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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

Can you imagine working on Farmville? I mean, it would be like going into work every day to refine the equivilent of the Fisher Price moo farm toy [1] except a) for adults and b) relatively juvenile. Imagine the meetings, mostly run by marketing idiots.

"Okay, we need the new chewy coco grove coconut tree special item out by next Monday. So that means everyone's coming in on saturday."

But how can you argue with 85 million users and a billion in revenue? Google sure can't.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek_qxoGDyAw

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Or maybe it'd be fun because you'd be making something that people can relax and enjoy and that adds a little extra social interaction to their everyday experience, often with people that they don't have another "reason" to be in contact with.

No, actually, it is just a stupid waste of everyone's time.

Other than you not liking it, how is it fundamentally different from any other game?

The games are designed to be addictive, not fun in the long term. You could argue the same about WoW but at least in that case there is a lot to do over a long period before you truly get into the addictive repetition phase. Something like farmville is pretty much that from the start.

The games are designed to be addictive, not fun in the long term.

Sorry, but I think you're pulling that out of your ass. All (good) games are addictive to some degree, precisely because they're fun, and I bet if you surveyed all the people who play Farmville, virtually all of them would say they enjoy it and are having fun.

Don't confuse "I don't enjoy it" with "No one enjoys it."

i wouldn't deny intravenous drug users enjoy their highs

I wouldn't agree with that, initial fun is important but over the longer term I think addictiveness can take over fun, to the point where the person feels obligated to continue playing the game to continue progressing even though each gaming session is in a sense almost dreaded.

I played farmville for about a month because some friends were, by the end of that I felt like I was wasting my time, the progression was for the sake of progression, the achievements were arbitrarily chosen to take more and more time and being better than your friends had a lot more to do with time invested then any form of strategy used. I had friends who admitted they were sick of the game and it frustrated them but continued playing just to finish off achievements.

Sure I'm not speaking for everyone but I do think it is a trend in Zynga games, they are build around user engagement and seek to maximise that for as long as possible.

These pop psychology articles prove you wrong. Gaming companies strive deliberately to make their games addicting. And by addicting I mean addicting, not fun.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-gam... + http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_d...

The techniques that I'll discuss in this article generally fall under the heading of behavioral psychology. Best known for the work done on animals in the field, behavioral psychology focuses on experiments and observable actions. One hallmark of behavioral research is that most of the major experimental discoveries are species-independent and can be found in anything from birds to fish to humans. What behavioral psychologists look for (and what will be our focus here) are general "rules" for learning and for how minds respond to their environment.

Seems awfully presumptuous to say that tens of millions of people aren't actually enjoying themselves and that you know better than they do what's "fun" for them. Would you call knitting merely addictive repetition? In a sense it is, but who cares: many people need and want things to enjoy and help them pass the time.

I would say that making a game addictive is the holy grail of gaming, no?

From the perspective of the people making money off the players? Yes.

When I'm actually playing a game myself, though, and recognizing that these two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, I prefer fun over addictive.

I'd say the holy grail is to improve people's lives, potentially even make the world a better place.

Why the downvote? For me the games I enjoy achieve this. And for whatever job I take on, I actually hope for the same (not just in game development).

reminds me of jane mcgonigal's ted talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...

Reflective games aren't a waste of a time (that allows you think and reflect on a situation thereby improving the way you learn things) but games that put you on an expert(or relax)-mode definitely are a waste of time--imho. I mean this is true when talking about games but probably in true in other situations e.g. you wouldn't like a Pilot who wants to reflect on a situation when plane and 400 passengers are in danger (taken from a Psychology book whose name I cannot recall) :)

I didn't claim that it was but let's assume I did for a minute.

1) no fine motor control involved

2) no complex puzzle solving

3) no storytelling

Those are just a few off the top of my head. I don't really play video games but it is pretty obvious that FarmVille is much different than games you'd play on your television.

And of course motivations differ, too. FarmVille makes more money by consuming your time and taking advantage of your impulses and desire for short-term rewards than most traditional games do.

Zynga isn't really a game company. They don't care about video games as an art form or even as an entertainment medium, they just care about behavior games and milking people out of money with as little effort as possible. It is like a casino that never pays out.

That's how I felt, as a guy who feels pretty "meh" about lolcats, when I was working at Cheezburger Network.

