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Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

"I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff?"

Did you ever stop to consider perhaps money isn't the worst fallout? The families of addicts suffer as well–and I suspect, when we look back years from now, we'll see a pattern of spouses and children ignored & damaged because companies like Zynga analyze/optimize everything in order to maximize engagement. A single person can't compete with that.

You're not just engineering people to part with their money–you're using your skills to get them to part with their time.

Sorry, but I consider what you do (& Zynga does) unethical.

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I believe that people can make judgement calls about what do to with their free time. I don't think what I do (which is to perform analysis) is any different than what the same analysts at Blizzard do when they make Starcraft or World of WarCraft. Or the people that performed analysis at Nintendo when the first Duck Hunt came out.

I have friends who play Starcraft II a couple hours a day. I've known people who will skip work and play 8 hours a day. I've seen a 60 minute story on someone who was addicted to World of Warcraft. This is a chronic problem of the industry as a whole, but its not a reason to stop making games because the majority of users can have fun responsibly.

What WoW was and what it is now are different things.

WoW vanilla was an MMO, WoW Burning C was basically moving towards the disney land model and away from the mmo. The overall business model has acknowledged the power of the Zynga model, and all actions so far have been moving towards Zynga's model and not away.

For a non-gamer, can you explain the difference?

It's the difference between building a game to sell an "experience" to a customer, and building a game to maximize the amount of revenue generated from each player.

Imagine if film makers stopped trying to make good movies and instead focused on making movies where you had to pay more money to see the ending of a movie, or perhaps to pay to see a different ending to a movie. You'd sit down in a theater and then right at the climax of the movie you would have to pay more to continue watching.

Then making movies would be less about making a "good" movie and more about creating the best hook to get people to pony up more cash.

Shouldn't we put Reddit, Facebook and Hacker News in there too? TV?

Limit everything except going to the gym? Maybe limit that too?

If pg is sitting off in the background trying to convince people to click buttons with zero thought being exercised, then yes, Hacker News should be voluntarily time-limited. Until then, it is an apples-and-oranges comparison. Video games and TV have always been pretty pointless, but at least you were exercising some skill. These games are no better than slot machines, which are regulated in many places for good reasons.

I doubt there more skill being exercised when watching TV or looking at cat pictures at Reddit. I don't play these games but I think they probably are more engaging than other activities.

Zynga games and slot machines are an easy target for because they are time sinks that aren't common in HN crowd. But imagine some outsider looking at your day under a lens and regulating how you spend your time.

What should be the metric by which you classify an activity as being "good"? Inducing happyness? I bet if you ask Zygna customers they'd all say Farmville is their favorite game. Productivity?

Should people be allowed to spend large amounts of money to buy cars they don't really need? Electronics?

I'm not saying the govt should regulate Zynga. I'm pointing out that they do regulate slot machines. That's because people know slot machines can be bad for people, and are generally a pointless waste of time and money that feel good in the short term. Clubs and pubs that operate those machines and know damn well that people misuse them resist these regulations to the last. The same attitude toward voluntarily stopping these things is being displayed here. And the TV thing was an accidental misstatement. I think the same thing is true to some degree or another of serialised TV and most MMO's. Serialised TV is all about making you want to see the next episode. MMO's are all about rewarding high play times rather than skill.

People have the right to decide whether they smoke cigarettes, too. But most people can see it's a harmful addiction and that it is plain unethical to profit from it. And yeah, I think World of Warcraft falls into the same category. Why don't they put hard play-time limits on the game? Because they don't care if you waste your life in front of their game.

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