6 ms·

The secret to Farmville isn't gameplay or aesthetics

164 points by aditya 17y ago

SlyShy 17y ago
Yes, but with my Facebook friends I have taken a decidedly different tack. That is, friends don't let friends play Farmville. My friends don't play Farmville because my friends don't play Farmville. If someone where to, they would be ridiculed. :)
- barmstrong 17y ago
  Haha...love it.
zyb09 17y ago
You know in the good old days we called it SPAM, today we call it 'social integration'.
weilawei 17y ago
While it's cool to note that Obama's involved in social media, his appearance in this essay seems a bit tenuous. Roger Caillois is repeatedly quoted and torn down again. His definition of a game is suspect. I don't think immediately think of a game as "free from obligation." To me, it smells like a straw man. All that aside, I think his analysis of how Zynga made/makes money is pretty fair. The idea of social capital is crucial. But, why is Zynga depicted as evil--even sociopathic--for utilizing that social capital, while Facebook appears to be treated neutrally, and our government officials are portrayed as doing the right thing?
amichail 17y ago
This is the sort of thing that should be taught in university computing degrees -- much more interesting than CS.
- Rod 17y ago
  Sure, because BS on user interface is more important than logic, automata theory, and complexity. If you don't like the Science in Computer Science you can always go to the Humanities side of the campus and engage in intellectual circle jerks with a buch of self-important morons.
  - amichail 17y ago
    You can of course perform experiments to see whether the author is correct. Those sorts of social experiments should also be part of a computing degree.
    - endtime 17y ago
      No, they shouldn't. They should be part of a sociology, communications, or (once the field starts having its own departments) HCI degree. You might think case studies of social experiments are important, and I might even agree, but they're not computer science (or "computing").
      - djcapelis 17y ago
        Cognitive science departments (at universities that have them) generally provide wonderful coverage of HCI topics, though some CS/EECS/CE departments do as well.
        endtime 17y ago
        Sure - my point was that you can't really get a degree in HCI yet. But once you can, they'll include case studies of the referred to social experiments.
        djcapelis 17y ago
        Just FYI: Yes you can and yes they do: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-study/major/major-ug_specialization.php#hci http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-study/major/major-u...
duck 17y ago
If Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it? The answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville. Very true from what I have seen. Nobody just starts playing something like Farmville unless someone else has asked them to. It is kind of sickening to think about how much time is lost to crap like this.
- ShardPhoenix 17y ago
  The time isn't necessarily "lost" if it substitutes for other forms of human "social grooming".
- sliderr 17y ago
  At least you noticed that you were wasting time. But the reason why people keep playing is not because of the others. The others are the reason why they start, they keep on playing because of the fake sense of achievement this game delivers. See Jessse Schells talk from DICE for details.
- watmough 17y ago
  I call my wife Farmer Pixel because she's never off Farmville. I've tried to get her to go out in the garden, but no avail!
  - duck 17y ago
    Yes, that sounds very familiar here as well. I don't know a single guy that plays it and that led me to search for male/female stats... but I only found that the average Farmville user is a 43-year-old woman (via http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/02/this_aint_your_mothers_farmvil.html http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/02/this_aint...).
    - watmough 16y ago
      I have one friend (male) that plays these games, but he uses specially created accounts, and is motivated only by being able to mess with other players.
Jd 17y ago
"Does this mean we are becoming better citizens? Ninety-seven percent of American teenagers play video games.[4] Does this mean they will become more politically active? Before you dismiss these questions, keep in mind that in October 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama became the first U. S. Presidential candidate to advertise in video games" I stopped reading at this lapse in logic. Besides, how can one cite Caillois without citing Huizinga. Caillois admits his project is little more than a commentary on Homo Ludens.
- cubicle67 17y ago
  "I stopped reading..." I see this phrase regularly, but I don't really understand it. Does it mean you read no further into the article, or did you actually read more, if not all, but use this phrase to signify that you disagree. I find the idea of only reading until you find something you disagree with curious. It seems to indicate a belief that one flaw in a person's work invalidates the remainder of that work. Surely you don't consume opinion in a binary fashion, either accepting or rejecting it in its entirety, but rather you have the ability to consider each point and reject some and accept others based on their merit? [pulls rant up short] Not meaning to single you out, you just happened to use that phrase at the same time that I had time to reply
  - waterlesscloud 17y ago
    I don't stop reading when I disagree with something, but I have stopped reading when there's something so ridiculously off-base that it throws everything else the author may think about the topic into question. If there's a fundamental misunderstanding of some aspect of a given topic, it makes it likely the rest is not worth reading. I'm not obligated to read anything, and if the author is wrong on basic topics, I'll not be giving them more of my time. It's rare, but it does happen.
    - jim-greer 17y ago
      Do you post your opinion of the article afterwards?
  - 17y ago
zemaj 17y ago
I find the idea of "sociopathic applications" mentioned in the second last paragraph interesting. I wonder what other applications could be included in that. World of Warcraft? I guess even twitter and facebook are in extreme usage. There's no attempt by those companies to stop people excessively using their services, beyond the point where its beneficial to the individual and only beneficial to the company.
