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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.
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.
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
...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.
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
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?
I find that xkcd ironic, because the conclusion is the very intro to Idiocracy: The bickering, hesitant couple never reproduces. They're deliberately portrayed as unlikable, stuck-up people. The movie isn't just the narration. The story doesn't take sides. And no, Idiocracy is not a documentary of the future, it is a satire of the present, with 20 percent more electrolytes.
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*
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).
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?
This attitude is probably why you're either not a boss or not a smart boss.
I've worked with a lot of people who fucked around playing web games or chatting part of their day. Some of those people were relatively useless and should have been replaced; others were the most productive members of their teams by a wide margin. A good boss can tell the difference between these people.
If Person A gets 10 units of work done in a week and doesn't Facebook, and Person B gets 100 units of work done in a week and plays Farmtown or whatever, you'd be a fool to choose Employee A over B, but that's exactly what you're endorsing whether you realize it or not.
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 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.