Even now, I know that software that I wrote is helping to make literally millions of people happy every day. That feels a hell of a lot better than helping a big cable company with video DRM, that's for sure.

Cheezburger Network is an honorable career. Nothing makes me as primally delighted as seeing a really cute lolcat. To be able to do that for tens of millions of people is more than most people accomplish in their lives.

That reminds me of "provide liquidity"

The people at Zynga are many things, "idiots" would not be one of them.

"Okay, we need the new chewy coco grove coconut tree special item out by next Monday. So that means everyone's coming in on saturday."

Surprisingly accurate portrayal of actual meetings here though.

Do you know anyone who works at Zynga? From this comment, I'd bet you don't.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann...

You get to run experiments on a huge number of users. Do a split test and get a significant result in an hour. Figure out a way to make it just 1% stickier and suddenly you created value worth millions to the company. It sounds fascinating and I could easily imagine working there.

Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you? The more users you get though, the more conservative you become. "But if this drops conversion by 0.1%, that will cost us $100k/week." Gets old fast and stifles change.

Do you work there? Just curious.

No, just relating a similar situation.

just like any big company

Presumably Fisher Price itself employs people who go to work every day to refine their moo farm and other toys. I doubt most of them see the nature of their jobs as particularly embarrassing or degrading.

that's because they make moo farms for kids...

Some people really like designing toys. And at least IEEE thinks it's a cool job: http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/shanno...

How is this different than the rest of the game industry?

Replace moo moo with desert eagle.

People have an easier time taking themselves seriously when guns and demons are involved.

Cf. comic books, authors, goth teenagers

You can also get a large mix of both. My brother works for a studio that, until recently, only developed racing games for the DS. So they might be working on the next Need for Speed and Barbie racing at the same time.

With the right engine, that should be a matter of theming.

Exactly right.

I present on game development to local user groups in New Zealand and I always get a good response when citing "It's fun to write games - wouldn't you much rather be writing a class called SuperLaserWeapon than MembershipIdentityProvider" :-)

Maybe we should just rename the "MembershipIdentityProvider" method to "SuperLaserWeapon"?

I haven't gone into SuperLaserWeapon territory, but I try to have a little (appropriate) fun with naming.

I'd never go back to the game industry. Low pay, long hours, and a pervasively juvenile mentality that just keeps getting more annoying with every birthday after 17.

If you like doing bare-metal high performance coding it's one of your best chances to test your skills though, unless you're doing lolgames.

I hadn't heard of the term "lolgames" before, it is quite apt.

You have to play farmville, first of all. It isn't a game. It's just as I described it--"cow goes moo" and that's the extent of it.

I'm quite willing to believe this. But then, I played Animal Crossing for a while and that involved mooing, as well (... if I recall correctly). I'm willing to believe a game can be made out of mooing, however I would assert that a Japanese game about mooing is almost certainly better than one owned by shady Russian investors, or whatever Zynga is.

I hate to say it for fear of giving aid and comfort to my Gender Studies professors, but I think a major portion of the reason why Blizzard et al get geek cred and FarmVille does not is because FarmVille is played by women.

I'd expect Mafia Wars to have mostly male players, and I'd put it in the same category as Farmville, i.e. time sinks with virtually no skill or strategy components.

I think that's only true in the sense that people always give more cred to products that they, personally, use. It's the same reason that Google = sexy while enterprise software = not sexy. Almost everybody uses Google, but very few people use any given enterprise software package (and when they do, they usually hate it).

If it were just a male/female thing, you'd expect games like SimCity and Civilization to not get geek cred, since their appeal straddles gender lines.

That's hardly the reason as The Sims which is also played by many women get's lots of cred.

The reason seems more to be that it's not blazing fast OpenGL 3D supernaturalistic advanced strategy/fps type of game.

A lot of people (including me) criticize WoW for being repetitive and mind numbing (grinding), too. I don't think it has anything to do with gender. Also there seem to be actually a lot of women who play WoW?

Hey now, don't talk smack about the Fisher Price moo farm. Memories right there.

I know the guy in charge of in game economics, he used to work for Upper Deck Entertainment as lead on a few of their games. He's a smart guy. When we talked he was hesitant to discuss Zynga too much because he knows that people are not fond of the brand, but his job sounded interesting.

On the other hand I think it would be a blast to work on pixel art and be paid for it.

I gotta agree with your comment about marketing idiots

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