jim-greer 17y ago
There's a lot of validity to this argument, but Farmville is not unique. If you take his criteria and replace Farmville with World of Warcraft, most of it still holds: (1) WoW is defined by obligation, routine, and responsibility; (2) WoW encroaches and depends upon real life, and is never entirely separate from it; (3) WoW is always certain in outcome, and involves neither chance nor skill; (4) WoW is a productive activity, in that it adds to the social capital upon which Blizzard and Activision depend for their wealth; (5) WoW is governed not by rules, but by habits, and simple cause-and-effect; (6) WoW is not make-believe, in that it requires neither immersion nor suspension of disbelief. WoW does require more skill. And it is governed by rules not 'simple cause and effect' - but so is Farmville. WoW is also more immersive. These differences are what make it a 'better' game to most gamers. But they don't change what the OP finds sociopathic about the game, namely that they're applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners’ needs. It is much more controlling, it just reaches a narrower audience. It is also equally social - the social interactions are arguably deeper and more meaningful, in fact. I say this as someone who works in the field of online games (I run Kongregate). I do think the feeling of accomplishment and social satisfaction provided by games are powerful, and not totally positive. I also hope that the positive aspects of online game communities balance this out to some degree. Edit: WoW succeeded in a competitive field largely on quality (and massive capital outlay). Farmville succeeded through the hyper-fast and skillful application of the A/B-testing 'lean startup' techniques widely admired and practiced by most readers of this site. If you hate it, it's worth thinking about how it came to exist.
- iron_ball 17y ago
  Hey, good work with Kongregate. It's got a great concept and great execution, though (being a Street Fighter fan) I never really played much beyond Kongai myself.
  - benologist 17y ago
    http://www.kongregate.com/games/GameTap/street-fighter-2-ce http://www.kongregate.com/games/GameTap/street-fighter-2-ce
- 17y ago
jshen 17y ago
This "essay" could have been two paragraphs. I almost stopped reading when the first two were talking about Howard Zinn.
- apphacker 17y ago
  Indeed, concise it wasn't. So much filler text such as "With this in mind," "To illustrate," This: "One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely because they invest physical effort and in-game profit into each harvest." could have been: "People may play Farmville because they invest effort and in-game profit into each harvest." It is a horribly written article. Those extra adjectives all over the place offer absolutely nothing. One might speculate that if the comments here on this site - Hacker News - were written deliberately with such very many adjectives, punctuated through out each paragraph and sentence, you may imagine that perhaps one would precisely spend an entire laborious day completing in the end simply a singular article within that languishing timeframe.
  - adriand 17y ago
    I thought it flowed very nicely and had a thoughtful, conversational tone. Taken farther, your desire for concision would eventually bring us to a list of Powerpoint bullets. This style of writing and speaking encourages reflection. When he says "One might speculate", his audience is encouraged to speculate themselves, to question his point, or to ponder if there are perhaps other reasons for why people play. Your revised sentence is dry and scientific, it says, "here's why, period, no need to keep thinking about it."
    - jshen 17y ago
      what did the howard zinn paragraphs add that justified the space? How many paragraphs did it take to even get to farmville?
      - c0riander 17y ago
        The beginning of the essay makes it clear that "This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk." So to the audience at the time, the paragraphs were a timely hook that contextualized the idea within a relevant current event. Also, though they're not as well integrated as they could be (perhaps we can forgive the author that one, given that the talk was the day after Zinn's death, so it was a pretty quick addition I'm guessing), they tie back into the overall idea that a democratic society suffers from this kind of gameplay.
barmstrong 17y ago
Bizarre article. After lots of fluff, it delivers some good insights into why the game succeeded, then calls on our moral obligations to stand up to sociopathic corporations? Did not see that coming.
neilk 17y ago
This article helps articulate this deeply creepy feeling I have about where online business is going. Does anyone else think using "addictive" or "habit-forming" to describe your product design goals is deeply immoral? And yet this probably appears in a lot of Powerpoints pitched every day in the Valley. I had to sit through just such a presentation a few weeks ago, and I work at a non-profit. The whole thrust of this Valley drone's presentation was that he could get users to value anything, any behavior that the customer wanted, by means of psychological tricks and social rewards. Now that may not even be true, but when your Powerpoint starts referencing Pavlov and Zimbardo I think you have to take a look in the mirror.
- jim-greer 17y ago
  It depends on the context - selling items on eBay is addictive and habit-forming. So is running your own business, or running marathons. I notice that you have 2258 karma. I think it's safe to say that you've formed a habit or even addiction to HN, but hopefully a rewarding one.
  - neilk 17y ago
    I disagree that these things can be conflated. Just because you find something rewarding, it does not mean you are addicted, or (more broadly) that any of one's reward systems are being manipulated. If my internal reward systems are telling me that running is good, for the most part it's because running is good. Even on HN, there's a fundamentally useful activity -- contribution to discussion. The measurement system is distributed to users, but that's because the benefits are similarly distributed. Things cross into "drug" territory when most of their value comes from tricking your reward system. Even drugs can be beneficial from time to time, but when too much of a person's activity is about chasing simulated rewards, we start calling that person "addicted". Most drugs manipulate the brain's desire for pleasure, or the rush of excitement. If we believe the author of the OP, FarmVille manipulates our desire for social connectedness.
