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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.'
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.
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
+0 Meh