FarmVille Once Took over Facebook. Now Everything Is FarmVille
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Tencent December 16, 2018
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent
Caveat: Not an endorsement of freemium; it's pure evil. And I mostly don't share the host's enthusiasm for a lot of the companies they study. But I always learn a lot, esp wrt to how the various players think about these things.
Could you expand on this? When I started getting serious about lifting way back when, I used an app to manage my routines. At a certain point, I decided I was getting advanced enough that I could make use of some of their premium features, at which point I converted and have been a happy customer ever since. I have friends who feel the same way about (eg) Spotify, TODO apps, or any of a number of services for which the free version was essentially an unlimited-length, limited-feature trial version.
These seem to me like completely aboveboard, mutually beneficial implementations of freemium. To your mind, what makes this "pure evil"?
I used to publish shareware utilities. I love try before you buy. For both publishers and customers.
I should finesse my phrasing to reflect that distinction. Thanks for asking.
> The game encouraged people to draw in friends as resources to both themselves and the service they were using, Mr. Bogost said. It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon, he said.
> “The game itself isn’t promoting a conversation between you and your friends, or encouraging you to spend time together within the game space,” she said. “It’s really just a mechanic of clicking a button.”
> He said he had spent more than $1,000 — that’s real money — over the years to improve his farm or to save time.
There's a point to be made here about Skinner Boxes, online interactions being reducible to flipping switches, pulling levers, and seeing numbers increase on someone's spreadsheet, but it's probably already been made before.
The general dynamic of social games reminds me of MLMs- the enterprise involves a lot of recruiting outsiders for advancement. Have internet products moved past this dynamic yet? If "the behaviors FarmVille normalized had made it a pace car for the internet economy of the 2010s", what is the pace car for the 2020s? TikTok, with its sophisticated curation algorithm?
loops that were hard to pull themselves from.
If you didn’t check in every day, your crops would wither and die; some players would set alarms so they wouldn’t forget.
If you needed help, you could spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends
— a source of annoyance for nonplayers who were besieged with notifications and updates in their news feeds.
Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor at Georgia Tech, said the behaviors FarmVille normalized had made it a pace car for the internet economy of the 2010s.
He did not mean that as praise.
The game encouraged people to
draw in friends as resources
to both themselves and the service they were using, Mr. Bogost said. It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon, he said."
PDS: Random Thoughts:
Sociologicially, We see the same patterns in MLM's and (possibly) some religious movements...
Gamewise, we see the same patterns in Farmville as we do in games such as Minecraft, etc.
An interesting mix, to be sure...
It’s crazy how things have changed so much I wish sometimes we could turn back time
And it tried to recruit all of its players as pushers.
The terrible thing is that I almost think Farmville is a more respectable business for Facebook to be in because it's an actual game that you pay for that doesn't require intrusive tracking and privacy violation for advertising purposes. Instead it just addicts people via social pressure and various freemium-style psychological tricks.