    - jim-greer 17y ago
      So you can't be addicted to running? Or posting on Hacker News? You have a fair point, the dictionary definition of addiction includes words like 'damaging' and 'pathological'. But the mechanism of addiction is very similar whether the ends are beneficial or not. And a lot of the people use the word to apply to things that are not terribly negative.
baguasquirrel 17y ago
Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine seventy-three million people playing a game that isn’t fun to play, just to keep up with the Joneses. I couldn't disagree more with this. Ever glimpsed at WoW guild politics? Many people get involved in this game because it's possible to keep up with the Joneses in-game, if not in real life. This is not a small nitpicking point. Games like these develop complicated social webs and social capital because they create a reality preferable to the one we live in, one in which anyone can see a path to success, a path that they are in control of. The real world is more ambiguous.
- piguy314 17y ago
  I was addicted to world of warcraft for about 18 months and I finally came to the conclusion that I was mostly using it as a "success surrogate." It was much easier for me to be successful in game than in real life, and the cycle time was much shorter. In an MMORPG you can achieve meaningful progress in your avatar in one weekend of solid grinding, but in real life to achieve meaningful results usually takes weeks, months or years of hard work. It was partly the immediacy of the rewards that made the game so compelling I think.
  - patio11 17y ago
    I think that was a large portion of the attraction for me, too. Plus, all the mental engagement of running a guild filled a void in my life, since my job was not very mentally engaging at the time. (Running a guild is of comparable complexity to running a fairly simple business like a hairdresser or restaurant, except with a bigger staff. You have employee relations, accounting, governance issues, embezzlement, the whole nine yards.) I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can structure your business such that it is also a success surrogate. Less dragons, better loot. (A sufficiently data-driven business can produce shiny pixels of happiness every week out of a few hours of effort. Trust me.)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
Adam503 17y ago
I do not like Zynga Farm Spam.. I do not like spam, Sam-I-am. I do not like them in my house. I do not play them with a mouse. I do not like Spam here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like Zynga Farm Spam. I do not like it, Sam-I-am.
yason 17y ago
In brief: Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. People are built to be social and be entangled in social obligations with other people. This may be less reflected in modern life than before but the tendency to get involved in that is nothing but gone. Earlier, these social obligations had a big role in reducing risk of famine and ensuring the continuum of life by making people do things together and keeping them doing that.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
After reading this, I wish I could blog better. I also wish the author of this article could write better, because he seems to make a lot of the same mistakes I make. Some good points, and a thread of relevance here, but aside from a general call to analysis I didn't see a lot to chew on. The best line in the whole piece was We are obligated to examine what we are doing, whether we are updating our Facebook status or playing Call of Duty, because the results of those actions will ultimately be our burden, for better or for worse The worst line came soon after, democracy depends upon demophilia, or love of the people. I'll leave the analysis of that one as an exercise to the reader. There just wasn't that much here.
chipmunkninja 17y ago
Let me be the first to jump in here and express a certain degree of uncertainty with what the author has written. While it does seem to be that, in Western societies, the societal pressure to cooperate and reciprocate would encourage people to keep playing, in Asian cultures (read: China), games like FV are based less on cooperation than on "sticking it" to other people. The local version of FarmVille here is called "Stealing Vegetables" by pretty much everybody who plays it, and you get ahead by sabotaging or stealing your neighbours' vegetables in addition to growing and protecting yours. Kitchen games involve sabotaging ingredients, parking games stealing spots, and so on. Indeed, a group of us were playing an iPhone game similar to FV called "We Rule", and while it was interesting for the first couple of days, it became so mind-numbingly dull that even the risk of annoying our friends couldn't keep us on the game. Cooperation only motivates so far. So, while the author has (in a very long and winding way) hit on some interesting points about these games, I think there's still something else at work. My current inclinations all lie in how simple tasks give rewards immediately (see 4square "hey you logged in, get a badge!" or stack overflow "You posted! here's badge!"). By constantly adding new things (WoW even spends lots of energy adding in new mounts, quests, and whatnot) you keep that reward loop active and keep me hoping for more.
IsaacL 17y ago
Yes, social obligation is an important factor in Farmville's growth, but it's not the main reason people continue playing. Short answer; they enjoy it. The game's basic cycle of "do action x to get a reward and unlock action y which gives a bigger reward and alloys you to do action z..." is one that's optimized to deliver predictable squirts of dopamine into human brains, and is also a mechanic that appears in numerous other games, including more respectable genres like RPGs and strategy games. Farmville and other social games just show you don't need to wrap it in a layer of strategy or skill, though it does mean that people tire of it quite quickly. Reading this is like watching an alien race trying to figure out why these hairless primates are so fond of naked gymnastics. "It appears to be for procreation, but they frequently use contraceptives, so that can't be it. They're generally lazy, so exercise can't be the motivation. I know! It must be a complicated sense of social obligation."

