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Baffled By the Obsession With Pretend-Business Games
theodp writes "Newsweek's Daniel Lyons confesses to being mystified by all the people tending to their virtual farms and virtual pets on Facebook. Even stranger, he says, is their willingness to spend real money to buy virtual products, like pretend guns and fertilizer, to gain advantage in these Web-based games. Pretend products are a serious business, estimated to grow to $1.6B next year, and have captured the attention of economists and academics who view the virtual economy as a lab for modeling behavior in the real world. Still, Lyons can't help but question whether the kind of people who spend hours online taking care of imaginary pets are representative of the rest of the population. 'The data might be "perfect" and "complete,"' says Lyons, 'but the world from which it's gathered is anything but that.'"
Dan "Lyin'" Lyons is mystified by many things.
He's still mystified why SCOX.PK hasn't buried IBM.
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BMO
You forget that real businesses require real work, and are a whole lot harder to progress in than a game that is engineered to let you slowly creep up the ladder of success no matter how inept you are.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
So how, exactly, is this any different from spending money on WOW? Not everyone likes the same kind of games.
Just because the average Joe doesn't like Farmwille, WOW, curling or knitting that doesn't mean it's not worth the investment in time and/or money to someone else.
To each his own.
.: Max Romantschuk
They went out of fashion together with adventures. The times of "brainy" games are gone. Since games got mainstream and the average IQ of the average gamer dropped below room temperature, what's left is twitch games. Hell, even RTS games are more twitch than planning these days.
Yeah, mod me flamebait all you want, you know it's true.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...Yeah, and wait for people to find obscure proxies that log information to get around these blocks and you have worse security problems....
Fact is, Facebook, Myspace, etc. are not security risks. On the other hand, obscurefacebookproxy.ru probably is, if an employee or student can get their work done while using Facebook, Myspace, etc. more power to them. If they can't they get fired/flunk out. It is that simple. Try to block the sites that people want and end up with more security flaws as they go to less reputable sites.
(PS. Sonic Wall is overpriced and sucks)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Taking Farmville for example, you don't have bugs, worms, critters to kill your crop. You don't have excessive heat or frost to kill your crop. You have a definitive timeline when your 100% yield occurs. You have 100% sales on all your items with no waste. This isn't really a business simulator more than it is something to do to pass time and share with friends.
The real cash comes in to play because some people are even more impatient and want the absolute best of everything, even if it doesn't really matter. Fortunately, my wife is of the opinion that she can wait for her FV coins to build up and not even worry about the FV dollars.
Yes but these "social" games don't really have any social aspect apart from spamming your friends for new items. My mom convinced me to try a popular facebook game, and the only social aspect was me having to spam everyone else that I either have extra crap or I want their extra crap. In general there is no interaction apart from "give me", and even that is based on preset buttons rather than conversation. I probably have more social interaction with a 1 minute conversation with the clerk at the convenience store than I would in hours of playing these shitty social media games. In your case it is different, as you were on an MMO, but these social casual games are much more limited in interaction.
Not only that but ... ermmmm DUH!
In a world of reality tv, real housewives, and shopping networks etc. why should anyone be _surprised_ that real vegetables will spend real money and real time trying to grow virtual vegetables?
We used to smirk at stamp collectors and train spotters. Now we have virtual farmers and others. The world has not changed, we simply have an easier way to collect data about people with odd hobbies, like stupid lawsuits, stupid patents, karaoke, leg warmer collecting, virtual farming, and many more.
Or maybe they are just bored at work?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Starting a business is a great thing to do! However, unlike how the conservative, pro-consumerism people who propose starting a business as the simple solution to your each and every economic woe will tell you, it is a very difficult thing to do and you will likely spend a large amount of time and energy making it profitable in the first place. If you don't have money in the first place, then forget it. If you can't live for a while without your normal steady income, then forget it. Basically, unless you're really lucky and are able to get funding to start, or you come up with some brilliant money-making idea that requires $0 start-up you're in for a long ride till your first real profit.
In real life people have jobs because they either cannot or do not want to start their own business, so simply saying "if you would have invested x amount of time doing y then you'd" whatever is just making a big assumption without really considering what you're saying. Go ask a successful business manager how much more he could accomplish if he spent less time on the golf course (assuming he golfs). I'm sure he would not take it well.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
I hope your wife is a fucking knock-out hottie because I can't imagine even talking to someone that can't comprehend a difference between work on a computer and FarmVille. I don't expect my girlfriend to understand exactly what I do, but she grasps the basic concept of programming.
Actually, I would disagree.
1. The notions that adventure games disappeared because people are dumb, was false all the time. The adventure games market was actually a growing market when it got dumped by the publishers. There never was as much as a dip in sales, it went up each year... then nearly went extinct.
I'm serious. Read some interviews with the Sierra people. Their last adventure game actually sold a lot more units than any of their previous adventure games.
What nearly killed adventures was... 3D. In the 90's, when the tools were in their infancy, the complex scripting and animation that adventure games needed, cost a lot more to do in 3D than 2D. An adventure game suddenly became 10 times more expensive to make. And it sold more units than last year's 2D adventure game... but not 10 times more.
2. Why the FPS nearly killed them is the opposite: early FPS were mindless affairs and dirt-cheap to make. You just needed to license a 3D engine, make some random maps and a couple of models, and you were all set.
Probably most FPS actually sold less units than some adventure games from the same age. But, think of it this way: if it sold half as many units, but cost 4 times less to make, you'd actually make more profit with a FPS. (Or just you'd make a profit at all with a FPS.)
People getting dumber simply wasn't the issue. Bang per buck, FPS in the 90's was simply the better investment of a publisher's money. (Somewhat like why nowadays every publisher wants a slice of the MMO market.)
3. The adventure genre has been actually making a comeback in force. Which kinda disputes the claim that people got dumber.
4. I dunno, economic games don't seem to me quite that dead either. There have been a lot of "tycoon" wannabe games released in the last decade, hotel simulators, restaurant simulators, mall simulators, etc. Including the occasional major title like The Guild 2.
So on the whole, while I won't mod you "flamebait" (and just blew my mod points for this thread by answering instead), I have to wonder if you're seriously into the genres you mourn. I find it hard that someone would be apparently so hard at decrying their loss... but somehow miss all the titles that have been released lately. Are you really a fan of those genres, or, no offense, just wanted to whine about other people's IQ?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
An how is this different from "traditional sports"? Strip all the fluff and trappings of sports such as football (soccer to you Yanks) for example, it is just 22 grown men running around kicking an inanimate spherical rubber object. These men get paid millions of dollars per season for what they do and looking at it baldly, it is just plain ridiculous. It is more ridiculous that people identify themselves with the teams and pay real hard-earned money to watch the sports. What's more, unlike say Farmville or WoW, the real-world sports fans don't even get anything tangible from the sports, other than vicariously sharing the ups and downs of "their" teams. Yet it is deemed by society as "normal". Why not for virtual social games such as Farmville?