The ethics of social games and how mass culture killed the auteur

I'm kind of torn on this, because a lot of the social gaming space is at the leading (and bleeding) edge of metrics use in our industry, and that is something that excites me (and gives me furitive visions of applying my skills in a fashion which would scale ridiculously well).

On the other hand, I'm sincerely worried that taking the craftiest engineers/marketers available and iterating directly on people's psychological levers risks creating an industry based on exploitation. I'm playing a particular Facebook game at the moment -- market research, I swear! -- and there are some game mechanics which I can only describe as darkly brilliant. I'm not going to dumb down "evil" by describing pay-for-roulette-disguised-as-treasure-chests as evil, but half of my brain is saying "That is Magic cards without the paper -- profitable, but not odious" and the other half is saying "You'd be afraid of running queries telling you who are buying those for fear of what you'd find out about 90% of sales."

Speaking as someone who made a living from virtual goods for five years, the article presents valid points and observations but could have been more specific on the positive aspects.

Then again, I am struggling myself to come up with much positive(longer term, not in the sense of immediate satisfaction from the Skinner box) for virtual goods, as they are being sold.

"And just as with other goods and services, it is possible to use virtual goods in business that contributes positively to people's lives, as well as in business that exploits people and harms them."

I went through the PhD thesis - http://info.tse.fi/julkaisut/vk/Ae11_2009.pdf of the author looking for the positive examples, but could not find any.

I play one of these silly online games. The draw is simple: my friends play it and it only takes a few minutes a day to move forward. I'm close to ditching it though because they've changed the game to be completely unable to progress without my attention and it's not good enough to justify more investment than I've already given it.