164 points by aditya 17y ago

Yes, but with my Facebook friends I have taken a decidedly different tack. That is, friends don't let friends play Farmville. My friends don't play Farmville because my friends don't play Farmville. If someone where to, they would be ridiculed. :)

barmstrong 17y ago
Haha...love it.

zyb09 17y ago

You know in the good old days we called it SPAM, today we call it 'social integration'.

weilawei 17y ago

While it's cool to note that Obama's involved in social media, his appearance in this essay seems a bit tenuous. Roger Caillois is repeatedly quoted and torn down again. His definition of a game is suspect. I don't think immediately think of a game as "free from obligation." To me, it smells like a straw man. All that aside, I think his analysis of how Zynga made/makes money is pretty fair. The idea of social capital is crucial. But, why is Zynga depicted as evil--even sociopathic--for utilizing that social capital, while Facebook appears to be treated neutrally, and our government officials are portrayed as doing the right thing?

amichail 17y ago

This is the sort of thing that should be taught in university computing degrees -- much more interesting than CS.

Rod 17y ago
Sure, because BS on user interface is more important than logic, automata theory, and complexity. If you don't like the Science in Computer Science you can always go to the Humanities side of the campus and engage in intellectual circle jerks with a buch of self-important morons.
- amichail 17y ago
  You can of course perform experiments to see whether the author is correct. Those sorts of social experiments should also be part of a computing degree.
  - endtime 17y ago
    No, they shouldn't. They should be part of a sociology, communications, or (once the field starts having its own departments) HCI degree. You might think case studies of social experiments are important, and I might even agree, but they're not computer science (or "computing").
    - djcapelis 17y ago
      Cognitive science departments (at universities that have them) generally provide wonderful coverage of HCI topics, though some CS/EECS/CE departments do as well.
      - endtime 17y ago
        Sure - my point was that you can't really get a degree in HCI yet. But once you can, they'll include case studies of the referred to social experiments.
        djcapelis 17y ago
        Just FYI: Yes you can and yes they do: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-study/major/major-ug_specialization.php#hci http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-study/major/major-u...

duck 17y ago

If Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it? The answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville. Very true from what I have seen. Nobody just starts playing something like Farmville unless someone else has asked them to. It is kind of sickening to think about how much time is lost to crap like this.

