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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.'"
I was more surprised by the title, and then summary disappointed me with Farmville and other crap. Where have the actual business games gone? We had titles like Capitalism II, all the different kinds of tycoon, simulators... Where are those now?
Just saying, maybe we should take that into account.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Dan "Lyin'" Lyons is mystified by many things.
He's still mystified why SCOX.PK hasn't buried IBM.
--
BMO
So reading between the lines Mr. Lyon's comment is basically, "Am I really surrounded by Assholes and Morons and am I also their King (intellectual superior)?"
Dannny...... The average Slashdotter has that thought 45 times a day dealing with other people. Watch Idiocracy some time and then tell me with a straight face it is not a documentary of the future.
These games appeal to the 50th percentile. More "serious" video games require more time investment and interest, which is out of the realm of possibility for most normal folks.
The same reason is why we have so many bland US and Japanese brand sedans, and unexciting light fixtures, and bland music, and beige computers (less, these days though). By definition, there are more people in the 50th percentile, thus we will always have woefully average stuff.
I think this is an indicator that a lot of people would like to own/operate a business, and have an entrepreneurial spirit, but are too bogged by the realities of risk and especially legal burden to carry out their entrepreneurial instinct in real life. Imagine how many jobs we could create if people felt safe enough to be able to play these games in the real world.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
After Eve proved that people were willing to play spreadsheets with graphics, it was obvious that the next step was to remove most of the graphics.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Last night I got drunk.
In my stupor, I decided to play a Korean MMORPG that consumed about 4 years of my life. I went through a cached version of the fansite forums. 300 posts by myself. Did I really type like that?
At any rate, I fired up the client and connected to a private server. Instantly, I felt my right wrist seizing up a bit... as if it was anticipating the pain from the click-fest (I broke several LMBs playing this game). I remembered how much this game sucked. The game is just a glorified treadmill. Getting to maxlevel (110) doesn't net you any special reward. It was really pointless.
What does this have to do with the current topic? The Social. The social aspect is the only reason I played for so long. It could have been a korean mmo game, it could have been a farm simulation, it could have been an online poker site, it could have been a tower defense game. It didn't matter. It was always about the social. Thats the only reason I played that stupid game for so long.
And that's why a lot of people on the social networking sites play those socially networked games. Not because they are economic simulators, but because everyone else plays them and it's a way to pass the time. Nothing too deep from my pov.
Wikipedia does not have an encyclopedia article for Accumulation.
The people who play these games are, as a blogger recently put it, addicted to fake achievement. They want to fill the bar over and over again, level up, and unlock the next item.
It's really not that baffling. People like winning. The actual value of the "win" is often unimportant.
This is exactly why the first thing I do when setting up security at a client site the first two domains I block are facebook and myspace. SonicWALL Content Filtering Service FTW!
It's fun to watch the logs and see how many people continue to try to go there despite the fact that it is blocked.
Cheers,
Fred
Not everyone has a good life or one they enjoy. Some people are bored and/or want something better. Virtual places and items offer an escape we may never have otherwise. When life's Skinner box doesn't give us enough pellets or pellets we like, we look elsewhere for pellets we can enjoy. Some people think outside the box and make a profit off our needs and the rest of us forever stay in the box.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
This is the same rent-a-rant tool* that shouted at the top of his lungs on what a great case The SCO Group had against IBM - and who consequently jumped off of the pro-SCO shill bandwagon so fast, he almost broke both ankles, when it became apparent that the whole thing was an extortion scam... it's interesting to me since The SCO Group doesn't really have real products anymore, and the bankruptcy trustee currently in charge has stated that the only thing he finds of value in the company is the litigation they're involved in.
Dan can't understand something that makes money, that Microsoft didn't invent - world points, laughs. Dan is worse than a has-been... he's a never-was.
*Not to be confused with another worthless tech "analyst", Rob "Rent-A-Rant" Enderle, who has never met a Microsoft check he didn't like.
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
http://xkcd.com/603/
Even stranger, he says, is their willingness to spend real money to buy virtual products
If people put a fraction of the time they spend on fake farms into a real business, they'd be rich. So much effort goes into collecting fake gold and going on quests to kill monsters that are nothing but a collection of 1's and 0's. It just seems like such a waste. If we could harness a small amount of that effort and put it toward something productive, it would be astonishing what could be accomplished.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
People have also been paying for mmo's and such for years just the same as it's a means of entertainment or perhaps avoidance of idle hands. You know what they say about idle hands...
sounds like a good way to do money laundering just put it in to a game.
How fast will this just drop if the us had on line betting and poker that was not bared by us law?
that people spend $50 to buy a video game for their xbox?
Or spend $400 for a ticket to watch a UFC fight.
Or go to Vegas and spend money to play roulette.
He might (and I do) find the idea boring as all hell, but other people find it fun (maybe the activity itself, maybe the "beating" other people to something part, maybe the socialization that comes from a common activity, etc).
This is a shame that people have become so stupid as to purchase virtual pets and virtual things to get ahead in a role playing game. I have to say it, people need to get out more often. The fact that this has become a 1.6bn business is really, really sad. What ever happened to buying old cars and restoring them or going on bike rides or outdoor activites?
