The secret to Farmville isn't gameplay or aesthetics | Hacker News Reader

The secret to Farmville isn't gameplay or aesthetics

mediacommons.futureofthebook.org

164 pointsaditya65 comments

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.

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.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/GameTap/street-fighter-2-ce

    Farmville succeeded through the hyper-fast and skillful
    application of the A/B-testing 'lean startup' techniques

From what I've seen of it. It looks to me that Farmville succeeded through being an online MLM scheme.

Know your evils: FarmVille is not an MLM. If FarmVille were an MLM, you'd have a downline (the people recruited by the people you recruited) also sending you money, recruiting would provide material awards far in advance of actually making or selling virtual pumpkins, and there would be a sub-industry of teaching you how to become a better recruiter of recruiters of virtual pumpkin farmers which would itself also be an MLM scheme.

Don't forget winning a limited edition, orange "Farmville" Lexus SUV if you generate the most leads and longest chain in a quarter.

More on Zynga testing (build it if people seem to want it):

> So I say to the marketing person or the product manager, “Describe it in five words. It’s built. If six months from now we built every dream you have, how are you going to market it? Give me the five words.”

We’ll put that up. We’ll put up a link for five minutes saying, ” Hey! Do you ever fantasize about running your own hospital?” (laughter) And, well, maybe you have! In this economy, it’s the only growth area...

So first you try to get the heat around it, you see how much do people like it, then

http://grattisfaction.com/2010/01/how-zynga-does-customer-de...

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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. :)

Haha...love it.

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.

The time isn't necessarily "lost" if it substitutes for other forms of human "social grooming".

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.

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!

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...).

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.

>It is kind of sickening to think about how much time is lost to crap like this.

That's rather judgmental re: leisure time. Are you sickened by the time "lost" by people following or playing sports, or reading novels, or watching movies?

We can make judgments about leisure activities just as we can about any other part of life. Playing sports, reading novels, and watching (good) movies can all make you a healthier, more reflective person, while being intrinsically entertaining. Even WoW, while it has some disturbing aspects, has the wonder of exploring a fantasy world, online society, and some strategy.

I don't play Farmville but I don't know of anyone that argues it's time well spent. Players don't even seem to be having "fun" by any normal definition. At best, it exploits social rewards to make you conform to the game makers' agenda.

Perhaps it's closer to fashion than recreation; where you're on a consumption treadmill that's largely controlled by others. Without the consolation of having nice clothes or looking any better.

You would have to think farmville would have a high churn rate to, I played it casually for about a month before I realised there was little point continuing. Even some of the most dedicated amongst my friends eventually stopped after a few months. If anything the achievements in the game seemed to keep people coming back, even though some of them were just arbitrary large numbers of things done.

I don't think it is really a fun game at all which makes me think how successful a similar game would be if someone got the fun factor right, something like a civ for facebook or something.

Yeah, but I think what we would consider fun would pretty much kill a game like Farmville in terms of popularity. I am only guessing... but your typical gamer is not playing Facebook.

Unfortunately, fun usually involves the possibility of failure and trying to overcome it (at least with video games). Having a high chance of failure would probably ruin the games popularity.

Nope, just apps/games/sites like Farmville (i.e. click games or maybe trance games?). As neilk said, the end result is not really 'fun' or learning. I know for a lot of people it is just something to pass the time, but there is so many other things that are productive like reading/watching where you either learn or feel something.

Maybe the easiest way to sum it up - I would not be sickened by anything that someone would enjoy telling me about. Tell me about a movie or book you like. Tell me about the the chess game you lost. Tell me about the five miles you ran. But if someone told me they clicked 20,000 times and enjoyed telling me that, I would call bull.

> I would not be sickened by anything that someone would enjoy telling me about.

This is actually an excellent test of the quality of a leisure activity and one I'd never considered. "And then, I clicked on the OTHER square, and a pumpkin grew THERE, too!" I just can't picture that.

It's an interesting experiment to see how long you can try one of the zynga offerings without creating some sort of invitation to a friend. These guys have really squeezed the heck out of their viral loops.

It's the same reason why people are on Facebook in the first place, because well, people are on Facebook.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh, I'll agree with you on that. Sometimes people even use 'addiction' in a positive sense, to describe their dedication to something. But in the context of this debate I want to draw a clearer distinction.

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.

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

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.

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."

what did the howard zinn paragraphs add that justified the space? How many paragraphs did it take to even get to farmville?

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.

I understand, and I'm not trying to be a hard ass. It's just that the internet has caused a giant flood of information, and one way I'm trying to cope is to prefer/choose concise and efficient expression. This means that I tend to stop reading or watching if a piece of content seems to take a while to get to the core of it's point.

It was ridiculous. If someone wants to encourage reflection they should simply say that instead of inundate their writing with unnecessary words. Words are meant to convey information, and what interests me as a reader are not thoughtful conversational tones. I prefer an executive summary with the option to delve deeper into areas I find interesting.

This instead read like a freshman's first English Literature essay.

The subjunctive prelude "One might speculate..." signposts the structure at the dozen paragraph scale. The author is both wondering why people play Farmville and providing a description for those unfamiliar with it. He works through a list of hypotheses, stating them and describing the features of Farmville that leads him to reject them.

The proposed alternative sentence is neither informative nor structural.

"People may play Farmville because ..." is uninformative; we were hoping to be informed that "People do play Farmville because ..." or that "People do not play Farmville because ...".

Nor does the sentence help the text flow. It is like encountering an if statement while reading code. Now there are two paths to follow, may and may not. The sentence imposes a cognitive load on the reader, but for no reason. The author is about to explain why not.

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."

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.

"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.

"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

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.

Do you post your opinion of the article afterwards?

I read until the point I found a lapse in reasoning, in this case that the fact that Obama advertised in video games was related in some fashion to whether or not video game playing teenagers would make better citizens.

I then scanned briefly for references to Huizinga.

You might be right that not all of the essay is fallacious simply because some component part is, but this seemed esp. egregious.

If my estimate of the value of the rest of the text is significantly less than my estimate of the value of the time and effort it would take me to read it, I'll skim to see if there's more value ahead, and if I don't find much I'll stop reading entirely.

Contributing factors:

- length

- clarity (grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, etc.)

- readability (layout, font, color scheme, distracting ads mid-page, etc.)

- directness/relevance (getting to the point, not getting sidetracked.)

- insightful or thought-provoking ideas (even if I disagree)

- correctness (in terms of facts as well as reasoning; non-sequiturs and factual inaccuracies, especially egregious ones, reduce my confidence in the author)

I found this particular article very close to my cutoff several times, though I did eventually finish it. Negative factors included opening with 2 paragraphs on Howard Zinn, several strange non-sequiturs like the one pointed out in the grandparent comment, excessive verbosity, irrelevant details (like the number of coins it costs per pumpkin), and stretches in reasoning (Farmville is "productive" and "not governed by rules" but "cause and effect"?) Occasional insights, and even occasional wrong-but-thought-provoking ideas, provided just enough value to keep me reading. But I'm a stay-at-home dad with a lot of free time; my valuation of my free time would go up if I had less of it, and I probably wouldn't have gotten past the first 3 or 4 paragraphs.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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").

Cognitive science departments (at universities that have them) generally provide wonderful coverage of HCI topics, though some CS/EECS/CE departments do as well.

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.

Just FYI: Yes you can and yes they do: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-study/major/major-u...

Just because computers are involved peripherally does not make it CS.

Rod, there's more to Humanities than circle-jerks. There's reach-arounds, tea-bagging...all kinds of stuff.

This comment is beneath HN standards for civility. Please don't encourage it.

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.

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