job mastery meter, get loot items), the different crops in Farmville provide no differentiation. All plants provide same benefit, only a matter of scale. The soybeans provide greatest return/cost, so I plant those. There is no reason to plant corn or strawberries or any of the others.

If you don’t harvest a crop in time, the crop withers and rots. This is a surprising use of negative reinforcement in an extremely casual game. Instead of rewarding players each time they come back, the game punishes players for not coming back. It is a subtle difference that has enormous impact on the players. Most games of this type use a sort of contra-positive reinforcement where you simply miss out on gains rather than incur losses by not signing on. The lesson is taught in decision science: people would rather miss out on gains than incur losses, even if they are the same economically.

Negative Reinforcement: Farmville – Plants die if you don’t log in to harvest them in time.
Contra-positive Reinforcement: Mafia Wars – There is an opportunity cost to having not logged in if your energy meter is full.
Positive Reinforcement: Parking Wars – You can only ticket people in your lanes if you constantly log in to check.

Then there is this cow.

I hate her. One of the first things I did was buy her. It cost most of my money, yet she has no benefit. I figure: Oh, a cow. She is expensive. Her price must be proportional to her benefit. She must make milk that I can sell at market. No dice. She just stands there, mocking me. In a pure min/maxing sense, the value of an in-game asset is the discounted future benefit it provides. In the simplest analysis, a Mega-Casino in Mafia Wars gives me $300,000/hour. I can calculate a break-even. If the Mega-Casino costs me $30 million, I know that in 100 hours I will have made my money back and every thing else is gravy. If I plan on playing more than a week, this is a good investment.

The exception to the rule is cosmetic changes. I could spend money on something that provides no future return if I get utility from the decoration aspect of it. For instance, some people spend hours upon hours looking for certain equippable items in WoW because it will make their character look cool. In cases where the item provides no game benefit, it is usually clear that the item is purely cosmetic. Rather than deriving benefit from the mechanics of the item, they derive benefit from the item’s appearance.

The cow does neither. I can almost smell the methane.

Now, I trust that like all Zynga games that this is a work in progress. But right now, the game is so bare-bones that it doesn’t feel ready for release. The tipping point in Mafia Wars came when they added job mastery – that wasn’t in the original release. This changed the gameplay dynamic from min/maxing on the same job to trying a bit of everything. Collectibles helped. Achievements helped. One can imagine that these are in the pipe for Farmville.

If not, well, I’m available for freelancing, Zynga.