ShardPhoenix 17y ago
The time isn't necessarily "lost" if it substitutes for other forms of human "social grooming".
sliderr 17y ago
At least you noticed that you were wasting time. But the reason why people keep playing is not because of the others. The others are the reason why they start, they keep on playing because of the fake sense of achievement this game delivers. See Jessse Schells talk from DICE for details.
watmough 17y ago
I call my wife Farmer Pixel because she's never off Farmville. I've tried to get her to go out in the garden, but no avail!
- duck 17y ago
  Yes, that sounds very familiar here as well. I don't know a single guy that plays it and that led me to search for male/female stats... but I only found that the average Farmville user is a 43-year-old woman (via http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/02/this_aint_your_mothers_farmvil.html http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/02/this_aint...).
  - watmough 16y ago
    I have one friend (male) that plays these games, but he uses specially created accounts, and is motivated only by being able to mess with other players.

Jd 17y ago

"Does this mean we are becoming better citizens? Ninety-seven percent of American teenagers play video games.[4] Does this mean they will become more politically active? Before you dismiss these questions, keep in mind that in October 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama became the first U. S. Presidential candidate to advertise in video games" I stopped reading at this lapse in logic. Besides, how can one cite Caillois without citing Huizinga. Caillois admits his project is little more than a commentary on Homo Ludens.

cubicle67 17y ago
"I stopped reading..." I see this phrase regularly, but I don't really understand it. Does it mean you read no further into the article, or did you actually read more, if not all, but use this phrase to signify that you disagree. I find the idea of only reading until you find something you disagree with curious. It seems to indicate a belief that one flaw in a person's work invalidates the remainder of that work. Surely you don't consume opinion in a binary fashion, either accepting or rejecting it in its entirety, but rather you have the ability to consider each point and reject some and accept others based on their merit? [pulls rant up short] Not meaning to single you out, you just happened to use that phrase at the same time that I had time to reply
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  I don't stop reading when I disagree with something, but I have stopped reading when there's something so ridiculously off-base that it throws everything else the author may think about the topic into question. If there's a fundamental misunderstanding of some aspect of a given topic, it makes it likely the rest is not worth reading. I'm not obligated to read anything, and if the author is wrong on basic topics, I'll not be giving them more of my time. It's rare, but it does happen.
  - jim-greer 17y ago
    Do you post your opinion of the article afterwards?
- 17y ago

zemaj 17y ago

I find the idea of "sociopathic applications" mentioned in the second last paragraph interesting. I wonder what other applications could be included in that. World of Warcraft? I guess even twitter and facebook are in extreme usage. There's no attempt by those companies to stop people excessively using their services, beyond the point where its beneficial to the individual and only beneficial to the company.

jim-greer 17y ago

There's a lot of validity to this argument, but Farmville is not unique. If you take his criteria and replace Farmville with World of Warcraft, most of it still holds: (1) WoW is defined by obligation, routine, and responsibility; (2) WoW encroaches and depends upon real life, and is never entirely separate from it; (3) WoW is always certain in outcome, and involves neither chance nor skill; (4) WoW is a productive activity, in that it adds to the social capital upon which Blizzard and Activision depend for their wealth; (5) WoW is governed not by rules, but by habits, and simple cause-and-effect; (6) WoW is not make-believe, in that it requires neither immersion nor suspension of disbelief. WoW does require more skill. And it is governed by rules not 'simple cause and effect' - but so is Farmville. WoW is also more immersive. These differences are what make it a 'better' game to most gamers. But they don't change what the OP finds sociopathic about the game, namely that they're applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners’ needs. It is much more controlling, it just reaches a narrower audience. It is also equally social - the social interactions are arguably deeper and more meaningful, in fact. I say this as someone who works in the field of online games (I run Kongregate). I do think the feeling of accomplishment and social satisfaction provided by games are powerful, and not totally positive. I also hope that the positive aspects of online game communities balance this out to some degree. Edit: WoW succeeded in a competitive field largely on quality (and massive capital outlay). Farmville succeeded through the hyper-fast and skillful application of the A/B-testing 'lean startup' techniques widely admired and practiced by most readers of this site. If you hate it, it's worth thinking about how it came to exist.