Really, he's no better than "Pretenderlee" Enderlee or MoGTroll Maureen O'Gara. His opinion and $5 will buy you a $2 coffee (you take a minus $3 hit for being an obvious n00b even to the cashier).
You know what they say about idle hands...
Idle hands get in the way of the devil's work?
the internet merely magnifies them.
Table-ized A.I.
Don't know where (or IF) he went to business school, but somewhere along the line in almost every program I've heard of there was a "pretend-business" game of some sort that students had to play for the term. The key to ours was to notice that your company could borrow long-term funds very cheaply, and loan them out at a somewhat higher rate of interest, and that this represented the best profit opportunity in the game, as interest rates were fixed. Most others I've seen have been a little more robust.
really i dunno but after running it thru my wetware a few times a few "thinks" came up... my first time in Tokyo i was introduced to Pachinko and immediately began to wonder how such a people could have accomplished anything let alone what the Japanese have done, but after a few minutes playing i was strangely hooked and played for about 3 hours, but only played the one time. it reminded me of the kind of fun, mindless calibrating kids can do for hours, getting closer and closer to something meaningless in itself but profitable in tweaking a mind set. maybe it's something like that. the other thing that popped up was reading accounts of indentured servants holding mock feasts made up of the scraps their masters had left over. the servants invented titles and names for themselves and seriously attempted to reproduce the manners of their "betters". it may be the people who do this stuff are wage slaves shedding their pent up aggression and frustration. while i'm just throwing stuff out there there's the point, click, download and install crowd who can't do much on the internet and just do basic stuff that fills the time. or they all could just be like me now doing anything rather than the brain breaking hard work i'm taking a break from, like you reading this :)
ideopath @ play
there are more people in the 50th percentile, thus we will always have woefully average stuff.
No, you'll always have average stuff because when you have a population of *anything*, the middle of that population is always by definition, average. It has nothing to do with how many of them there are.
Deleted
I don't think its surprising to find out that someone stupid enough to spend half of their day on Facebook giving out personal info for enjoyment would be stupid enough to spend money on their Facebook habbit.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
> 'The data might be "perfect" and "complete,"' says Lyons, 'but the world from which it's gathered is anything but that.'"
Exactly, he gave the reason himself. Escapism. Not one I care for at all now, but when I was longer I played a lot of MUD. Does he hate such books and movies too?
he first two domains I block are facebook and myspace.
Blocking by domain is so like... 1999, it's very fail.
Deleted
It's a Skinner Box. It doesn't just apply to humans; it applies to most animals. It's the same effect that makes rats press levers for food, and that underlies Pavlov's Dog and standard drug dealer techniques.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_Box
Farmville short-circuits the reward relationship in a number of psychologically sophisticated ways. It's essentially a hoarding generator with addiction back-off.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
the average IQ of the average gamer dropped below room temperature
The average IQ of the average gamer has always been less than room temperature (assuming a room temperature of about 293 K).
Links like that are the reason I read Slashdot.
Are folks playing Farmville doing what we are right here, reading and posting these remarks? Has anyone benefited from this discussion other than the social interaction?
Mr. Lyons might want to consider that buying and reading Newsweek is also an exercise in mental masturbation.
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.
Umm, I dunno, did business games actually go anywhere? The expansion pack for Anno 1404 just got released, and that's mainly a late medieval trading and economic game, with some city building thrown in.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Twitch games require skill and fast reaction times. But many games don't even do that anymore. FPS now reincarnate you with weapons and health near where you died just so that you can continue, and they'll overlay an arrow or give you verbal instructions on where to go so that you don't get lost and don't have to figure things out for yourself. Forget about having to have any kind of plan or strategy to get past the baddies. Forget about having to figure out a level.
Even if you buy physical goods, most of the money goes into branding and identity. Nike sneakers, organic produce, green energy, BMW luxury sedan, diamond rings--none of that is necessary or rational, but it's the "virtual" attributes that make people pay extra for it. It's how you show off to your friends, or some other attribute unconnected to the physical good that makes you happy.
I think this carries those Facebook games to their logical conclusion - http://progresswars.com/
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
Steven Johnson: Everything Bad is Good for You
It explains this phenomenon perfectly.
ResidntGeek
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?
I believe that these goal-oriented video games feed a false sense of accomplishment. My wife is into the Farmville. I was into Call of Duty, busy unlocking "perks". WoW people work on "levels".
All of these games have a similar draw - they feed a sense of accomplishment, very similar to as if you had actually done something meaningful. It triggers the same sense of reward in the brain.
It's addictive.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
She does until there's a purchase of an imaginary object.
She controls it, but I make it.
"Lame" - Galaxar
The idea that imaginary or virtual products are new is really only true in the US Patent Office sense, that is, they are new... on a computer. The truth is that we've been buying virtual products all along. When someone buys an article of clothing from a manufacturer whose products are fashionable, yes, they are buying something real -- shoes, a shirt, a jacket, whatever -- but they are also buying the associated fashionability, which is purely imaginary. People buy all kinds of things for reasons that make the physical object itself a secondary concern. The only thing that has changed is that computers and the Internet have made it possible to dispense with the inessential -- the object -- and directly purchase the intangible benefit.
