The Ethics of Social Games

Gamespot is running a story about the ethics and morality of the social games market, which in recent years has exploded to involve hundreds of millions of players. Between micro-transactions, getting players to recruit friends, and the thin line between compelling games and addictive games, there are plenty of opportunities for developers to stray into shady practices. Quoting: "The most successful social games to date have used very simple gameplay mechanics, encouraging neither strategy nor dexterity but regular interaction with the game ... Although undeniably successful, the existing social game framework has been the subject of much debate among game developers from every corner of the game industry, from the mainstream to the indie community. Some, like Super Meat Boy creator Edmund McMillen, are particularly strident in their assessment. 'Social games tend to have a really seedy and abusive means of manipulation that they use to rope people in and keep them in,' McMillen said. 'People are so tricked into that that they'll actually spend real money on something that does absolutely nothing, nothing at all.'

Comments

Personal experiences with the social side of MMOs

[RogueyWon]

There's something to this as far as MMOs go. People like to talk about how MMOs tickle the reward centres of the brain with their level-up/upgrade cycles and so on, but I suspect that this wears thin fairly quickly. Certainly, as somebody who has been heavily "into" and then got out of two MMOs (FFXI and WoW) over the last year, the social side of the game has been the biggest deterrent to leaving.

MMOs, of course, get to sting you twice in this respect. Not only do you get a social circle within the game, but if you're not careful, they also start pulling you away from your real-life social circle.

I remember I found it a bit disconcerting when I decided to stop playing WoW. I'd stopped enjoying the game about 4 or 5 months beforehand, and while I had friends within the game, I was finding the sheer tedium of playing the game itself increasingly unbearable. When I quit, I decided to go cold turkey, which was a pronounced contrast to the gradual drift-away I'd had with FFXI. For the first two weeks or so after quitting, I found it very difficult to fill the time I suddenly had. I'd gotten out of the habit of going out and doing things on weekday evenings and it took a while to get back into it.

This isn't to say that MMOs are entirely bad. I mostly enjoyed my time with FFXI and WoW. And while only having an online circle of friends is hardly ideal, it's still a step up from having no social life at all. I don't think I'd go so far as to accuse MMO developers of being outright unethical. But I do think that the MMO market is one where the principle of "caveat emptor" is relevant in some fairly unusual ways. I didn't touch MMOs during my student days, because I knew I would find them engrossing and I didn't want to take this risk until I had steady employment. It's probably worth thinking about your ability to stop playing before you get too heavily into an MMO.

I agree w/McMillen a bit

[Purity Of Essence]

Edmund McMillen is right on the money. This topic (along with the GameSpot article) fails for not mentioning an insightful and informative talk Braid creator Jonathan Blow gave at Rice University a couple of months ago. Unlike other diversions, these "social" games are not at all about providing fun or entertainment. They are entirely about separating you from your money using sophisticated psychological tricks. You might be right in saying there is a perception of value, but these systems create that perception in a very devious manner. If you were to take away the tricks, you would find there is no game -- or rather, the only game is the system creators gaming the players for all the money they can get. People don't play these games because they are fun or challenging. They play them as a conditioned response to a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, in the same way a caged rat hits a trigger for a pellet.

Watch or listen to Jonathan Blow's talk:
Games and the Human Condition

Social Games (aka Skinner Boxes):
Operant Conditioning Chamber
Reinforcement

Re:I agree w/McMillen a bit

[hyphz]

The problem is that if you start looking at things that way, every game fits into the same category. Super Meat Boy is _all_ about skinner-box conditioning of reflexes and observation. Yes, it's tremendously satisfying when you finish a new level by pulling off moves you'd never have though possible, but what you're experiencing there is the result of operant conditioning on muscle memory.

Thing is, skinner boxes provide something that we need. Here's a quite from David Wong of Cracked that sums it up:

"As shocking as this sounds, a whole lot of the "guy who failed all of his classes because he was playing WoW all the time" horror stories are really just about a dude who simply didn't like his classes very much. This was never some dystopian mind control scheme by Blizzard. The games just filled a void. Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don't even have two of them: Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day); complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition);and connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

Most people, particularly in the young gamer demographics, don't have this in their jobs or in any aspect of their everyday lives. But the most addictive video games are specifically geared to give us all three... or at least the illusion of all three.
[...]
The terrible truth is that a whole lot of us begged for a Skinner Box we could crawl into, because the real world's system of rewards is so much more slow and cruel than we expected it to be."

Part of the problem is that economics has reached the point where going for top jobs actually involves irrational behaviour. Tim Harford wrote in The Undercover Economist that the incredibly high wages in top jobs are not just to reward the people in the jobs, but to incentivize others into working to try and get them. The idea is that if I offer you $100 for a job or $200 if you work hard, you'll probably work hard, because the reward is right there. If I offer you $100 for a job or, if you work hard, a 1% chance of getting $200 , you won't work hard. But if I offer you $100 for a job or, if you work hard, a 1% chance of getting $1bn, your brain will tell you to work hard because the reward is so high that any slender chance is a good thing. Problem is, 99% of the time, you don't get the reward no matter how big it is, so that decision making process turns out to be an irrational cognitive bias.

And that process has trickled down over time and become embedded in our collective psyche. Why were computer games seen as so dorky in the 80's? Because it was really easy to believe that there was a better alternative. Now, society has started to realize that it is being sold a pup. Yes, I could spend that time learning guitar, or learning to draw, or learning another language. But I know that the vast majority of musicians, artists, and translators are unemployed or sporadically employed or even working for free. Furthermore, most people in those fields will tell you that if you don't enjoy just the process of playing guitar (or whatever), there's no way you'll do it often enough to get really good. So why shouldn't I just do what I enjoy instead?

Don't look at the games. Look at the society.