iron_ball 17y ago
Hey, good work with Kongregate. It's got a great concept and great execution, though (being a Street Fighter fan) I never really played much beyond Kongai myself.
- benologist 17y ago
  http://www.kongregate.com/games/GameTap/street-fighter-2-ce http://www.kongregate.com/games/GameTap/street-fighter-2-ce
17y ago

jshen 17y ago

This "essay" could have been two paragraphs. I almost stopped reading when the first two were talking about Howard Zinn.

apphacker 17y ago
Indeed, concise it wasn't. So much filler text such as "With this in mind," "To illustrate," This: "One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely because they invest physical effort and in-game profit into each harvest." could have been: "People may play Farmville because they invest effort and in-game profit into each harvest." It is a horribly written article. Those extra adjectives all over the place offer absolutely nothing. One might speculate that if the comments here on this site - Hacker News - were written deliberately with such very many adjectives, punctuated through out each paragraph and sentence, you may imagine that perhaps one would precisely spend an entire laborious day completing in the end simply a singular article within that languishing timeframe.
- adriand 17y ago
  I thought it flowed very nicely and had a thoughtful, conversational tone. Taken farther, your desire for concision would eventually bring us to a list of Powerpoint bullets. This style of writing and speaking encourages reflection. When he says "One might speculate", his audience is encouraged to speculate themselves, to question his point, or to ponder if there are perhaps other reasons for why people play. Your revised sentence is dry and scientific, it says, "here's why, period, no need to keep thinking about it."
  - jshen 17y ago
    what did the howard zinn paragraphs add that justified the space? How many paragraphs did it take to even get to farmville?
    - c0riander 17y ago
      The beginning of the essay makes it clear that "This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk." So to the audience at the time, the paragraphs were a timely hook that contextualized the idea within a relevant current event. Also, though they're not as well integrated as they could be (perhaps we can forgive the author that one, given that the talk was the day after Zinn's death, so it was a pretty quick addition I'm guessing), they tie back into the overall idea that a democratic society suffers from this kind of gameplay.

barmstrong 17y ago

Bizarre article. After lots of fluff, it delivers some good insights into why the game succeeded, then calls on our moral obligations to stand up to sociopathic corporations? Did not see that coming.

neilk 17y ago

This article helps articulate this deeply creepy feeling I have about where online business is going. Does anyone else think using "addictive" or "habit-forming" to describe your product design goals is deeply immoral? And yet this probably appears in a lot of Powerpoints pitched every day in the Valley. I had to sit through just such a presentation a few weeks ago, and I work at a non-profit. The whole thrust of this Valley drone's presentation was that he could get users to value anything, any behavior that the customer wanted, by means of psychological tricks and social rewards. Now that may not even be true, but when your Powerpoint starts referencing Pavlov and Zimbardo I think you have to take a look in the mirror.

jim-greer 17y ago
It depends on the context - selling items on eBay is addictive and habit-forming. So is running your own business, or running marathons. I notice that you have 2258 karma. I think it's safe to say that you've formed a habit or even addiction to HN, but hopefully a rewarding one.
- neilk 17y ago
  I disagree that these things can be conflated. Just because you find something rewarding, it does not mean you are addicted, or (more broadly) that any of one's reward systems are being manipulated. If my internal reward systems are telling me that running is good, for the most part it's because running is good. Even on HN, there's a fundamentally useful activity -- contribution to discussion. The measurement system is distributed to users, but that's because the benefits are similarly distributed. Things cross into "drug" territory when most of their value comes from tricking your reward system. Even drugs can be beneficial from time to time, but when too much of a person's activity is about chasing simulated rewards, we start calling that person "addicted". Most drugs manipulate the brain's desire for pleasure, or the rush of excitement. If we believe the author of the OP, FarmVille manipulates our desire for social connectedness.
  - jim-greer 17y ago
    So you can't be addicted to running? Or posting on Hacker News? You have a fair point, the dictionary definition of addiction includes words like 'damaging' and 'pathological'. But the mechanism of addiction is very similar whether the ends are beneficial or not. And a lot of the people use the word to apply to things that are not terribly negative.