Looked at another way, buying game-related virtual products is not really any different from a lot of entertainment purchases. When you buy tickets to a concert, what tangible thing are you purchasing? Absolutely nothing. You're paying for an experience. The difference between a musician and a stored value in a game server is, from the point of view of the customer, quite irrelevant: in both cases, the customer is paying to be entertained.
If anything is new here, it's just the introduction of a new medium for entertainment and -- as Apple's recent success amply demonstrates -- brand-based social status contests. That may very well be interesting in its own right, but it doesn't represent anything novel as far as market economics are concerned.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
But that's a different issue. "It exists but has has a too oppressive DRM" is a completely different issue than the "they don't make them any more at all" slant of the message I was answering too. The market exist and the games exist. The DRM... well, that's a good issue, don't get me wrong. I could even join in the lament. But it's a differnet issue from asking "where did the games go." They didn't really go anywhere.
PS: Dunno about the one on the expansion pack, I'm sure the original game worked for me more than thrice. But I digress.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But that's not the point. People were buying them anyway, and buying more boxes each year. There was no point at which the buyers rejected them.
There was a point where the _publishers_ rejected them, because bang per buck another genre offered comparable sales for a lot less buck. But that's not nearly the same issue.
Basically blaming their supposed loss of popularity on anything (low IQ, bad format, gameplay, etc) before establishing if such a loss of popularity actually existed (and, again, check out Sierra's own statements: it didn't exist) is simply what's called "tooth fairy science." You know, the kind where you build a whole theory about the tooth fairy, and which teeth are in higher demand, and whatnot, before you have any support or evidence for the existence of a tooth fairy at all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I find spending more than a couple of minutes on Facebook mind-numbingly boring.
As for the games and stuff, anyone who spams my account with their game results gets hidden from sight ever after.
Facebook is a huge yawn. It is vaguely OK as a bulletin board for catching up with a few close friends and relatives, but that's it. I don't want to be contacted by people that I haven't been interested enough to contact for the last thirty years. I am not interested in games, or endless mindless thoughts about the piece of cake you just ate, etc etc.
UUUUGGGHHH!
I am anarch of all I survey.
More than "business games" i think the issue is about casual gaming. One has to admit those facebook games are not exactly challenging. That would make you think that the average gamer's IQ took a nose dive. Makes sense. You also have to consider people (in this case facebook users) motivations to play those games. It all depends on your point of view and who populates your social univers of course. From my point of view, a lot of them are average joes with lives, jobs, families. They get home after a hard day's work and they want to relax. Lets play a game for an hour. They dont want to have to compete with(and ultimately be humiliated by) a 14 year old that does nothing but play that fps or work on his build order for the perfect zerg rush. They want the equivalent of hobby gardening or jigsaw puzzles. A simple, relaxing, almost zen like experience. They are not stupid by any stretch. They just want to chill. Of course you also got the OCDs, the ones who get addicted easy and super competitive s who will try to beat everyone at anything just because (yes some of those play farmville too. Why is beyond me but they do :).
Change the word "pretending" to the word "practicing". Talk about technology as an evolutionary advantage, right? We can practice in an environment without tangible consequences and then attempt to apply those principles in the real world. The only issue is that some or most never get back to the "real world" part. The positive twist is: at least we have their data for large scale modeling. In a "singularitarian" sense, assume that all the violent games are practice for war. If we gather enough data, modeling human warfare will be much easier (and with fewer casualties/causalities) than ACTUALLY engaging in real combat. Voila! World Peace! Isn't that what all this emphasis on technology is: making life better for ourselves...all of us?
*ducks*
"Virtual entertainment." What a weird choice of words. Can I be virtually entertained by a simulated song?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This isn't baffling at all. People enjoy the games because they happen within some very controlled environments, on their time, at no risk to them, and with few variables to consider. The more complex you make the games, the less they are games. The reason people pick them up is that the themes are simple and already understandable. Farm? Plant, grow, pick. Got it. When it gets more complex, like what day do I plant given the current weather patterns, or you must be doing this at a specified time, it's work. Now, please pay me some money, because you wasted all the fucking research dollars.
Nope sorry, you are wrong. There's a reason they only make 3,000 of my car every year. The infrequent sighting of my car alone makes it more interesting--the completely over-the-top performance notwithstanding--because you don't see it very often (duh?).
My light fixtures are not the generic $.15 white plastic ones that nearly every house in America has. Gee, I guess that makes me a hipster because I wanted to get rid of uninteresting plastic from my otherwise expensive house. I guess people who buy curtains, rugs, plants and crown molding must be super hipsters?
My computers are, well, computers. They don't HAVE to be boring, but some are and some aren't. Besides, it doesn't cost any MORE money to make something interesting. My e-machines is black and boring. My white iMac is not beige and has interesting features. My MacBooks are MacBooks, which are far more interesting than the average black Dell Latitude. I guess you are right, though, in that my MacBooks are no more interesting than my neighbor's MacBooks.