baguasquirrel 17y ago

Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine seventy-three million people playing a game that isn’t fun to play, just to keep up with the Joneses. I couldn't disagree more with this. Ever glimpsed at WoW guild politics? Many people get involved in this game because it's possible to keep up with the Joneses in-game, if not in real life. This is not a small nitpicking point. Games like these develop complicated social webs and social capital because they create a reality preferable to the one we live in, one in which anyone can see a path to success, a path that they are in control of. The real world is more ambiguous.

piguy314 17y ago
I was addicted to world of warcraft for about 18 months and I finally came to the conclusion that I was mostly using it as a "success surrogate." It was much easier for me to be successful in game than in real life, and the cycle time was much shorter. In an MMORPG you can achieve meaningful progress in your avatar in one weekend of solid grinding, but in real life to achieve meaningful results usually takes weeks, months or years of hard work. It was partly the immediacy of the rewards that made the game so compelling I think.
- patio11 17y ago
  I think that was a large portion of the attraction for me, too. Plus, all the mental engagement of running a guild filled a void in my life, since my job was not very mentally engaging at the time. (Running a guild is of comparable complexity to running a fairly simple business like a hairdresser or restaurant, except with a bigger staff. You have employee relations, accounting, governance issues, embezzlement, the whole nine yards.) I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can structure your business such that it is also a success surrogate. Less dragons, better loot. (A sufficiently data-driven business can produce shiny pixels of happiness every week out of a few hours of effort. Trust me.)
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Adam503 17y ago

I do not like Zynga Farm Spam.. I do not like spam, Sam-I-am. I do not like them in my house. I do not play them with a mouse. I do not like Spam here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like Zynga Farm Spam. I do not like it, Sam-I-am.

yason 17y ago

In brief: Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. People are built to be social and be entangled in social obligations with other people. This may be less reflected in modern life than before but the tendency to get involved in that is nothing but gone. Earlier, these social obligations had a big role in reducing risk of famine and ensuring the continuum of life by making people do things together and keeping them doing that.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

After reading this, I wish I could blog better. I also wish the author of this article could write better, because he seems to make a lot of the same mistakes I make. Some good points, and a thread of relevance here, but aside from a general call to analysis I didn't see a lot to chew on. The best line in the whole piece was We are obligated to examine what we are doing, whether we are updating our Facebook status or playing Call of Duty, because the results of those actions will ultimately be our burden, for better or for worse The worst line came soon after, democracy depends upon demophilia, or love of the people. I'll leave the analysis of that one as an exercise to the reader. There just wasn't that much here.

chipmunkninja 17y ago

Let me be the first to jump in here and express a certain degree of uncertainty with what the author has written. While it does seem to be that, in Western societies, the societal pressure to cooperate and reciprocate would encourage people to keep playing, in Asian cultures (read: China), games like FV are based less on cooperation than on "sticking it" to other people. The local version of FarmVille here is called "Stealing Vegetables" by pretty much everybody who plays it, and you get ahead by sabotaging or stealing your neighbours' vegetables in addition to growing and protecting yours. Kitchen games involve sabotaging ingredients, parking games stealing spots, and so on. Indeed, a group of us were playing an iPhone game similar to FV called "We Rule", and while it was interesting for the first couple of days, it became so mind-numbingly dull that even the risk of annoying our friends couldn't keep us on the game. Cooperation only motivates so far. So, while the author has (in a very long and winding way) hit on some interesting points about these games, I think there's still something else at work. My current inclinations all lie in how simple tasks give rewards immediately (see 4square "hey you logged in, get a badge!" or stack overflow "You posted! here's badge!"). By constantly adding new things (WoW even spends lots of energy adding in new mounts, quests, and whatnot) you keep that reward loop active and keep me hoping for more.

IsaacL 17y ago

Yes, social obligation is an important factor in Farmville's growth, but it's not the main reason people continue playing. Short answer; they enjoy it. The game's basic cycle of "do action x to get a reward and unlock action y which gives a bigger reward and alloys you to do action z..." is one that's optimized to deliver predictable squirts of dopamine into human brains, and is also a mechanic that appears in numerous other games, including more respectable genres like RPGs and strategy games. Farmville and other social games just show you don't need to wrap it in a layer of strategy or skill, though it does mean that people tire of it quite quickly. Reading this is like watching an alien race trying to figure out why these hairless primates are so fond of naked gymnastics. "It appears to be for procreation, but they frequently use contraceptives, so that can't be it. They're generally lazy, so exercise can't be the motivation. I know! It must be a complicated sense of social obligation."